Oink

Running It Like A Pig

I was the piggy.

At Thanksgiving dinner, when my brothers oinked at me.

But also before and after that, when my dad redirected my mom’s accusation at him - chauvinist pig - towards me, and made me go on a diet with him, since I was a fat pig.

I grew up thinking there was something very wrong with my weight and proportions. Body dysmorphia from being a girl in the late 90’s who thought I was supposed to look like Britney Spears or the Victoria’s Secret catalog, or my one sister with the blonde ringlets that the pastor wanted to introduce to his praise and worship guy when she was older.

The kind of attention I got indicated I didn’t look like that. I got told I had such a pretty face, and an hourglass waist and admonished about what else I could do. It came from all angles. Like how the John Casablancas modeling agent that my high school had invited to speak to our girls’ gym class screwed up her face when she saw me filling out one of the cards she passed around, making it so clear that I was not what she was there looking for that I threw my half-answered sign-up form in the trash.

Now of course I want to ask, seriously who the hell in administration okayed such a recruitment visit? Girls from poorer regions are already extra vulnerable to being told our beauty is a currency we can trade on, and we sure don’t need our schools helping that shit along.

When I look back at photos from that age, it is strange to see that despite my memories, I appear strikingly normal in appearance, perhaps even slim for a few of those years, and now I feel only grateful I didn’t get pulled into anything associated with the human trafficking and grifting those types of modeling agencies actually represented.

Then there’s that southern adage of if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all, and it has gotten told to me me often, but I have always wondered who that benefits exactly.

The state I’m from still has the highest gender pay disparity in the country, and the maternal mortality rate is through the roof. It was (and still is) perfectly legal for my parents to have registered their home as an unapproved school and then never had anyone but me even learn to read.

Luckily I was one of those weird hyperlexic kids whose first word was “butterfly” rather than “momma” and I just started reading the pages myself after they were read to me. Writing came later and I’ve had it ever since, collecting the nice and the not-so-nice.

I could have gotten married at age 17, if I wanted to, as my dad offered to sign the papers while on a drive we took to look at the only university he helped me apply to (which also happened to be his own alma mater). But after I chose college he was a lot less forthcoming with a signature when I needed verification for the FAFSA.

Amidst all this, I got the message that my brain, although it was clearly my ticket out of that mess, was somehow even worse than my marginally bigger body. Because what was always the true shame, an even bigger waste, is how much space got taken up by my personality.

Piggish. Bossy. Too much, with all my asking questions, making observations, continuously drawing unsettling connections between things, not letting sleeping dogs lie.

But once, after driving away from a rally at an abortion clinic in New Orleans, my dad, in one of his broken-clock-is-right-twice-a-day moments, had his own realization. He said he thought those women needed to get right with God on their own terms, and we didn’t need to be there.

Unfortunately the staunch anti-abortion pastor of the church we were attending did not agree, and my dad and our family was asked to leave.

I saw that that same pastor had the last word a few years ago, interviewed in the news after the clinic’s closure, his now much older face in the paper next to a quote saying he’d waited 32 years for this.

I tell this story to highlight the fact that man is not an apex predator. Instead he will simply exhaust you. If he has decided you’re the prey, he will walk and track and stalk you however he can until he’s tired you out.

And if one man doesn’t deplete you, there will always be another one right there, willing to take his place.

So it doesn’t surprise me that the second-class-citizen-enforcement and the rude power-grabs and all the motions that lead to them continuing are being bolstered on so many fronts. I see them in a news reporter being called “piggy” by a jackass occupying our highest (and increasingly overgilded) office, as punishment for asking a real journalistic question, and nobody around her saying a word in her defense. I see them in the categorical deprofessionalization of nursing and social work. I see them in the Halloween witch costumes, when history tells us that the pointed hats were traditionally worn by women who ran home breweries, until men, seeing women enriched by such a profession, cast them as witches and stole the job for themselves. The story and the profession of alewife forgotten, but the cats, the brooms, the boiling mash, and the women all remaining implicated to this day.

The men got all the beer money and we got to stand in a lineup of frightening monsters. And for that, somehow, we are the pigs.

