Another World

Violence against women is often against our voices and our stories. It is a refusal of our voices, and of what a voice means: the right to self determination, to participation, to consent or dissent, to live and participate, to interpret and narrate. A free person tells her own story. A valued person lives in a society in which her story has a place. - Rebecca Solnit

I can tell you that white-throated sparrows sing only in early spring in the Adirondacks. I can tell you because I heard them while I walked a narrow pasture lane, leading a herd of sleepy dairy goats at 6 am in June. We marched together, a woman and her harem.

Over the course of our farming tenure, we witnessed something close to 500 goat births. Goats give birth in late-winter to early-spring, depending on how ambitious (or perhaps foolish) the farmer is when organizing the breeding five months earlier. Throughout the weeks-long kidding season, we’d check the barn through the night for signs of labor. Barns are not heated of course, so we bundled in various iterations of long underwear, wool socks, flannel-lined canvas jackets.

Not all births were easy, and some would necessitate intervention. So I, with the slender arms and hands, would coax a tangled set of twins or a breached kid from their mother’s uterus. Despite spending the majority of my life up until then absorbed in books and papers, shepherdessing was surprisingly intuitive. I was adept at blindly identifying a kid’s head from its bottom, its hoof from its spine. I knew when a mother was in trouble, comfortably giving intravenous fluids into her jugular. I could name every doe in the herd, tell you their milk production, who ran in their crowd.

My mother received her bachelors in Animal Science from De La Salle University in Manila in 1979. I didn’t know this until I was 22 and we squeezed our belongings into our 2001 station wagon, listening to Tom Petty as we drove over the Brooklyn Bridge one final time in search of a new life on Vermont farmland. She arrived in the United States alone, the first of her family, at the age of 26 with $20 and the address of her sister-in-law’s cousin somewhere in Los Angeles. She thought America would save her. Just a few credits shy of completing her MBA in a country where rice was built into the national identity, she found herself nannying the children of Beverly Hills. It was there that she met my father, a ruddy English punk 5 years her junior.

We decided early on that we did not want to know the sex of our baby. When you don’t know the sex of your child, people invite themselves to ask you which gender you’d prefer. The stock answer is that you don’t have a preference, that you just want a healthy baby. My honest answer was that the question is ill-conceived because gender is a social construct. But my honest honest answer that I told no-one was that I hoped for a boy. I hoped for a boy because I would never wish my lived experience as a girl on anyone, especially not my own child. And as I understood it there was no alternative reality to trauma: 1 in 3 women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime.

I was 14 when it happened to me. My friend’s brother’s friend was one of the few people I knew with a car, and she drove me to Planned Parenthood so I could get the morning-after pill. I remember filling out the paperwork, arriving at the line about income. They request that you disclose your weekly income. I didn’t have a weekly income. I didn’t have an income at all. So I walked up to the desk and asked the woman if I needed to complete it. Without pity or judgement, she asked if I received an allowance. I said yes, for washing the dishes, setting the table, and vacuuming. She told me to list that amount: $20.  

We asked my brother-in-law to watch our flighty rescue dog as I went into labor, but for whatever reason the dog was now hunkered under our bed while I screamed into my spouse’s face, gripping his hands with all my force.

Around 11 am on the third day, I gave one final, terrible push and a 5-pound crumple of skin cascaded from my body. I held the slippery newborn and saw she was a girl.

She was silent and she was purple, which is actually the color they are when they breathe that first breath of oxygen into their lungs. I noticed her hands, her impossibly tiny and perfectly formed hands. Her fingernails. She had my fingers, my long piano-playing fingers. The same slender fingers of my paternal grandmother, my nana, with whom I share initials - SAF for Shirley Ann Fisher. The woman also responsible my proper English nose.

I have a picture of my nana on my dresser. She’s cradling a lamb, somewhere in her late thirties. She built a budding homestead in England where my family still lives with the exception of my rogue father, who splits his time between LA and Tokyo. It’s common practice in England to give name to your land. My nana’s home was called Netherby. When we moved into our modest 1890 farmhouse on 1 acre in Highland, we hung a sign on our mailbox declaring our residence. It read Netherby.

We named Ida on her fourth day. Ida in deference to the few Idas in history who were activists, journalists, women after my own heart. Ida Acadia Meyer was born on November 22, 2016. Her initials are incidentally IAM.

A few years ago, I called that Planned Parenthood location where I confronted my womanhood. I wanted my record to find physical proof that it happened to me. Because like Christine Blasey Ford I don’t remember why this boy, my friend, drove me home, or where we were coming from. I only remember that it happened in the fall: an Indian summer carried me back to my Catholic high school where I had to wear my long sleeve Oxford shirt to hide the self-inflicted incisions on my arms while the other girls bared their tanned skin and jelly bracelets in short-sleeves. Despite this, the world has reminded me over and over again that it was likely my fault. And for a very long time I believed them. I believed that I had actually made the whole thing up. The woman on the phone at Planned Parenthood explained that they purge records that are more than ten years old, there was nothing under my name.

This begs me to wonder why, sixteen years later, I’m still telling this fucking story. Why I continually allow that pubescent boy to control my story. But this story is not about him, it’s about me. It’s about my daughter. It’s about our daughters, our sons, our children. It’s about us.  

Violence against women is often against our voices and our stories. I’m telling you all of this about my mother, my nana, my birth, my daughter, my rebirth because I’ll truly be damned if I ever stop telling it.

Hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope. - Rebecca Solnit

That I found myself a mother to a daughter, I had no choice but to imagine an alternative reality. To believe that another world is possible. To use hope as an ax to break down the fucking door.

Consider the rag our collective ax. This zine exists to give context to our world, to have questions raised, explored, and maybe even answered. To give our stories a place. Glimpses into the lives we lead so we can bear witness to the lives we seek. This is a place where our stories are not refused. It’s a place where another world might be possible.

I can tell you that white-throated sparrows sing only in early spring in the Adirondacks. I can tell you because I heard them, but by July their song becomes absent. It’s replaced by the hiss of the cicada. I rest assured that the white-throated sparrow annually returns. They return to sing stories of the worlds they’ve been. We need only listen.

letter from the editor - v1 i1 by stephanie fisher-meyer