Fat Finger

To be the good guy, the savior, you get involved

In lives that are none of your business.

Your cavernous pores ooze money and privilege and superiority and a life without struggle, adored, coddled, indulged, cosseted simply because you were born in your body to your circumstances.

So you think you are a god, and the world confirms it,

bowing and scraping to eat the crumbs that fall from your ornately carved table.

Sychophantic, fawning,  liars, all, abandoned of dignity, of integrity, of Self.

You seek not to actually care but to be seen as caring.

You offer what doesn’t actually cost you anything,

And people fall in worship of your excessively generous sacrifice

Affirming your place as the worshiped; the Hero of many narratives.

You grow fat on the empty calories of praise, for giving what you did not earn in the first place,

Unwilling to actually lift a finger for the for the targets of your good graces,

Except for this.  You willingly lift that fat finger to point it and accuse those in the trenches, those doing the emotional labor, those making the real sacrifice, those expending love and heart and sweat and tears for nothing, nothing, nothing in return.

You will lift your heavy, fat finger to accuse them of not doing it right.

And I?  I sit with the wounded. 

I have little to give for I am wounded and messy and bleeding too, but I give it with my whole heart and to my own heart’s detriment. I do it imperfectly; I do it poorly, even, but I do it with everything I have.

I show up after the midnight beating, gathering confused and wailing babies to my chest, as mothers bleed from violent encounters.

I show up to births of babies unwanted, to the early hours’ escape to safety, risking my own in the process.  Wondering what will happen to these innocents next time, seeing the damage already done to little hearts and little minds that didn’t ask for any of this, unable to alleviate even one ounce of their suffering.

I show up to buy new bras and underwear and diapers and formula because all was left behind in the exodus for the third time.  $500 here, childcare there, rides before, after, and in the middle of my workday, help with rent, help with food, help with bills, the favor upon favor upon favor, the giving from nothing until far past when it hurts.

And their trauma becomes my trauma, the blood from their wounds stains everything I own. Their screams and retellings of knives to necks, of pistols to foreheads, of whispered calls for help from inside dark closets, of babies left behind in bassinets become the building block of my dreams, of my nightmares, that leave me no peace.

And I worry and I question and I see in my sleep the day that I will get the call that all of them are gone from this world.

And you swoop in with your money-as-the-answer, your swagger, your arrogance, your power without asking a single question, without an intelligent pause to consider that you might not actually know what’s happening here or what’s best or what love looks like in this absolute shit storm because actually no one does;  but you think you do, so you show up without a shred of respect for my hands, cracked and bleeding from bleaching, scrubbing,  soaking, scorching  these stains from my life and the lives of these little ones, these children-made-pawns, without even a nod to my taped-together heart, and I finally find my voice and I say,

“I don’t know that trying to save this is the best idea any longer…”

Because I can’t do it anymore.  I can’t wipe away one more tear.  I can’t bandage one more cut over one more black eye.  I can’t cuddle one more screaming baby in the hopeless knowledge that we’ll just be here again tomorrow.  I cannot hold one more broken story. 

I cannot do this for another breath.

Because what if the dissolution of all of it is actually the beginning of better?

What if trying to save it has actually been holding the cycle in place and has become the ruin of several lives?

But still you swoop in, and I say what I said..

And still…you…swoop…in,

put your heavy, polished, dustless boot on the windpipe of my goodness, my compassion,

and then scream at me for not breathing.

You and your fat finger.