The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

You just don't know.

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, when the house is humming or when the walls creak with age, I lay awake and think of what he said, what he wailed when he found out.

Of everyone I’ve ever known, you were the LAST person I thought would ever do this!

I have to admit that I’d thought the same thing.

What I’ve learned in my relatively short time on this planet, is that can never say you know yourself that well. What you might do daily in a routine environment will usually be vastly different from the things you do when the rules around you change. With age and time, and most importantly experience, you begin to find yourself looking at things in a way that is new and sometimes frightening. The thing that is the most frightening, at least to me, is the realization that something I had once so fervently believed about myself was never real.

My morals are often challenged by reflex and want. My goals and ideals are often breached by my summer storm moods. While I am fairly sure that I am basically decent and good-hearted in the way I conduct myself, I know that there is always a chance I’ll do something ‘out of character’, something which will surprise everyone who thinks they know me. I know that I have the ability to snap, just as much as I have the ability to push my impulses down under a layer of silken intentions.

I have never stolen anything from a store, at least, not intentionally. Once, when I was very small, I took a roll of Lifesavers from a convenience store, but it was an accident. I was holding it while my mother was paying for something and I was asking her if I could have it, but as most mothers will do, she ignored me and made pleasant conversation with the cashier who also ignored me. By the time my mother realized that I still had the candy in my hand we were almost home. She lectured me about taking things, and then kept the candy for herself. Somehow, though, I managed to take away from that experience that it’s wrong to take what doesn’t belong to you. Despite the crunching and sucking sounds of the woman who bore me as she let the cherry candy roll around on her tongue, I did not come to believe that it’s okay to eat stolen goods. What I felt was bonafide guilt at having taken from someone else. My guilt was innate. Irish Catholic roots spreading out in the dirt of me. Since then, I have never taken a cent from a cash register at work even though I had easy access, and I never allowed close friends to take advantage of my employee discount, when I had one. I just couldn’t reconcile my wants or need for acceptance with my seemingly ironclad allegiance to my morals. It didn’t feel religious, though, had little to do with breaking commandments. It’s just me. That said, I don’t think I’d have a problem taking food if I were hungry and couldn’t provide it for my family or myself, just as I’d take clothes if I were cold. I believe I’m capable of theft, I simply choose not to.

I can’t fathom picking up a gun and delighting at the sound of the crack as the bullet careens to an innocent animal, ripping through its skin, piercing its heart. I don’t want that kind of responsibility, the weight of knowing I’m a killer. I think every justification of any person I’ve ever known who hunts is weak and insipid. At the end of it all, they’re simply asking me to ignore the fact that they like to kill. They can make it sound reasonable by saying that they eat the meat, that the animal is there to be eaten, but very few of them ever come close to convincing me that they’re in it for anything but the high of killing. How else could one explain the stuffed beasts by the fireplace? The detached heads of innocent herbivores mounted on a slab of wood on the wall next to the books that are never read? No, I don’t understand the need to extinguish the life of another living being simply because it’s the season for it, and because they don’t have the guns to defend themselves against my bloodlust. It’s cowardly. It’s unnecessary, simple, dinosaur thinking. And yet, if I take a step back and look at it from a different angle, I have to consider whether or not I could ever do it if I needed to. If my child was hungry and there were no grocery stores, no access to prepared packages of meat in a neat and tidy case, would I take out that deer? Could I pick up that crossbow and pull the arrow back, letting it go, watching as the sharp point of the thing pierced the animal’s side, causing it to thrash and howl in pain until I either shot at it again, or strangled it to death with my bare hands until it quieted down and submitted to the death I’d worked to bring it? Could I do that?

I could. I absolutely have the ability to do that. I have lived with someone who had a crossbow and I’ve picked it up and aimed it, though I never fired. I could pull a trigger on a gun. I have the physical ability to pull a knife through the air and let it cut through the skin of something breathing. Physically, I possess all the necessary power to do these things but my mind, my conscience is presently not okay with it. I can’t imagine taking the life of something innocent and free without wanting to hurt myself as punishment. But, I’ve never had to. I’ve never been that hungry, and given the choice of any kind of dinner, I usually pick the pasta and salad. That’s me.

