A Brief Note About Forgetting

In his 1982 foreword to the first, heavily abridged publication of Sylvia Plath’s Journals, Ted Hughes wrote that he had burned one of Plath’s last diaries because “(in those days I considered forgetfulness an essential part of survival).”

Although my enmity for Hughes is well-known, for a long time I held this line close to me. It had to do with my ex, the violent one who I once thought of as “my Ted Hughes.”

It had to do with the things he had done, the ones that terrified me. Not the physical violence— that was the least of it. It was the elaborate lies he had told me, which included the lie that his ex, who he was engaged to when we met, had been pregnant with a child he wasn’t sure was his. He sent me faked sonogram photos; he told me they had picked out a name. Then, after he had me convinced we could somehow make it even if he was the newly-minted father of another woman’s child, he sent me a series of panicked text messages claiming she had a “cerclage,” a late-term miscarriage.

He told me about the blood. He told me about the emergency surgery. He told me about the imaginary last moments of his imaginary dead baby. Later, when we were together, he wept in my arms and described it over and over again. And when I was pregnant, a few months later, he talked incessantly about it and played the Joanna Newsom song “Baby Birch,” about either a miscarriage or a still birth or an abortion, on repeat, until I begged him to stop, panicked and short of breath in our sunny kitchen, terrified that the song and my terror would cause me to miscarry.

It did not. Six months later, I gave birth to a healthy son. Six months after that, we were living in Texas, having fled southern New Jersey, my home, because he had made living near my family untenable. They were not speaking to me, and I had left my job mid-semester. I wasn’t working and instead spent most of my days and nights with a sleepless infant, nursing, writing poetry in my head that never made it to the page, and saying the Serenity Prayer on repeat. Once, I wrote down every terrible thing he had done and placed the paper in a coffee can and set it on fire.

The crux of the problem was this—

I knew I could not live with this knowledge, but I was not yet ready to run. And so, I decided that soon, in the near future, in what I could not then recognize as something marked by all of the hallmarks of dystopia, I would forget. I would forget and then I would be happy, because then he could truly be the center of my world. He was already the center of my world, because anytime my attention shifted to anyone or anything else, he acted out to swing it back. But in this near future, he would be the center of my world without this niggling misery, this doubt.

And, I thought, I would be free.

Forget, forget, my brain would hum, as, beneath it, a harmony, went the hum of his sins. Plath wrote, in 1953, how she began to understand the appeal of opium, of adoring Hitler, and, soon, so did I. If I could surrender to his version of events, of our life, and forget everything, I could be free. Chained to a lie, I was free of the burden of morality.

Of choice.

There was an ease to it.

One I could not surrender to, despite my best efforts. I could not love my own demise. And I could not forget. Because for women, forgetting has never been essential to survival. Forgetting means the long arms of the men who still control our bodies reach out and take what we need to survive.

Last week, Donald Trump told the world that when he becomes president, women won’t have to worry about abortion anymore— as such, we will be “HAPPY, BEAUTIFUL, AND GREAT AGAIN!” We will be protected. We will be healthy, hopeful, safe and secure.

We will be all of those things, according to him, because we won’t worry anymore. Because we have forgotten. Like the forgetting that almost killed me, and my son. Like the forgetting that, if you are a person who can bear children in America, might kill you, too.

Like the forgetting that killed Amber Thurman and Candi Miller. Who we cannot forget. Say their names. They are essential to our survival, even as we forgot and failed them. Even as we owed them our lives. Say their names again and again. Say them until they spark up and burn, leaving not a pile of ashes, but a woman-shaped scar.