Yep. Me too.
My best friend and I were looking for adventure during our senior year of high school. We found it at a fraternity house party full of rugby players who introduced us to new drinking games, and rape.
I don’t remember every detail and could never identify my attacker by face or name all these years later. I do, however, remember that Sade’s “Smooth Operator” played in the background and that I was confused how a room that was full of people had suddenly become vacated. Soon, I felt crushed by the weight of a guy with urges and a sense of entitlement about how his needs should be served. When it was over, I ran out of the room sobbing, but never did anything about it.
Unless you count self-loathing, because I did plenty of that. I blamed myself for being drunk and clueless and, then, compounded my shame by embarking on a path of abusing alcohol and participating in willful, shame-filled promiscuity for the next several years.
My life calmed down when I met my husband. We started our family and I shelved my thoughts of shame on this subject.
During these mothering years, my friends have confided in me their own stories. One friend had been raped when walking home from school, another was raped by a group of boys she had grown up with, another was raped by a relative, and yet another was raped by an employer. I started to feel lucky (lucky?!) that at least I was drunk enough to numb the horror and never had to see my rapist again.
The bar for feeling lucky was low, indeed.
As my own daughters reached the age of my assault, my trauma bubbled up to my conscious thought again, and keeps on bubbling behind the walls of my daily to-do lists.
I’m not going to lie— it scales the wall each time my youngest mentions she’s going out on the town. I hold my breath. I say my prayers. I send what pretends to be a cheerful text the next morning. “I hope you had fun last night,” as I wait and wait for a text back that confirms she made it home.
Since fear mongering isn’t actually great for mother-daughter relations, I do my best to limit my reminders to a casual once per month:
“Have fun! Please lessen your chances of being targeted by a predator by never drinking so much as to make yourself easy prey. I love you!”
I’m pretty sure the technical name for this is a fear sandwich. It is a dish I wish I never had to serve.
When the #MeToo movement started, I never felt the need to share my story. I thought it only mattered that the women in powerful positions of influence came forward. I don’t believe that now.
I share my story because I believe the world needs to see the actual preponderance of these stories, long carried by my sisters. Too many of us have sat in shame or in fear of repercussions for being victims of the kind of men who lack the humanity to understand the destruction they leave behind as they walk in their daily parade of privilege. I now understand that only when the world comprehends the enormity of this issue will we be moved to raise a new generation of humans who are raised with empathy and an understanding that only a soberly stated “yes” can mean “yes.”
I believe that our wounds, when cloaked in shame, prevent us from reaching our potential as humans. By shining a light on a subject that has been a source of my shame, I release any remaining molecules of it to the universe so that they may land where they rightfully belong, on the shoulders of a certain rugby player at Stanford University in 1985.
#MeToo