Are you better off now than you were four years ago?

MAGA is aiming for collective amnesia. It’s downright delusional but we still have to push back. Hard.

It was a week to the day after my first-born’s due date. The doctor had been very clear with me that he wasn’t the type of dude who liked to let women go more than a week over, plus he had a Hilton Head golf trip planned and he sure as shit wasn’t gonna let me screw with that, so into the hospital I went to be induced.

Before that pregnancy, I’d never been in a hospital bed in my life, and this was actually the second time during my pregnancy. The first being the day I was 7 months pregnant and returning from visiting my dad who was in the hospital himself, when some deranged drunk and high woman decided to play pinball with her car and all the other cars on the road, which ended with mine when she gunned it straight for us from a stop and slammed her Honda into my Kia door.

She promptly slid out of her car bloodied and bruised and itching for a fight. One she managed to find when she punched, kicked, slapped, spit at and bit, the officers and paramedics who had responded to the scene.

I seemed fine, but we wanted to make sure our son was also fine, so off to the hospital I went.

During the ultrasound, he stuck his tongue out at us, which I realize in retrospect, really was the first sign of the snarky sense of humor he’d grow up to be known for.

Anyway, back to me being induced with him a few months later… and I promise this will all make sense once we get there, but if you’ve learned anything about me, you know I tend to like a bit of a tease, a slow simmer so to speak. I like to warm y’all up with a seemingly unrelated story you’ll follow along while wondering when (hopefully not if) I will suddenly kick the whole damn thing into the next gear. You see, I want you hungry, so hungry for how this all comes together, so it’s like literary foreplay in a way, although I’m not going to tease a glimpse of my boobs or anything because that’s a totally different app and as I’m writing this, I’m thinking maybe I’ve now taken it too far, but it’s out there now, (not my boobie) so back to the hospital we go.

The nurses were doing their things, poking me with this, prodding me with that, all while telling me that I couldn’t eat, which when you’ve let your blood type become donut holes for the last 9 months is torture worthy of The Hague.

But my son had other plans. He seemed quite content to just hang out. None of the measures they were taking had any influence on him vacating my womb of his own volition.

Eventually, they sent in an anesthesiologist to give me an epidural, which my then husband was warned to sit down for given the size of the needle. One which, I luckily never saw.

So, there I am, miserable, hungry, poked and prodded and in comes this dude who says “don’t move” a hundred times and I don’t because I very much enjoy the use of my limbs, and he’s got the needle and he’s poking around my back and I’m not moving and the nurse’s face is getting weird and my husband’s face is getting weirder and I can’t move or speak and I’m thinking “I’ve never seen this in a movie” when the nurse says “You know what, let’s take a minute…” and ushers him to the side of the room where they whisper and he leaves.

He leaves the room.

And now I’m thinking, “how did I fail this? What, don’t I have a spine? And then I’m thinking how weird it would be that I didn’t know that, and did it just slip out somewhere like in the shower, and then the nurse is on the phone looking increasingly worried and I’m growing increasing worried and then she’s standing in front of me smiling like a flight attendant at the end of a bumpy flight.

“We’re gonna get a different anesthesiologist.” She says flatly.

A different one? Was that one spoiled? Had he passed his expiration date? Was it a chemistry thing? Was this a me problem, it felt like it was a them problem, but how the hell did I know.

“Luckily, Dr. So and So is here today, so all is well.”

Had Dr. So and So NOT been there that day, would all have NOT been well?

So, the backup needle guy comes in and 1,2, 3 he does the thing and my husband exhales and I’m like cool because I can confirm the existence of my spine, but I’m still miserable as fuck. And then my water breaks like some tsunami of primordial goo out of a Stephen King novel and all of the sudden I was nostalgic for the misery I had been feeling in the before times because the brand new misery was an 11.

And yet, my kid was still chilling. Cracking beers in my belly for all I know. Just not coming out. And now it’s like Tuesday afternoon and I feel like I’ve been slapped around and thrown up on by post-spell Chet from Weird Science and my husband, who hasn’t had a cigarette this whole time asks if he can just run and grab one real quick. Cuz, ya know — he was “stressed” (really?! face).

And off he goes.

Not one minute later in walks the doc with what looks like a hazmat team of scrubs and gloves and a gurney and he says, “Umm, where’s your husband? We gotta go. Like now.”

And they’re moving me from my bed to the gurney and I’m thinking omg I have to do this alone, and what does he mean we have to go, I’m not clearly not “going”, I’m the opposite of going, I’m as stopping as anything can stop, and then I realize, “FUCK, I’m having a C-section!!!!”

My. Worst. Fear.

“There’s something about your son’s heart rate” they tell me, and they don’t like it and WHERE THE FUCK IS YOUR HUSBAND??!?

Anyway, they found him just in time, cleaned him up and ran him in to the operating room where I was given the good stuff and started making small talk about golf (I don’t golf by the way, never have golfed) while good doctor Mike opened me up like a table-side Dover Sole at a fancy French restaurant in 1965.

And voila — we had a baby boy. A cone headed baby boy, but a beautiful, healthy baby boy. And no, I hadn’t been sneaking wild nights with an alien (ok maybe the one time), he’d just been fighting the forces seeking to vacate him from my body for so long that his head became a 3D model for my insides.

Yeah, that was as weird for me to write as it was for you to read.

But he was perfect nonetheless and all was well. I couldn’t feel my legs for a while and that was weird, but I was lying in my bed, chatting up my nurses and cracking jokes about how worried I had been for nothing, cuz I felt fiiiiiine.

Until, I very much didn’t feel fine.

Until the good stuff wore off and my body stood up and slapped me across the face repeatedly for what I had just done to it.

I asked every nurse and my doctor over and over again if that level of pain was normal because I felt like I had been trash compacted and set on fire and that the doctor had replaced my organs with poison-laced razor blades and that couldn’t be right.

Right?

I explained to my husband that I had never known pain like that pain and that I couldn’t imagine ever having to endure that kind of pain again and I worried audibly about having more kids.

To which the nurses would laugh and say, “You’ll forget all about this. Just wait and see.”

Ha. Impossible. I was hamburger meat. I was miserable. I was dirty and smelly and achy, and some super aggressive lady kept coming in when I was trying to get 5 minutes of sleep and squeezing the fucking shit out of my Sahara Desert boobies, my insides had spent a bunch of time on my outside, it all hurt, and I wanted to speak to the manager and oooohhhhh give me my beautiful baaaaaby boy…

And a few years later I had my daughter via C-section which made the pain from the first one seem like a night at a goddamn Holiday Inn Express.

And my point is, that human beings ARE capable of forgetting some seriously crazy shit.

If we want to.

Even if it defies all logic, all reason and our OWN FUCKING REALITIES.

Which brings me to this:

Like they’ve done with January 6th, and just about every single facet of his record on everything from the economy to how he stacks up against the likes of Lincoln and Reagan (it’s bigly better by every conceivable measure of course) Republicans have whitewashed, upgraded, downplayed, falsified and revised the ever-loving fuck out of Donald Trump’s catastrophic mishandling of the Coronavirus pandemic.

This is how authoritarians work.

And they’re hoping that we’ll all just nod and smile and scratch our heads as if something feels the teeniest bit out of whack and we can’t quite figure out what it is, but we’re pretty sure it’s just that tuna salad we had for lunch that we knew was questionable at best but rolled the dice on anyway, and perhaps a bout of violent, hallucination-inducing retching was deservedly imminent and it wasn’t at all that we remembered vividly the Squid Game endless “what the fuck is happening” awfulness we had endured at the time, but I digress.