But, what about humans? Could I ever picture myself hurting another human being? We’ve all wondered about this, especially when we start debating the relevance of abortion or capital punishment, which, to me, are essentially the same thing, as in, they mean the deliberate termination of a life. This is where it gets difficult, because to say no to one would mean saying no to the other, right? From one point of view, this would make sense, but then you have to consider the ‘innocence factor’, the reasons behind the proposed termination. Doesn’t it make more sense to kill someone who has killed other before considering ending the life of an innocent fetus? Which one could I potentially see myself ordering the death sentence for? Which one has more rights? This is the thing that has always confused me about conservative vs. liberal thinking: so many liberals support abortion rights but abhor the notion of killing a killer, while conservatives are mostly pro-life but have no problem killing another human being if they’re deemed a danger to society. Where do I fit into this then, being a self-described liberal? Would I be capable of killing either?

Right away, my first thought is that I’d kill the killer. I would pick up a needle and jam into their vein if I knew they killed a child, especially if it were my own. I would take a shovel to their head, barbed wire to their neck, a gun to their temple if I were in the heat of it, I think. In that situation, I doubt I’d feel any hint of a moral dilemma, but you know, I’ve never been there? I’ve never had to look into the eyes of another person and see their fear at my presence. I have never had to feel their life in my hands. I have never had to wear the hood and be the one to let the guillotine blade drop. Would the power of it intoxicate me, or would it make me cower with shame and sorrow?

I wonder, if people knew a fetus could feel, would those who support it now continue to? Isn’t killing basically just killing? I also often wonder about the diehard anti-abortionist, rightwing men and how they’d feel if they accidentally impregnated someone they didn’t intend to marry or share a life with. What about married rightwing men? Say they got someone, who wasn’t their wife, pregnant. Would they still be anti-abortion? Would they fess up and take care of the child or would they arrange for a careful procedure that would erase all their wrongdoings? I think it is naïve to assume they’d all fess up. I have a feeling that morals often take a side seat to desperation and shame.

What would I do, though? If I got pregnant with someone else’s child, a result of a one-night stand or a dalliance that went too far, would I abort it, so that I’d stand a chance of keeping everything in my life the way it is now? The honest answer is I do not know. I don’t know what I’m capable of. When my friend A. got pregnant with her lover’s child, and she asked me to go with her to the clinic when she opted to abort it, I surprised myself by saying no. I couldn’t do it, I said, because I didn’t believe in it, and my conviction at the time was more important than she was. I stayed away from all of it, didn’t want my hands dirtied, but somehow we are still friends. We don’t talk about it often, but when we do, she tends to talk about how sad it made her to do it, how regretful she sometimes is, and I often respond with kind words of support, because I’ve learned some things along the way, and I know now that it was not an easy decision for her to make. I’m not so perfect up here on my high horse.

I never thought I’d ever be the kind of woman who would fall in love with someone when I was already involved with another. I hated cheaters, was contemptuous of everyone I knew who had stepped outside their relationship into the beds of others. I have to say that when after years and years of feeling as though my life was set, I felt nothing resembling guilt when I was afforded the opportunity to pursue a different life with someone else. I thought that because I wasn’t technically sleeping with him I was still an innocent, despite my almost intolerable cravings to bed him. Lucky for me, after the dust settled, I was in a relationship with the one I believed I wanted after all, but those words, the way they squeaked out of the one who had trusted me, ‘You were the last person I thought would do this’, continue to haunt me, and the guilt I’d evaded all that time eventually came to live with me, and hasn’t bothered to leave. I am still amazed at how I behaved, how cavalier I was about another person’s feelings when I had always been so sure of myself, so convinced I wasn’t capable of treating someone who loved me like they didn’t matter. I don’t know if this makes me human, or if it means I had no idea who I was, or if I have any idea who I am right now.

No one really knows what he or she is capable of doing when it comes down to it. You’re never the labels assigned to you, and you’re never the accolades or the criticisms. You are always a fumbling, bumbling, occasionally enlightened individual struggling to make sense of all the human experiences, and sometimes you will find yourself doing things you don’t understand, because it felt instinctively right at the time, even if your head told you not to. It would be nice if some of the surprises were good ones, though. I’d like to surprise myself by being uncharacteristically altruistic or brilliant and finding some kind of new worth in myself. As it is, though, I’m just as I am, aware that I have the potential to be a monster or a saint, depending on the weather, and that I have only so much control over any of it.

There’s a reason why people find religion on their deathbeds after years of denying God. It’s a last chance effort to believe in something which we hope won’t disappoint, a way to leave the judgment to someone else.