It started in the 5th grade. My first experience with sexual assault. Perhaps assault is too strong a term, with too many legal connotations, but if the state of my tiny psyche has anything to do with it, it felt like assault. 
See, I was in plays since the third grade. I loved it - everything, the smell of the pancake make-up, the paper-mache sets, the elaborate costumes. In fifth grade, our class did a play based on Free to Be You and Me, and I was cast as the "Lady's First" girl. While I was getting ready to go to the show one night, I got a phone call from a boy in my class. He was breathing heavy. He used the "c" word. Mentioned pubic hair. Giggled. He gave me a name, which even at the time I knew was not the correct name, but that didn't stop me from feeling weird around a kid named Matt for the rest of my school career. (Sorry, Matt. Not your fault, dude.)
I remember feeling my heart stop, feeling all the fluid in my body run to my feet. Then feeling my heart start up again, fallen sparrow fast. I had to go perform that night, thinking all the while that this guy was watching me. Had to go to school on Monday, knowing he was somewhere, maybe sitting next to me. 

Yes, yes, it was a crude school boy prank, c'mon, get a grip, right? It's not like I was molested. But here's the thing. That phone call, that "boys will be boys" phone call fundamentally changed me. Changed how I viewed the world, my place in it. How I viewed my safety, my body, my girlness. That was the assault. 

Here I was in a play celebrating the goodness in each of us, and on the inside I was growing smaller. Growing afraid. 

I've never told anyone this story. Including my mother, who I'm sure will immediately upon reading this respond with indignant horror on my behalf, followed by sadness that I'd kept it a secret, followed by the guilt that claims all mothers, that she wasn't able to shield me.

The reason that I did not tell her is because I was ashamed. Embarrassed. Sheepish. These emotions are not at all logical. What on earth does a little girl have to be ashamed of when a boy makes a call like that? And yet that shame hung on me like a prophet's hair shirt, tucked away underneath so no one could see. 

Since the tender age of ten, I have encountered a smattering of "little assaults." Guy edging next to me in a darkened bus stop and masturbating, guy flashing his flaccid bouncing penis as I walked to the grocery store, various cat calls from cars. Each one, to different degrees, forcing me back to that place of fear. That place that tells me the very fact I am a woman is dangerous to me. And sends me head long into that second assault, shame. 

My friend, producer and host Katy Sewall, just recorded two remarkable episodes on assault for her lovely podcast The Bittersweet Life. All of the episodes are sublime, but the recent ones on her and her co-host Tiffany's experiences of assault abroad struck a strong chord. It was not just my empathetic anger, it was how admittedly embarrassed  Katy was to share her story.

As if anything, ANYTHING Katy did or said was at all to blame for this a-hole who cornered her in the bathroom. But I recognized that shame. The almost apologetic tone in recounting her story.

And yet, she, we, have nothing to be embarrassed about. Nothing to apologize for. These men and boys should be the ones feeling shame, feeling degraded, feeling fear...(of course, many of them do and that is why they act out in this fashion, but that's for another blog post).

So why? Why do we feel this way?

Katy and Tiffany touched on it. I think we feel shame, because in some deep place within us we feel we have failed. Failed in our "duty." 

Western culture, and probably others, teach girls to be people pleasers, to stuff their own wants and desires in order to serve the greater good, to serve others. We are taught to be helpers, not to make waves, to give others the benefit of the doubt. To above all, be polite. These attitudes are so deeply engrained we often don't realize them until we're in a place where, by God, we should damn well be much more than impolite.

I remember when the guy flashed me, in broad daylight, on a fairly well trafficked road. I was trying to think how to respond - and I distinctly remember thinking "But giving him the finger would be rude." 

What?!?! How in hades was I concerned that my response to this jerk was polite or not? How did that even enter my head?  

So, first, we're to be polite people pleasers, but second, we are also to be vigilant of our own safety. This too, is ingrained in girls. I remember as a kid creating escape plans if I ever ran across the Green River Killer. No matter that he killed prostitutes and generally plucked his victims from the street a good twenty miles from my house. In fact, I tried so hard to be safe AND polite, when my parents weren't home and I had to answer the phone, I would turn on the faucet as high as it would go and say my mom was in the shower. Creative, yes, but also ridiculous. And no, my brother didn't do this. He wouldn't have had to. He's a boy.

And that's the crux. I am a woman. And I've had my fair share of issues to deal with because of it. But from now on, I claim no shame. 

No shame. 

There is nothing I can do about the criminals and just plain a-holes of the world. But what I can do is not allow the bastards to get me twice. I will not be ashamed. To go for a run alone, to wear a swimsuit, to have breasts, to expose these self-lies for what they are, to have a voice. 

I will tell my story, and those of my sisters. And I will take what was meant to degrade me to make me stronger. Will you join me?
#BeNotAshamed

In honor of Mother's Day, I thought I'd repost an oldie but a goodie...

I just gave my son a haircut — his first major one to date in his seventeen months of life. (Yes, I’m sure there’s some sort of gender bias there, but his hair was getting in his eyes, and I will not abide a mullet, jazz hands or no.) I swept up his soft little locks with a tiny hand broom and as I opened the trashcan I paused. There was something wrong — something heart-rendingly wrong about mixing in his baby hair with the chicken juice, snotty tissues, and floor scraps.
Look, I know hair is dead, and frankly, sometimes hair is just creepy. But what struck me at the kitchen garbage, breathing in fumes of rot, was that, the act of throwing away his delicate hair felt like I was throwing away him. The smaller him. The crawling-cutting-his-first-teeth-pureed-food-two-nap-snuggle-bug him. In tossing out his hair, I was finally saying goodbye to that season of life, for him and for me.

There have been a lot of blog posts recently about what it feels like to be told “they grow up too fast so enjoy every minute.” Steve Wiens (husband of last week’s guest blogger Mary) had an excellent example here. I’m not a fan of being told this either, especially in the middle of Target when one child is imitating the orangutans we just saw at the zoo and the other is eyeing the massive pink rabbit, face about to crumple into piteous pleading. I know for a fact I will not miss hearing my daughter whine. I also know for a fact I will miss her naïve and boundless joy with the world and her unfaltering faith in me. Both in a few short years, and when I’m 80.

So for the record, for now, standing with the last tangible remnants of my son’s babyhood scattered together with fallen peas, Cheerios, and dust, I soaked in the moment. Flooded with honeyed memories, and knowing, with that mix of grief and thrill, that this too must end. We both must move on to full-fledge, flailing toddlerhood. His hair must go in to the bin, memories into the store of my heart. That hair is a part of him no longer.

When I’m 80, I know I will vividly remember the sound of his chirps and his little clomping, stumbling feet. I’ll be able to feel with my mind those delicate hairs now destined for the dump. I’ll see his happy eyes. I will miss him as he is now. Knowing this inevitability, I’m struggling not to go wrench the trash bags out of the hands of the garbage man, dig through and find this last vestige of my baby, as if holding his hair, I can somehow hold on to him – the little-little-him.

But that would be fruitless. And make me smelly. So in the end, I resign myself to the knowledge of future bitter-sweetness. Future afternoons of a quite house, my frail knobbed fingers, and tears down my wrinkles for little lost hairs, gone to the dust.

Also knowing, with blessed contentment, that I will never feel that way about his diapers.

How about you – what brings back happy memories of your children or your childhood? What was hard for you to throw away?