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i can't see my body here.
[connie]
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--
Pro-lifers. I'd heard the term all my life. Pro-lifers. The way people tended to say it, with a little bit of an incredulous laugh, told me what it must really mean. Oh, there they go again, those crazy pro-lifers, they would say, and I would laugh too, the same way I laughed in the second grade when someone else was accused of farting.
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I walked into the clinic four months ago with this warning ringing in my ear, that it would be full of women who drove minivans with self-righteous bumper stickers, women who threw dry ice bombs at Planned Parenthood and never wore shorts, women with tight lips and hands bound with rosaries. I wore a short skirt just to tick them off.
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I walked in to write a story, inappropriately dressed and braced for I knew not what, but when I crossed the threshold everyone was laughing. No one seemed particularly interested in my womb. I was a little hurt.

Someone asked me what I wanted to do, and I vaguely mentioned Alaska, and she said, Fabulous. You can date moose hunters and sled to work. She tossed a peanut in her mouth, winked at me. They laughed loudly, deeply, like people who sit around fires at night with people who love them back.
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I loved them so much that two weeks later I walked back in and asked if I could be with them, help out at the clinic, because I never meet middle-aged women who wear faux cheeta-print capes that fall all the way to their feet, women who fought in the jungles of Panama and the African bush, women who pushed the button that burned their babies out of their wombs, women who were enslaved to alcohol or men. Women who woke one day to tremble at the face of God and lived to tell that tale and so many others, to other women, other girls. To me.
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These are women who will never judge me, no matter what I tell them, women who despise riches and do battle every day without getting paid a dime, women who fight murderous boyfriends and furious mothers and false gods, women who put their hands on a teenage girl's shoulder and look into faces frothing with fury and say, Enough, leave this place. Women who embrace girls who have gone too far, have made mistakes, and clothe their babies, teach them how to raise a human being, speak on their behalf.
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They do this because this Being has whispered in their ear, Fight. Fight for women and for children, who for too long have had no one to speak for them. I see them crouched to speak to a child and drawn up to their full height to deflect a man, I hear them soothe a weeping mother and loudly make fun of me for being the only virgin present, and I think, Glorious.
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It seems incredible to me now, how deeply I listen to voices I don't even like. There are so many more opinions in me, I know, forged by people I wouldn't even call to go get coffee, but somehow I let them write both our obituaries.
--
I don't want to judge ever again. I don't want to smirk, act like I understand things, because I don't. Because there are webs of sisterhood and pain, blood and birth and broken babies in sterile trash cans, women with faces like lions and hands that can hold up everything in my world, voices that say Enough, something no one else in the world seems to know how to say. Enough anger. Enough self-righteousness. Enough death. Turn and leave this place. The thing that is left is more glorious than I know how to explain. And this is why I'm for life.