9:18 a.m. - May 03, 2002
Match tile to cartoon and you have a terrible story
I've mentioned before that Thursdays I find myself in a women's rape crisis center and I've been privy to some serious issues--come on, anything related to rape is serious--but not like yesterday. Even this morning I keep thinking about it, how helpless a woman, a mother, would feel to watch her husband strangle an infant with a metal clothes hanger wrapped several times around the neck and be unable to stop it.
As a sign language interpreter I'm bound by the same confidentiality laws that apply to counselors and lawyers so I've tried to be minimalistic when referring to some of the assignments I've had. Technically I'm not supposed to even mention assignments but the human in me feels the need to digest the emotional intake. I suppose if another interpreter were to report me to the certifying organization, the fact-finding, the report, and the possible censure wouldn't matter because I'll be off doing something else. Neeener neener, eh? Let me live dangerously.
So back to the baby, the mother, and the father. The common sense refrain wafts, How can somebody harm an infant that way, and we know the answer: Anybody is capable, not only those who possess a penis, but anybody who's fucked up. It's discomfiting, this constant switch from the women's rape center one day to the men's rehabilitation group the next--each of the men in that program have raped in addition to battering and assaulting women one way or another. The worst is when the men's group uses a shady form of art therapy to communicate; I say shady because the therapist is not trained in art therapy as he admitted to me when in my excitement approached him afterwards and talked about sandtrays and mandalas and realized he uses a label without the substance behind it. At any rate, the men draw pictures of what they did and have to explain in words the pictures, their feelings before, during, and after the assault, and things like that. It's an earful and enough to make one nauseous, and a couple days later I go back to the place where those who have been raped tell their stories on clay tiles and hang them up on a wall. I find myself matching tiles and stories, kind of like playing Memory as a child.
