Yesterday Fort Hood happened, and since most tragic events since 9/11 cause me to completely shut down when I begin to obsess about them too much (and I will, I will!), I've decided I can't write about it. Partly this is because I don't yet know what to say, partly because the whole event and the frenzied aftermath of media coverage went down while I was completing my long teaching day. The closest I got to the tragedy was when I found out a friend has a brother stationed there, and through Facebook we all learned he was okay. As soon as Brock and I got home last night we put on Mad Men and popped open the wine. We turned our Thursday lives into a no-news day.
(At the risk of making what I hope doesn't come across as an offensive analogy, this obliviousness of the news is the same thing that happened to me a few weeks ago with CNN's balloon boy incident. I pulled up Facebook at work and everyone was throwing up onto their keyboards about how horrifying this was--this little boy in the balloon would surely die--and by the time they found out it was a hoax I was just getting into my car to drive home from school, hadn't yet seen the silver spaceship-looking balloon. The gravity in these two situations is drastically different, of course, but Balloon Boy hovered over my head as I sat down to write this because it was another time when a news junkie like myself had no clue about the biggest story of the day, thus for me it hadn't happened. When it comes to a shooting rampage at Ft. Hood--a real story--guilt washes over because I should know about this, I shouldn't let ignorance prevail. But for now I feel if I escaped the terrible experience of seeing it go down live, why should I create pain by reading and learning more about it? I know: clear avoidance behavior. But these days I'm taking any path towards self-preservation that's available.)
So I've decided to write about Rihanna today. She's just given some very important 20/20 interview and said some pretty obvious things about her domestic abuse situation. Apparently she's now broken up with Chris Brown for good, though it took her eight or nine tries at it. It was very hard to get away, she said, because she loved and cared for him so much, she said.
Sadly I've very little patience for this. This may be unfair to say, but Rihanna has options. A young mother who needs a guy, any guy, to help feed the screaming kids she is not. Rihanna's a talented kajillionaire, and when her bruises and swollen eyes were printed in every major paper for the world to see, her love should have clearly died there. Because domestic abuse is a lot like alcoholism: the fewer people know you're suffering from it, the better. Once everyone knows, the spell is broken--you will be forced out by people who know better than you whether you like it or not. Common sense tells us this, but Rihanna was blinded by her (sigh!) love for Chris Brown.
I recognize this is not very liberal or kind-hearted of me. Maybe it's because I'm tired of the thread: growing up I witnessed a bit of domestic violence (a drunk screaming man + a woman not scared to slap = hello, police officer), and when I grew old enough to chose a person to love it was one who, when he felt abused by the world, felt better once he stuck a shrimp boot in my face or, with his course fingers, hooked my mouth like a fish to pull me around wherever he wanted: down to the ground where I belonged, or up to his face where he could tell me so. The only tragedy is that I was with this person for four years, but if you're worried about how I suffered, please don't: my final and most striking memory of him is my standing on the front porch of his friend's house, terrible boyfriend passed cold at my feet, and me taking this outstanding opportunity to kick and punch him in the head, practically swallowing his ear with the words, Do you like this, you little fuck?
So that's my quick domestic abuse story. What I worry about now is my youngest sister, Erica, whose boyfriend has been imprisoned for more years than he attended high school (from here on out I'll call him C, not for reasons of anonymity but just because it sort of sickens me to type out his name). C has also inseminated Erica with the gift of life--two times--but has yet to do any work to support these new lives he created, proving yet again to the young women of America that the penis cannot pay the bills. Erica is just learning this, seriously, and doesn't like it.
This C person has cut into my sister with a leather whip and pushed my mother into a window. He's injected needles into any available vein in his body, has dognapped my sister's dog, a sweet old dachshund who was found hours after his absence was noted in a garage refrigerator, mouth taped shut with duct, front paws and back paws similarly bound. Erica's beloved Cocoa, who she'd had for twelve years, died about a week later.
You can probably guess I've got murder on my mind.
(I say that, though, and worry that this C bastard will get killed one day soon and investigators will come across Buggy Face and conclude it's a grand plot I've conjured from Tuscaloosa. But I really don't worry so much about this, because my false imprisonment would be worth his inability to hurt my family any longer. Also, I don't believe in ghosts.)
I'm telling you this dog murder-leather whip-window pushing stories because of Rihanna, actually: these events in Erica's life happened right around the same time as the Grammys this year. As soon as I opened Firefox the morning after the Grammys and saw Rihanna's swollen eyes I thought: Erica. I'd heard about the leather whipping, how Erica called the police and how the coward fled the scene (and didn't know yet that in the ensuing weeks and months she'd protect him from the cops, "He hasn't been around here, Officer."). I imagined my sister's face superimposed upon Rihanna's, and I started to cry. That morning I had to teach, though, so I wiped my face and tried to focus on what was the most important thing to tell my students of creative nonfiction that day.
Later when I gave myself the time to think about it, I remembered how Erica loved Chris Brown, and she loved Rihanna, and came to the realization that this situation between the two stars was Erica's perfect opportunity to romanticize what was happening with her. It's love, man, it's love. Previously I'd never known what the big deal was with earnest parents who wished Britney Spears was a better role model for their children. I would think, you take offense to her personal behavior and not her music? Perhaps you, earnest parents, aren't the best role models either? But now I understand what they were railing over. These parallel domestic violence sitations couldn't have been aligned more perfectly for Erica, or more woefully for me and mom. We, the adults, had thought that by quietly supporting my sister and not talking smack about C (as was our previous tack), she'd glide away slowly, like a natural-moving ice floe. Now she was stuck the way Rihanna was stuck, in a pit of love adults just can't understand. It's love man, you just don't get it.
So basically I'm saying I blame Rihanna for my sister's horrible relationship. I don't blame my mom or myself for our sometimes less-than-role-model behavior (at least when it came to choosing successful, placid relationships), I don't blame Erica for having lived through enough to know better, for not getting herself educated and giving herself a chance for a way out.
It's safe to say that Rihanna is mostly to blame here, for returning again and again and giving my sister reason to do the same. Because of this I personally will not be purchasing Rihanna's upcoming album Rated R.
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