Post-Roe Indiana
Indiana has passed the first post-Roe near-total abortion ban. Have I moved into enemy territory?
It made me feel a lot better when I read that nostalgia is an adaptive coping mechanism. It means that interpreting the peony bush outside my back porch as a sign that I’ve made the right decision coming to Indiana because my Grandma Jeanne used to grow them isn’t the dysfunctional weirdness I thought it was.
By the time I was born my grandparents, Jeanne and Charlie, lived in an old Victorian house in the Chicago suburbs. They’d married just before he went off to WWII.
When he came home they had the ideal life: 65 years of marriage, two kids. They were a beautiful, quiet, homemaking wife, and a funny, hardworking husband who worked in advertising and journalism and who, despite being a bit pompous, was basically harmless.
Grandma and I got along great. I think she understood me, and she always made sure I had art projects to do. There was a bunch of oil clay in a plastic grocery bag, and I would sit at the kitchen table mooshing it into swans and turtles and, always unsuccessfully, horses (the legs wouldn’t hold). When I got tired of that, there was a huge box of markers and paper.
At night, she always turned on the electric blankets an hour before bedtime because there was no heat upstairs. We’d take baths in the clawfoot tub, hustle down the hall, and dive into our toasty beds.
Once, when Grandma was eating ice cream out of the container, my brother called her a “big lummox.” She bonked him on the head—gently—with the spoon, and kept eating. Finally, I thought.
Grandpa died a few years before Grandma, and she was alone in the Victorian for a few years before moving to an assisted living facility in Virginia. It always made me sad, thinking of her moving around in that house all alone, before she sold it and moved away.
Have I failed?
The response to the above question, according to a big segment of the population, is “Yes.”
When she was my age, Grandma had security, a lifelong relationship, a house. I’m divorced, I live with one ancient, grumpy cat, and although I have a stepdaughter from my marriage, I have no kids. I spend a lot of my time wandering around my home, which I do not own, alone. I get lonely at night, and I’m terrified that as I get older, I won’t be able to afford to care for myself, especially after two years of working as a contractor. Financially, I feel deeply unsafe.
Safety is why I moved to the Midwest. I grew up here and it feels safe. It’s inexpensive and it feels safe. I know the rules and it feels safe. These are my people and it feels safe.
But I moved here six months ago. And back then, I could convince myself that the fact that Indiana is deeply red wouldn’t affect my life.
“He couldn’t boil an egg”
I once asked Grandma, after she’d moved into the assisted living facility, about her marriage. Here’s what she said.
“I got married far too young. Those three years after your grandpa died, when I was finally alone in that house, were the happiest years of my life. That man couldn’t boil an egg.”
I was stunned, not because of what she said, but that she’d said it at all.
My grandparents slept in separate bedrooms, which my grandma said was because Grandpa snored but I knew was because she didn’t like him. She read with earplugs in while he watched TV in the other room. He held forth about obscure books over dinner while she quietly cut the corned beef she’d made. Again.
But this was the quintessential Midwestern marriage. As one friend’s father, a lifelong Midwesterner, said, “Marriage is the living death.”
I remember how, on their 50th anniversary, Grandma gave Grandpa a gift that he loved. He stood up, approached her, and said, “I hope you don’t mind,” then kissed her on the cheek. Even at the time I was surprised. I thought, How long has it been since he kissed her if he had to ask if she minded?
My suspicions were confirmed when she smiled a little angrily at the ground, as though she were tolerating contact with something gross. This was not the flush of love that teenage me was expecting to see after 50 years of marriage.
And all that time, neither Jeanne nor Charlie complained. This was just what marriage meant, and when my parents got divorced, the lens through which my father, their son, viewed it was that now, we came from “a broken home.”
Even though the divorce rate was even higher than it is now, Dad seemed to believe that staying married even when spouses hated each other (and at the time, you guys, my parents did, I knew it even as a child) was the ideal, and anything less was a failure.
But how do we define “failure” when it comes to relationships?
“Marriage is the living death.”
Which is sadder: A relationship that ends before death, or one that makes those within it feel like they’ve died already?
Enemy territory
I was at Planned Parenthood the day the story broke that the Supreme Court was going to overturn Roe v. Wade, and I’m ashamed to say that I did nothing. The government will never let this happen, I thought. Biden or Congress will do something.
But they didn’t. On June 24, the Supreme Court took away the constitutional right to an abortion. And I’m ashamed to say I still did nothing. Indiana has no trigger law, I thought. Plus there are no estimates that we’re going to pass a ban. I’m still OK.
The Indiana Attorney General tried to sue the doctor who helped a 10-year-old rape victim get an abortion. A week ago yesterday, Indiana became the first state since Dobbs that passed a near-total abortion ban.
