The treehouse in the backyard was in sad shape. Wood greened and fuzzed and slick from the jungle moss that covers everything in Louisiana. The bright yellow slide scratched and out of date. An old tic tac toe game painted on the roof awning, years and years old. My daughter Charlotte had the idea of remodeling it for her little brother’s 5th birthday. The trouble was, it was either too damned hot or too rainy all summer to really tackle a big paint and refurb job like that. But then the week before August’s birthday, things got real.
“We’ve got to go to Lowe’s right now and get paint,” Charlotte said, standing by the front door. “We’ve got to get busy!”
I had spent the weekend before in a cabin in West Virginia with dear friends, talking through the many things that lay both heavy and light on our plates. I brought up the fact that all of my sudden, my daughter, mere weeks shy of turning 11, looks 14. At least. She’s an early bloomer who’s been blooming for the past year, but in the past few months, her body has begun to really change, and to anyone else, she looks like a teenager. By anyone else, of course, I mean leering boys and men. What’s more – she is striving to be older, to look older, to act older.
I’ve been so careful not to give her the impression that the world is full of bad people. I want her to know it’s mostly good people – I don’t want her to be driven by fear, because I know fear closes hearts and breeds hatred and bigotry. AND – not but, but and – I also know the stats. I know how many girls between 11-16 are sexually assaulted and how this window of time also coincides with a girl’s eroding self-esteem, particularly in terms of how she feels about herself physically or in intellectual esteem associated with “male fields”, like math and science. Because they get attention, good or bad, for their looks, many girls quickly learn, if they haven’t already, that that’s where they are valued most by society, at their same time they are getting the message their voices and brains are devalued. This never ends well. Few of us make it through without sexual assault or an eating disorder or worse.
And then, it’s not as though you’ve crossed the finish line – the pain of assault or abuse is housed within the body and mind, and is often crippling. My husband is a clinical psychologist in a pain clinic and tells me that well over 75% of the women he sees for chronic pain have been raped or assaulted as children or teens. This isn’t just a stat from his office – it’s a well recorded correlation across the mental health industry. The pain simply doesn’t go nowhere.
I had avoided talking about any of this with Charlotte because I do want her to view the world as intrinsically good and also because I have been afraid that talking about sexual predation would take away some of her innocence and childhood. But when we got the paint from Lowe’s and started painting the inside of the treehouse, I knew we had an opportunity. It was laborious and humid, the paint runny down the mossy planks as soon as we laid it on. She was teasing me by stealing the paint off my paintbrush with hers every time I pulled it out of the can. I dug in.
“So, you know when you wore your play make up and exercise outfit out of the house last week and I got upset? I need to tell you more about why.”
We painted and talked. I asked her what she knew about sexual assault, (she knew it was most often people that might know her, and not strangers. She knew to be careful about flattery), and it also gave her a place to ask me things (no, you didn’t get twins by “doing it” twice in one night, although that’s a totally fair question, and absolutely a woman gets to choose when she has a baby). We got into the territory of unwanted attention and what was within her control about that. We covered the planks with our Jimmy Buffet turquoise while we talked, the sweat springing up instantly on our foreheads, and we agreed that it was unfair that women had to think about how they dressed to avoid catcalls or attacks. I stole a glance at her. I could see how my daughter is now, just as oblivious to herself as when she was 8, yet as leggy and curvy as a young woman and wanting to wear what she feels pretty in, as she should. And yet. I am afraid for her. How much do I tell her to keep her safe without projecting too much of my own fears, or too much of the world, onto her?
“It’s not fair,” she said again, before heading inside to cool off. I felt sick. Like I had been preparing her for a future witness stand, ready to pre-empt the “what were you wearing question?” or its multitude of permutations.
When she left, I moved on to the 2nd coat. I am reliving many of my own assault moments – incidents that I didn’t think to report because it wasn’t technically rape and I never thought I had a voice, that anyone cared, that it mattered. The boy in college who did such a similar thing that Christine Blasey Ford has accused of Judge Brett Kavanaugh when he threw me down on a bed, pinned me there and ground himself against me until I was able to escape and get back to my friends. Nothing happened, right? Except for the fear that was lodged in me, except it changed how I entered a room for ever after. I know from the National Sexual Violence Resource Center that one out of four girls is sexually abused before her 18th birthday, and it’s widely and credibly assumed that this number is too low because so few cases are reported. I desperately want my daughter to be one that makes it to 18 — I want it for all our daughters.
