A sweat-slicked, overworked deli woman stands before me, arm extended with the weight of poverty and its favourite mystery meat – Devon. With sunken eyes and a tired smile, I get the sense we are both well acquainted with it. My last five dollars is spent and so am I, grocery bags digging into the crooks of my elbow.
The illusion of achievement is a brief success torn apart by a warm, fateful trickle of red that slides down my leg. The charm of completion is gone. Blood.
All too quickly, fluorescent grocery lights become spotlights, imaginary audiences begin to laugh comically, the steady thud in my chest is a raging rhythm and once again, I’m a 16-year-old girl deeply aware of her own body.
But then, the conclusion comes: I didn’t budget for this.
With $70 for two weeks to feed three people, I’m used to feeling like I’m on a suburban spin-off of Survivor. Mystery meat or menstrual hygiene?
Doesn’t sound like much of a choice when you put it that way, does it?
*
To be a sacrificial lamb for the deeds of man is a tiresome existence. Women are programmed to forget their potential, and it glues us to rendering ourselves insignificant. And when I say women, I am referring to those who were held under the patriarchy’s magnifying glass from a young age, regardless of gender.
It’s a circular breath, a collective wave that we must endure from childhood – to swallow the gripe, to be afraid to take up space.
It’s consistent and buried deep within the history of girl.
For our nanas, for our mamas, our women of second-wave feminism, there is a rigidity in the relationship with healing. It can be scary to know freedom. If we have compressed ourselves for so long to fit the patriarchy’s crawl space, how vast can we become with liberation?
I once held a jaded resentment for my mother. Her laboured disconnection to us left me permanently hungry to love her. If I was to love a husk, I was determined to fill it with whatever soul I could. Even if it was pain, even if it was anger.
Yet the plight of being a woman is an ache that tugs well beneath the surface of strength.
There are limitless stories that detail 50-hour weeks and three-hour sleeps – my mother no exception. On the rare nights she was home, her body could be seen slumped over our cheap, nylon monstrosity of a couch that I often called the Vermillion Mistake.
She’d never make it to bed.
I’m sure this kind of behaviour is part of why women get called “great multi-taskers”. As if we have the choice.
For this is what we do. We continue to work ourselves into an oblivion of forgetting who we are. Raising our brothers, raising ourselves. Raising the bar of expectation because even the thought of skimming underneath it might turn us invisible again.
It is a slicing, feigned realisation that we must run greater distances, face larger perils and overcome bigger obstacles in order to become merely visible. The truth is women cannot think of their future without considering the oppression and tyranny against them. And it’s mortifying.
I could sit here and tell you how broken that system is, how broken that thought process is – but it’s not. This is the design that has been meticulously crafted by a patriarchy determined to distance women from themselves. It is a creation readily exceeding its own expectations; it is a match that has burned for long enough.
But that’s the thing about matches – they cannot burn forever and, with enough force, will be snuffed out.
“It’ll be up to you, you know,” grieves a brother not old enough to even have an email address – and I knew it to be true.
Head hung and skin jaundiced on the Vermillion Mistake sat my mother. After fighting so long, her body had shut down. She was sick – it was up to me now.
With an 11pm knockoff at my trashy ice-cream parlour job, I soon learned to heal relations with The Vermillion Mistake – in fact, I really depended on it to feel my mother again.
Women have been programmed to lead every single life except their own. Often, that’s what their mother did. And their mother probably did it because their grandmother did.
In my starvation to love my mother, I became her. With pain, I ripped open the angry husk of our relationship and crawled inside. Only once I truly lived in her fracturing chest did I start to know her.
“Joey’s got this school trip on Thursday, but we’ve also got the dentist on Friday, so I’ll be working tonight,” I could often catch myself saying.
“You’ve got to slow down soon; it’s time to slow down.”
It unravels a stitch I’d sewn over my heart.
I know.
*
The emotional epiphany lies in the slick scent of sour milk marinating on my shirt, chocolate stains illuminated by the fluorescent lights amongst a desperate supermarket experience.
I look at the 10-pack of super-pads and I look at my leg. I feel the warmth of yet another beckoning trickle down my skirt as the tension inside me snaps like a rubber band. A history of composure has left me heavy for so long, and in its absence is rage.
It’s a fury that beckons to the abandonment of past selves. The kind of anger that rumbles a sleeping earthquake.
There is a certain emptiness in desperation. All too quickly, we become a strung-out washcloth, insides twisted and drained until there is simply no fight left.
I look at the 10-pack of super pads again. I look at my leg again. My cheeks tighten into a heinous smile that grows as every ounce of peace bleeds out of me.
I shove them in my bag.
Heart blazing in my chest, breathless, I think, “I kinda get the whole klepto thing.”
Once again, I’m on that stage. Again, those lights blind me with a searing intensity and I’m still smiling. I’m smiling with a new kind of rage, with a new kind of release.
Hands shaking with brimming adrenaline, I scan everything at a brand new speed of life.
“Unexpected item in bagging area.”
Shit.
“Please remove this item…”
Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.
“…before continuing.”
Begging nobody has seen my criminal virginity, I walk out of that store with just enough leisure so as to not look suspicious. If you ever witness me steal again, you can be the judge of that.
The humbling end to this story is that nobody even noticed. Nobody noticed I’d stolen pads right under their nose.
Nobody noticed the financial hole I was in.
Nobody even noticed the blood.