It’s Always Been Your Body
What my mother taught me that the Supreme Court never will
When I was about eight years old, my mother tucked me into bed one night and told me this story:
When she was about my age (at the time of the story), a man in her small Wisconsin town — a friend of her father’s — took her into the backroom of a local shop and touched her inappropriately. He told my mother that if she shared their encounter with anyone something terrible would happen to her parents.
My mother really loved her parents — in fact, everyone in the town really loved her parents. They were pillars of their their Swedish immigrant community: respected, looked up to, admired and cherished. My mother was understandably terrorized.
She told me that, over the month following since the man had touched her, it became more and more difficult for her to live with the terrible feeling that the man had produced inside of her by touching her; and (perhaps even more difficult), with keeping a secret from her parents, especially her father, to whom she was very close.
Eventually both her mother and her father noticed that she was behaving strangely. They sat her down, and asked her what was going on. She refused to answer for fear of what might happen to them. My grandparents continued to cajole, press…
