Before attending college, the protagonist in my novel “Fool, Anticipation” is raped and becomes pregnant. The idea for the story came from what I believed was an incident that happened to my mother. Of course, she never told me this. Like many rape victims, she took this story to her grave. It was a conclusion I arrived at after witnessing years of unexplainable family dysfunction, odd comments, and out of context reactions, which I never understood. I mean, on the surface we lived a very nice blue color life. We owned a house and went to good schools. Why was everyone so angry? And if she was raped, by who?
My father was the only one who ever said the word rape. One night he leered at an attractive woman entering a bar and said “she’s taking a chance going out like that.” I asked what he meant and he said, “somebody might rape her.” It wasn’t just the words that was chilling, it was the look on his face. I wouldn’t want anyone looking at me like that. Years would pass before I recalled that night and came to the conclusion it must have been him and so began the novel.
Writing the book led to years of research into rape survivors, most of who had deep emotional problems, which didn’t surprise me as that was my mother. She was incapable of social relationships, she had few friends, and went out of her way to alienate people. You never had a conversation with my mother, she would go on endless monologues. My mother also had wild mood swings. Today you would call her bio-polar, which I believe is inaccurate. The outside pleasantry she showed to the world was only a front she put on for public consumption, so it was hard to tell what she was really thinking. The only insight I ever got was one day while we were getting ready to go to a restaurant and my mother said she was going into her bedroom to put on her costume. That was it. What the world saw, and misinterpreted as a good mood was only a show. She wasn’t bi-polar. She was uni-polar. I believe my mother lived with a simmering rage every moment of her life, which she had to keep hidden behind a facade.
Recently, a man in New York State shot a killed some teenagers who mistakenly pulled into his driveway. What set him off? My guess is this man did not spend his days watching Frank Capra movies and singing songs from The Sound of Music. Most likely his days were fed with a steady stream of victimhood and gun rights activists and one day he could no longer contain himself. So it was with my mother. A phone call of random pleasantries could turn ugly in the blink of a eye.
One day, after a ten minute rant, I interrupted her and asked to speak with my father. That was enough to set her off. Suddenly, she became enraged and went from talking about Aunt Cele and shopping at the A&P to saying she regretted she didn’t kill me when she had the chance. She was talking, of course, about an abortion. How could she switch moods so quickly? The answer is simple. She didn’t. What happened that day was she was unable to keep up the guise of pseudo pleasantries that normally carried her through her day and just like that man in New York, where simply having someone pull into his driveway was enough to expose years of bubbling resentments, a simple request to talk to my father blew her lid off.
Her rape alone didn’t cause her to be like this. Although never specific, she spoke to me of her fathers abuse in her childhood. Still, that experience didn’t incapacitate her. My mother was artistic, perceptive and read poetry every night. I imagine back when she was still young, ambitious and hopeful, she must have had plans for her life, which were never fulfilled. What the rape did was corrupt her ability to trust, and as a result could longer vet through normal social interactions. With that went her ability to get through life. Instead of being a functional person, the rape confined her to a convoluted universe of grief, anger, shame, and rage. The rape might not have caused this, but may have only been the catalyst added to a deadly mix of prior sexual abuse causing it to bubble over creating a runaway chain reaction of trauma she never recovered from.
Yet, my mother had her moments. She was the one who got me guitar lessons, and the one who bought me a car when I played in a wedding band and needed a way to get to gigs. She was the one who encouraged me to go to St Peters Prep and who arranged month long summer vacations for us at nearby lake, where she spent days on her hands and knees cleaning up a filthy cabin, and she was good in school. In spite of her comment about killing me as a baby, I still wonder what kind of person she might have become had she not spent all her days plotting what to say if the wrong car ever pulled into her emotional driveway, an inflection point from which she never departed. A profound sadness accompanies the realization I will never know the answer to that question.
My experience writing the book, certainly deepened my understanding of the after effects of rape and also made me realize my mother’s emotional damage was not unique. Research revealed these emotional difficulties were common to many survivors of sexual abuse. I included as many as I could in the plot of the novel, after which, when completed, in classic male hubris, I thought I understood everything women go through with rape. Not surprisingly, I was wrong. It wasn’t until I explained the premise of the book to my demographic - read older white males that I realized the real scope of what women who are raped go through.
I first explained the premise to a publisher - a promising woman gets raped by a disturbed soldier and becomes pregnant. “Yeah, that happens,” he said. His tone sounded like she went through a little playground bullying. Rape is a crime. It is often violent and overwhelmingly happens to vulnerable young, women. That happens? Really? Well, I could deal with a man who doesn’t give a shit. That happens, right? What happened next I wasn’t prepared for.
I told two colleagues my mother was raped and they both said exactly the same thing. “Or, what she thought was rape.” One was a therapist the other my best friend. There were both men I respected. How could they be so dismissive? It was only then I realized how profound it is what young women go through. These men, reduced rape to a little misunderstanding - a social gaffe. I don’t think the psychological problems I witnessed from my mother were caused by a little breach of etiquette. I think it was because think my father had the same terrifying look in his eye when he raped her as he had that night in the bar with me. This was not a misunderstanding. But, if educated, mature otherwise moral men had no idea off the brutal consequences of rape, how on earth does a 19 year old college freshman?
Today, sexual assault is nothing less than an epidemic of the young women. They may not be talking to you but when they find out the subject of my novel, what they’ve told me takes your breath away.
The problem of toxic male attitudes and conceits about sexual abuse exist at virtually every demographic. It has to change and it has to change now. The women who are most vulnerable, our daughters, nieces, our waitresses and baby sitters, our college freshman and store clerks all deserve our love, support and most of all they deserve protection at all levels of our culture. All men need to understand how destructive sexual assault is. And we all have to recognize that the problem is not confined to 19 year olds.
