Where the president followed me

Last October as the presidential election approached, I was on a mountain vacation with my husband and four-month-old son. We watched our  child roll over for the first time in front of the fireplace. He was squishy like the moss that grew around the house. He lay on his back, where his hands squeezed the deep pile moss, and his feet crunched the fallen leaves with every kick. 

It was a relaxing getaway to one of my favorite places in the world, but there was one thing that wasn’t right: I could hardly do anything without Donald Trump’s face or voice popping up in my head. Just the thought of him made me feel sick. And along with him came memories of some of the worst moments of my life because he reminded me so much of men who had hurt me.

I’m not talking about broken hearts. I’m talking about sexual assault, emotional abuse, gaslighting. I’m talking about pretending that facts don’t exist and that truth isn’t real. I’m talking about never taking responsibility for one thing done wrong and twisting mistakes back onto someone else. I’m talking about vicious name calling for refusal to pander and only being pleased with unquestioning loyalty. I’m talking about weakness and insecurity hidden under a need for power and control.

I thought, “Soon this disgusting man will not dominate my thoughts and seep into private moments I share with my family. I won’t hear his voice on the radio when I drive my son to a doctor’s appointment. I won’t hear his voice as I’m trying to fall asleep at night. He will be gone. He will be history. This will all be over.”

I wrote these lines to capture that moment in time, like a time capsule I would bury after the election:

Donald Trump is on vacation with me

He haunts the house that Grandmama designed on this mountain. By the hearth under the Mississippi magnolia, he sits there. Staring at me.

Donald Trump is with me in the shower, crowding behind me while I wash my hair.

Donald Trump is looking over my shoulder while I’m reading a book.

Donald Trump is standing over me while I’m nursing my son. He’s looking at my breasts and telling my baby, “Grab ’em. Bite ’em. Do whatever you want. When you’re a baby, they let you do that.” He tells me, “You’re disgusting.”

Donald Trump is eating my pancakes.

Donald Trump is breathing on me while I lie awake in bed. He’s whispering “It’s gonna be great, it’s gonna be amazing” while I try to fall asleep.

Donald Trump is watching me get dressed. He says,”This is someone who likes to eat.” He says, “You’ve gained a massive amount of weight and it’s a real problem.” He liked me better when I was an anorexic teenager.

Donald Trump is friends with the man who made me give him a blowjob while I was crying and said ‘No’. He’s telling me, “Must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees.”

Donald Trump is in my dreams. He whispers in my mom’s ear and puts his hand around her waist when she leans in to take his drink order on the airplane. He plants a wet kiss on her lips. She pushes him away, and he tells her not to worry. “No one has more respect for women than I do.”

Unfortunately, it did not all end a year ago.

It was just beginning. And like any survivor, I have learned coping mechanisms. I have learned how to tune out his voice, and I’ve had so much exposure to his face that it doesn’t affect me as deeply as it used to.

My first year as a mother will always have his imprint. I’ve struggled. Phases of minor depression, triggers from abusive times of my past, estrangement from family, losing faith in the church, re-envisioning my identity, wondering if we’ve all gone mad. It’s not all Trump, but he was the first domino that fell. He is connected to them all.

He built the damn wall. He built it inside me. So that to get through my day I had to climb over it. The wall was surrounded by a fog of disbelief, hidden in a cloud of doubt. The real felt surreal; fact mixed with fantasy. Am I really a mother? Is he really the president? Little made sense. Little happened as expected. The misty awe and reverence of motherhood met the cloud of horror and disgust of the climate in which my baby would take his first steps, speak his first words.

And when I pulled myself up off the floor the day after the election, something started to germinate. Not powerfully. Nothing I could see or you could see. It was the seed I folded in a wet paper towel in a ziploc bag in my third grade classroom. It was the seed folded deep inside my rage, sadness, and fear. The seed that seemed to do nothing day after day until it sprouted. The sprout I didn’t know would live or die in my care. It made roots that wove down and shoots that reached up, and I have watched it. I have yet to see it reach the top or bottom of where it can grow.

This is where my voice was planted. It was planted in the soil fertilized by the rot. My motherhood was planted there, and my son grows there, too. I call it a garden. 

“They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.” 

If George W Bush is a painter and we didn’t know it, Donald Trump is a gardener and he doesn’t know it. He is a gardener of negligence. Everywhere he walks, he scatters seeds around him from the wind of his breath. Those seeds will grow into a forest taller than him. As he golfs and tweets and speaks of countries that don’t exist, we rise. Taller. Taller still. All around him we rise. Soon we will be the thick wilderness that he has to grapple through to get out of bed in the morning and to fall asleep at night. Our roots connect, and our branches intertwine. We rise around him.

He built the wall. With seeds he didn’t know he planted. 

Here’s your wall, Mr. President. All around you. A living, breathing human wall.

 

Photo credit: Christopher Guider