Yet I see piggishness in all the chummy man man coverage, whether it’s the Epstein and Bannon emails or Mamdani and trump meetings, plastered across the media as dudes you could have a beer with.

It’s all just kinda gross. I have nothing nice to say about it and probably need to take a break from the news.

But what I have had in front of me hasn’t been exactly working, or divorced from it, either.

I don’t get to focus on anything too hard or for too long, because I become distracted by something domestic, the five year old and the toddler both holding one silly toy and screaming as they each claim it, or the baby puking on me as soon as I lay her down on my chest, leaving me hurriedly wiping milk out of fat rolls and off of clothes, both hers and mine.

The baby also wants to practice flipping from back to stomach, so she may attempt an alligator roll at any time, including while firmly latched to my boob, and I’d like to see anyone maintain mental equilibrium while being subjected to at least a dozen titty twisters a day.

I would like a scream-free meal, I tell my husband. He shrugs his shoulders from his place on the couch, holding the crying baby and briefly looking up from his phone to say I don’t know what you want me to do, I don’t have boobs.

My needs in the situation are clearly not anyone else’s priority, so I have felt a bit curdled.

Or perhaps more like a feral hog in the dirt, ready to charge across a bayou with tusks out if anyone else bothers me.

On what should have been the twelve year anniversary of our first date, I get in a fight with him over his spending, ruining a domestic budget I’m supposed to be in charge of. Then my mother in law is drawn into the argument, because clearly I’m not making good decisions either, as I’m the one who calls her on the phone and asks her to take her son back.

“It’s you,” she says, predictably, “it’s you that needs to change.”

I feel angry at first, but honestly, this woman survived a war and adapted to a whole different culture in another country while keeping three babies alive, and in neither place would I expect patriarchy or circumstances to have taught her any different.

After I calm down I feel shitty about the timing of the call, although I reason that perhaps a tiff with her daughter-in-law about mankeeping could be a distraction for her from something much more difficult - the delicate state of her own man.

My father in law just got out of a three week hospital stay and she has her phone set to wake up and administer his pain medication every three hours, only to see he’s still very much feeling the radiation treatments to his spine.

So all this to say that things are rough. We are worried. My husband isn’t handling it well. I’m not handling it well. My father in law is not well at all, and there isn’t anything any of us can seem to do to make him better.

I get the kids to draw Grandpa pictures and make him some art. I transcribe the verbal notes they have for him. I feel so proud of my eldest daughter, who makes him a peapod out of playdoh to go alongside a tiny green peapod-shaped eraser set she won in school. After one of the eraser peas was lost and replaced by a marbled green and purple bead of the same size that I found for her, she decided it’s magic, and Grandpa can have her magic peas to help him get better.

It feels like a more sensible decision than some of the ones us adults are making, as we crab and bicker and shop, giving unsolicited half-baked advice and taking irritable potshots amongst ourselves.

I feel stuck, both a victim and an asshole, staring down the stresses of the sandwich generation. If I’m not a bull in a china shop, I’m at least a pig.

Maybe my mother in law is right about the context if not the content, and I do need to make some changes.

Instead I find myself in analysis-paralysis, googling strange rabbit holes, wondering if the same Agent Orange that likely gave my father in law cancer gave his son ADHD and my youngest baby a slightly malformed earlobe.

The answer is who knows. Maybe.

That’s the answer to too many things.

Will we get to have the holidays together?

Who knows. Maybe.

Will my toddler stop shrieking at the top of his lungs right at the moment he sees me lay the baby down for a nap?

Who knows. Maybe.

Will the assistant principal call me again and tell me my kindergartner seems to be trying to get sent to the office with how often it’s been happening?

Who knows. Maybe.

Will the Epstein files get released and if they do, will it make a damn bit of difference?

Who knows. Maybe.

Will south Louisiana stop embarrassing me?

No, probably not. It’s pretty clear on that one. We’ve got Scalise, Johnson, and now Higgins up in the federal government assuring us of this. Bringing the worst of Louisiana culture to the prime time. But I buy cheap tickets for my family to fly down in the new year and see my own Grandpa, who is using a wheelchair now, and I can’t wait to go. Home, as dysfunctional as the place is, is home. And I miss it terribly, not having been back in a year and a half.

