Mel Kadel Women Overcoming Obstacles

Some of the most painful choices are braver and more profound to me than getting married or having a baby. I can think of a thousand stories where a celebration or ritual is needed but our culture doesn't know how to meet what is happening. I would love if a person who leaves an abusive relationship could run through a tunnel of arms stretched out and sparklers in the air. If, when a mother and father put their feet on the cold floor and stand up in the morning, when they have lost a child, they could somehow be met with a circle of tears. Could there be such a thing as a cap and gown for a woman who has finally decided her voice has more weight than the beat of a wing? Might we shower a man with gifts when he can allow himself to cry?  In my work with survivors of abuse, I am surrounded by mostly women, women surviving, women carrying the burden of each other, women picking up the pieces that capitalist patriarchy throws behind its shoulder in its pursuit of wealth for a few. 

Someone said to me that there is no gender pay gap in my work because all the employees are female, but that is just the point. Men see themselves as above all that nurturing, heavy lifting work of holding people's hearts together that are broken, and finding whatever scraps of resources can be found among the giving of donors who see what is going on. "Women's work" requires stamina, courage, fierce determination in the face of a culture that devalues them everyday with a big middle finger to equity in pay.  There is not a day that goes by where I don't have to make some kind of choice that avoids harassment from men, whether it be walking to my car with a bag of groceries, or just plain getting dressed in the morning. I do not enjoy the company of churchgoers very much these days, only a few religious friends from my past have really stayed with me as I have made choices that are true to what I have experienced.  I do not trust most religious communities to give a flying fuck about women, but I will say the times that I was free to fall apart when I was trying to walk their line was only ever in the shadows.  In back rooms, surrounded of course by other women, who encircled me like musk oxen protecting their young from predators. But there are words not in the English language that describe perseverance in the face of suffering.  And I think those moments of resilience are a thing to be recognized. Rituals for the poor or abused would not be beautiful for me if they culminated in the blessing of a pastor, a bishop, or a priest. The patriarchy needs to wash its hands of itself, men need to fucking listen to women and allow them to share in leadership if they are to have the honor touching such stories. One cannot protect abusers in the name of mercy while turning a blind eye to the ones the abusers have shattered on the floor.  If our communities were a safe place to fall apart, as this beautiful post on OnBeing, suggests, I would say we would be a lot more human, less violent, softer.  God damnit our communities would be a hell of a lot more feminine, and males would not be afraid to look themselves in the eye and see their own frailty, and just how much their selfishness hurts. Benevolent sexism hurts more than blatant misogyny because it is offered with such moral syrup, it is coated in lies. Over and over, it makes women apologize for their very existence. Might an orchestra in the pitch black desert night of mourning sound just as radiant, and more mysterious than some violin on a wedding day? Might we celebrate something more complex and real, less oppressive than the image of a bride dressed in virgin white, met by some priestly fellow at the end of an aisle?  I am still trying to name what I am picturing, still trying to find the words but it is much more communal, circular. Not looking for the highest point on the mountain so much, just the wonder of all that grows in its whole. What kind of celebration would it be for two people who love each other to look one another in the eye and be two equals, able to be broken and strong equally, free from the tug of war that our culture of binary gender hierarchy creates, free from the pretentions of a middle-priesthood between ourselves and all that we don't know. There would be dancing, that much I can say. 


If Community Were a Safe Place To Fall Apart

Telling Stories and Lies

"What makes a good story? Now, there’s two different concepts. There’s good story talking. We’re all trained to talk story and to talk story engagingly, but good story on the page has to have a really confident, engaging voice and that is nowhere near as simple as people would like to imagine. I work with a lot of baby writers. I believe in baby writers and I encourage the hell out of them, but getting them to relax enough to have a fairly engaging voice in the story is the hard part. It’s very, very difficult. Writers will take me on journeys I absolutely do not want to go on, but the voice catches me and pulls me behind them. That’s a lot of what I try to work with when I’m working with young baby writers. I don’t teach as much as I used to, but that’s the core of it.


Frankly, there are a lot of fantasies about all us Southerners who were given stories by our grandmothers on the porch. My grandmother lied, and one of the things I think that makes a good writer is that you figure out they’ve been lying all along and then you start sorting out what are the true stories and then you figure out that true changes all the time. There are stories I’m willing to tell now — now that I’m older than dirt — that I would never have been capable of telling you when I was 25."




-Dorothy Allison, Living up to the Legend: Dorothy Allison on Storytelling, Cussing, and Family Secrets ,  interview from deepsouthmag.org

Do yourself a favor and follow weirdmormonshit on instagram. This image is such a fabulous collage over the artwork of Arcade Fire's Neon Bible. The artist is a former mormon who pulls weird shit out of the Mormon archives and also creates images that portray a distorted reality. He shows how the underlying anxieties of mormonism dwell in the subconscious, whether you stay or leave.

When I lived in Boston for a time, I dropped out after a semester of theological study and discovered I was living in a place whose history and contemporary literature had much of the stew wherein Joseph Smith's early thoughts were born. I read a lot of 19th century history, literature, and when I was buried deep I remember feeling like the prophet's brain had a gravitational pull, much like hypnosis.  I really like the reflections of Jacob Bender's  blog on how an implicit Mormonism can be found in many of Arcade Fire's songs. Win Butler was raised Mormon, and I wonder how conscious he was of the dystopic nod to the mormon tabernacle organ on the record.

Lyrics from Ready to Start for example make you wonder:

"All the kids have always known
That the emperor wears no clothes
But they bow down to him anyway
'Cause it's better than being alone"

I remember being raised with a great fear of "anti-mormons."  I see that now as a tactic to isolate and scare me away from anyone that might make me question the story as the church tells it.  Weirdmormon shit understands that discovering reality is a trip. Living in the present and building a life grounded in real life is a gift, one that would never have been possible without the weird questions I had to ask to find my way out. Freedom is worth the ride, I will say, and whatever they may tell you, there is hope on the other side.  


"There are no events but thoughts and the hearts hard turning/
The hearts slow learning where to love and whom."
-Annie Dillard

"Religion has everything on it's side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence... and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas."

-Irvin Yalom The Schopenhauer Cure




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