The author and her father
This article is a response to Pippa Biddle’s call to action in her piece “Dear Sisters,” published last week on Ryot.com.
To whom it may concern (hey, Dad):
The summer after my freshman year at Exeter, you slammed me into the fridge by my neck because I mouthed off to you about doing dishes. You may remember this as the day I climbed out of my bedroom window with a change of clothes and my laptop in a bookbag, and stopped living with you.
I remember it as the day Mom pulled me into better lighting in my aunt’s living room so she could take pictures of the finger-shaped bruises you’d left on my neck. They were strikingly similar to the ones I’d soaked in Visine, held a cold spoon to, and ultimately covered up with concealer five months earlier after a man held me down and raped me in the bedroom at a Christmas party. I was thirteen then.
Maybe that is why I tried to stab you in the arm with the fork with which I’d been scraping dishes. In the moment, your hand around my throat was his hand around my throat. You grabbed the fork, threw it in the corner, and said, “Don’t you fucking dare,” which is the same thing he said to me when I tried to yell out before he covered my mouth with his other hand.
At least this time I could leave and live in relative safety on family and friends’ couches for the next few months. This time, I had a voice.
You might also remember the morning in my eighth grade spring when you woke me up at 6 by throwing a laundry basket at my head and telling me that if I didn’t clean up, I’d “turn into a fat pig just like Mom.” It was the same day that my boyfriend slammed my wrists into his bedroom wall. He said that if I really loved him, I’d be willing to do this. Then he forced my head down.
I believed him because I believed you. I watched as you convinced my mother that she brought your rage upon herself. I learned that that was love. We are fatally flawed women, according to you. You are trying to correct our own failings. It’s only because of us that things are so painful. And if we really love you, we will bend and break and clean it up. So I felt loved when that boyfriend told me I was a fat whore at school. I believed him when he called me at night and I hid under your desk so you wouldn’t find out I was using the phone, and he told me he loved me and asked what my ring size was. It isn’t love unless it hurts.
And that Christmas party taught me that sex is also pain and that I deserved it because I was a 13-year-old at a party with the audacity to hit puberty early.
I stopped talking to you for a few years after that summer. When I saw you again, you were remarried to a woman from my mother’s writing group, the woman whose apartment we had spent Christmas at the last few years, whose son I had watched while my sister threw up in the closet. Mom took us home and you stayed there, with the woman.
We began to exchange emails starting my first week at college. My friend had just lost his father and sister in a car crash and I felt like I needed to appreciate that you and my sister, Lila, who was in your care, were okay.
I was raped by my best friend and her drug dealer the week before, too high to move. I spent an hour shaking in the parking lot of my apartment building while my ex-boyfriend pushed his car out of his driveway to come get me.
The first time I decided I could sleep a night in your house again was during my sophomore year of college. We stood out in your garden, where you had built my sister a swingset and you were growing beautiful heirloom tomatoes and spicy green arugula. You were high and I was in the throes of long-latent post-traumatic stress disorder. You asked how I was doing. “I’m doing a lot of therapy right now,” I said, and you laughed. “How’s the psychobabble?”
And I told you I had been raped.
I had told Mom, who responded empathetically. She’d been raped in college.
I had told my friends. They opened up about their own lives as survivors.
And I told you, and you burst into tears, and said, “My only job is to protect my family. That’s the only thing that matters.” And I hugged you while you wept.
So let’s try this again.
It was my experiences growing up in the same house as my father, while he emotionally, financially, and verbally abused my mother, that taught me that that was the love I deserved, too.
It was experiencing two sexual assaults before my father finally became physically abusive that taught me I deserved it. Abuse had been woven into my life by everyone I loved, all the people who were supposed to protect me; by my father, by the uncle who took care of my sister and I for a weekend, locking the kitchen so we only ate if we followed his orders, and then beating my sister with her own shoe for an hour as he drove me to school, by the family members who told me I had to apologize to my uncle if we wanted to spend Christmas with them, by my first boyfriend who knew what I would do for love, by the best friend whose hands and mouth I couldn’t fight off.
This was my normal life and I didn’t know there were other options besides love and harm, sex and pain. I bought into this warped idea of normalcy so much that I began to hurt myself compulsively, picking off skin and slicing repeatedly into the hidden parts of my body.
But I was going to the best high school in the country, then accepted early decision into an amazing college. I was getting fantastic grades. I was snarky and outgoing, and with the loudest voice in all of my classes. Who would have thought I was silent about anything?
And when I stopped going to classes, dropped down to 5 credits in my sophomore fall and stopped leaving my room, who could understand why? I spent my waking hours in vivid flashbacks. I could feel all of your hands on my body and I was so dissociated that I barely noticed hunger or having to pee. And it was in the coils of this that I hugged my father as he cried about how hard he had tried to protect me. That man’s hand was still over my mouth and my father’s was still around my throat, and I said nothing to him.
I survived through my only close friend, a boy I’d met my second night at college, when we drank too much and stayed up all night talking in his bed. He told me about his son, whom his ex-girlfriend had given up for adoption. I told him about the abortion I had had at fifteen, the first time I had said anything about it out loud. And we lay there, arms barely grazing each other, as he looked at pictures of his son and I remembered watching blood clots falling out of me into a toilet in New Hampshire.
He was the first person I loved who did not violate me. He let me weep into his new white t-shirts, and then dragged me outside to walk around Central Park. He could talk me through a flashback and then dance with me on chairs at parties.
He was the one who bandaged my arms after a halfhearted suicide attempt, sitting in a median on Broadway. As he laid gauze onto my arms I realized he was the first person who had touched me without triggering me in months. And I saw, briefly, that that was love. Not the sting of constant criticism and abuse, but the way he asked me if the medical bandage was too tight, and took me back to his room to watch Top Gear, with his arm around my shoulder.
But it was the next term, my sophomore spring at Barnard, that I found my own voice as a survivor. I was sitting in Ollie’s Noodle Shop on 116th and Broadway with a group of female friends.
“We need to talk to you about him.”
He had raped at least two of my friends and every other woman at the table told me quietly over our noodles how he had consistently tested their boundaries, seeing how far he could push without raising the alarm.
He refused to use a condom when he raped my friends, even though he had a son. He coerced them into sex and sexual acts to which they said no repeatedly, even though he had spent the last two years watching my own violent battle with assault.
They asked me to do something, so I sat him down, and told him I knew. He said barely anything, and for the first time, I used my own hands and voice to push someone away.
I left school the next fall and spent a year in Los Angeles. I tell people that I went out there to work, but I spent most of my time in intensive outpatient therapy with other women, with drug addictions, with mental illnesses, and with their own voices and stories to give to me.
And each of those voices, from the women in my group therapy, from my own mother, from the sorority sisters who shared their own assaults with me, from the women who spoke to me about who my friend was, helped give me my own words. I lost the friend who had been the conduit for my pain for so long, but I am finally my own advocate. I know now that we deserve better love, sex on our own terms, to feel the power in our own hands instead of the hands around our throats, and I can speak now because others before me have spoken.
This is the power in Pippa’s call to action: to have us share our stories. Not just to shed light on the realities and painful frequencies of sexual assault, but to give other survivors their voices, and let us build with our own hands a world in which we may be safe, in which we may love and be loved.
There are still days when feeding myself is the best I can do. Sometimes still, partners’ hands feel too much like my rapists’. But there are many, many more days when I wake up ready to speak, ready to build, knowing that I am not that pain I felt for so many years. And every day, I know I never deserved what happened. None of us deserved those things, and we have the voices to demand better.
