“Is that how we lived, then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is as usual. Even this is as usual, now. We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.” Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood Last week, I finally sat down to watch The Handmaid’s Tale based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel. While the television series was released seven years ago, I have not been able to bring myself to sit before it, neither in print nor on film, until now. This particular work, this tale of subjugation and violence against women, I could not open for fear it would feel too real. I was not wrong. I have sat with too many women who have been violated in these ways, women who were reduced to bodies, stripped bare of feeling or choice. These women, these friends, were not unlike Atwood’s protagonist, Offred. In those unspeakable moments, they were diluted to just their physical form, Handmaids all of them, all of us. I have experienced this violation myself. I have been reduced to a body more times than I can recall. I do not wish to recall these times but only to warn that such dystopia is not so far away in some imagined work of fiction. It is right here. It always has been here, breathing just under the surface, leaking out in millions of ways upon millions of women. We have all been Offred in some form, though so many still confuse their oppressors with saviors, as does Atwood’s problematic character, Aunt Lydia. “There is more than one kind of freedom,” said Aunt Lydia. “Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from.”

I’ve been suffering from a fierce case of writer’s block lately. I have nothing to say, or maybe I have too much. These days, my inability to pin down a topic sentence stems from the endless string of topics before me. Every day, I tally ideas in my head. Idling in the pick-up line at school, a scroll through my phone brings me to a friend’s Facebook post. In it, she outlines a procedure she endured after experiencing two separate miscarriages. She relives the grief of those unchosen, unwanted procedures to bring awareness to legislation that will outlaw these surgeries. For thousands of women across America, these necessary procedures are already banned. I want to scream. Instead, I jot down idea number one.

Last week I cried longer and harder than I have in a very, very long time. For three days, I dropped my kids off at school with visions of picking them up at the close of the afternoon in body bags. I could not shift that image from my mind as the hours of the morning ticked by. “Where are they right now?” I wondered, as I sorted the laundry. Were they sharing their good news for the day? Were they out for recess or nibbling on a morning snack? Were they thinking of me as I fixated on their little bodies ducking under desks as they tried their best to stay quiet? “Please stay quiet, please stay quiet,” I pleaded. Or maybe they should run. Maybe I should tell them to just run and keep running as fast as their feet can carry them. Maybe we should all run.

Two mothers stand along a busy road in the chill of a January afternoon. “Are you from here?” she had asked, peeking out the vehicle window. The woman, I had assumed, was in search of directions. “Yes, can I help?” Relieved, she exited her car with a small stack of postcards, bold black ink printed across the top. An American flag waved from the bottom. She pushed one in my direction. “I wanted to let you know about an upcoming school board meeting where they will be discussing some really important issues.” She smiles. I smile back. Based on the handout’s bullet points, I am doubtful we will be allies. But the concern in her eyes is evident, so I let my hope linger just a bit longer on the snowflakes drifting between us. “What are the issues?” I ask. She enters into her spiel. Her opening sentence snatches all hope from the wind and drops it to the icy sidewalk. It seems she is very concerned about the books in the school library. I wouldn’t believe the vulgarity in these books, I’m told. The cursing. The propaganda. The lesbians! And the lies – so many lies. “Would I believe all of these lies?” she wonders.

Twenty-nine days out of thirty, I cannot be heard above the cacophony of high-pitched shrieks and monster trucks smashing one atop another. My voice is trampled by the line of children marching to and fro across anything I dared hope to accomplish at the start of each new morning. And by nightfall, every tiny head snug in its bed, I’ve nothing left to say anyways, my throat long since tired. Twenty-nine days out of thirty, my words are swallowed up by all that these children require. That is the great conundrum of motherhood as I nibble broken Pop-tarts in the quiet hours of evening, trying to remember what it was I thought worth mentioning all those hours ago. These paragraphs penned once a month are my chance to speak without interruption, to finally be heard, but as I sit here tonight, my focus lies squarely on those little interrupters, not the ones I birthed but the ones I am borrowing for a time. This small space my voice occupies can amplify theirs.

Americans love a good Holocaust novel. We drink our moderately-priced wine, cover ourselves in the weight of a down comforter, and dive into what we think is an entirely different world. Aghast in our beds, we try to wrap our minds around those evil Germans. We shake our heads and shed our tears laced with a hint of relief that our past is not in these pages, forgetting the trail of atrocities this country was built upon. Someone else’s crimes always overshadow our own. The unmarked graves of 215 children were recently discovered in Kamloops, British Columbia on the grounds of a former boarding school for Canada’s Indigenous children. 751 remains were found in Saskatchewan at the Marieval Indian Residential School shortly thereafter. Given the 130 such schools in Canada, it may be safe to assume these will not be the only sins coming to the surface, and with America’s eerily similar deculturation of Native peoples, our reckoning cannot be far behind.

This past year has left many of us in ruins. The unluckiest have said premature goodbyes to loved ones. Others have lost jobs, homes, businesses, and financial independence. Those of us who’ve escaped these casualties have suffered in different ways – fear and frustration over continued racial injustice, crumbling mental health, longing for community, warring with family and friends over politics. No one has made it through these last twelve months without a few scars, and many of us still have open wounds. As we drive through our neighborhoods and on backroads between towns, we see the wallpaper of this past year slowly disintegrating across the frozen landscape. Trump signs linger, painted plywood and weathered blue placards dot the ditches throughout the county and beyond, though nature is slowly stepping in to tear down the divisions between us. Names have already been taken, though, and mental notes made. We all know who belongs to which side, and these things are not easily forgotten, not after the year we’ve had. Silences linger between family members, and there are pauses in friendships we have now grown accustomed to. This year has revealed more honest versions of ourselves, but this revelation has yet to prove helpful or harmful. I think back to March when the worry set in, and I began to hold my children just a bit tighter. I remember May and June, the rising racial tensions and righteous anger fueling protests. My husband and I lingered on the brink of something ugly, threatening to split us down the middle if we could not find common ground on how to lead this transracial family of ours. Arguments rolled long into the night, and neither of us knew if we would ever find our way out. I remember late summer when a traffic ticket led me into a conversation with a local police officer. He wanted to ensure I knew all about the “China virus” and the litany of conspiracies he heralded as facts. Inside the county courthouse, he sat uniformed and smiling, glistening really in his authority and privilege. “My wife, she plays along, but me? I never wear this thing,” he bragged, pulling at the mask laying limp around his neck. September came and swept my kids up in its undertow as they sobbed onto the kitchen table, missing friends and classrooms they wouldn’t get to see. I excused myself to the pantry to hide my tears behind a closed door, questioning the choice we had made. I remember wondering which onlookers thought we had overreacted. Then came October and November and December – the longest election of our lives. Those of us who’d made it through the previous months without weeding our gardens were soon covered in dirt, ripping out the creeping thistle we always thought was a flower.

Have you ever actually been grabbed by the pussy? Have you ever felt the pressure of five hungry fingers gripping your body without permission? Has someone ever clutched, squeezed your flesh without warning or consent – someone you know or someone you don’t, a supervisor or a coworker or a client, a smiling face you had wrongly considered a friend? Have you ever been kissed by a mouth that “[didn’t] even wait” for an invitation? Have you found yourself alone with someone who expected you would let them “do anything,” someone who then decided that the most private, sacred parts of you really belonged to them? Has your body ever been the topic of discussion in whispered laughter - your butt, your mouth, your legs, your “big phony tits?” Have you ever listened as a pack of wolves tore that body apart? Did you pause for a moment, trying to decide whether or not you would bear the weight of confrontation once again? And again? And again? And again, did you ask yourself, “Can I just pretend I didn’t hear them this time?”