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Biddy is a woman of some years: a GenX'er, Riot Grrrl, survivor, traveler, tattoo collector, senior pet owner, music lover, former public school embattled public school retiree and amatuer vegan chef. Biddy Sounds Off is a thinking woman's bildungsroman and pirate radio station some thirty years in the making: featuring episodic writings and eclectic musical selections.
Welcome to Biddy Sounds Off, a place for episodic writing and music I love. I'm Biddy. Gentle listener, I have not felt this good in a while. I confess, I feel more alive, and so this makes my body and mind and heart lighter. There is a general feeling of goodness that I can't deny, even though I try to deny it, that is.
Biddy:There's always going to be this sort of melancholic longing or attraction inside me. It has been with me all my life, a gravitational pull towards the morbid, a homing device that responds to the deep vibration of death. There is a longing for decay in me. That morbidity comes to me naturally as an artist, I think, because I can obsess myself with beauty. And in so doing, as artists we feel it deeply.
Biddy:To understand a thing is to know it. And the feeling of beauty, to possess that finite gift from the universe, is also to beware of its fragility. To feel beauty means we must also feel the loss of it too. The death of beauty. The allure of decay for me, the aesthetic, I admire.
Biddy:But beyond this, I've learned to protect myself when this morbid longing makes its way into my emotions and thought patterns. Behavioral patterns, for me, this is where I've lost my footing in years past, plunged myself into darkness. The self destruction, the self hate underlying it all, the mental health scars I have as a result of battling immortant attraction within myself, inclining me towards self destructive habits based on an early misunderstanding of myself as an unworthy person. The misunderstanding that because I was worth less, I deserved the consequences of seeking out these self destructive patterns. Knowing better now, my self understanding and awareness is not based on the result of others' treatment of me.
Biddy:My self worth is not the byproduct or consequence of anyone else's actions. It reminds me of an expert or an author I once heard speak on TV who said, your body is not a cum dumpster. It caught my attention as it may catch yours now. Let's take a break. 1st, we heard Grass Widow, an EP that came out in 2009, the song Lulu's Lips.
Biddy:After that, we heard Crown by The Knead, finishing up with Bang On by The Breeders. Now where did we leave off oh, yes. Your body is not a cum dumpster. The time I heard this doctor or philosopher, I can't recall who she was or what she may have been promoting, but this would have been back in the nineties on an afternoon talk show. I remember the house well.
Biddy:It was grandma's house we'd inherited after she passed early to my mind. She was only 65, I think. Mom was tasked with ending her life. She had to administer the dose of morphine that my grandmother, her mother, had requested. Grandma had been ill for some time and was receiving at home hospice care in the room I would later inherit.
Biddy:1 afternoon, I caught mom standing motionless in the enclosed porch room of our own modest home. Mom was always an avid and extremely talented gardener. The porch was sun filled and leafy. I approached her cautiously. Are you alright?
Biddy:She grabbed me, both shoulders. This isn't a woman who touched. As an adult, I'd always go in for hugs just to embarrass her. She'd roll her eyes and wiggle her shoulders as though she were laughing good naturedly, but all the time resting herself from my grasp. Her sapphire blue eyes burned holes into mine.
Biddy:I had to do it. I had to give her the shot, she said. Your grandmother's dead. I had to give her the shot today. Gripped me hard and pulled me into her.
Biddy:Her fingers almost hurt. I was so stunned, I spoke honestly. I don't know what to say. I'm sorry, mom. I I don't know what to say.
Biddy:I began to return her hug, reached for her with both arms and she started laughing uncomfortably. She withdrew and poked me with a pointed finger in one shoulder. Had she been joking? Had I said the wrong thing? This was a meaningful moment, wasn't it?
