Category Archives: Life

They Turned Them Back in Stalingrad

Posted on by

From the mind and memory of Dr. Michelle Harrison

“They Turned Them Back In Stalingrad!”

The year was 1942. My mother had gone into labor on Thanksgiving, the 26th of November that year, and had delivered me in the afternoon of the 27th. The following morning my father came to visit her in the hospital. He leaned over to kiss his beautiful young wife, and with pride and joy announced, “They turned them back in Stalingrad!” She said, “But David, the baby…” “Well,” he told her reassuringly, “there is always plastic surgery.” I had first appeared to the world in the shadows of World War II, and with my face a bit caved in.

My appearance was a terrible shock to my mother, as the nurses had initially, and mistakenly, brought her a beautiful ten-day-old red haired boy. She adored him for the hours he was with her. I do not joke, but on my 60th birthday she was still remembering and talking about that baby, how beautiful and perfect he was, how happy she was holding him, talking to him, how shocked she was when they brought me to her. Part of her shock was guilt. She blamed herself for my face because, “no one taught me how to give birth.”

So, by the time I was one day old, there were stories to tell, stories and themes, personal and political, that would be with me throughout my life. As for my face, it mended on its own, probably within a day or two, but that part of the story is never told. I think I just had an ordinary newborn smushed-in face. To my mother though, I never really looked right. She longed for the “perfect” ten-day-old red haired boy she had held in the hours after giving birth. She also longed for a son, which she never had.

I have another day-of-my-birth story. I became a doctor. One focus of my work was the early relationships of mother and child, in pregnancy, childbirth, and the newborn period. I once participated in a meditation and hypnosis seminar where we were supposed to regress back to our lives before we were born. But I could only get back as far as my birth. The delivery room was cold and gray. I saw myself being born; I looked around and there was my mother, frightened, lying on the table. Then the doctors were holding me upside down, dangling me by my feet as was the custom. I was screaming and screaming at the top of my lungs, “You are doing it wrong! You are doing it wrong!” No one was listening to me.

In 1982, I published a book, A Woman in Residence (Random House 1982; Penguin 1994), an autobiographical account of my training in Obstetrics and Gynecology. It is an expose; it is about the institutionalized abuses of women; it is about how childbirth should be practiced, not how it is practiced. It is my strongest voice, and the words no one listened to in the hospital room forty years before. I am persistent. I have the memory of an elephant, and the tenacity of a mother searching for her lost children.

Michelle Harrison

The Silence of the Fathers

Posted on by

“Son, you are becoming a man. You will feel lust you will have to manage. If you choose to drink you may give up control and then you are nothing but a wild beast of the human jungle. A wild beast of the jungle brings shame and dishonor to your family, to our ancestors, and to other men.”

I wish I knew who said those words, or even if they have ever been said. I certainly don’t hear them being said now. I don’t hear them being said by fathers on Social Media, by the coaches on sports’ teams.  In fact the coaches seem to have been indulging in their own lust.  Today’s music, TV, films?   We live in a culture, East and West, where wanton male sexuality is admired.  Any threat to that male sexual behavior is perceived as emasculating.  It’s as though we are afraid to really lessen the power of the wild beast.  To me, this is an insult to all men, because not all men are wild beasts.  But it does seem they are rather quiet.

Like most women around the world I have my share of stories, molestation, rape (for me a knife held at my throat), college professors who lined up the girls he wanted to bed, wandering surgeons’ hands in the operating room, sexually inappropriate and demeaning remarks in the high echelons of the corporate world…

A volcano of smoldering fire has burst forth with molten lava, which by nature consumes all in proximity.  The wild beasts and gentle men become indistinguishable,  part of the problem being we don’t always see the wild beast hidden inside the gentle man.  And the gentle men seem reluctant to speak up, and organize themselves into a movement that redefines a maleness that excludes rape.  Yes there have been small groups but they never seem to grow.  Where are the Corporate Board members and the CEO’s taking leadership in wiping out sexual discrimination and harassment?  Name a University head who has pledged the same.   Is the problem that the “big fish” are the beasts?  Will strong men in leadership give up the perks of freedom to harass?  I am hoping for these leaders to pledge to raise their sons differently, and to wipe out these offenses in their companies, universities, hospitals, law firms, etc.  So far they seem unwilling.

