13 Lessons From A Morally-Wounded Woman: Chapter 10

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Chapter 10
“The only way to respect your womanhood is to do what you damn well please.”


“How can he owe her more money than he has?” I ask My Only Friend as we sit together on her balcony, discussing her trip.

The Boyfriend will not be returning for another week. Their trip has been rather successful in that he has managed to draw up an agreement with The Wife for the terms of divorce. In an effort to avoid going to court and speed up the process, The Boyfriend has agreed to give The Wife a lot more money than she would have gotten had they seen the actual process of divorce through. In an attempt to secure even more she offered to give him custody of the child in exchange for more money. I wonder how that can be allowed when rationally the parent footing the expenses of the child would need more money than the one who isn’t. The Boyfriend having had no hope of ever gaining custody of the child jumped at the opportunity, I don’t think I can blame a person for agreeing to pay any amount to get their child but My Only Friend is miffed he has let his emotions get the best of him instead of being patient and negotiating the amount down.

“Because he owes her a part of everything he will ever earn,” she says speaking the words of a lawyer through her lips.

Apparently being married is like selling your soul to the devil or a multi-level marketing company, you owe them forever.

“Does that cater to the possibility of him retiring early or just losing his job?” I ask her, “Because all of that could have happened even if they had remained married and, in that case, she would have been legally obligated to stick with him if they were married. Or are you also allowed to divorce people if they lose their job?”

The business of marriage is so dirty that when I look at it objectively it feels like a combination of prostitution, child trafficking, manipulation and negotiation. I don’t understand where the idea that marriage is about love even came from. It’s like wrapping up a brick in taffeta and giving it to the person you intend to bludgeon with it.

“I don’t fucking understand any of it,” she says to me, “I just know that he is going to get a loan, give her all the money and a child is going to come live with us.”

My friend and I, we are not the type of people who have ever considered having children in our lives. Even now we spend most of our time at the shelter trying to avoid the child or interacting with him through toys, biscuits and budget allocations instead of actual words. I think we are scared of children, and the world will tell us that we are actually scared of responsibility, but that’s only because when all else fails you can try shaming to convince women to take their rightful roles as mothers. I don’t think we are scared of responsibility for the simple reason that we are two women in this world who fend for ourselves. That is not the type of thing irresponsible people can do, it’s much easier for a man to fend for himself, if only because he isn’t constantly fighting off threats like we are, and perhaps some people would rather crucify me than admit to the reality that nothing is easy to do as a woman. It’s harder to get loans at banks. It’s harder to get jobs and when you do get them, it is harder to get good pay. A man can just answer an ad online and get an apartment, but a woman must prove her morality before one is rented to her and even then, in most places single women are not allowed. A man can be the breadwinner in a family and no one will bat an eye, but if the roles were to be reversed, we are apparently emasculating them. They tell us that the fact that we get to stay home and spend time with our children is a privilege, but if we expect them to do the same it is an insult. It’s even harder to walk down the street when you bear the cross of womanhood because you must always look over your shoulder to ensure rape is not following at your heels. You can’t step out of your house without weighing the likelihood of being accosted.


…….



My Actual Abusive Boyfriend used to beat me for complaining about period cramps.

“I fucking hate this shit,” I used to say to him, “I wish I could resign from being female.”

“You period is the price you pay for the ability to bear children,” He would say, “Don’t say shit about your period in front of me, it’s what makes you a woman.”

Of course that is what makes womanhood to men like him, the biological condition of bleeding out your vagina once a month. He never asked me what womanhood means to me though, because the answer if it comes from the mouth of a woman, immediately has less value. If he had asked me though I would have told him because I have known what womanhood means all my life. It means accepting injustice with beautifully painted lips.

“But I cannot even bear children,” I would tell him.

“That’s because you don’t respect your womanhood,” he would retort in anger.

