Some Kind of Chain

The first time my 17-year-old daughter’s boyfriend slept over was unintentional.

Content warning: sexual violence

The first time my 17-year-old daughter’s boyfriend slept over was unintentional. During the pandemic doldrums, they built a blanket fort in the living room to watch a movie and fell asleep inside.

Jordan, are you still in there? I called down the stairs at 3:00 a.m.

Shuffling. His throaty voice inside the shroud of sheets. Uh … yup.

Then, my daughter’s softer, disoriented words swam beside his in the darkness. Oh my gosh, Mom. It was an accident. He’ll go home right now.

It’s fine, he can stay.

I smiled at the carpet on my way back up the stairs.


17 was different for me. My best friend and I took a camping trip to the rugged West Coast. I could drive stick so she navigated. Six hours later, we howled with laughter and freedom as we set up our orange tent on the sand. Later, sparks rose into the purple sky, and I could hear waves against rocks. We drank sweet apple cider straight from the bottle and passed joints with new friends. Guitars were strummed—drove my Chevy to the levee ...

What’s a levee?

I have no freakin’ idea! But it’s definitely dry!

I’ll get more firewood, I said.

I’ll help, said belt buckle and denim shirt.

Down the beach, outside the flame’s protective glow, I tripped over a storm-smoothed log. Belt buckle caught my elbow and pulled me close for a long kiss—I remember the skin crackle. Something tender and new unfurled inside me. This is my life! But before I understood what was happening, he unzipped his jeans and forced my face lower, lower, lower. His strong hands held my head in place.

You like that, don’t you? It’s nice.


Mom, I’m sorry about last night. It wasn’t on purpose. I didn’t mean to break house rules.

It’s okay, I said.

I am the house. I am the rules.

You’re not mad?

Nope. Isn’t it lovely to sleep close to someone you trust?

It is.

Dad and I talked it over and …

Can you please not?

I am the house. I am the rules.

I want you to know the choice is yours. Every time. If you feel you’re ready and you want Jordan to sleep over …

Oh my god. Will you stop.

Not that you need my permission …

Why are you all up in my business?

Because I want you to be happy.


Marriage number one failed for various reasons, but if you’d asked my ex-husband at the time, he’d likely have said blowjobs. If she’d just given me more blowjobs …

My second husband knows not to come up behind me while I’m standing at the counter and put his hands on me. He’s felt the zap in his fingertips for years.


The second assault was worse. The motel on the highway must have been near the ocean. The sign out front pressed its glow through the curtains—some kind of sea creature—starfish or seahorse, it doesn’t matter. In a dim room on the third or maybe fourth floor, the beds were filled with bodies. Disinfectant did its best to veil the smell of dirty socks.

Clock radio, ice bucket, dark blue walls, dirty shag carpet. I slept, passed out and drooling.

19 years old and 130 pounds, I had struggled that afternoon to keep up with the much larger men-boys on a party weekend disguised as a slow-pitch baseball tournament. Either our team advanced to the finals, and we celebrated by biting holes in the sides of Coors Light cans and chugging the explosive contents. Or our team was relegated to the losers bracket and we drowned our disappointment by lining up red plastic cups of tequila along the third base line, crawling toward them on our hands and knees like animals, and sucking the tequila through our teeth.

We were the Huskies … or the Wolves? It had to be some kind of dog the way our inhuman barking became howling as the shots burned their way down. Someone filled a watermelon with vodka.

In the dark blue hotel room, the hum of semi-trucks on the highway the only sound, baseball players with sunburned arms and noses slept wherever they could find room to stretch out.

The player I’d been occasionally sleeping with that summer—the funny shortstop with one green and one brown eye—curled toward me. He pressed his body up against mine. Kissed my neck and stroked my shoulder. I smelled grass. A persistent cock jabbed the curve of my lower back. I rolled over.

I must have. Or did a hand hook my hip and pull?

Yesterday’s booze coated his breath. He was on top of me. Fingers prodded my underwear. A sharp kneecap forced my legs apart. Then he was inside me, moving fast.

