Angry Woman, Where Aren’t Thou?

My mother is a midwestern woman. A landlocked, rural woman from birth to what should have been death, except that at 34, her husband, in following whatever voice most sounded like God’s, took her East.

In the East there were fewer silos reaching up than there were shores pulling out, and it wasn’t long before she learned about the ocean currents and what they could do to small children, particularly her children. And although her own body found pleasure from the slap of salt waves, she couldn’t shake the ghosts in her peripherals: three blonde heads bobbing away, eternally shrinking towards the horizon.

On the days that our small family would drive to Hampton Beach she’d give her warning before we could reach down to unclasp the sandals from our feet, If you feel yourself getting sucked out, swim parallel to the beach.

I feel compelled to tell you what you already know: that Florida is a state of coasts. That currents inhabit the shores of your favorite beaches, and that the rules are the same from the Hamptons to the Keys: swim parallel to the beach. 

In my adult years, I moved from the Granite State to the Sunshine State, to bathwater beaches and jelly-fish bubbling up on dark sands. I moved for the sunshine, which I thought would make me less angry, less “seasonally affected,” but my pockets still emptied for bottled capsules of vitamin D and evenings saw me crumpled under bed sheets.

I wish I could tell you that Florida cured me, but at age eleven, I started treading, and now I’m 22 and just as angry, still looping and scissoring my feet. I thought by now I’d be out of this current. But from “Sea to Shining Sea” it seems the same shit keeps happening.

I remember when I was little, being angry at the old white ladies who sat on the back pews at Church and pulled my mother to their ears to whisper their critiques. Be it my clothing or the tempo of my playing feet, they always had some complaint over me.

But those were the little things, the tug of a current at the soles of the feet. Through years it became sermons on modesty and the sin of my body’s being. Then lessons on purity that by default marked me dirty, no matter how many hands I didn’t hold. And the marriage roles rolled out of preachers mouths like red carpet to the feature show.

Call it what it is: Propaganda for “Biblical” patriarchy. Of which there is no Biblical founding. Of which, by its very nature, is destructive to the message of Christianity.

Do you know what it does to a soul to be told, over and over, that she must fit a specific and gendered role? That that role is defined by god as second.

How much worse it is to have God limited. To tell God that women, lacking the authority of “headship,” can’t be trusted to speak.

After tearing the veil to the Holy of Holies, removing the separation between God and me, there is mention of a great many women in Jesus’ company, ministering. (Matthew 27:55)

So yes, I am caught in a riptide of biblical misogyny, and swimming for the shore isn’t working. It’s stay with the church or leave, so I’m swimming parallel to the beach.

I close my eyes against the ghosts in my peripherals. Thousands of bobbing heads, women and men, lost in a current of the patriarchy. Some swam straight toward the beach, each breaststroke forward spiraled them back into dark currents.

I hope in life I heed my mother’s warning. That all the angry women like me wouldn’t sacrifice Jesus to escape misogyny. That we would stay angry and forgiving, always swimming

parallel to the beach.

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If you want to read a book that oozes and leaks, I’d recommend Lauren Groff‘s Florida. To me, it was a collection of angry-women stories, unique to the way that so many women are angry. It wasn’t loud. There was no screaming, and —don’t worry, you fearful Christian boys, not even you would call it the work of a “feminazi.” It’s just a bunch of short stories, and a lot of them have to do with women. Women, who, for one reason or another, are angry.

If you don’t have time to read the whole thing, I highly recommend you at least carve out space for “Ghosts and Empties.” It’s the first short story of the book and sets the mood with calm intentionality. Once you read it, tell me what you think!