Melanie Sweeney

Microaffections

By Leave a Comment

On Walking

When my son was a newborn, he did not sleep well. I won’t try to explain the tragedy of a baby who doesn’t sleep because it will sound hyperbolic… But, his not sleeping led to me speed-walking around a botanical gardens nearby for an hour, two hours, sometimes three hours straight, because the movement and vibration of the stroller made him sleep.

When I look back on his infancy, I think of two things: how much he cried and how much I walked.

The walking was manic. It was the only answer I had, the only thing I could DO to keep him quiet, to keep myself sane. This, too, sounds like exaggeration. The day I walked until I could barely lift my feet and my clothes were soaked through from sweat, I thought, “If I stop walking, I will cease to exist.” I believed it.

I still walk, but now my son is awake for it, and we talk about trees, cats, birds, trucks on our usual route through our neighborhood. I walk fast, but I do so for exercise, not because I feel so strongly that I have to. My son says, “Go fast again,” when I slow down. He wants to pet every dog walking with its owner across the street.

We’ve been walking regularly here every morning for a few months. It’s our routine. Most of the other morning walkers are old-ish men. They always wave back, and it feels like I live in a time and place where neighbors still know each other, even though we don’t.

Today, as I pushed hard down the main road back toward home, I was approaching an intersection as a car coming the other direction slowed. The driver waved me through before turning after me onto the cross-street. He leaned through his window as he turned behind me. “I didn’t want to slow down your momentum,” he said. “You’re always really moving.”

I expelled a breathless laugh and thanked him over my shoulder. I looked at my arms and chest where I was sweating streams of milky sunscreen sweat. I could feel more sweat drip down the part in my hair.

Another man, just a couple minutes later, came out of his garage to say, “Hey,” as we passed. “See you tomorrow.”

And yet another, by the park where we stop to play before completing the circuit, tugged one ear bud down and told me, “I saw you down the street. Decided I would suck it up and go.” This man must be sixty. He walks most days the opposite way on my route. He wears khaki shorts and a tucked in t-shirt and somehow never breaks a sweat.

I don’t know why, suddenly, all of these people had something to say to me today. I have been feeling a little aimless lately. I have been feeling closer to depressed than usual, enough to look for a therapist. Does it mean anything? I don’t know. Probably not.

But it was nice. Just like I’ve sort of memorized the gait and height and route of several strangers, there are these people out there who knew I’d be there and who know I’ll be back tomorrow.

By Leave a Comment

Just a thing I miss

Before my son was born, I used to go to the movies about once a week. I went with my husband, with girl friends, alone. I watched good movies, bad movies, ones I’d already seen before, ones I barely knew a thing about. It didn’t matter much what I watched. It was a comfort thing: the dark space, the surround sound, the people there but not there. I liked how the sun made me squint when I emerged from the theater.

When I was a teenager, my mom used to take my brother and me to the movies a lot in summer. He liked Sci-Fi and action movies. I liked romantic comedies. We would sometimes do a double-feature. And yes, we bought tickets to both. We would spend half the day at the theater.

Sometimes, people turn their nose up at movies and TV. As a writer who can be a little too serious about ART, I downplay my love for them. I take deliberate breaks from them where I only read literary fiction, practice some self-restraint.

In the two years since my son was born, I have been to the movies once. There have been some huge adjustments since I became a mother. I’m not ashamed to say that this is one of them.

By Leave a Comment

This Life

So, sometimes I look at my life and miss coffee shops and writing for hours and talking and talking and talking with passionate people and having solitude, and I think this life of being home a lot with a toddler and of my husband being gone a lot at work and just always being responsible for someone else is not exactly what I hoped it would be.

Last night we had friends over. There was a lot going on, everyone talking, the dog pacing. I looked across the room at my brother-in-law and another male friend playing with my kid and my nephew, and their faces were completely joyful, and I just felt relieved. Like, these are good people, and although my life has changed a lot, and I sometimes feel like I’m just waiting around for things to evolve or change, there are times when it all feels okay just the way it is.

By Leave a Comment

On Sharing/Withholding Trauma Stories

The impulse is to start with a list. 

