An open letter to parents, part 1

You can't imagine what happened to your daughter or how it happened so quickly. A few weeks ago she appeared to be cheerful and mature and the very essence of functional. Now she can't get up to go to the new job she had pursued and won with such impressive energy and determination. She almost can't get up at all, to do anything. That's just one symptom, one way in which she appears to be falling apart, disappearing into an alien personality. She is even starting to look different, her usual clean, crisp, attractive demeanor replaced by unkempt hair, unwashed skin, a standard wardrobe of dirty, disheveled shorts and t-shirts.

The worst part: she doesn't seem to be aware of her own deterioration.  She offers blithe excuses for missing work, and her conversation on the whole has become nonsensical, child-like blabbering such as you've never heard from her before,  even when she really was a child. Before she leaves for a weekend in Chicago's Grant Park, where the Grateful Dead will be performing -- suddenly she is a Dead Head, another new development -- she spins crazy fantasies about a plan to make and sell donuts at the event and claims to be sure she will earn big bucks with this spur-of-the-moment venture.

The world has turned on its axis. Your daughter is no longer someone you recognize.


You don't know what is going on or what to do about it. She is, after all, an adult, still young but not under your protection, not even a member of your household. She has her own apartment, although if she doesn't work, can't pay her rent, that might change, and soon.

Then she tells you what happened on that other weekend, a year ago. A long ride with an old classmate. Not even a date, at least not in your mind or, you think, in hers. A weekend you can barely remember because at the time, when she came home, there was no sign that anything had happened at all. She had already submerged the memory of it so successfully she couldn't have told you about it even if you had known to ask.

She tells you now because suddenly the event refuses to stay buried and is forcing its way back through frightening dreams, confusing flashbacks, disorientation, inexplicable psychological pain -- pain that has transformed her into a parody of herself. She tells you now because a good friend has recognized the symptoms and helped her begin to consciously remember. But she can't call it by its right name. She tells a piece of the story, talks around it without ever saying the one word that will make it real. You see that she is still half in denial. Maybe more than half. Painful memory has returned, but perhaps not acceptance of either the memory or the pain. 


You want to help, offer to take her back into your home, but with a condition: she has to see a counselor. She agrees. You make an appointment. She doesn't go. You make another one. She thanks you, promises she will be there, but misses that one, too. You can see that there will be no healing until she can bring it all out, talk it all out, but you can't make her go to the appointments.


You have been clear that seeing a counselor is her "rent" for a place to live, and after the fourth mysteriously missed appointment you see that you won't help her by letting her avoid the necessary healing work, by providing the means for her to crawl into another hole and shove the memories back to the place where they can be forgotten again and can continue their insidious poisoning, only to come forward as more and maybe worse dysfunction on other days, in future years. 


You tell her she must leave. 

Friends who don't know the whole story, who can't know it because it is not your right to tell her story, assume that of course you would never kick out your own daughter, that's not what a good mother does. But you've prayed about it, and discussed it with her father, and despite the other problems that have caused your marital separation, the two of you have agreed. You have to tell her to leave. He has to refuse to let her come to him. To do anything else will not help. To make her go might not help either, might lead to a horrible conclusion, but setting your own boundaries is the only course of action within your control. "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference."

It is by far the hardest thing you have ever done as a parent. Maybe the hardest thing you have ever done.


She goes, with a plan for what she will do next, although not a plan that makes any sense. But you leave it to her to make a decision and follow through. You pray, a lot. You wait to hear from her. You hope you did the right thing, and still can't see what else you could have done. 

Everyone's prayers -- hers, yours, her dad's -- are answered when it almost happens again, this time with someone she barely knows, a friend of the friend who has given her a place to stay. This time she fights him off, her anger from before exploding all around him and chasing him away. Somehow this clears the air in a way that maybe nothing else could. Suddenly she recognizes that rape is the only name for what happened to her and knows she needs help. She makes her own appointments, willingly goes through the pain of disclosure, of psychic re-enactment, of emotional healing.

She becomes herself again, but stronger, calmer, more aware, more mature. Still the whole episode remains a family secret. You can't talk about your experience because that would reveal hers. Then one day, years later, you are astonished to read her latest blog. Seeing that memory revives your own pain and your memory of hers, but you are relieved that now you can share the experience with other parents. Because you know, in this world of confused and misplaced values that result in uncounted experiences of sexual abuse, there are many, many others who will need to hear it.