Oh no they DIDN'T

Do you know where I am right now? I am in Section 107 of Nationals Park, one of 10,000 lucky fans here in person to watch the Nats face the Arizona Diamondbacks on a very chilly Friday night in April. I'm dressed appropriately for the cold, but I am missing one thing. Women are no longer allowed to bring handbags into Nats Park. And now the entire Washington Nationals organization are my sworn enemies. 

Have you been here before? If so, then you know how I feel about my handbag. I don't like to go anywhere without it. Now I have to carry my phone and my wallet and my keys and my extra mask and my kleenex in the tiny girl pockets of my jacket and pants. It's almost like the Washington Nationals don't want women here. 

You might be thinking that I should have checked the handbag rules before I showed up at the gate, but I've been coming to Nats Park for over a decade, and I have always had a handbag with me. I even changed handbags before I left the house, because I knew that my usual Longchamp Le Pliage bag was too large. This terrible rule is brand new. And as they say on the Internet, I'm not having it. I am not here for it. 

I didn’t put up much of a protest at the security gate. After all, the staff don’t make the stupid rules. I stepped out of the line, pulled all of the essentials out of my bag (it's ALL essential!), and handed it over to my husband, who took the bag back to the car. He met us on the concourse a few minutes later. "Do you want to go right to our seats," he asked, "or do you want to walk around first?" 

"I have to go to the ladies room first," I said. "But wait. Do they still have a ladies room?" 

"Oh boy," he said. 

"I'm just getting started," I said. 

"Yeah," he said. "I can tell." 

*****

I tweeted @Nationals when I got to my seat. They didn’t respond. I looked around at the other women in the stadium. Some of them carried tiny wallet-on-a-string crossbody bags that just met the size requirement, and some of them had diaper bags for their small children (also allowed), but most of them carried nothing; at least, nothing visible. They probably also had wallets and sunglasses and phones and keys stuffed into pockets. 

I thought for a minute that maybe I should just get over it, and let it go. I’m too attached to things. Maybe I should just go with the flow once in a while, roll with the punches, adjust to circumstances. But I also need things to make sense, and a 5x7 handbag rule doesn’t make any sense. If God forbid there’s ever a mass shooting in a stadium, I promise you that the middle-aged lady carrying the Coach file bag will not be the shooter. 

*****

I’m still torn about this. We had fun at the game, and the Nationals won with a ninth-inning walk-off homerun. I want to go to another game, but I don’t want to knuckle under to tyranny. I don’t want to live by the man’s rules. 

A handbag is just a thing. But it’s also more than a thing. Women need things that men don’t need. Women have children who need snacks and band-aids and toys. Women have bodies that require supplies. Women have husbands and teenagers who carry nothing, who ask their wives and mothers when they need a kleenex or a mint or a squirt of hand sanitizer. Women carry makeup and hair ties. And we wear clothes that have shallow little pockets that barely accommodate spare change, let alone tampons and Lego minifigures and Altoids and keys. We shouldn’t have to worry about how we’re supposed to stuff everything we might need into our pants pockets, assuming that the manufacturer of the pants we happen to be wearing has deemed it necessary to even put pockets into those pants. 

So I think I have some letters to write. I think I have to take this fight right to the Lerner family. And I bet that Mrs. Lerner isn’t giving up her handbag for anyone. Nor should she. Nor should any of us.