Half awake. Wait. Breath not sweet—foul. Push-push-push-push-push.

Breath unfamiliar.

Wait.

This was not the brown-green-eyed shortstop.

I wanted it to stop. I didn’t know what to do. Or say. Paralyzed, I …

He shuddered, exhaled, slipped out and away.


In my large Catholic family, sex was a wordless shadow—a conversation about sex was as likely to happen as a casual chat about the bag of weed hidden under the false bottom of my jewelry box. If we didn’t talk about something, it must not exist. The idea of a high-school sleepover with a boyfriend would have made my mother spit Nescafé all over her peach velour bathrobe. Our morals were implied. Church on Sunday, good girls don’t, wait for marriage.

But now I question the misogynist architecture behind those values which were designed, mainly by men, and based in shame, judgment, and control—mainly of girls. The vines of patriarchy choking our young ankles.

I don’t want my daughter sneaking around, drunk-screwing in cars—unless she wants to drunk-screw in a car. I want her to have comfort and options. I want her to experience sober-slow-relaxed sex. I want her to understand the social contracts she makes and how to break them. I want her to know that enjoying sex with someone she trusts is as normal and healthy as French toast on Sunday morning.

But now I question the misogynist architecture behind those values which were designed, mainly by men, and based in shame, judgement, and control—mainly of girls.

She’s always known the when was up to her; now the where is, too.

Sometimes Jordan stays in her bedroom. And yes, it was a little weird at first, slicing bagels while they sat bed-headed at the kitchen island, but that awkwardness faded quickly, much more quickly than my memories, which may or may not be trusted.


When I opened my eyes the not-shortstop was gone. A shovel full of gravel filled my ribcage. I showered and went to the field. The manager probably shouted out the batting order for the final game. Maybe we won. On the way home in the car, I closed my eyes and pressed my cheek against the cool glass.

I didn’t understand that what had happened to me under those bleached sheets was a violence. I told no one because I didn’t know how to speak the tarnish. I didn’t know I could be prey. The solution was to shove it down, down, down. I certainly couldn’t tell my mother.


On a hike one day, I mentioned to a close friend with a daughter of her own that Eve's boyfriend had been sleeping over.

Why would you do that? she said. Eve should have to hump in the bathroom at McDonald’s like we did. She laughed.

I stared at my muddy trail shoes.

I hope you’re not doing this, she said, because you’re trying to be her friend. That’s the worst thing you could do.

But I could think of worse.


I found Redacted on Facebook and made contact, which he ignored. I tried again, and he blocked me. I got his email address from an old friend and wrote to him directly. You can block me on Facebook, but you can’t make the truth disappear. Over 30 years ago, you sexually assaulted me. I was too young to know how to deal with such an attack and didn’t understand the deep impact it would have on my life. I do now.

When he finally replied, Redacted seemed scared and defensive—I have no recollection of any of this, can you call me? He wanted to talk about things in person. Which meant not in writing.


I’ve been searching for the correlation between the teenage sexual assaults I suffered and my daughter’s boyfriend sleeping in her bedroom. It feels like correcting a mistake. Like receiving a long-awaited forgiveness, from myself. It feels like advocacy.

I don’t want my daughter to spend one minute in that dank and confusing swamp. For decades, I have carried the cargo of an unspoken shame, pretending I was fine—marriage, children, success, celebration. But the abscess always thrummed.

If something is not spoken of, it must not exist.

Now that my daughter is headed for university and I am the one in the bathrobe, I want to offer her the skills to protect herself—the tools to recognize the situation before something terrible and heart-altering happens. I want to hardwire in her the knowledge that each and every time she decides to have sex, which includes a form of social contract, the provisions of that contract are drawn up and agreed to by her.

I want her to think of sex the same way she thinks of Christmas—with anticipation, pleasure, and joy.


