1. KC had a huge chemical explosion like six months ago. It’s a potential wasteland. They’ll have to drink bottled water there for the rest of their natural lives.

2. Judy Garland died after filming a movie about Kansas once.

3. Don Johnson (1959) was born in Kansas.

4. So was Amelia Earhart (1897) and look what happened to HER.

5. Kansas produced six known mass murderers and/or bank robbers between 1866 and 1945. Yeah.

6. So they lead the nation in sunflower production. Big whoop.

7. The Kansas Territorial Government once drafted a pro-slavery constitution. Bigots.

8. When a crazy guy decided to bomb a government building, he chose KC.

9. With the exception of Moscow, the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center in Hutchinson houses the largest collection of artifacts from the Russian Space Program. Commie bastards.

10. The world’s largest hand-dug well, called “Big Well” (clever name, guys) is in Greensburg. Unsuspecting toddlers could fall in.

11. The 1960-2005 crime rates are horrifying. I’d study them, if I were you. I’ve linked an official site for your convenience: http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/kncrime.htm

12. There are currently 58 Walmarts in Kansas. And counting.

13. It’s 364 miles from Wisconsin.

Hmph.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my body.

I have working eyes to see the beauty all around me. I can smell the sweet scent of my babies and I can feel their weight against me when I hold them in my two strong arms. I can walk these country roads and feel my muscles flexing and hear the cacophony of coyotes out my bedroom window each night. I’m smart and I’m disease-free and I am blessed, no doubt.

But I weigh 207 pounds.

I know what Harriet would say. Harriet would say there should be no “but” before that statement, and not just because she’s an editor. Harriet, along with all the other feminist voices in my crowded head, would say my weight should in no way define me. I am a strong, successful, otherwise happy woman and I should see myself as completely beautiful, no buts about it. I certainly shouldn’t be blogging about the number on the scale.

Yet, here I am. Telling my entire listening audience that I weigh 207 pounds. Even worse, I told my husband. Like, I just spit it out the other night. Lying in bed. Talking about Gretta’s overnight plans and the ridiculous thing Emma said that morning. Like, “Hey we’re out of milk and did you mail those bills and by the way, I weigh 207 pounds.” (MY GOD, what would Cosmo say? Admitting your true weight to your husband while lying in bed was most definitely not on that “Top 10 Ways to Drive Him Wild” list.)

I think I was trying to make something happen by telling him, and I think I’m trying to make something happen here with this blog entry. To set something into motion. I mean, what else could it be? Why on earth am I telling you this? I think it’s some sort of bizarre self-preservation thing. I’m mature enough and experienced enough to know how dangerous it can be for me, this singular focus on my weight, so I can’t let anything be a secret. I can’t go back to that place where I hide things and lie and be a different person in public than I am in private.

I think I eat a relatively healthy diet, at least compared to the other shopping carts I see at Kalscheur’s, and maybe I drink too much wine but I’ve been going to the gym each morning with Katie and I’ve been paying attention to it, really. And I thought I was on to something last month when I had that epiphany, the one where I realized I haven’t been thin since my marriage was in such trouble, and before that I hadn’t been thin since that Year of Anorexia, and that (ding ding ding!) I probably associate being thin with being really unhappy. And I guess I thought just knowing that, just acknowledging it and really feeling it, would make the pounds magically melt away. Because that’s what Oprah would say. And because God knows nothing else is working, and there must be something Larger going on here, something blocking my progress….

But it didn’t. So I’m left here, still, wondering. Blogging. And I’m thinking this is the final step. Step 1423: Tell the world how much you really weigh. Be honest.

And then I weight. I mean WAIT. (God, I honestly didn’t mean to type that. Talk about a Freudian slip.) I wait for the pounds to magically melt away. What’s stopping them?

Annie Ruth Brown grew up in a slave shack on the Blue Lake Plantation beneath the whithering Mississippi sun. She and her children worked the surrounding fields for little to no pay, sometimes to the point of passing out, from 1964 til 1994 — an era when slavery had supposedly been illegal for more than one hundred years.

Annie has since moved to Itta Bena, a tiny town a couple miles from that four-room shack. She helms a comfortable home with a revolving screen door of kids, grandkids, neighbor kids, and strays, a loving swirl of chaos eddying around its matriarchal island. Annie has stories like you wouldn’t believe, as you can imagine, but I started thinking about her today for one story in particular. It flashed suddenly to my mind this morning when I had to physically restrain myself from hitting my child.

