MARLA'S MUSINGS COLUMN: She's mind-raped on Thursdays
By Marla Buchanan
He’s downstairs with the therapist. The man who molested her daughters, and beat her son. A man who takes regular pleasure trips to Europe. The man that the court system, while ‘smacking his hand,’ said, “you’d better not do this again or we’ll spank you.”
Why didn’t they give him a ‘time out’ (say 20 years or so)? This is not ‘making love,’ this is being held down and forcibly f----- in the mind every Thursday night. She drives to a town an hour and a half away to a court-appointed counseling session where the therapist tries to help ‘re-establish the bond’ between her ex-husband and son.
She used to drive home and cry herself to sleep. Wishing that she would develop cancer, have a heart attack, or have the courage to put one of her stepfather’s guns in her mouth and pull the trigger. Death has called her name, but she doesn’t listen; the love she has for her children gives her the strength to ignore those sinister urges. If she didn’t have her kids she wouldn’t be here.
After that first ‘session’ she wanted to run him over with her car until he looked like a dog lying on the side of a dirt road. Maggots crawling out his eye sockets, and his tongue hanging out. She imagined the crows refusing to eat his flesh as the purification emanated from his soul causing the deterioration of his body. Evil incarnate. It probably wouldn’t taste good.
He laughed in the office just off to the side of the waiting room. He sounded like this was a party, a picnic as he joked and put on his ‘human’ face. A mask, that for years, he could put on and take off to promote the illusion of respectability and civility.
She’s seen him with his mask off, and so has her son, that’s why she is sitting there. She is sitting in the therapist’s kitchen, almost entirely out of range of the muffled voices that carry from the office downstairs. When she is there, she usually sits and reads “The Handmaid’s Tale” (for Gender 2000), she tries to remember that this is not the ‘Republic of Gilead,’ and she is not ‘Offred’—it could be worse.
How can the courts do this? Forcing “counseling” with a man who cried, and beat her with a clothes hanger when he found out that she was pregnant. Her marriage was never meant to be permanent. Like ‘Offred,’ she was to be used as a vehicle, but instead of bearing life she was meant to give birth to his citizenship. This was her only purpose. During her divorce he took great pleasure in telling this to her, and her family.
As she reads, the therapist’s family is in the kitchen cooking, horsing around, and munching on chips. She is not really there. She is invisible. She wants to cry, to scream, to confront this man to ask him how he can sleep at night.
Where is Divine justice? If this is karma, she must have been a real a------ in her previous life. She is emotionally raw and bleeding. ‘Offred’ found a mysterious message etched in her wardrobe written by a previous ‘handmaid,’ it said: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum (Don’t let the bastards grind you down). She’ll try.
She has been told that it is going to take a few more sessions until they get it right. She’ll get ‘raped’ again next Thursday.