With Lee, some lake in Minnesota, August 1994. Click through to image on Flickr for explanatory notes.
Longtime readers (in my various blog incarnations) will be familiar with the name of “Lee,” the woman with whom I spent four years in hell Minnesota1. More recent readers can still access some of the backstory here; old entries about this relationship, for better and for worse, did not survive the blog-deletion-and-starting-over I did in April.
No, that wasn’t her birthname; rather, “Lee” was short for the name to which she’d changed hers in court, which was deliberately derivative of the name of Aileen Wuornos. Note: she has had yet another legal name change since. Fortunately, she did not feel it necessary to acquire new legal names for each of her variously vicious, excessively passive, and other personalities. (I am not, incidentally, being metaphorical here in referencing “multiple personalities.” Someday I’ll have to write about that fragment of her known not-very-affectionately as “Mrs. Hessley.”)
Anyhow, this is her, leaning against me as I’m attempting to nurse my infant daughter. We will skip, for now, the exceedingly complicated story of how I acquired said daughter, who did, in fact, save my life. Suffice it to say that being with Lee carried certain risks, such as being dragged through an underground odyssey involving such places as a downtown Minneapolis homeless shelter (the notorious “410″). And that while what happened to me there was against my will, I made a conscious choice, after I learned I was pregnant, to keep my daughter2, and have not regretted it for a moment since.
I’ve blurred Lee’s face out of respect for her privacy (I haven’t spoken to her since 2001, although she continues to send my daughter and me bizarre pieces of correspondence by postal mail; my daughter will be permitted to access these only upon her eighteenth birthday, I long ago decided), as well as because, let’s face it, it was kind of fun to blur her face this way!
Oh, and you may notice there is a bruise on her leg. Click through to the image as hosted on Flickr for the story on that (mouse over the image to access the annotations).
Those with academic library access may also consult the November, 2000 edition of Violence Against Women for my poem, How the Fugitives – Two Women Writers – Tried to Love Each Other and Survive for yet more background.
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1 Actually, our journey started in Seattle (the city I loved, which we had to leave after an ex pimp of hers from Chicago figured out where we were), continued through Fargo, ND (Fuck those Coen Brothers for stealing the title of the movie I otherwise would have written about that experience; this angst is made all the worse because of their film’s ineluctable brilliance), and on through Minneapolis, St. Paul, and outlying areas of the Twin Cities.
2 Anyone who imagines my not having an abortion, after such an event, is inconsistent with my lifelong commitment to women’s reproductive freedom needs to review the dictionary definition of the word “choice.” And any anti-choice asswipes who would exploit my decision, and its ultimately happy outcome, in support of the idea that women should be denied access to abortion services, or have such access granted in only very limited circumstances, can fuck right off.