I’ve only met Annie once. I sat in an uncomfortable concave hole in her threadbare couch one March morning last year, and listened as she told me things I will never be able to scrape from my memory. Indignities and violence suffered on a daily basis simply for being born the color of lovingly shined mahogany. She testified her life story to me that day, spoke things that had me shedding torrents of silent tears, had me terrified I’d be unable to survive the hearing. But she told me a story that made me laugh, too. It was about the time her new neighbors called the police when they saw her take a belt to her grandson. The local officer approached her front door cowering. He was the age of her children, and he’d known her all his life. He knew she wasn’t abusive. He believed she’d had a good reason to do what she’d done. That grown officer of the law, armed with a gun and strong as an ox, respectfully shrunk in the presence of that proud southern mama. He slinked inside her house, saying, “I’m so sorry to bother you, Mrs. Brown. It won’t happen again.”

In Wisconsin, in the gorgeous pocket I live in, we don’t have a whole lot of heartache. That’s not to say we don’t suffer the same horrific car accidents, the same percentage of domestic abuse, the same incidences of random violence, it’s just to say that our level of basic economic comfort is higher than many. The poorest of the poor kids don’t go hungry or naked, and there’s not a single homeless person on the streets of our town. And around here? You don’t hit your kids. You don’t spank them, let alone take them behind the woodshed. If you do? If a cop responds to a call at your house? He’s not cowering.

I don’t know what my life would be like if I’d been raised in a different setting, among different cultural mores and norms, but in this life, I don’t hit my kids. The rare gentle swats to the behind have come in moments of grave danger, or in play. My husband doesn’t hit my kids, we don’t believe in hitting our kids, and I cringe when I see others do it. It doesn’t escape my attention, though, that every single one of the children that ran past Annie Ruth Brown that day called her “ma’am” as they stopped to quickly snuggle with her. These were not abused children.

Emma is the challenge that Gretta never was. She has the ability to boil my blood to a temperature I never knew it could reach. I even wonder, sometimes, if it’s more than the normal tantrums of her age group, if there’s some underlying psychosis driving the worst of her behavior. If I put her left sock on before her right sock, she will have a full-on meltdown. If I lift her out of bed from the left side instead of the right, she will work herself up into such a froth it takes hours to come down. To be clear to my social worker readers, it’s not the order of things per say, it’s that I’m not doing it exactly as she demanded. It’s beyond being bossy, though — she is utterly unable to control her emotions in these moments. She always, always apologizes later. “I’m sowwy I fweaked out, mom. I’m so sowwy.” And each time we go through this, at least daily, I feel more and more helpless. And so angry, so angry in these moments, I hate myself. I shrink beneath the weight of my own self-control, and the horror I feel that I need to work so hard to use it.

I know I’m not the only one that goes through this. I also know that child abuse is a very real issue, and that’s not really what I’m talking about here. I’m sitting here this morning, coffee gone cold, wiped out from another episode that made us 20 minutes late to school this morning. I’m thinking about Annie, and I’m thinking about Emma’s uncontrollable rages, and I’m swallowing down a bitterness born from more than just dime store java. I’m asking myself hard questions, the least of not being this one:

Am I doing it all wrong?

After a hiatus, you’d love to come back with a bang. You’d love to hit one out of the park, write the most breathtaking treatise anyone has ever read. Unfortunately, tonight I can barely string these words together, and I hope you’ll forgive me for it. I just needed a place, I just needed a brief second, to catch my breath. To spit some of this poison out where its less damaging to my innards.

I’m overcome by fatigue, by sadness. I’m shuffling through my disappointments like tattered confetti on the floor, like his ashes, spread from an airplane flown low over our town on Friday night. I can’t escape the haunting and sorrow and bitterness in the air all around me. Worse, I’m trapped in the bell jar with all of this, stuck suffocating in some kind of sick snow globe.

I don’t understand people who live in small towns and think their actions are not witnessed, their lies not recorded. I don’t understand how so many people can snap their marriages apart with the effortless ease of stepping on twigs. I don’t understand why I’m feeling so used. I don’t understand incessant racial slurs in front of children. I don’t understand drunken name-calling over the phone. I only understand this: Given enough time, nearly everyone will disappoint you.

Most of the time I appreciate it all so very much, this world in all its painful, breathtaking glory. I swear I do. But sometimes I’m paralyzed, wounded, petty. Sometimes I can’t stop feeling sorry for myself, can’t stop ranting in my head at those I feel have wronged me. And those who haven’t, those who never do — these three beautiful creatures I’m incredibly blessed to share a home with — can’t do a thing to make it better. Not for all the sticky kisses, the breathy mother’s day wishes, the grubby fisted dandelion bouquets in the world — and that is what hurts the most.

