Was My Mother Right?

Vice-Principal Vashke Breeding called girls into her office from the common areas of our middle school to measure our skirts. The hem had to be no more than 1/2-inch from the ground, or you were sent home to change. My friend Barbara had a great idea. We’d roll up the waistband of our skirts and if caught, unroll so Miss Breeding could measure to her heart’s content. She’d press her thin lips into a grudging smile and make a disapproving sound.  

Eventually, we were caught and had to go home.

I grew up in the 60’s and things were changing in the world outside the rules my mother believed in. Her rules came from a time when women weren’t influenced by rock and roll, bikinis, and drag races. Movies showed girls bending the rules and dreamy guys falling for them. Of course, someone would always get “in trouble.”

Our skirts were getting slimmer, and hemlines were rising, our short hair teased into bubbles, and we wore slip-in shoes, bobby socks abandoned. We were good girls grappling with the rules set by our mothers. We attended etiquette classes at the Ebell Club where we learned all the essentials: charm, white gloves, and petticoats… learning the rules.

A rule… if you’re in a car with a boy, don’t sit on his lap, and if you have to sit on a boy’s lap, put a book between you and him.  We know the formula: girl on boy + hard on = devirginizing.

At church teen dances some ruler-wielding chaperone measured between the slow-dancing boy and girl to keep us far enough apart for decency.

I listened, behaved, and never did anything, short of rolling up my skirt height to disappoint my mother.

But her rules didn’t protect me from a preacher pressing his hard-on into my back during my immersion baptism at 13. Her rules didn’t protect me from teenage boys holding me down so their friends could rape me at 17. What happened to me was way outside the rules my mother and the etiquette classes taught me.

My mother’s rules?

They might have been right, but they were all talk and prayers.

Through centuries women have been blamed for causing rape, accused of being witches, and even when I asked questions about the prospect of divorce in my first marriage, I was told it was my duty to take the abuse (men will be men), not complain and keep my family together.

Roxane Gay, the author of “Not That Bad, Dispatches from Rape Culture” asks:

“What is it like to live in a culture where it often seems like it is a question of when, not if, a woman will encounter some kind of sexual violence? What is it like for men to navigate this culture…?”

On a day off from writing I watched The Last Duel, available on Netflix and starring one of my favorite actors, Jodi Cromer. Apparently, it’s based on a true story and takes place in the 14th Century where the law was as follows: when the wife of a lord was raped and she reported it, the resolution was up to God. The law called for a duel. The combatants were the husband of the accuser and the man accused. If the husband won, the couple was free. If the accused won, the wife is burned at the stake, on the spot.

I’m no movie critic, but good or not, it made a point. 

I didn’t talk about my rape in high school for reasons of survival.  Not worried about being burned at the stake, I imagined worse. What would happen if I did? From my book “Survival Isn’t Mandatory” the reasons I didn’t tell my parents are in the form of a letter written that summer of 1964 and tucked away in my jewelry box. The pink one with the innocent ballerina twirling on one toe and my stash of painkillers my mother kept at her bedside.

Dear Mom,

I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, and probably I never will.

I’d known since I was nine that I reflected your success as a mother. I could not bear to witness your imagined failure. I was too weak to fight; I was blind and ashamed to let myself get into that room. I thought I was strong, but I couldn’t…didn’t fight back.

I didn’t tell dad. 

He might drive through town with a shotgun and cause a problem bigger than mine.

Mom, I filled the hollow space with silence and locked the top. I added a bow to disguise it. I prayed the thing could never escape.  It struggled to get out, and after a while, it quieted down, withered, and slept.

I love you, Mom, and always will.

Given the common responses to reporting assault, it is statistically rare that someone lies about being raped. In fact, it is much easier for victims to engage in self-blame than to face the disturbing fact that they had no control over what happened even when violated.

“If a survivor then tries to report, they may feel punished. Re-traumatized by disbelief and stigma. When one’s closest allies can’t really believe the story, it wounds deeply.”

https://www.nsvrc.org/resource/false-allegations-sexual-assault-analysis-ten-years-reported-cases

My mother, the one following all the rules, was raped too. She was a tennis champion in her state, a known singer whose performances were published in local newspapers, and she was the Orange Blossom Queen. She was a beautiful, strong, young, accomplished woman who was “taken down a peg” by boys in her town. 

She never spoke of it until we told each other our stories right before she died.

Ina Mae Redmond Orange Blossom Queen 1946

This is not a culture that will change until it can be defined as a movement where men and women stand up for the rights of all people. So many beliefs need to change, yet women are being assaulted with the disassembling of Roe V. Wade, and laws being written that women no longer have the right to decide to terminate a life threating pregnancy.

The war being waged against women has no purpose other than to keep us quiet, subjugated to those to want to “take us down a peg.”

Roxane writes, at the end of the introduction in “Not That Bad”, “This is a moment will hopefully, become a movement.”

We know that one out of every four people we pass on the street has a story of physical, emotional, and psychological pain, which forces them into silence that continuously influences decisions, one’s sense of worth, and inhibits the ability to grow and embrace opportunities.

Our strength is based on our belief that forgiving ourselves and being heard and validated by a shared community is the foundation of healing.  When our healing is heard, when silence is given a voice, the human ability to move forward is empowered.

We have a movement, it’s called Our Silent Voice a Book, a Movement, a Stand.

Join us, we who report, who talk about it, and break the silence. www.oursilentvoice.com

In our book Our Silent Voice: End the Silence, our writer’s scream. They’ve gained strength in truth and combining their voices is freeing. If our book is for you, get it here. https://www.oursilentvoice.com/books

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