Vendetta: Origins
The baby will not stop crying.
G is 17 months old in September 2023. She is a good sleeper but today, she resists her afternoon nap. Put her in the car, I think, I hope, and she'll pass out. Instead her volume increases with each green light and stop sign that my husband passes on the way to his mother's house.
My body vibrates with G's screams. It is a postpartum body. No one told me I'd lose so much hair, my forehead would resemble an early Elliot Stabler's from Law and Order: SVU. Pressure builds in my breasts two to three times per day, stretching the skin in proportion to the baby's hunger. I soak the bed with night sweats from the lactation hormones, which awaken me, drenched and freezing.
I'm losing my chill in the front passenger seat. To transport a screaming baby is to tune into the classical music station in the human brain. Turn up the volume loud enough to silence the animal keening and concentrate on the road. But I'm not in the driver's seat. There is nothing else to command my attention. Certainly not my life's work, which I thought I'd resume once G started daycare five months earlier. I am an abortion journalist. The final weeks of my pregnancy coincided with the last days of Roe v. Wade, a story I'd pre-reported while my perinatal blood pressure rose and eventually crested into preeclampsia, necessitating a premature birth. The story published while I cradled G in the Level II neonatal intensive care unit. It was the last thing I'd written in 17 months.
Daycare ravaged what little I recognized of my postpartum body. I contracted illness after illness that spring and summer. Hand, foot, and mouth disease. Strep throat x2. And a mysterious stomach bug that required two emergency room visits for fluids, which I couldn't retain on my own between the shitting and the breastfeeding.
The first time, the ER discharged me with instructions to follow up with the hospital's primary care practice within seven days. By the time a nurse called me back to say it'd be more than a month before I could get an appointment, I'd rebounded to the ER. I was annoyed that I was back where I started. The primary care nurse was annoyed at the ER's stream of referrals. We mutually ended the call. In my medical record, she logged a "telephone encounter" stating that I hung up on her—a falsehood from a practice that never medically treated me.
It was important to me to be the perfect patient. Otherwise, I feared I wouldn't receive life-saving care. I'd asked one too many questions—that is, one question—of the OB-GYN on call for my daughter's birth in April 2020. The OB-GYN seemed offended that I'd challenged whether I really needed the C-section she said I needed. Twenty minutes earlier, a different doctor finishing her shift thought I could have a vaginal delivery. I was so scared I upset the new doctor, to the point I believed she'd provide a sub-par C-section. If that sounds bananas, consider that during the 34 weeks and 6 days of my pregnancy, I'd been treated more as a host than as a patient. The fetus always takes priority, the pregnant person be damned. My question pushed out the procedure to the end of the day, and from there, my medical conditions spiraled.
Early the next morning, I'd wake up in an MRI machine. That is all I'll say for now—the birth deserves its own post.
I tried to expunge the "telephone encounter" under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. "This is highly prejudicial and defamatory, which as a woman already is difficult enough as it is," I wrote. "I cannot imagine that neither [redacted] nor [redacted] wants to be known for this kind of treatment of women—a burden which, like the reproductive health issues I cover as a journalist, Black women and other women of color disproportionately bear across all socioeconomic levels. I'm a white woman, I’m still troubled for myself AND I'm troubled for people who don't look like me and/or don't have the time to pursue this time-consuming and emotionally draining appeals process with no guaranteed outcome."
The outcome was not favorable. I still didn't have a diagnosis. The ER only tested me for bacterial infections, claiming it is the standard of care to let viral infections be. Viruses have to run their course, after all. This deliberate ignorance seemed medically negligent to me. I sought lab tests on my own. The diagnosis came back as rotavirus. It would have been helpful to know I had such a highly contagious condition. I would have told my mom to stay home instead of visiting to help with the baby. My mom contracted rotavirus and ended up in her local ER, which ran bacterial and viral panels. Standard of care, my ass.
Back in the car, I start to cry in tandem with the baby's wails. And I can't stop. I cry the rest of the way to my mother-in-law's house, where my husband parks. The baby has just fallen asleep. Of course. I want to stay in the car with the baby, I say.
At 4:50 pm, I pull out my phone and begin to type.
"Vendetta: Essays From a Girl Who Can't Let Go," I write.
Welcome to my Vendetta, dear readers.
I am a long-suffering journalist with a passion for essays. I've tried to leave reporting to pursue my writing. Every time, I end up quoting Brokeback Mountain: "I wish I knew how to quit you." The truth is that I don't exist in an apolitical vacuum. And neither do you. Our personal experiences are political by their very nature.
Essays are usually categorized as personal or critical. I hybridize the form, focusing my critical lens on the people and power structures that attempt to define our lives. I've published some of these essays at The Flytrap, the feminist media collective that I co-founded.
When my dad, a high school graduate, enrolled in the University of Phoenix, he was reaching toward a promotion within a for-profit education system that exploits workers like him ("The Robin Hood of For-Profit Education"). My colonoscopy featured unexpected appearances by a conservative Catholic judicial society and an Obamacare loophole that left me with medical debt ("The Red Mass Went Up My Ass"). My love for Jersey Shore, a tanning balm for the sunburn of the first Trump administration, would turn rancid when one of the stars attended the candidate's 2024 "Nazi rally" ("Feast of the Seven Fishes and Eight Abs.") And I'm chilled by the specter of "Christopher," the boy my parents thought I would be and the kind of man I fear our patriarchal society would have turned me into.
You can count on me to prioritize and contextualize "kitchen table politics," a term that mainstream Democrats love to throw around when they're trying to appeal to the center or the right. I'm here to reclaim it. I am not beholden to any political party. Accessing abortion is as much of an economic justice issue as opening a bank account. Protecting trans kids is as important to families as their public education. Our politics don't define us. We define our politics.
At Vendetta, I'll explore the intersection of the personal and the political through essays, discussions, and the "Grudge of the Week." Something is always going to piss me off in this country, about this country. We deserve so much more than the scraps we're given and told we're full. Your grudges are my grudges. Subscribe to Vendetta today.