Sister Margaret Anne

Photo taken yesterday whilst out and about locally.

She was a plain woman. Some might say ugly. A whiskered and misaligned face which drooped in chronic disappointment at life and those participating in it. Nature compensated her with beautiful hands, large, well formed and competent, the hands of a sculptor, and naturally blonde hair which she wore in a fluffy halo around her head. An incongruous appearance.

At the age of thirty-six, when her widowed mother died, she left her nursing order of Catholic sisters and reclaimed her birth name of Grace. She wrote to a man who had an advertisement in the lonely hearts section of the Catholic Register. Serious replies only, he said. Loyal, he said. Looks not important, he said.

How was she to know when he drove all the way from rural Saskatchewan to Brampton, Ontario to meet her and marry her within the month that he was a drunk and would beat her every Saturday afternoon and make her perform disgusting things in bed? She a thirty-six year old virgin and twenty years in a convent her only life experience?

She desperately wanted a child so suffered the daily indignities of living with such a man. And of course there were the vows of holy matrimony, and the leaving of the convent to consider. Pride? Yes, she swallowed it.

Her longed for child resulted in a great hulking daughter with the bright red hair of her father who outweighed her own mother by her tenth birthday. This was the year Grace left her husband and had a restraining order placed on him by the courts. Her divorce and subsequent annulment on the grounds of unrepentant abuse and chronic alcoholism followed swiftly.

Her daughter moved out when she was barely sixteen. Searching, Grace found her living in a commune on Bathurst Street in Toronto, high on drugs and alcohol. Grace refused to speculate on the type of income that would support such a lifestyle and thought it best, after pleading with her, to leave her there. It had been a challenge to love such a child, a child who seemed like her father reincarnated in female form.

Grace drifted backwards, drawn more and more to the life that had been so safe and uncomplicated. She retook her vows of poverty, chastity and obedience and asked for, and was given, work in the wards of the terminally ill.

She would often say to me that she didn't know what that long intermission was about as all she was taught when she was out in the real world was how to hate the man who had abused her and the ungrateful daughter who was his seed through and through.

And I'd say - Hate? Is hate all you learned? Can't you let it go?

And she'd shake her head vehemently and her crooked mouth would settle into a grim straight line and she'd hiss:

You don't understand at all, do you? Hate is all I have left.

Consumption

She's old now. And you'd wonder at the bitterness that she wears like a jacket pulled tight around her. But finally on a snowy cold Saturday evening your patience pays off. The flames of the fire create the intimacy of the confessional. A couple of glasses of sherry and the story slides right out of her.

Did you ever love a man so much that when it finally all turns to acid you get to experience a hate you can’t even imagine?

A hate that makes you want to hurt him so badly that he lives in pain the rest of his life? You don’t want to kill him because that would be too good for him and you couldn’t handle the grief anyway of him being dead. But you could handle him suffering every day of his life. And part of his suffering would be hating you.

Have you ever felt that kind of hate? It curdles your stomach every morning when you wake up.

Sure we all pretend to be above that kind of thing, don’t we? Well some of us are. But the some of us that are have never felt the kind of love that wants to draw blood either, right?

Like you could never get enough of him. Like six of him would be ten too short. Like if he were ten thousand drinks you could never get drunk on him.

It’s like a disease, an addiction. There’s something mental about it. Like you’re not living in this world at all, like you can’t work or eat or sleep.

And part of you knows how insane it all is and part of you never wants it to end but part of you is weeping for the end of it all the time, because you know it has to end. No one could handle this kind of passion every day for the rest of their lives.

And then it does. Ends. Like it burns out. But something else gets lit. That hate. And it makes you doubt the love you felt. As if you don’t know what love is about at all.

And that’s your hell right there. So you make a hell for him. There are all sorts of ways of making a hell for a man. Women are far too clever and devious for their own good and only get caught if they want to be, right?

And you become this person with the hate pouring out like sweat. Every single pore leaking it. And it never seems to go away.

And you can’t seem to love anyone else when you wake up with that sour in the belly every morning and that sweat waiting to leak all over everything. It doesn’t matter - be it a child or a cat or an old lady.

That hate takes everything away. It puts a face like mine on you. And you’d think the fire of that hate would light up something else.

But it’s like one of them black holes. All it throws out in front of you is darkness.

I've had it up to here with misogyny.

Keith Olbermann, a journalist (hah!) I used to respect, calls for "a man to take Hillary Clinton into a room and only he comes out" on MSNBC.

This main stream talking head is calling for the murder of Hillary Clinton?

I simply do not understand the senseless rage and fury generated by this woman. The demand for her submission to the patriarchy, the humiliation of the T-shirts - "Why didn't OJ Simpson marry Hillary Clinton instead?" - being an example.

This is what evil looks like. And I am not silent. Silence condones such words of horrific intent.

Where is the outcry?

So it would be OK to suggest lynching Obama?

Or suggest, oh, tipping McCain's wheelchair over a steep cliff?

I am beyond disillusioned with the main stream media.


“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” Martin Luther King.