Respect your womanhood. That is the refrain of men who want to get us to see ourselves as the ornaments that decorate the world as opposed to creatures that inhabit it just like them. These are the men who call womanhood a beautiful experience while making the life of actual women a living hell on a daily basis. These are the men who find womanhood only in experiences that involve suffering and they are buoyed by the women who support them in that view. Women like The Seamstress and the mother of My Actual Abusive Boyfriend. I will never call womanhood beautiful because if womanhood is the social experience of being female-identified then it is a fucking shit-show. I am often accused of being a misandrist but I have met about four-score women’s share of men and my feelings are based entirely on the empirical evidence of getting to know them and I know that it doesn’t have to be us against them but there are no options left. Sometimes it has to be us against them because they won’t stop trying to control our lives, but even that I can bear, I can bear a man acting like an entitled misogynist because that is what society has taught me to expect. It has taught me to expect that men are the enemy but the women who support them are worse because they have defected from the course and become traitors to the cause. The cause isn’t slut-walks and the right to live without bras, no, the cause is to lift thousands of years of injustice so pervasive that it impacts everything. The cause is everything. Even a man being screwed over by laws and mediators that favour women is part of the cause.


…….



“How do you feel about the kid?” I ask my friend.

“It’s a kid,” she says, “I will feed it, teach it, talk to it, keep it safe. What more could it need?”

“I don’t know,” I tell her, “Still I am sure a woman who has never wanted a child would do better than a woman who sells one.”

I really cannot make my peace with that. I had a client many years ago who wanted custody of his then 12-year-old daughter but he tried to attain it the legal way and was essentially told that the court does not trust a man to raise a daughter as much as they trust a mother. He then attempted to reason with his ex-wife but the court had awarded her the right to govern his access to his child and even though he was legally allowed visitation, he almost never got to see his daughter because the mother just refused. He could have gone to court each time he was denied visitation but instead he tried to appeal custody and by the time that case was even heard the daughter had turned eighteen and wanted nothing to do with either one of her parents. I don’t blame her, children aren’t supposed to be pawns or bargaining chips, which is why I cant blame The Boyfriend for jumping at the opportunity to gain custody by way of money. I even understand now why people stay together for the sake of the children, it’s not because they want their children to have the semblance of a normal family, but because it is impossible to tell which parent will end up with the kids. I think the wisest course is to make the best decision in the interest of the kids but that’s just some idealist crap that five people in the world would actually do while the rest of us just pretend to do it while really attempting to get our own way.

“I want to tell you something,” she says clearly nervous, “I think... I think I want to marry him.”

I’m simultaneously surprised that she wants that and surprised that she thinks I don’t already know that. I understand how fighting so hard for your right to love can fuel in a person the need to legitimise it lest you lose it again.

“I’ll finally have a married friend!” I tell her.

“But...” she says still nervous about something, “You’re not going to judge me, are you?”

I am a little taken aback that she would even go there but again, I understand. There is a certain expectation that people have from women like me. People expect that I will burn bras and crash weddings to protest them. I expect that too sometimes. These ideas of women’s empowerment sometimes feel like walking a tightrope in high heels.

“Only if you wear anything orange to the wedding,” I hug and tell her.

There was a time in my life when I came really close to a wedding too. My Actual Abusive Boyfriend asked me to marry him when I was 24. We were at the height of our relationship then by which I mean it was all sex and punching. He was going to move back to Delhi in a few months for a job he had gotten through his family’s connections at a manufacturing concern as the floor manager and he said it paid well, which is kind of a crazy thing to say to a whore. Now, here’s the thing, career whores are rare. Most women who venture down this line of work do it for about six months to two years. That’s the average period. Once you have done it for longer than 2-years it stops making sense to work with a manager because the chances are you have already developed your own clientele, carved your own niche, struck your own deals with cops and have your own situations with hotel managers or concierges at service apartments. Since I had done all of that years ago, I was making excellent money for a 24-year-old. I had even found a bank manager who helped turn a lot of that cash into legitimate income that I could have used to put a down payment on a house. I wasn’t going to marry him, of course, because even though I said yes immediately when he asked me, I had absolutely no intention of ever marrying. I decided when I said yes that I would leave him once he moved out of town, he was an angry man but I didn’t believe he would get on a plane just to pound me to the ground.

“I will not wear orange,” she says, “But... what should I wear?”

I enjoy the occasional girlish excitement of my friend because no one deserves it more. My friend can be moderately neurotic but it is entirely obliterated by the fact that she is the most loyal person you will ever meet.


…….


