My Mother Is Screaming

And she wants Susan Collins to know why.

My mother is calling me on the phone from Oklahoma. She is screaming, and crying. She's sobbing. She needs me to be her mother right now, because her mother never was.

Adolph (yes, his real name) married my grandmother when my mom was 10, after her first dad died of chicken pox. Adolph's ex-wife had told my grandma Adolph attacked little girls. My grandmother married him anyway. I have always known this; my mother never kept it secret. But she needs to say it out loud, again. My mother, who is 75 years old, is wailing for someone to protect her.

Adolph would maul my mother's breasts from the time she was 10. He molested her for nine years, until she married and got the fuck out of dodge. Once, when she was little, he came into her room and lay on top of her. She screamed. "HE WOULD HAVE FUCKED ME IF I WAS OLDER," she yelled at me, just now. Adolph told my grandma my mother had unzipped his pants. He told her little brothers my mom molested them .

And my grandmother always knew. Oh Donna, she would say when my mother flipped her shit, why do you always cause trouble? 

Adolph molested my mother and beat the shit out of all of them. My grandmother would pray to Mary and Jesus every day for Adolph's death; she wrote her prayers on little scraps of paper and kept them in her sewing kit, from which she made rag dolls for children all over the country. I have the sewing kit now, with an illustration of the Blessed Virgin on the lid, and its prayers for Adolph's death inside.

Grandma would pray for deliverance, but she never protected her children. "I'm just a wet noodle," she would say, over and over again, waiting for someone else to save them.

And here we are, and my mother is screaming about Susan Collins, all curses and unintelligible, guttural cries, barely able to come out. Susan Collins knows. She knows . SHE FUCKING KNOWS. And she's letting it happen just as surely as my sweet grandmother did. She's complicit, just like my grandmother was complicit, leaving them together in the room. Oh Donna, why do you always cause trouble.

My mother is crying. "YOU WOULD NEVER LET THAT HAPPEN TO DONNA ROSE," she is sobbing. No. I never, never, never, never, never, never would. She is apologizing, for "laying this" on me. She is telling me that she couldn't let a man touch her breasts until she was in her 40s. She is telling me about her beloved mother's betrayal. But I've always known, and all I can say is "yes."

Susan Collins, there's an old woman in Oklahoma right now sobbing like a tiny girl, and she wanted me to write this. She wants you to know a lot of things, mostly your name combined with ugly curses. She wants you to know she watched every word of your "disgusting" speech. She wants you to know you have betrayed her, and millions upon millions of tiny girls and old women and all of us in between. She wants you to know what you have done. Out of all of them, you were the one who claimed to be better. She wants you to know you are loathed.

It's a week. If you're able, will you keep us going?