Our Red Book by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2022-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

Drew Pham is a queer, transgender woman of Vietnamese heritage whose writing meditates on legacies of violence, trauma, and memory. She is an educator whose philosophy centers on undoing racism and oppressive hegemonies through literature and writing. Though she cannot carry children, she is a mother to two beautiful, if spoiled, cats.

Shira

My pads were scattered all over the floor around my backpack. I’d just come back from a soccer game, and as far as I could tell, I was the only one in the locker corridor, unless someone was in a corner snickering. I was Deaf and had no way to know. The next day, I couldn’t very well tell anyone about it because who was there to tell? My hearing friends and I had drifted apart the minute we walked into our first day of middle school.

In elementary school, we’d been close. We’d had playdates every weekend. They had learned American Sign Language, and we’d played and giggled through the night on the weekends. That didn’t happen anymore.

Standing by my backpack, I knew I stood apart from others at school in some obvious ways: I was Deaf (I still am), and I was a Little Person (I still am). Other than that, I was pretty sure we were more alike than different. But it was hard, at that point in my life, to trust that feeling. I scrambled to clean up and never told anyone.

The following year, I had leg surgeries that took me away from school for five months. My legs were bowlegged at the time (oh, right, that’s another difference), and I needed reconstructive surgeries to straighten them. That would allow me to continue being physically active with minimal pain. After a monthlong series of surgeries, I returned home and lived in my family’s living room for the next four months.

Soon after arriving home, I received a video from the kids at school. On the screen, I could see students, prodded by an adult to come to the camera and say something. “Hey, Shira, so, uhhh, feel better soon!” “Um, hi! I hope you get better soon!” they muttered, one by one. They didn’t come visit.

At home, I was in a plaster cast from the waist down, with a hole in the cast so I could go to the bathroom. I didn’t actually go to the bathroom; the bedpan came to me. The day nurse came to my side when I rang the bell and set me up for the bathroom, right on my bed. And when the nurse wasn’t there, at night, my mom came to my side.

She also cleaned my monthly periods. The horror! At the same time, it wasn’t. In my family, having periods was natural and healthy. So natural and healthy that we never talked about it; it was like eating breakfast, except we talked about breakfast more than we did periods. If I needed help, then I needed help. Despite that logic, I sure did not tell anyone that my own mother cleaned my period mess.

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