A few years after I met her, when she was still working as a hair stylist, a client I had for years and years altogether asked me to move to Delhi for him. He was a wonderful man in many ways. He ran a large construction company and was extremely wealthy. He always had clean nails, feet and teeth. He was articulate and amazingly, and this is rather rare, very good in bed for a man who hired whores with regularity. Perhaps the strangest thing about him was that he was a germaphobe, sometimes when he picked me up from places, he would ask me to jump up and down outside his car so that I didn’t bring the dust in. He had wipes in both pockets at all times, and sanitisers all over his entire living space. He pretty much exclusively fucked prostitutes and I wondered often if he steamed his dick after; there was such fundamental inconsistency between who he was and who he wanted to be that it amused me endlessly. I had started doing more client-based work as opposed to volume-based work when I had finished college. I had more time, and I had made enough money to really invest in my career, I didn’t want or need to work at a college-girls service anymore and so I began developing relations with a smaller pool of much richer fish and the best thing to come out of that was him, The Germaphobe.

He hired me as a consultant for his company at an exorbitant, taxable salary in exchange for being available to him whenever he felt the desire. We had seen each other roughly twice a week for three-years when he decided to relocate and told me I should come with him. It was the best retirement plan a professional fornicator could imagine: a salary that I didn’t have to keep in cash, a house that he would pay for, a nice man who bought me things I didn’t need and never beat me. It was too good to pass up. I told My Only Friend about the offer and she told me that I absolutely had to take it.

“I do want to take it,” I told her, “But, honestly, I don’t want to leave this place without you.”

She was silent for a moment.

“I’ll move with you,” she said, “It rains too much here and it’s not like I have a fucking life here.”

I couldn’t believe she would actually consider that but I was wrong to think she was just considering it. She insisted and even before I had told The Germaphobe that I would move, she had started packing. She doesn’t dwell on things, my friend, she either does them or she doesn’t. There are never months of contemplation with her, there’s never any words that get taken back or reconsidered. She is and has always been, perfectly decisive. It was as if this was nothing to her, before I could even have a discussion with her, she had enrolled herself in a graduate program, gotten a job at an upscale salon and found herself a hovel to live in. I told her that I would pay her for college and she objected vehemently.

“Not for nothing,” I told her, “I promise you I will hire you to work for me someday.”

“You planning on becoming a madam now?” She asked.

I never had. I didn’t ever want to make money from women who fucked on my behalf. I had never wanted to manage a bunch of women or really a bunch of anything. I am not a manager; I am an operator and I operate only myself. The only exception was that I won that argument about paying for school for her. Honestly, money means nothing to me, as long as I have enough to take care of myself, I don’t even know what to do with the rest. I spent it on anyone in my vicinity so spending it on my friend was an actual delight for me. She was the only person I have ever met that whose love for me I didn’t doubt. She knows me exactly as I am which is not something I can say about my mother, my lovers, my employers or maybe even myself. She knows what I will say, what I will do, where I will love and even who I will fall in love with.

A few days ago, she had told me that she had always been skeptical about Number 3 moving in but it was never because of The Child.

“I just knew you were going to fall for her,” she said, “I tried to keep her out using the kid but it wasn’t that.”


……..


My Only Friend recovered from my admission about Number 3 with her usual rapidity and was now extremely supportive of my weird relationship with an 18-year-old runaway. There are very few people in the world who would support you through something like that, and I am not certain if they should but I appreciate it. I have never understood the type of friendship that is contingent upon approval. To be fair, I have never had any friends but I have been in the world long enough to know how a lot of those relationships work. My mother had friends when I was growing up and their relationships seemed based on reciprocal favours and social approval. They stopped being friends with one another when they disagreed with something the other did. School was even more confusing, friendships seemed to be based on niceness and chastity, and by the time I got to college I was no longer interested in any platonic relationships with people.

“Do you want to go shop for something to wear when he proposes?” I ask her as she looks up orange wedding clothes on her phone just to rile me up, “Do you know when he will? Or are you doing it? How are we playing this?”

“You’ve gone mad,” she says pointing at an especially heinous orange gown with a big bow at the back, “We have talked about it and we think we should plan it for six months after his divorce is through so I can have a chance to see how I adjust to the child.”

Her plan makes perfect sense but I feel a pang of loneliness as I realise that she has made detailed life plans with another person before she discussed them with me. I don’t resent her that freedom, of course, but for so long now it has been the two of us that it comes as a surprise to me when any of us plan a life outside of our tiny little world.

“That sounds like a good plan,” I tell her, “I can’t believe you’re going to live with a child. What if it..touches you?”

She rolls her eyes at me. It’s quite a beautiful sight since her eyes cover half of her face.