The not-shortstop wrote back saying he’d be in his office at 9 a.m. on Monday and would I come in to sit down and discuss it in person. A matter like this warranted a private person-to-person talk. I mean, think about it, after 30 years, saying an event happened … he had tried to jog his memory, he really had, but he simply couldn’t recall. He really would feel more comfortable face-to-face. I mean, put yourself in my shoes, he said.


The data on sex-positive parenting is clear. Talking openly about sex helps children grow up with a sense of sensuality as a natural, healthy, and pleasurable part of being alive. Most importantly, any sexual activity needs to be consensual. And in order to consent, there needs to be discussion, which means language.

Can we? Is this okay? Do you want? Yes, I do. No, I don’t.

When we get comfortable with the words and how to use them, we take away the shame. When we raise our children not to be ashamed of their sexuality, they can develop a personal sense of what they want and don’t want. They can give a true yes or a true no to partners.

I felt strongly that allowing these conversations and decisions to happen in the calm sanctuary of her bedroom would help level the power imbalance. I wanted her to have home-field advantage.


Shifting the parameters for Eve was easy, but oh, doing it for myself was so much harder. The fingers of family and societal conditioning kept prodding me to leave the matter alone. But the sleeping dogs were restless and pacing. My blurry memories crystallizing, I began to see that even though it had happened a long time ago, staying quiet was perpetuating a lie of omission. He’d be getting away with it, again. And I’d be complicit.

Part of protecting and preparing my daughter meant reaching back in time and taking care of my younger self. If I wanted to show Eve how to navigate a world of male dominance, I had to break the pattern. I needed to grow a pair.


I replied to the not-shortstop’s email. Your shoes? Try putting yourself in mine. Imagine sleeping in a place you thought was safe, only to wake up in the midst of a sexual assault. Before you can even identify who is on top of you or the horror of what is happening, the person ejaculates and rolls off of you onto the other side of the bed.

The vivid reminder seemed to jolt Redacted. Holy shit man, can you call me direct on this?

He really didn’t want to talk about it in writing.

I let him dangle, the same way I’d been suspended for years, toes barely touching the ground.

The waiting felt deeply satisfying—as if my hands were finally on the controls. Eventually, I wrote back that I wanted a full and sincere apology and that if he were honourable enough to acknowledge his predatory behaviour, I would consider the matter closed. I am tired of carrying around painful things, I said. I need to put this one down.

The not-shortstop seemed relieved. He had been suffering from long-term memory loss, he said, from playing high-level hockey for too many years and the trauma that can come with it. Many times a day intense ringing in my left ear that, he said, can make me quite irritable, along with intense anxiety.

Redacted wanted my reassurance, in writing, that the matter would remain confidential. I do apologize for all the details requested, he wrote, but it is real foggy to say the least.


To receive his apology, Redacted wanted me to agree that I wouldn’t disclose what had happened. He would be off the hook, and I would be exactly where I have been since that night in a cheap hotel listening to truck tires on the highway, bearing the weight of his actions.

And wouldn’t that be the same thing all over again?

I wanted a shame transfer. I wanted him to be scared and his body filled with mud when he should be happiest.

I changed my mind (as everyone is entitled to do, at any time) about the confidentiality thing. I won’t be silent.

Writing about what happened feels like liberation, like retroactive self-determination. The past no longer rusts my ribs because I have flung the responsibility over to his side of the mattress where it belonged in the first place.

And now that I am armed with the double-barrelled ammunition of experience and motherhood, I will protect my daughter the way I should have been protected. I will draw a boundary. I will speak. I will say the thing I didn’t know how to say when I was young, Catholic, naive, and afraid—the word my daughter knows to say, at any time, in any place, especially in her own bed.


No.


Sunday morning, I pour mango juice. Light streams through the kitchen windows. A hummingbird whisks her powerful wings to drink from the feeder outside. Eve and Jordan make toast. Their shoulders touch. They show my husband TikToks. We laugh. We talk about nothing and graduation and university. Nobody is embarrassed. We are all comfortable and safe. And it feels like some kind of link in some kind of chain has been broken.