Who championed the women in the garden of Gethsemane?

At twelve years old, I laughed

When they told me Christ suffered every pain.

There were ways a woman suffered

That a man would never know.

What a thing to insist! That he,

struggling against his twisted tree,

wept through the pains of childbirth,

Miscarriage, period cramps, pap smears,

Or—perhaps a teenage girl’s high school heartbreak.

Or a collegiate loss of innocence.

It seems mindless to imagine Him

Feeling the ache of my fresh braces

Or my first high-heel blisters.

But who am I to complain?

Did He feel the death of Marilyn Monroe?

The rape of Maya Angelou?

A whirling montage to a load-bearing martyr in a garden—

Weight Watchers, waxing woes, Botox, BMI,

Infertility, IVF, restraining orders, alimony hearings.

The unacknowledged truth of

Not all men, but every woman.

For the thousands of years of

patriarchal persecution…

Could a compassionate God

Let his Daughters suffer alone in these things?

What we are told to accept easily

Is that He died equally for the sins of the feminine—

The abortions, abandonments, aqua tofana.

The foul-mouthed, the fast women,

The quick-to-judge, the questioners.

Harder to accept is that He felt the pains

That brought us there.

The only way Christ makes sense to me

Is to know that He envisioned my suffering—

Lived through it with me, beside me,

Earning his tiger stripes as I did:

Crying tears of betrayal

On old ballet knees

Cursing as we leaned over the bathtub vomiting

With a baby’s foot in our ribs.

I like to think we did that one together.