Strong Enough

Last night I watched my kiddo grow up a little bit more.  Seeing that is rare, at least for me.  Growth is normally a gradual process, and you notice it after the fact. 

Sitting at the kitchen table, I was working, he was doing homework, and we were talking about our days.  He was working on an essay about a trip we took, he wanted a school t-shirt, and he was caught up after missing a few days of school to travel for a sports competition. 

"Oh, and in social studies we talked about school shootings, and what to do if one happened in  school" he said. He mentioned it so casually; deliberately not lifting his head from the drawing he was working on. Hearing this my heart sank a little bit.  He's 13 now. I know he is aware that school shootings happen, but that doesn't change my  urge to shield him from the fear and hurt that lurk out there in the world.  Since I can't shield him from reality and prepare him for it at the same time we need to talk these things through. Like so many other frightening realities that could happen, it's better to have a plan.  We have them for fires, floods, bomb threats, and abductions. We live close enough to Three Mile Island that we have a plan for any sort of meltdown or leak there. None of these things have ever happened to me, or to him, but they're a possibility, so we make plans, and we hope we never need them.  Following his lead, I didn't turn my eyes away from my computer, and I asked what they talked about, and what the plan was.

The plan is to get out of the school, if at all possible. 

The plan is that they may have to fight someone with a gun, if someone with a gun is in their classroom, because you want to get the gun away from that person.

The deal is, that not everyone is a fighter, and that's ok.  His teacher said so.

I know that this came up because the kids asked about it.  When you talk about these scenarios, and you tell kids that they need to get out of the school, they want to know about the worst case. What if you can't get out of the school? What if the shooter is in the room? What if you have to fight?

What if you have to fight, and you can't?

My kiddo is a good person.  He wants everyone around him to be happy and safe.  Some of that is how we raised him, and some of that is the person he is.  Last night I watched him try to determine if he would be brave enough to try to keep people safe by fighting someone with a gun.  He was chewing on a rice krispie treat, trying to figure out what kind of hero he thinks he is strong enough to be.

He was finishing his homework, and weighing his fear against the safety of others.

He was growing up a little bit, right there in front of me.

I am not a commodity.

Facebook holds 879 tagged pictures of me. Spread out through 45 albums, I have added over 2000 pictures.  These are pictures of me having fun.  Pictures of vacations and parties and weddings and days at home.  Pictures of my child, my husband, my family and friends.  They are snapshots of a life filled with love and fun.  Not all of these pictures are flattering.  I'm fine with that.  I've never had concerns about sharing them with anyone I choose to associate with on Facebook.

Then, Saturday night, this happened.

Moving past the fact that the picture in question is from 2008, and that this person had to crawl through plenty of other pictures of me and my family and my life to find it, I now refuse to have concerns about the pictures I have out there.

I have spent way too much time being uncomfortable with my body, and with my face.  I have spent too many years trying to deny that I can be found attractive.  I worried that these things didn't reflect the person that I am, and that they detracted from that. I worried that I needed to be nice to people who made me uncomfortable when they made comments about my ass, or my tits, or my body in general, because I didn't mean to be noticed like that.  So if I was noticed in that way it was probably my fault, and I needed to make it ok. I needed to be nice, because they meant it as a compliment.

FUCK.

THAT.

I'm most upset with myself that I STILL told him it was ok, and I would take it as a compliment.  I know full fucking well that it isn't.  That conversation has NOTHING to do with me as a person, and everything to do with my body as a commodity.

Nothing about me is a commodity.  

This is true for every single person on the planet.  

This was verbal sexual attack.  This happened because someone I know, someone I have spent time with and chatted with and smiled at, chose to view me as an object, and more importantly, thought that this was fine.  

This is not fine. I fight every day to be respected as a person.  I work every day to be a good one.  I have to live every day knowing that any number of people will discount all of that, and only see a sex object.  This will be the case no matter how I dress, or what pictures I choose to share.  This will be the case for every woman I know.  

This makes me really angry.  There isn't a lot that I can do about it, but I know that I will NEVER apologize for it again.  I will never say it's ok, and I will never again categorize it as a compliment.

This is the picture in question.  

These are my lips.  This is my mouth.  I will not be ashamed of them, and I will use them to speak up for myself.