Watching You, Seeing Me
Trigger Warning: sexual harassment, sexual abuse and rape.
They say that motherhood is hard. But no one ever told me that as you guide your child through life, there will be moments when your history smacks you so hard you nearly fall over. Sometimes I did…
When she was young and bold, and she’d talk to strangers, and I could feel my insides scrunching down into a ball because I don’t remember ever being brave. What had made me so afraid, so young?
When she turned ten, her body was changing and developing, and I had a complete meltdown. How can she be ten? It’s not okay.
It had nothing to do with age, everything to do with me, with the memories of lips on mine that I didn’t ask for, didn’t want, or didn’t understand. With hands on my developing body, with confusion. With the feelings of shame and horror and guilt, because I didn’t know how to be angry yet, I only knew how to be a good girl, to be nice. To not cause a fuss.
I feel a little better because she has always caused a fuss.
When she turned fourteen, I could remember my first desired kiss with my first boyfriend and how I flew out of my body, watching from somewhere overhead, completely unable to feel what was happening with my lips, with his.
She asks if I want her to tell me when she gets intimate with someone. If I want to know about her first kiss, I tell her I do. I tell her I want her to be able to share anything with me, the good and the bad. And the things I desperately want to never happen to her. That I will listen and be there, no matter what.
I’m so proud of her that it hurts sometimes.
When she comes home from hanging out with her friends in the park, she is upset because some older people – parents with young kids of their own – were commenting on the length of her skirt, taking photos of her, and telling her that they could see her ass. And I vividly remember how my high school English teacher would tell me that I was teasing him and that I wore those short skirts just to torment him, that my legs were long and sexy. He’d tell me it was my fault he felt this way; I was responsible because of how I looked and what I wore, even though all I wore was the same uniform everyone else did. The way his eyes seemed to touch me with their intensity made my skin want to shrivel away, pull tight, and form a cocoon around me.
I wasn’t brave then either. I didn’t say a word even though some of my friends could see something was wrong, and it wasn’t okay. That I wasn’t okay. Maybe because he’d make me stay behind after class and insist that my friends not wait for me. He’d close the door on them, shut me in with him. Maybe it was the way he’d always touch my arm, my shoulder, and I’d stiffen, eyes wide and afraid, air trapped in my chest.
Maybe it was because I forgot how to breathe.
But I’m breathing now, and a part of me wants to go into that park when she tells me to walk until I find those people who thought it was okay to speak like that to anyone, let alone an underage girl. I want to tell them that this is sexual harassment, that they don’t get to dictate what she wears or how short her skirts are. Never mind that she always wears tights under them because it’s more comfortable. Never mind that she wasn’t showing excessive skin, and if she had been, that’s her choice. Her right. Her body.
Instead, I tell her that I know how it feels. That it makes your skin crawl and your heart race, and like you need to have a shower to wash those comments off, to sear those looks from your skin. And I tell her that she can wear whatever the hell she likes, that she’s not the one in the wrong here. It’s her body, and she has nothing to be ashamed of.
And I say if this happens again when your friends are around – and that bit is important, you need backup, support, a safety net – you tell those bastards that what they are doing is not okay. You take their photo, and you tell them to leave you alone, or you’re going to take that photo to the police and tell them about the harassment.
Because it’s not okay. It’s never okay. Why do people think that it is?
And I hope she’s braver than me. She already is. I hope she can hold onto that.
She’s fifteen soon. And I am scared for her later teens; I’m petrified of her early twenties – what they might do to her, what it might do to me because those were the worst years – but I’m trying desperately not to let that get in the way of me being a parent, and her being a teenager exploring the world, learning about herself. I think I’ve done well so far, but the world is big and scary. If not for her, then me. I can’t let my experiences, my past, taint her future.
And I hope, I hope, she can make it through this next chunk of life without the sexual harassment becoming abuse or rape.
And I still have two more daughters to raise…
I am a mother to three girls, and you know what the stats say.
1 in 3. 1 in 4. 1 in 5.
It seems to vary depending on what document you read, the kind of abuse, and the severity. Harassment vs rape. But the only wish I’ve ever had is: ‘Please, let it just be me. Let me be the one.’
I bear the weight of my trauma, and I’d take on more if it meant I could save them from it.
But I can’t.
It doesn’t work that way.
What I can do is make sure that my past doesn’t tarnish my children’s present. Make sure that I’m present too, and not locked back then. I can teach them the words that seemed taboo when I was younger, instil them with the knowledge that their bodies are theirs alone, and assure them of the right to speak up and not let shame swallow them whole.
And I can hope.
This generation is braver than mine.