Since the explosions have been placed in the US congress as the place of battle, I propose  a Truth and Reconciliation Commission be set up, with it’s first charge to address the secret fund of taxpayer money that has been used to settle the cases of sexual misconduct against members of congress.   Let that be public, and as in South Africa, a forum for denouncing the past and pledging to a future that is different,  What we have now is sheer hypocrisy in the Congress.

When I wrote and published, The Preteen’s First Book About Love, Sex, and AIDS, (American Psychiatric Press Inc. 1995) I wrote: “The crossing of sexual boundaries between people, whether in word or touch seems to cause deeper wounds and greater shame than any other kinds of abuse.  The person who commits the crime of sexual abuse seems to pass on the shame and humiliation to the victim.” p.76

Women are angry and hurting, triggered by one woman’s story and one man’s position, both being managed in highly politicized ways.  None of this happens on its own.  Bill Cosby has gone to jail at 81 while Harvey Weinstein and Bill Clinton walk free.  Juanita Broaddrick is silenced as are the women claiming abuse by Keith Ellison.  The conflict is bigger than black and white or right or left., socialist or capitalist.  It is at the core of every culture known to our species — what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman.

The shame eats at us.  I am 75 but I still have places of shame which are untouched by my accomplishments in life.  How do you wash away the feeling of being soiled when a man has forced himself into your body?  How much soap?  How many years?

The wild beasts, be they doctors, professors, corporate executives — they had and have no shame.  They are often treated as though the offenses are so old they are outweighed by these men’s accomplishments and good deeds.  We women carry the shame for them and that burden has become too great to carry in silence.  There seems to be no expiration date on shame, so why should there be one for the offence?

 

Gandhi on “The Jews”

Posted on by

A new blog… started a while ago, but never published, as I thought about what I was trying to do.  I have a blog about my life as mother to thirteen girls at Shishur Sevay (www.shishursevay.com)  but other currents and journeys happen simultaneously and increasingly I want to share those thoughts, those parts of my life.

Today is the first of these posts because I cannot get these words of Mahatma Gandhi out of my mind. Writing in 1938, on “The Jews”, he says:

“The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the god fearing, death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep.”

Reference:  http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/JewsGandhi.html

 

I’ve admired Gandhi all my life.  My father told stories about him.  In India we celebrate him.  I once wrote a piece about Shishur Sevay entitled, ‘Let all our children bloom as Gandhi did.”  He was a poor and sickly student and his family did not have high expectations.

Getting rid of us Jews seems to be a common theme in history.   We are a bit like weeds. You put us anywhere and we tend to thrive, and certainly no one yet has found a successful Final Solution.  And I think after the Holocaust, you simply can’t count on our passivity.

I have a personal story to tell.  When I was 18 years old I was raped at knife-point.  I accepted what was happening and didn’t “fight or scream” because I was more frightened of being killed than of being raped.  I believe that I survived because of my submission.   Ten years later, I was visiting a commune, staying overnight in my van, when the commune was invaded by drunken men, presumed to be local police.  Other women were quietly secreted into my van with me.  I had no weapons but a small pen knife.  I held it out, knowing that no one would ever rape me again without a fight.  I fully expected to die that night.  The drunken men discovered us and my dog started barking wildly.  They rocked the van.  The road had been blocked by their cars but there was a lone farmhouse across a large field.  I started the van and plunged ahead over the field, horn blowing..  The elderly couple came running down and let us in.  A bit later the men of the commune arrived and gave me a scolding for running, for disturbing what they believed could have been settled with guitar playing and singing. You see, the second time is worse, because you know the pain of being invaded, of losing the battle, and what passivity does to you, even if it’s the “rational thing to do.”   For Israel, the Holocaust symbolizes helplessness and passivity. Now, It’s other people’s turn to be morally superior and stop trying to exterminate us.

No, I didn’t expect to write all this today…..  I guess there will be more over time.