Women are strong

[[From the Journal of a Demented Woman. Retrieved from the Trash Bin of Decaying Things]]
“Women are strong, strong, terribly strong. We don’t know how strong we are until we’re pushing out our babies. We are too often treated like babies having babies when we should be training, like acolytes, novices to high priestesshood, like serious applicants for the space program.” –Louise Erdrich

I’m training for sainthood and this has gone on for years. Martyrdom is not my cup of tea but here I am, sacrificed before an altar, staying awake at 10:41 at night, waiting for him to come home.
It’s another kind of experience, something which fiction could only approximate but never copy. Bleeding and angry at the same time, I sit here on a chair, facing this computer on my table, trying to make sense of the ticking of the clock, thinking of that body—a baby I once pushed out of my body now a being separate from me. It is now a body with a life of its own and a mind that has totally discarded me.
Early in the afternoon, I climbed up the stairs leading to the high school faculty room on the second floor and was surprised to find the teachers waiting for me. The stories they told me were simply astounding. Of the school disciplinarian chancing upon the four of them--smoking? maybe drinking?--in a store in an eskinita across the school ground. Of the sketchpad full of drawings—his drawings?—of demons and monsters and obscenities—what do they mean?
Six hours after I left the school campus, I sit here, waiting interminably, thinking of a million things that could go wrong. I am thinking of the dark, deserted road stretching from our house to the highway. I am also thinking of the people surrounding him, I am thinking of gang wars in the news, of dangers lurking in the streets. I am thinking, too, how come that he cared more for other people than he ever cared for me?
Where in the world is he?
It’s like inside a torture chamber, sitting here, held incommunicado for eternity. It’s like the crucifixion of Christ, only that, this time, I am the one being nailed. I can feel the stab wounds all over my body. I am bleeding.