The Other "Talk"

The one every mother has with her daughter... and how learning about how awful it really is out there shrinks our world

Realest scene ever when Cassie (Carey Mulligan) learns that her boyfriend Ryan (Bo Burnham) who has been a support to her and seems like one of the “good” ones was present during the rape of her best friend, Nina, in medical school. An event that destroyed both Nina’s life and her life.

It’s. A. FREE. Country. Hands on hips, smirk, held stare. Mic. Drop.

It was true. And it wasn’t.

Even on the playground, there was the chime of chainlink when a ball struck the fence to contain us. At home, the wind-whipping thwack of a paddle, belt, or hands against our bottoms. At work, when we grew older, the clink clunk of punching time cards. And later, the crescendo of operating systems starting up, ringing like Pavlovian bells.

Calm down, the boy said to my daughter. It’s just for fun, he said as if it meant nothing.

He was, she thought, her friend. But when she confronted him after learning that he liked to say the n-word in casual conversation. That he was part of a schoolwide group chat where boys toss out racist, antisemitic slurs, and rape jokes like they’re table topics.

She learned he was not.

This week alone, a 21-year-old Seattle man was arrested for running an OnlyFans house, and girls from their little sequestered suburban high school were tricked, coerced, and forced into participating. Young boys and men (some also from their school) helped lure and traffic the girls to his mansion, where he threatened them into appearing in incredibly degrading, sexual online “content”. Rumor has it, police entered their campus this week to remove at least three boys, their classmates, people they sat next to every day in school for years and years, as part of the investigation into the crime ring.

In the same week, my daughters also learned a beloved teacher at their high school is a predator. A seemingly quirky, gentle man from the English department, he’d been texting a fellow student all year, maybe even longer.

On an otherwise quiet Monday, I picture him eating dinner with his family, helping his two young daughters with their homework, kissing them goodnight. Then waiting for his wife to fall asleep before slipping out to meet one of his students — a high schooler — in the middle of the night, to “smoke cigarettes.”

His wife had woken in his absence, worriedly searched for him, and caught them in his car doing god-knows-what.

My 15-year-old, who especially adored him, came home in tears, crestfallen. Her sisters held her. They, at 19 and 18, are already more aware than she that this is a thing that happens. This was a man she thought she could trust. It turns out he’d been plotting to rape (raped?) her classmate.

As the blows kept coming this week, I could see the epiphany dawning on her face.

All these years, me raving on like a lunatic, this is what I knew from experiences I never wanted to share with her. This, she now understood, wasn’t some quirky (and barely forgivable) paranoid delusion of her mother’s. It was, it is, real.

Her heartbreak pained me. Deeply.

Men and boys they trusted have been hurting other girls and women. And, this devastating truth will change how all of my daughters see themselves, others, the world, and their place in it.

I know, because I remember when my own imagination started to narrow. The possibilities available to me as a young girl suddenly shrinking with the growing awareness of the potentially dangerous men all around me. I did less alone. Went out cautiously, anxiously. Was far less adventurous and spontaneous than is my nature for a long, long time.

What are the limits of who we can be, and who sets the terms of those limits? Us? Or some power outside of us?

As much as we wish it were only us. It is both. And.

A few days ago, a commenter on my Instagram page jokingly told me to be careful expressing some of my views because “the FBI may just kick down your door.”

“Maybe,” I responded. “But I will continue to exercise free speech and so should you.”

“FREE SPEECH? NO SUCH THING ANYMORE,” he wrote back.

It’s true – kinda. Our legal rights are under attack. ICE and police have targeted immigration rights lawyers and activists, union organizers, and Palestinian protestors. The media has been captured and consolidated. Journalists are increasingly being threatened. But also?

Our beliefs and the actions we take to censor ourselves out of fear—obeying in advance—are doing some of the work for them. That man in my comments section? If he stops speaking out now, he no longer has freedom of speech. His freedom and the possibilities for his future narrow.

While researching history for The Who We Are Project docuseries episode in Texas, we came across researcher author and researcher Roseann Garza, and the story of an interracial couple living in the early 1800s named Matilda Hicks and Nathaniel Jackson. Though their story will not be featured in the docuseries, it is one of many that have changed how I think about freedom and each of our roles in making space for it, no matter the conditions.