Then, as if on cue, I get an email from the airline telling me that they’ve rerouted my connecting flight to Denver, making my travel time eight hours instead of five, and they hope this is ok, but if its not, I have 15 days to change it without incurring extra costs. I laugh and add this to my to-do list that already has all kinds of things, like trim the kids’ nails, and scrub mildew off the bathroom ceiling, and get rid of old shoes on it.

Instead I take a nap with the baby, waking up to the sound of my husband using a drill in the kitchen. I come out to see the most janky sound system installed under a little tv on the wall. This has got to go, I say. And how you didn’t realize this was ridiculous before putting holes in my walls, I’ll never know.

You don’t know if it’ll work until you try it, he says, by way of explanation.

I list a few ways that I have learned to tell things are bad ideas before trying them. Clearly he cannot relate. “Ok, rainman,” he says, “you’re over here seeing the future.”

And yet, I am. As Cassandra.

While I’m bogged down in feeling like the only adult in the room, my babies are growing up (which is such a beautiful thing!), my elders are getting older, my nation’s politics are getting more regressive, and my husband is getting lost in the weeds.

But I am lost in my own way too. I look at my face in the mirror and it’s not the one that now exists in my mind and old photos, slim and young enough to be my daughter. I comb my hair and handfuls fall out, typical for me at about three months postpartum, as I make my way through this tangle of red strands starting to turn gray.

I feel that it’s a failure on my part to be so frazzled by incessant childcare and husband-minding that I can cringe to hear my tone reflected in my kids voices, as they angrily say “don’t do that again!” to each other. Then I hate that I feel guilty about it, when I know damn well none of us were meant to be raising our babies and dealing with men who are completely (and understandably) overwhelmed at feeling like they’re in charge of a whole household, alone in a house by ourselves.

I think about how the nuclear family is a feeder to capitalism because we have so much unmet human need we then try to get out of by buying things.

How I have way more baby onesies and kids’ sensory toys than I need, but not enough people to hold the baby while I shower.

I tell myself that in such circumstances, it is unhelpful to attempt to maintain control of the way people experience me, or keep distant, fearful that after they’ve seen my struggles they too will find reason to call me a pig.

I need to reach out, be in community, have my environment be valid and real.

So when a friend offers to stop by, intending to help me with late fall gardening, I tell her I leave the leaves (and the stems and the stalks), so all I have left to do is plant some garlic and a few daffodil bulbs, then trim and bind up the fig tree. But we didn’t even do that. I invited her into the chaos of my house and she just sat in my kitchen and held my baby as I made us lunch, then washed my own dishes, and put away my own groceries on the pantry shelves.

It was wonderful. It joined other little things that have held me together in the midst of this, like the crossing guard giving me a hug as I ferried my children to school, after telling her it had been a rough morning with all the tiny coats and hats.

Or happily texting my new neighbor the name of a red maple the city just installed on our shared hellstrip. A gorgeous living thing that will only get better with time. A tree I had personally filled out the request form for earlier in the year.

“How does your husband feel about you writing things that are not flattering about him?” my friend asks, bringing me back to an uncomfortable layer of reality.

I tell her about the pressure I feel to do the opposite and write husband veneration content, but how I’ve found that writing things that are real, the actual struggles I have, issues I face, things I think about, is actually a positive choice, not done to embarrass anyone, but to make sure I’m actually reflecting the life I have and am not a spectator with a filter, pretending away somewhere.

Also, any post that mentions him, I read it to him first, so he could say no, if he wanted to, but so far he never has, being a generally unembarrassed person, whether I think he should be or not.

I consider it all a bit more and decide, like most matriarchs eventually seem to do, that after all these years of being inspected for piggishness and accused of it, while dealing with everybody else’s, perhaps there is in fact some room for me to actually act like a pig.

I clear my throat, ready to root out what I want.

“I’d like to be in charge,” I tell my husband, “I want to run things and have you say ‘yes dear.’ Stuff’s gonna start being handled differently around here, and you might find it takes a bit of getting used to.”