Until the Violence Stops

The Ferris State University 2013 Vagina Monologues will be performed in Williams Auditorium on March 1, 2012 beginning at 7:30 p.m.

All proceeds go to W.I.S.E

Tickets:
$5 for students with ID
$10 for others

This is my cause.
I am what Eve Ensler would term a "Vagina Warrior."
I was in the show last year and promoted it heavily on facebook.
A few people asked me whatever happened to feminine mystique and if I were a lesbian or not, but I wasn't terribly concerned over their opinions. I had my reasons (very strong ones) for speaking up, and I wasn't going to let public opinion sway me.
By way of explaination or clarification, however, I posted the following note:

I think it's time I explained what on earth possessed me to audition for something like the Vagina Monologues in the first place.
I was certainly not "raised to talk about these things."
I even feel a little guilty about posting such a personal note. How shameful! This is a polite little social network where people are not supposed to burden everyone with their personal agendas and issues.
By way of explaination, let me introduce you to myself and to the women I am representing in this program.
During my divorce from my ex-husband, I ended up homeless in Grand Rapids. My children and I stayed at Mel Trotter, because I hadn't established residency and no one else would take us.
My ex-husband hacked into my email account and took the letter I'd written to my family asking for help getting the children to a safer shelter and he took it to a judge, making me out to be some sort of Andrea Yeats who had kidnapped our children and was endangering them.
In retrospect, had I conducted my affairs more wisely, I might have done a few things differently so that I could have looked a little better in the  eyes of the judge. Hindsight and all that.
My ex was granted temporary emergency custody, and I ran out of money to pay the lawyer to get full custody back again. In case you haven't noticed, I see my children every weekend.
Within a course of one summer, I had slept in no less than three separate shelters, one hotel that charged by the hour, a Super 8 that my brother paid for (all my family lives out of state), and the back of my van under a pile of garbage bags with my clothes while parked in an empty lot behind an abandoned building.
I heard through Frontline Community Church of a ministry called Healing Hearts, and went to my first meeting so full of grief and guilt and shame that I couldn't even look in a mirror at my own face.
I thought God was punishing me for messing up my life and the lives of my children by leaving my husband and allowing him to divorce me. I had some old-fashioned, Old Testament ideas about God back then, reinforced by the man I was married to.
Of course I was wrong, but it took some time before I came to realize that.
I got myself a job and an apartment and began the slow process of rebuilding my life.
People talk about rebuilding their lives and they generally mean that they had to become financially stable again.
What I mean that I had to completely change the way that I viewed myself and my life, and God's view of and purpose for my life.
Healing Hearts, along with a Divorce Care group at Impact Church in Lowell, helped me to not only shed light on my past, but also to see it in myself.
The hardest part about the process for me was the chapter in our workbook on childhood sexual abuse. I never really had too much to say on that topic if I could avoid it. I didn't consider being molested by the neighbor boy as real abuse because it had been so long ago, but when I read the list in that chapter of traits a person might have if they had been sexually abused, I found that I had nearly all of them. That really disturbed me for a long time.
The fact is, anyone who has been physically and emotionally abused and repeatedly had their boundaries broken as a child would share many of these traits, regardless of sexual abuse. Furthermore, I have come to see that what happened to me was very serious - it stole my innocence and violated my trust, and I spent the rest of my life until that point "protecting" myself from being hurt by encasing myself in a little half-life world where nothing touched me. I think very few people knew that I had a troubled childhood. It wasn't something I told very many people in high school.
I was horrifically lonely long before I ever got married.

Part of the problem was that I had not been raised to talk about those kinds of things. In fact, when I told my mother I was going to be in the Vagina Monologues and I told her what it was all about, she said stiffly, "Well, the way I was raised, people just didn't talk about those things. Why, your grandmother will be rolling over in her grave."
I told her quietly that maybe if we had talked about those things more, I would have been better able to tell her what the neighbor boy had done to me. Maybe we could have talked about what happened and how it made me feel, and maybe I wouldn't have grown up ashamed of my body and ashamed to be a woman and... ashamed.
That's why I auditioned for The Vagina Monologues in the first place.
I felt it was time to talk.

I auditioned because I heard the money would go to the local women's shelter, which has experienced horrendous cuts just like the school systems, and is short-staffed. Having been there, let me tell you that those women need all the love and support that anyone can give them.
What the author of the Monologues did was actually interview over 200 women about how they felt about their bodies and what their experiences had been. These are real women's stories, and they are not rated G. Many of them have suffered and struggled and done, as I did, all the wrong things, but only because they were doing the best that they could with what they knew at the time.
There are parts of the show that make me very uncomfortable. After all, I was not raised to talk about "those things," and because some of the women use language that I wouldn't. You hear them in all their anger, humor, courage, humiliation, guilt, shame, love, sin, misguidedness and glory.
But the main theme is not to be ashamed.

Some of the women whose voices we hear have been raped.
Some were abused as children.
One angry woman complains about how awkward and uncomfortable it is to go to the OBGYN.
There's a duo that talks about rape warfare in foreign countries.
There's a woman who describes how she ended up in the sex trade.
A woman who describes watching her grandchild being born.
A little girl who tells about how she feels about her vagina.
A homeless woman who falls in love with another woman because that was the only person who had ever been kind to her.

One woman talks about sex - actually, many of the women talk about sex.
There's an elderly woman who sounds just like my mother. That one is both hilarious and heart-breaking. (Also just like my mother.)
Imagine my horror when I was given a part in the five-woman cast story of a transgendered person. After all, I don't personally even know any transgendered people. Well - I don't know that I know any...
However, I don't believe that judgement or hatred is the road to healing for anyone. How could it be?
I have come to look at these women in this show as the very women that Healing Hearts was created to help.
They need someone to love them unconditionally and to let them know that they are worthy and they can succeed in life despite what they have been through. I know in my case, all the things that happened to me happened for a reason.
After my divorce, I thought I had lost everything.
But I gained myself.
Through the love and care of kind women of the shelters, and the guidance and love of my family, friends, and spiritual family, I became a new woman.
A woman who could stand in front of a crowd of people and say out loud that love is stronger than hate, and that they are not alone.

I was overwhelmed by the outpouring of love and support I received from people after they read this - and touched beyond words when many women came on there and shared their own stories with me. Being open and honest about yourself if a cathartic experience in which you almost always find someone else really does understand and want to help.
That show was life-changing for me.
I highly recommend it because it could be life-changing for you as well.
Shocking, perhaps, and never quite what anyone expects to encounter, but life-changing.
It leaves you thinking.
And all the proceeds go toward the local women's shelter.
Since the Violence Against Women Act was allowed to drop, these shelters need more of our help than ever.

Maybe, if you can find the courage, you could share your story with me. Break the silence. I understand if you can't, believe me. Just know that in a sense I am talking to you, and thinking of you. Things do get better. Don't give up. And don't let them get away with it without speaking up when you've healed enough!