Biddy:Had I read it wrong? She left me standing in the sun filled porch. I gazed at Flippy, a blue parakeet whose wings were clipped so his cage door was kept open. Mom always draped a ruffled yellow floral cloth over his cage at night. When she set the kitchen on fire once, Flippy had survived, probably because she'd been making breakfast early that morning, which meant Flippy's cage had still been covered from the night before.
Biddy:She moved his cage in from the porch for the Colorado winter. Later, I overheard my mom on the phone, mocking my response for the benefit of persons unknown. She said, I don't know what to say. I felt like Flippy that time he struck the window head first. What should I have said instead?
Biddy:What an idiot I've been to answer honestly. What had I been thinking? I loved grandma and she used to let me talk to her. Grandma had been a farm girl at heart. Practical above all.
Biddy:Her decision to end her own life with dignity, in the face of more guaranteed and worsening suffering, was fittingly characteristic of the woman. A woman I knew for a handful of years, but believed I understood better than my own mother. Grandma was a lean, tough woman whose elegance was from another time. Her short hair was a coiffed white cloud when I knew her, but she showed me pictures of the fiery redhead she'd been in her youth. She let me talk and shared with me in return.
Biddy:Mom only wanted to hear certain things, and I hadn't been listening to her well enough to respond the right way when she needed me to. I'd let her down. Of course, now, I realized this is a shitty way to tell a child that her grandmother is dead, a complicated death at that. I knew we'd been waiting for grandma to die. We knew it was coming.
Biddy:We got to talk to grandma about it who assured me that I'd be given her car, a 1979 brown and tan Dodge Omni, over my sister who is 20. I I knew my sister needed a car badly so she could get a job. Grandma never liked my sister, at least that's what mom told me when she wasn't allowed to go with us to visit. My sister was wild. She was.
Biddy:That was all the convincing I needed. I was 15 working at Baskin Robbins, dipping into the hot fudge concentrate, saving up for a car. I took grandma's car and drove it all through my teens, finally burning up the motor coming back from a rave in California. We left it on the Pacific Coast Highway outside of San Francisco. I was always grateful for that car.
Biddy:I was grateful for my grandmother, who'd called me strong, and that became my favorite compliment. I realize now, I hadn't been wrong to respond to my mother honestly. No response I I may have exhibited at that time should have been out of bounds. I could have ripped up the plants or dropped to my knees and wailed and smeared my grief all over the fucking place. When people die, we feel angry.
Biddy:Totally normal. I could have shouted, my body is not a cum dumpster, and hightailed it out of there. I didn't know that one yet. That would come later, maybe even too late, on an afternoon talk show in the late nineties. My self advocate received those words and they resonated.
Biddy:They carried an energy with them that would stay poised inside of me somewhere, saved for later. Many years later, but the words still vibrate My self value is not a byproduct, not dependent on the actions of another person. My grief response is not secondary. A lot of times, we may be compelled to immediately care for another, physically tending to them, keeping other people alive and going in times of that we view our own grief as less important. The rage of grief will out.
Biddy:It is another one of those traumatic experiences that will come for us all if we don't take care. Back when I first heard that phrase about not being anyone's cum dumpster, for me, it cut to the quick of my internalized hatred of self that so many childhood sex abuse survivors know and understand. A misunderstanding of myself is a thing whose value was determined by by its ability to serve others, a tool of comfort for others, while my own heart shattered. Or so I interpreted or misinterpreted the saying to mean. Back then, I remember thinking, I wish I had the self confidence to live that saying.
Biddy:I didn't then, but I do now. To close out this episode, first, we'll hear I'm Going to Haunt You by Fabienne Del Sol. This song was featured on Killing Eve. And if there's a better character than Villanelle, I haven't met her yet. After Fabian del Sol, we'll be hearing the song how insensitive by Aster Gilberto.
Biddy:This has been Biddy Sounds Off. Thank you for listening. If you'd like to reach out, I'd love to hear from you at biddyybiddybops@gmail.com. That's 2 biddys and bops with an s, all lowercase at gmail.com.