September 12, 2025
Parenting, Appalachian Solidarity, and Charlie Kirk
I went to my very first miscarriage grief support group today 4 years after a devastating missed miscarriage which resulted in a bout of postpartum depression and psychosis, a cruel trick of nature that came along with an extra month of morning sickness that lasted long after the medical abortion where her body was separated from mine and stored indefinitely in a bag in our freezer while we agonized over next steps.
It was reassuring to have reinforced that this kind of grief isn’t linear. It isn’t neat and pat. It can’t be put in a little box and labeled, then hidden away. It can consume your life, destroying relationships and possible futures.
I ended up mentioning that yesterday someone I disagreed with decided to repeatedly point out that I can’t have an opinion about a “sensitive subject” because I’m “not a parent.” The folks in my group were horrified. Shooketh, one might say. They understood exactly how cruel a thing that was to say to someone who has struggled with infertility for so long and so openly. I wanted to extend the benefit of the doubt to this old “friend” at first, but I’ve been talking almost daily on socials about my upcoming hysterectomy and the grief and loss I feel about not having living children. There is no way she’s missed that. Her comment was calculated to sting. It was personal. It was meant to shame and silence. It was on a post she shared where someone waxed poetic about Charlie Kirk, mentioning that he was a father as if that somehow negates all of the hatred he has spewed into the world. Charlie Kirk didn’t get what he deserved, but he did get what he thought others deserved. Never mind that many people whose destruction Kirk openly cheered, such as George Floyd or countless Palestinians, people kidnapped by ICE—were fathers or had families. Kirk enacted political violence on anyone who wasn’t a straight, white man for over a decade.
This woman is someone I’ve known since high school. Someone I defended ferociously to the youth group kids when she got pregnant ‘out of wedlock’. Someone I’ve tried for years to offer support through hard times because we shared a (sort of) ex who ended up in prison after shooting at cops outside Wal-Mart a couple of years ago. Outlaw country! She ended up being shunned by much of the community for the actions of her ex. Some real small-town bullshit.
She followed her repeated insistence that I can’t have an opinion because I’m “not a parent” with a vague book post saying that “some of y’all need Facebook taken away during y’all’s manic episodes.” Be for real, though.
She made sure to point out repeatedly to me that she is a parent “IN MINISTRY”. Look, I know all too well what that brand of faith teaches about conception. Even by her church’s beliefs, I am considered a parent.
It’s this particular brand of Appalachian Mean (Grown Ass) GirlTM energy that is a huge part of why I’ll never set foot in that culturally bankrupt hellhole of a region again. How someone can simultaneously brag about being “in ministry” and voice their support for a man who hated everyone who wasn’t himself (including his toddler daughter, who he bragged that he would force to carry a pregnancy to term if she was ever raped and impregnated) is beyond my capabilities for cognitive dissonance. I’m not ashamed that I don’t have successful pregnancies under my belt or that I struggle with mental illness. I know to your kind all of my value as a person with a womb comes only from my ability to ‘birth them babies!’ My womb is going into the medical waste bin next week—what value do I have then?
Just a head’s up–Charlie Kirk’s corpse isn’t going to pick you. I get that you are trying to publicly wash yourself so that you will maybe be welcomed back into Appalachian society and made respectable, but the way to do that isn’t to attack the people who have always accepted you. You really think defending a hate mongerer like Charlie Kirk is worth more than 20+ years of solidarity?
These small-minded, small-town folks often use this exact brand of cruelty to shame and silence people who might speak up against the status quo. It’s turned against abuse survivors in order to protect their abusers and keep them active in the community with a constant supply of victims. It’s utilized against anti-war protesters to keep them quiet so that the local boys keep throwing their bodies into the war machine in the name of “freedom.” It keeps the queer kids in the closet. The women from getting an education or access to reproductive choices. It keeps everyone ‘in their place’ and stifles any voice that tries to speak up about how the coal companies are poisoning our streams, stripping our trees, and devastating entire mountains with mountaintop removal. In an area pretty much the only thing they have going for them is the natural beauty, even that is being destroyed in the name of Capitalism. People like this are going to make sure it happens and that no one speaks up too loudly as it does. I hope for your sake, old friend, that you find a way out of that mire eventually. Or that your kids do, if you simply don’t have the strength or vision.