#lupe garcía

Imagine. You're a teenager and you're a lesbian in a super catholic conservative family and community in the 30s. You get pregnant, and that must already be traumatic enough, bc how does it happen - rape, at worst, pressuring yourself to fuck a boy to be normal, maybe, and even if (in the absolute best case scenario) you did choose it for real, fucked someone you liked, you have "no partner" which means whoever got you pregnant doesn't step up and you know your standing in your community is too fragile to come forward with his name, bc you're a girl, bc you're queer. And then you're pregnant for nine months and no one cuts you any slack bc you shouldn't have been an irresponsible whore if you didn't want to carry the consequences. And then you give birth and For Sure no one gives you any pain relief and your body is too young for this so it probably fucks you up physically - maybe you tear badly, maybe someone cuts you so you don't tear and that isn't really any better, maybe you are a little incontinent for years after and you get no help and it takes professional baseball training to get your core back into shape. Your parents are afraid you'll make her like you if you get to raise them so they take her from you. But you love her, so you write her letters when you can and call her mi vida and send money for her care, and you stay in contact with your parents for her sake, which keeps you a little under their thumb, to the extent that you have to go to the tryouts in secret when you're about thirty fucking years old because your dad would be mad if he knew.

And leaving her is the price of getting to live, of getting to be, of fleeing the complete self-annihilation expected of you if you'd stayed. You get to be with women, you get to dress in a way that feels like you, you get to build a career in baseball, eventually you even get to play in a professional league, you get to live dreams you'd never have been able to if you'd stayed to be her mom. But maybe when your elbow hurts because of Dove's fucking forkball, the pain reminds you of the carpal tunnel you developed rocking her to sleep for hours when they still let you, and maybe when the wartime food makes you gassy, the bubbles popping in your stomach knock you back to feeling her fluttering kicks when she was inside your womb, and maybe when you finally get to fuck women Vi and Edie's bar, without judgment or scrutiny, you're hyper-aware of how big and dark your areolas are, of the faded stretch marks on your stomach, of the old scar tissue they'll surely feel if you let them touch your cunt. Maybe you desperately want to fuck your new best friend who you are pretty sure you're falling in love with, but if you do then she'll see and she'll know, she never misses any details like that, especially not about you, and then she'll look down on you and you don't know how you'd deal with that.

At least one of your teammates has kids, and she gets to talk about them, probably, gets to knit clothes for them in public, and your other teammates who are planning pregnancies when their husbands return from the war probably ask her questions about it, and you don't get to talk about any of it because everything about your pregnancy and motherhood is shameful.

And another one of your teammates is a girl who speaks Spanish and has your daughter's eyes and is at most five years older than her and treats you like her mom, and it hurts every time she's around you, and she's around you all the fucking time. And the rest of the team, even the chaperone, treats you like her mom, too, because you're both other, and you don't know whether you really wanted to be your daughter's mom but you never got a choice in the matter, and at least you got all this freedom out of it, but now this girl, this team, are treating it as a matter of fact that you should give up all this freedom for her, and they think you're mean to her and collectively resent you for it when none of them pay any attention to her themselves.

And then you tell the girl. You've probably been thinking for years about how your daughter feels about you, about whether her community made her hate and despise you for everything you are, or whether she's like you and is deeply unhappy where you left her and hates you for abandoning her, whether your letters and your money mean anything to her or just highlight your absence. You tell this girl, who reminds you so much of your daughter, who you can't help but love, and who you're sure will reject you as soon as you tell her your story — but she doesn't hate you, she throws her arms around you and buries her face in your neck and for the first time you consider that the choices that were forced on you maybe don't make you worthy of contempt.

LUPE GARCÍA | roberta colindrez | A League of Their Own (2022-present)