One Tough Bitch, One Tired Bitch

[A lot of this was written last night. My mom stayed overnight at the hospital last night, and she’ll stay again tonight, but she’s slated to come home tomorrow.]

I’ve just left my mom at the hospital. She had a hip replacement this morning and they’re keeping her overnight. I need to feed the cat, run a couple other chores, and along the way I also stopped to pick up a book, Bitch: On the Female of the Species, that my mom had put aside for me at her local bookstore.

When we checked into the hospital this morning, the nurse exclaimed on her beautiful skin, how great she looked for her age. It’s those features that made her an Alabama beauty queen many years ago, and it’s also those features that made her a perfect decoy at the abortion clinic.

She’d pull up, one hell of a glamorous bitch, driving my dead grandmother’s ’87 Chrysler 5th Avenue — an absolute boat of a deep blue car — with what appeared to be a scared pregnant teenager in the backseat, and attract every pro-life protester and TV camera in a two mile radius. Meanwhile, they’d scoot the real patients in through the backdoor.

It takes all kinds of bitches.

Which is good I guess because I gotta tell you, I’m not feeling much like a bitch at the moment. Definitely not like a bitch as in “Dude, that shit’s bitchin’!” 

Not like Glenda the Bitch.

Not like a smug bitch who knew it was coming all along.

Not a bitch who knows when & where to draw a line:

And not even the bitch I feel like I have the most right to be, the I-will-burn-your-motherfucking-house-to-the-ground bitch:

I’m skimming the copy on the inside flap of the book cover, trying to figure out what kind of bitch I could be. An orca matriarch leads her pod to better hunting grounds. Mother meerkats murder their babies. There are lesbian albatross couples.

How about tired bitches? Is there a species where all the females are really, really tired? Sloths, maybe? I could maybe be a tired sloth bitch.

I keep thinking about Lauren Hough’s post, Take a Hike, from immediately after the Dodd Supreme Court decision. Lauren goes on walks with her dog Woody, she notices things with him, because of him.

I realized this somewhere in the Smokies—that I walk different, because I’m walking behind him. His entire being is focused on the walk. He sniffs the ground, sniffs piles of leave, sniffs tree trunks, and sniffs bushes like he’s scrolling twitter. When he finds a particularly interesting spot, he’ll shove his face in and suck at the scent like a wine snob.

I love it for the detail, and I love it because I was going on little walks around the neighborhood at the end of last week too. 

I was missing my cat, Malka, and reading the news, and listening to Female Species, and trying to remember how to notice things like a squirrel eating the neighbor’s plums.

Like a lot of female bands, Female Species was ignored. Then, after 50 years of obscurity, they were recently rediscovered on a Japanese Youtube channel and a compilation of their songs, Tale of My Lost Love, has been released on Bandcamp and on vinyl.

What kind of bitches were they when they were 14 and 16, just putting the band together, dreaming of being an all-female version of The Beatles? What kind of bitches are they now?

I’ve got to get back to the hospital, got to get back to see my mom. She’s staying a second night, but she’ll get out tomorrow. That’s the kind of bitch she is, a tough bitch.

I kind of already know what this Bitches book is going to be, what it’s about. All the kinds of bitches we might be, all the profusions of ways to be female.*

The book is right, but frustrating. We’re taking discovery walks, but forced to walk in circles. We’re every different kind of bitch and also, and most consistently, tired bitches. Without access to safe, legal abortion and other healthcare for women, the number of sick, tired, dead bitches promises to proliferate.

To paraphrase Lucille Clifton, I want to know all the bitches who could have known me. All the ways of being a woman, a bitch, a female species. What in the world are their names?

I don’t know, all I know is that one of their names is my mom, and one of their names is me. My mom would like a visit from me, the tired bitch, and so I’m going, because I like to be with my bitches, and I like to learn their names.

*As Bitch notes, sex and gender shouldn’t be conflated. Not only is sex “wildly variable” but as far as I, personally, am concerned — honey, anybody can be a bitch!