Nathaniel’s family enslaved Matilda’s family on the Jackson Plantation in Alabama. Close in age, the pair were raised alongside each other. I like to imagine them raised the way many Black and white children were raised during slavery on plantations: together, cared for by Black mammies, and briefly unsegregated. A small, lazy opening in the boundaries and barriers white supremacists created around the possibilities of belonging, humanity, and interracial interactions.

When they grew older, they left the plantation where Mathilda was held against her will in slavery (Nathaniel claiming he was taking Mathilda as his slave) and headed for the Rio Grande, where they at least, according to the oral accounts of the descendants, married, had seven children together, and built a home and a life.

Confession: This detail gives me the ick. What right do we, living in a freer future, have to romanticize the dynamic between a slave and her captor? How do we know Nathaniel freed her? Loved her? How do we know she wanted to be there if there was nowhere else she could be?

Did she love Nathaniel, or was he, given her very limited options, the closest approximation to a life of freedom that she had? We’ll never know.

But, at the time, marriage between a white person and a Black person, a free person and an enslaved person, was illegal. The family’s own oral history and available records suggest the two were initially headed for Mexico themselves, to a place where Mathilda could be free. They never made it there. They stayed on this side of the Rio Grande and helped dozens of other enslaved people get free

Why? Again, we’ll never know.

But we do know they bought over 5,500 acres, raised cattle and grew crops, ran a licensed ferry, and became conductors on the southern Underground Railroad — offering food, shelter, and safe passage to enslaved people fleeing bondage and making the treacherous journey through Texas to Mexico.

We do know she lived a life alongside her own seven children, far away from the threat of being bought or sold.

I don’t know how Mathilda felt about any of it. I don’t know how she would have chosen to live in any other time and place in history fully free to make those choices for herself.

How she lived was itself a negotiation with whatever (limited) agency she had and the world she inherited. Just like right now how we live is a negotiation between the agency we have and the world we’ve inherited.

Our oppressors, the ones imagining a much less free future for us all, understand this. They’re betting on it. They’re narrowing the possibilities, the options available, however and wherever they can.

But my ancestors, those who inspire me in this deeply troubling time – people like Mathilda – also understood this. To the degree that it is possible, to the extent that we are able, we must carve out as much freedom as we can for ourselves and for others in an impossibly unfree time.

What I’m reading/watching/thinking about/listening to:

Andrew Tate’s Empire of Abuse | Heidi Blake

Speaking of imagining a different future, we’re not the only ones doing that. Horrible people with terrifying visions are, in Andrew Tate’s own words, “shifting the Overton window heavily.” They know that’s possible. Do you?

Also: Aren’t all empires “empires of abuse”? (This could be an alternate title for this piece, no?)

A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape From Christian Patriarchy | Tia Levings

This week, over 6,000 delegates (a majority) at the Southern Baptist Convention voted to advance a total ban on women in leadership within the church. The denomination has 15 million congregants, 50% of whom are women. This, in the wake of a report uncovering widespread sex abuse within the SBC, that implicated nearly 400 church leaders and over 700 victims in 2019, that the church has since done nothing meaningful to address.

Women in that delegation voted for their own silencing.

Why? One reason: Because abuse narrows how we see ourselves and what we believe is possible. Abusers know this: It’s one major reason why they abuse.

Read Tia’s incredibly riveting memoir for more on that theme.

Blood Orange | Coastal Grooves

We’ve been listening to this album a lot since my oldest daughter returned home from study abroad this week. It’s a throwback but, it’s a perfect summer vibe. I am ready for BBQs on our deck, hugging people we love, and soaking in all the sun possible this summer.

What about you? What are you reading/watching/thinking about/listening to? I’d love to know.

New here?

Every week I share personal reflections, takes on pop culture and current events, and deep dives into U.S. history.

I’ve got four teens, some animals, live in the woods and have a demanding (but fulfilling!) job. And you’ve got well… *gestures at your equally full and hectic and wild and precious life.*

So, I know it isn’t a small ask to ask you to join me here. Still, I’m humbly asking that you do.

NGL, you will be pushed… but never punished. This is a space for learning out loud. For taking steps toward change in your personal and communal life that matter. Because when you know better you do actually have to do better.

But you can do this. We must, together. LFG.

With love — always,