Excruciating Intimacy

Who has touched you today?

It’s a question, for me, usually answered with a very short list, if actual physical touch is in view. My list expanded this week as I participated, as a staff member at the prison, in a yearly training aimed at enhancing our safety.  We practiced techniques to fend off an attack, and to end an altercation.

There’s an intimacy to this, with a lot of touch—much of it harsh—as we repeat defensive and directive moves, always with a partner. We get up close and personal with fellow staff members, female and male, in ways that don’t happen even with close friends. Nothing inappropriate, I assure you, and always in a most matter-of-fact way.

There is touch that we welcome, and touch we undergo for good reason, and the touch that is done to us.

This week’s training was in the second category. It is important that we do this. Although I have never personally needed to utilize these practices (thank God!), I understand that safety is enhanced if I, along with all other staff, remain vigilant and primed to respond.

Similarly, we undergo touch for good reason when we visit the dental hygienist, or the gynecologist, or schedule a colonoscopy.

I minister at the prison with women who have way too much experience with touch done to them, often violent, usually repeated. Repeated by the same father uncle stepfather boyfriend neighbor friend. Or repeated through a succession of such men. When it begins very young, and when mom grandma sister auntie friend pastor teacher don’t take action when she tells, she begins to think that’s just the way things are. Evidently, she’s kinda right.

It can lead her not to know or savor the welcome touch that is all some of us fortunate ones have ever really known.

And I quail at the necessary but uncomfortable touch of a four-hour training session.

As we celebrate mothers this weekend, or women, or the Christian home, or however we do this in our churches and our families, let us not forget the many—one in four, or one in five of us women—for whom intimate touch has sometimes been excruciating. They are in our midst. “We” includes this.