All week long, when I got breaks between my work and the rain, I worked on painting the outside of the treehouse. There are so many wooden slats and planks, and everything is so wet, the task feels Sisyphean. It’s also become clear that we will need to get some kind of AstroTurf for the floor of the treehouse to make it more inviting to sit and hang out there. I spend a lot of time, mid-week, out there, hearing the occasional news update and revisiting both my own past and my conversation with Charlotte. Most of the time, rare time for me with my hands busy but brain free, I am questioning – how is making light or dismissing teenage assault as “horseplay” not just harmful to young girls who feel they have no agency or voice and ultimately come to blame themselves, but also to young men, because it unfairly stereotypes them all as toxic, misogynistic, and violent – and essentially give them a free pass to engage in these horrific acts? How is just talking to my daughter her choice of clothing so complicated and maddeningly fraught?
By Thursday, all that remained was that godawful yellow slide and a rusty swing. Charlotte had the great idea of spray painting it metallic silver, space-age style. She ran off to school, and me – for the gazillionth time to Lowe’s. I started spray painting while listening to Dr. Ford’s testimony about her sexual assault to the Senate Committee. As I listen, along with most of America, with my heart in throat, my phone is blowing up. So many friends, men and women, with so much sadness that this is where our country is right now. A woman with an accusation of sexual assault shaking while being interrogated by a prosecutor, live before millions, and her accuser, a would be Supreme Court justice, tantruming between rage and tears. What do we do with this? We can do nothing and yet its outcome will affect our lives. None of it in the proper setting, the just setting, the setting we would want for ourselves, our daughters, our sons if godforbid this happened to us. And it has, or it will, or we love someone has already walked this out. All of my friends have a similar story, as I’m sure do yours – some no doubt are worse than others, like my friend who told me recently she still, decades later, lives in fear — actual fear for her safety and life — that the man who raped her decades before might come find her because she threatened to “destroy his reputation” by coming forward and reporting it and taking him to court (he was never convicted).
Have any of you seen Hannah Gadsby’s brilliant Nanette on Netflix? Please treat yourself for 60 minutes if you haven’t – particularly relevant is her take on Picasso and the complicit, communal effort to protect powerful mens’ reputations. It’s made me think about my own destructive place in that fold. “We think reputation is more important than anything,” she says in this clip from the show, “Including humanity.”
Silver spray paint drips and runs. It’s very hard to get it smooth, like a mirror. And silver glitter paint, I found the hard way creates a roughness that makes speedy sliding hard. Ultimately, what one needs is silver metallic appliance paint and a paintbrush to smooth it out. It’s absurdly painstaking but at least by Thursday the weather had cooled, so it was easier going, and I finally could look forward to putting down the AstroTurf. At Lowe’s, this kid employee asked the one cutting my ‘turf, “Who buys this stuff anyway? What do people even do with it?” “Boats,” said my Lowe’s guy. “And this lady,” he added, with a friendly cock of his thumb back towards me. “I’m not sure what she’s doing.”
I don’t really know what I am doing either. This project might be a total time waster, or it might make a little boy happy. But the process feels like something, like a room I’m occupying this week. It’s felt good to do these normal life things when I had just given my daughter a message that our national government was overtly contradicting. You aren’t listened to if you report sexual assault. If you do so it will be at great peril and risk to yourself and all you hold dear. The world will tell you your value is in how you look, but if you draw too much attention – or just randomly draw the short straw – this will be your undoing, the reason you are on opiates with back pain and seeing a pain psychologist in 25 years. I reject this as Charlotte’s world. (I reject this as anyone’s world).
I want my daughter’s world to be as open-ended and magical as this play house we are creating. Tonight we are hanging the lights and unveiling it for the birthday boy. Hopefully, our little half-baked project will breathe a little more life, a little more play, into this old treehouse. And I am, actually, hopeful.
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