“It’s a child bitch, it won’t burn me,” she says laughing.

“Shall we go now?” I ask her looking at my watch, “We have to set up before the party.”

The Teacher is leaving us today. My Only Friend shot down my idea of hiring Number 3 in her stead about six seconds after I made the suggestion. Her only line of reasoning was that I have lost my mind and that was enough for me. She rarely disagrees with me with a vehemence as strong as that, it’s not as if I don’t know that she has absolutely no qualifications to teach anything and after watching her struggle to do basic math when we went shopping a few days ago, I realised that my idea of hiring her was rooted inside a fantasy of creating a perfect situation for myself instead of genuine sense. Instead, we have hired a college student who is easily as bright as The Teacher though she lacks her impeccable sense of control. She will be moving her stuff in tomorrow evening and tonight we are having a little farewell dinner for The Teacher. I had asked her to stay a couple of extra weeks but I don’t blame her for refusing to do it.

“I just can’t stand this place anymore,” she said, “Everyone looks at me like I am a criminal.”

We treat victims of abuse with such disdain. First, we make the qualification for whether they even really deserve our pity on the basis of how they dress, speak, live and most importantly how the abuse came to be. Then we give them advice which either presents them with an ultimatum as to what they should do or an explanation as to what behaviours they should avoid in the future so this doesn’t happen to them again. Then when they refuse to take our advice because abuse doesn’t actually follow a twelve-step programme, we blame them for not having the strength to leave and start holding them responsible for whatever is happening to them.


…….



I blamed myself for years for not having the strength to leave My Actual Abusive Boyfriend and the reason for that was that every person who approached me to help me, made me feel like staying in that relationship was my fault. Over time, it became impossible to hide his abuse and when the people who were regular fixtures in my life started to take note of it, they began telling me what I should do. The guy who sold me cigarettes told me I should kick him in the balls and call the police. The woman who rented me my apartment told me that I should seek help in a shelter and then when she grew tired of the inconvenience of the abuse, she told me she would kick me out of my apartment if I continued to scream when someone kicked my teeth in. Real nice lady. She was the sensitive, artistic types who had a floral arrangement painted onto her door. She was a practicing Buddhist and a self-confessed pacifist, and the first woman to ever kick me out of an apartment for having the audacity to continue being abused after she had categorically told me to stop.

The most amusing, honest and selfish bit of advice I had gotten was from The Pimp. We didn’t see each other often in the two years that I worked for him, only about once a month when he needed to make me a payment or I needed to make him one because one of us had failed at maintaining the chain. The first few times he saw bruises on my body he didn’t say anything even though I saw him looking at them, I tried to bait him to ask but I suppose a man like that has seen a bruised woman enough times to know when to say nothing. He finally asked me about it one day when he met me beside the rain-gutter before I met one of my regulars. His first enquiry, predictably, was if someone was doing that to me at work. I told him it was not work-related wounding and I asked him if he shouldn’t have checked about that sooner if that was his first hunch.

“I’m not your father,” he said to me, “If you don’t want to get punched, don’t get punched.”

“I’m sorry?” I asked him, confused.

“Just.. you need to keep it under check,” he said, “I don’t care what you do with yourself in your life but I don’t need people thinking I am beating you.”

“The bruises get me bigger tips, though,” I told him, “Do you want a cut on my tips to shut up about my bruises?”

“You’re insane,” he told me stroking the especially purple part of my arm, “I’ve never met someone like you.”

I was worried he was going to fall in love with me and that is what precipitated my hastening of the process of becoming an independent. That’s what men do when they find a woman who is being abused, they rescue her. It’s such a beautiful sentiment, no? A poor woman in a desperate situation meets an unlikely knight in ratty cotton and they live happily ever after in matrimonial bliss after he rescues her from her life of undignified victimhood. Except that it’s utter garbage. All of it is complete garbage. Right from holding women responsible for their own abuse to shaming them for not recusing themselves to rescuing them to a life of being controlled by the rescuer.


…….



I understand completely why The Teacher cannot bear it. She’s in love, she’s not a moron who isn’t capable of taking actual stock of the real situation that faces her.

“They should all know better,” she said to me when we last spoke and she turned down my request for an extension, “But they act like I am an insult to womanhood.”