.

I thought about deleting last night’s post, but the comments are already too valuable. I wanted to do away with the post not because I regret the message, but because I could have and should have done better. I was tired, and I was sad, and I was angry.

I’m no night owl — I do all of my writing during the day, when the coffee’s hottest and the light is least depressing. It’s interesting the way a post comes out differently when you write it long past bedtime, half dressed and freezing on a living room sofa, cloaked in the heaviest of darkness, the screen barely visible through the tears. I’m going to try to do better right now.

On last night’s post, Elizabeth commented, “How many people are aware that October is Domestic Violence Awareness month? Most people associate this time of year with pink ribbons and fundraising initiatives to support breast cancer research. ” She had no way of knowing that simple sentiment is what started this all for me a year ago.

I’ve bragged endlessly about meeting Gloria Steinem last year. The reason I met her was because she came to town for the 30th anniversary of Domestic Abuse Intervention Services in Madison. Our city magazine scored an exclusive interview, and they gave it to me. I spent 30 minutes on the phone with her, and then she invited me to be her guest at the banquet, and that’s where we snapped that picture. From her, I learned how incredibly pervasive domestic violence is, and how even though we’ve come a long way, an honest community conversation is still very much lacking. I’d also interviewed a close friend who is a TV news anchor for the same article, and she told me how frustrating it was to sit there in the newsroom and listen to the scanners trumpeting all of these arrests and know, because of safety and privacy concerns, that she couldn’t say a word on-air. I learned that in our own highly-educated, affluent, white-collar county in Wisconsin, between one third and one half of all arrests are domestic violence related. But these stories most certainly did not make up one half or one third of the news. They were only reported when someone died. Murder-suicide.

The article with my Gloria Steinem interview ran in the October issue last year, right alongside a stunning portfolio profiling breast cancer survivors (written by someone else.) I thought to myself, why can’t we do an article just like this for domestic violence victims? But I knew why. It wasn’t safe. Where would I find women who were safe enough? Brave enough? Whose situations were uncomplicated enough? It would never work.

I decided to try anyway.

Thanks to the help of a prominent local advocate, seven women — seven women — agreed to be photographed, agreed to use their full names, and agreed to let me tell their personal stories. The article will be on newsstands before the month is out, in time for Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

This is the cruel, hard fact: One in four women will be a victim of domestic violence in her lifetime, according to a 2000 report by the National Institute of Justice. Tell me, do you know four women? Believe me, the men and women who are victims of abuse are all around you. They look exactly like you. They are sitting next to you at the PTO meeting and they are pumping gas in the next stall and they are your sons and daughters’ friends and they are your sons and daughters. And it’s not always easy to tell. And it doesn’t start out violent. Men don’t walk up to women and punch them in the face, to have women say, “Gosh, you’re romantic, let’s get married!” It is slow, creeping, insidious, until you wake up one day and find you are not the person you once were, and you have no idea how you got here. It has happened to me, and since starting this article I have learned that it happened to many, many people I thought I knew. Listen to me: Every nine seconds in this country, a woman is beaten. How many seconds did it take you to read this post? If you read fast, maybe you can do it in a two minutes. 120 seconds. That’s 13 women while you read these words.

The several months spent living inside the words of these wounded women have not been easy. I’ve mentioned before the unfortunate tendency I have to sponge up the emotions of the people around me, and the interview and writing process for this piece affected me deeply. It cut, and it itched, and it burned. But it also healed, and it evolved, and it surprised. These women were such a gift to me. Their stories are now forever entwined with mine, deep inside.

That’s what brought me to my knees about Viviana. I did not know her. She was not one of the women profiled in my article — but she was exactly like them. She lived in the same town as my seven women. She volunteered with other victims, just like my seven women. She had managed to leave her abuser, just like my seven women. She knew several of my women, and they knew her. To me, reading that article, it was like I’d lost one of mine. And in addition to the mourning, part of me felt a sick lump of fear forming in my stomach for my new friends, and what the exposure from this upcoming article could mean for them. Bravery is not a strong enough word. It just isn’t. So, please: we owe it to them to listen.

In my article, I speak these women’s names, because the fact that they are using them is the most powerful thing of all. That’s why Viviana’s name squeaked painfully out of me last night, why I whispered it over and over again. Why I’ll continue to whisper it in my heart, along with the seven others I’ve come to know as well as my own. Why I’ll continue to listen for their stories.

May they all be heard.