And today, I am thinking of Grandma.
She had a husband, whom she married out of high school, and two kids. She had a house. She had a “successful” marriage, everything women are told to want and more.
You know what else she had? A lifetime of fucking bitterness. It rolled off her in waves. I could see it in her face.
She had to wait eighty years for the life she wanted, which is exactly the one I have.
I walk around my house at night and think, “I love this.” I eat ice cream alone on my porch and think, “This is great.” I have no biological children, because I have never fucking wanted them and therefore I shouldn’t be a parent. Yeah, I wish I had someone to snuggle with sometimes, but a snuggle partner isn’t worth living with a person you can’t stand.
I may not own property but I pay my own bills, and I may not be married anymore but my ex and I still love each other. I just got off the phone with him today, actually, and if he ever kisses me on the cheek again I will glow with love, because I don’t resent him. I never wore earplugs when he was in the house. I don’t wish he would die already so I could be happy, and while we were married my husband never had to wonder if, when I said I loved him, I meant, “I have no choice but to be here.”
I don’t know why Grandma never left. But I’ll tell you this: I often feel her looking down on me, happy to see me thriving. She wouldn’t want her white-picket-fence, lifelong-marriage-at-18 life for me.
She didn’t even want it for herself.
California vs. Indiana, as a liberal who’s sick of liberals
After 6 years in California, I started to tune out all the progressive self-congratulatory hand-wringing. It’s a performance in self-righteous bullshit, a card you have to show every time you meet someone that says, “I belong here.” I knew this because I was married to a Black man, and I saw firsthand how crying about “I marched with Dr. King in the 60s” and “Conservatives are just so backward” didn’t translate into keeping their hands off his hair, or resisting the urge to follow him around stores.
Progressives love words. We know all the right ones, and we love to attack people for using the wrong ones. We love the rules and when someone breaks them, we respond with more words about why they shouldn’t have.
And the thing is, conservatives talk a lot too. They also don’t give a fuck about the rules, or the law. They act, while liberals keep releasing more statements. We liberals may be whiners, but we’re not wrong when we say that conservatives want to limit our freedoms.
Liberal legislators: “You can’t do that!”
Conservative legislators: “We just did.”
Liberals: “But that’s wrong!”
Conservatives: *pass another law*
Liberal bitching or not, it’s a mistake for me to think the small group of conservatives who run Indiana right now won’t do something I wouldn’t do, just because I wouldn’t do it. I’m measuring them by my yardstick, and that’s dangerous—especially because they’ve made it clear that they’re willing to ignore the will of the people.
This isn’t just about bodily autonomy. It’s about what’s going to happen in the next few years, especially if nothing comes of the investigation into the January 6th attacks. Conservatives are galvanized by the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago; if Trump runs in 2024, will it even matter whether he wins democratically?
Am I wringing my hands over a glass of non-alcoholic Chardonnay here? Or is the U.S. as close as we think it is to collapse, and am I on the wrong side of the new Mason-Dixon line?
Some things, like peonies and oil clay and electric blankets, are good to bring with you from the past. Others should be left behind.
The cost of nostalgia
The other day, I took a picture of my left hand to show a friend my tattoo. I looked at the picture closely for a second, then became alarmed. Where’s my chocolate mark? I thought.
Grandma used to call the birthmark on my palm my “chocolate mark.” She would check it when she saw me, “To make sure it was still there,” and then she’d give it a kiss. Now, it’s barely visible. I didn’t know birthmarks could fade. It’s there if you look carefully, but only if you know what you want to see.
It was foundational to who I was, a reminder of her. But it means something different to me now.
It makes me wonder whether nostalgia makes us idealize things—or places, relationships, values—that really shouldn’t be idealized.
It makes me think about what it means to be “Constitutionally Midwestern.” Does it mean I have a personality that can only be happy in the middle of the country?
Or does it mean I should take what’s good about it with me, and leave the rest behind? Do I need to flee before the bad overtakes us, seizing us in its teeth like a crocodile, dragging us back underwater?
I stay here largely due to family, but also because I hold out this tiny glimmer of hope that my fellow idealists and I can improve this godsforsaken state just a little bit. Or at least make things a little easier for the next generation. Or at the very least use protests and marches and demonstrations to show the folks who can’t escape this state, that they’re not alone. Or just exist here to irritate the homophobes, out of *~*~pure spite*~*~
(My mother and great grandmother also used to grow and tend peonies here. Idk if that’s a sign of anything but it’s definitely an indicator that we both descend from women with excellent floral taste)
Your writing so eerily mirrors my own thoughts!