I was moved by what she said. She is right, of course, it’s one of those situations where you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

“Listen to me, and believe me when I say this,” I told her with a knot of tears stuck in my throat, “The only way to respect your womanhood is to do what you damn well please.”

My Only Friend told me that was terrible advice to give to a person whose free-will was leading them to move away from a place of safety to an apartment with her abuser but I don’t think so. I think we all have to go through the motions before we either decide we deserve better or we perish in the battlefield. I know that it is a much more serious gamble than betting on horses but womanhood is a much more serious game. It’s a war for survival and if you put yourself at the head of the fight, you have to accept that you could be martyred. I knew that when i was with My Actual Abusive Boyfriend, I knew that which is why I lived in terror around him but I think the terror was also a draw. I believe I would have left him much sooner if I hadn’t grown up entrenched in terror. I used to be so afraid of my mother growing up that I would immediately feel the need to hide when i heard her car pulling up in the driveway.

Even now I can hear the faintest sounds because all of my childhood was spent listening for terror outside my door an preparing myself for whichever kind was going to make an appearance next. I think adrenaline is the easier addiction to catch and the hardest to quit. He gave me such free access to adrenaline that as a junkie I don’t think I could have ever found the strength to leave him if he hadn’t left the city. The distance from his drug made me more capable of seeing I could get a better, cleaner dosage in many other ways. I don’t know why The Teacher needs to go through this experience of living in defense of the creature that instils fear in you but somehow, I feel much more comfortable with letting her do it than I felt with leaving the wife of my ex with him. I am sure my reasons have to do with a classist, elitist idea of empowerment according to which The Teacher is better poised to get out than that woman ever was, and even thought I hate that, it is true. The Teacher has a strength and it’s not her power as a woman or any such crap, that doesn’t get people out of situations like these, she has her own money. The Teacher has enough money that when the day the levee breaks comes, she will have the options she needs to get the fuck out. I trust that more than anything else.


…….


Emotionally, leaving My Actual Abusive Boyfriend was rough, and he left scars on me that might never heal. However, actually getting him out of my life when I needed to was extremely easy for two reasons: I had all the money and I never made the dumbass mistake of marrying him. I also believe that I put up with so much of his shit because I believed that my deception of him over what I really did for a living was not only a form of vengeance but a sure-fire way to get rid of him. When that day finally came, I took the only sadistic joy I have ever taken in my life as I explained to him that all the money, I had ever given him, all the work-appointments I had ever talked about, all the clothes he wore had come from his girlfriend selling her vagina. I told him at the airport because I wanted to see his face but I also didn’t want to be beaten by him ever again. I saw the news utterly destroy him. I expected that he would shout and scream, and make a scene, instead I saw him break into a million pieces right before my eyes.

“I still want to be with you,” He said, dejected, as tears streamed down his face, “I’ll still accept you despite everything.”

I wanted to slap him for believing he had any right to accept me. I don’t know what society teaches men but it often leads them to believe that even when they are angry, jobless abusive monsters they still have more dignity than a whore.

“But I can’t accept you,” I told him.

I left him at the airport without so much as another word and even though I knew a lot of pain would follow in the years that I removed his effects from my soul, in that moment I felt invincible. I suppose I hoped The Teacher’s story would meet a similar end.
…….


As we pull up to the shelter, I ask my friend if she wants me to go get sushi after we finish with the party. She nods her head. We walk from the cab, past the guard and to the office door where Number 3 is standing and waiting for us.

“She’s gone,” she tells us as soon as we come up to her, “I went to her room to ask if I could borrow some clothes for the party and I found this.”

She hands me a note.

“Thank you for everything. I am sorry I won’t be able to attend this party.”

As I hand the note over to my friend, I realise I am not as surprised as I should be. The party is a formality we are using as a silk bed sheet on a lumpy mattress. It’s for us, not for her. It’s so that we feel better about everything that has happened while she walks out of fantasy into the real world where there’s a war going on.

“We should have the party anyway,” I say as the two of them give me a matching look of bewilderment.

They don’t look alike at all but they have all the same facial expressions and reactions to things.

“For what?” My friend asks folding up the note and putting it in her pocket.

“Yes, what?” Number 3 asks in a tone of far more annoyance than is warranted, “What exactly are we celebrating?”


“A fallen warrior,” I tell him, “We’re celebrating a fallen warrior.”

I can see in their faces that they believe my headiness is distasteful. They are not wrong.


…….