Her flower blooms power

I found a new place to walk my dog in an old cemetery on the edge of Oregon farmland where most of the deceased were born in the mid 1800s and most of the tombstones were for children. Reading parents’ last words for their lost child made me think of the women who committed their bodies to the process of motherhood and then lost that investment to circumstances beyond their control. It’s not just the loss of the child that’s tragic. Those mothers gave a piece of themselves when their uterus was occupied by another human for nine months. They risked their lives giving birth, and then their breasts became the baby’s food system for another year or two. She might have been breastfeeding more than one child at the same time. That’s how her tribe flourished. She put her body in service to the future. Her flower blooms power.

A woman’s body is the biology that produces other humans. We are made from our mothers. Every family, every tribe, every nation begins in a uterus, a collaborative organ that enables colonization. That’s why rape is a weapon of war. A nation must have an army of uteruses before it can have an army of fighters. We don’t often think of our uterus as a powerbase. But when you start to look at it as a man’s path to power, it explains a lot of why the patriarchy needs to come down hard on women’s rights. Children are a source of wealth. A uterus is a gold mine. The word husband comes from livestock breeding. Her flower blooms power. But for whom? 

A uterus gives a woman a particular power that men don’t have. That’s why King Solomon had 700 wives and a harem of 300 concubines. Henry VIII married six times and killed a couple wives because he wanted a better uterus. For hundreds of years women were not allowed to own property because men saw that a uterus with control of land could change the balance of power. Virginia Woolf was not allowed to enter the library at Oxford because she had a uterus. The Taliban won’t allow anyone with a uterus to go to school because they need their women uneducated and pregnant to hold power. The United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of the patriarchy when they decided the government controls a woman’s uterus. Her flower blooms power. So, lock it up. 

I was diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome when I was 16 in rural Illinois in 1970. My PCOS was treated with birth control pills to make my menstrual cycles more manageable. The birth control pills gave me blood clots. The clots put me in the emergency room of a Catholic hospital for my first D&C. The hospital nurses were nuns. They stood beside my hospital bed and told me they would not give me pain medication because I was a bad girl and pain was God’s punishment. I had a pulmonary embolism when I was 19. I have been hospitalized many times because my uterus was bleeding too much, my blood was clotting too much, because a cyst appeared to be an ectopic pregnancy, because I had an incomplete miscarriage. Science was slow to catch up with my healthcare problem. Treatments were primitive, misguided, and ineffective. If all that had happened to me today, it’s possible the government that rules my uterus would leave me to die rather than allow doctors to treat me and risk the appearance of freedom. Yes, the rage still festers in me. But as I get older, my story becomes my strength. My flower blooms power.

I have used the letters CU to abbreviate “see you” for a long time in email and texts. Still, it took me a google search to understand the meaning of the slang epithet “See You Next Tuesday” after the news reported a famous crime boss saying that phrase to a woman at his deposition. Now I get it. We live in a world where a crime boss who is campaigning for President of the United States can call a female lawyer a cunt in the presence of other lawyers and still be thought of by some as fit for the highest office in the land. This is the normalization of misogyny. Like racism, sexism is structural.

So, I’m thinking of my new book as Critical Clit Theory. For my own mental health, I needed to write a humorous satire about women’s healthcare issues because sexism is so layered into our life experience that many of us are numb to it. But I am a biological being. I was born into this skin. My body is me. My biology is a poem I write with my life. These are my beliefs and I stand by them. I chose the exquisite orchid Cattleya labiata for the cover of my book because like her, our biology is Nature’s masterpiece. Women can be powerful and sex positive and love men and demand control of our biology. That’s the story of Clitapalooza: Her flower blooms power. Women have the power, but we must also have the courage to use it.