The first boy who asked me out wrestled me to the floor in a locked room and held scissors to my throat until I said okay. I was twelve. 

At fifteen, on a family vacation, I was separated from other girls and women by a man who worked at the resort, and he pulled my swimsuit from my hips to expose me, saying, “We have to see if you are a woman.” 

During the welcome meeting at my college dorm, we covered, almost exclusively, the importance of curfew and not leaving male friends unattended because in the past boys had gone to other girls’ rooms and raped them, which made me wonder why I’d believed an all-girl dorm was safer. 

In my twenties, a man asked me for cash in a parking lot, and my first thought was that if I got in my car, he might overpower me, rape me, kill me. It was the middle of the day. It took every bit of courage to tell him I was sorry, I didn’t carry cash, and pray he’d move on. Instead, he stuck his hand in my pants, and I gave him the three dollars I had. Of all the times I’ve felt violated by a stranger, this one burned the most because of the money, because this was a theft that anyone else would acknowledge. And then, when I sought counseling to work through lingering anxiety over that day, my male therapist asked if I regretted engaging with the man because, if I’d ignored him, nothing bad would have happened.  

And then there’s the long-term boyfriend whom I still struggle to speak privately about, let alone publicly, because I know my version of our relationship and his version will not match up: I was in an abusive relationship/he loved me. It’s far too complex to even begin to address here, compounded by the fact that, as soon as I say I was in an abusive relationship, the chorus asks, “Why did you stay? What were you thinking? How could you put up with that?” Or worse: “It takes two people to make a relationship.” When I was with him, I used what I now think of as The Boyfriend Filter: every time something terrible happened, I asked myself, How does he see this? and from there, I completely demolished my own lived experience, my own reality, in order to manage his behavior toward me. He taught me to do this. 

So did every school dress code, every self-defense seminar, every warning to be modest/pure, every rape case where the victim was blamed in the media, every teen show where the pretty girl eventually rewards the nice guy with her body because he tried hard enough, and on, and on. 

The impulse is to list every instance that proves the point, from the ones that stand out so starkly I still see the face of a man I made eye contact with for less than a minute fifteen years ago, to the ones that feel so small by comparison that I can trick myself into not feeling them—which is it’s own kind of tragedy. But if lists of violations and traumas worked, if they could break down the walls of willfull denial, then the brave people who have shared their stories publicly before me would have already accomplished this. In some cases, maybe it strikes a note with those already disposed toward empathy and compassion. I guess there’s hope in that. But the list of ways I’ve been violated is not for those who are already forming a dismissal of it before I finish.

This is the catch-22: I want even just one of my scars to be enough for another human to reflect, to care, to change; and yet, why must I prove that I’ve been harmed in the first place? It’s not enough to say, “I’ve been violated.” If my most horrific example won’t convince others, then the default is to initiate the onslaught, as if the sheer magnitude of all the violations taken together will then mean something. For those who want to understand my reality, this isn’t necessary, but for those who don’t, even the onslaught is futile. And then I’m back where I was before, filtering, trying to understand others so that I can find some way to get them to understand me. 

What I have learned is that this is pointless. A person who doesn’t want to see you will not see you, and at some point, it does more damage to keep trying than to disengage. I don’t owe my story to anyone. I share it sometimes, cautiously, filled with panic, because I’m grateful for the people whose own stories make me feel less alone and less ashamed, and because, the very worst constant in all these negative experiences of my life is the silence, how the most visceral fear and pain I have ever felt can be turned into a lie—how the certainty of what I feel in my body most intensely, through silence, can be taken from me, too. 

It feels defeating to draw a line, to say, “Here’s where I stop trying to convince them.” It feels like giving up. When adrenaline spikes through me and my breathing falls shallow, when my hands shake as they are now, when that spot in my abdomen pulses like the start of a charley horse, I worry that I’m letting fear control me instead of standing up for myself and others. But I didn’t save myself from a toxic relationship until I was willing to draw the line, to not need him to validate my reality. I don’t know what that means for sustaining a meaningful conversation around this issue. I just know that it was the most important rebellion of my life.