My grief, not yours
I'm probably 18 years old. I'd been with my ex for about 3 or 4 years at this point. Knock down drag out type of fights were just a part of the roller coaster we'd been on since we met. The kind that leaves you feeling like a piece of shit yet never more in love at the same time.
This go round, I told his parents he went to a house party because they couldn't find him one night, but mostly because I wanted there to be some kind of repercussions for the fact that he went out without me. How could I enforce his love for me if my smothering presence wasn’t there to remind him of the reasons to stay loyal? The sweet anxiety I carried since he had cheated on me a couple years before. I ratted on my boyfriend. His parents kicked him out of their house. His dad pastored a church that was built on to their double-wide mobile home. A fun juxtaposition. Of course they kicked him out. Pastor's kids don’t party. I knew from experience.
His revenge was telling my parents I had been smoking cigarettes for a couple years and that we'd been having sex our entire relationship after I had lied to my mom's face about that as often as a chronic good girl could stand it. We'd only done hand stuff, I told her. And that much was a shock. A few hours post my big exposé, my mom, dad, boyfriend, and I are all in my suburban basement bedroom that is somehow large enough to fit a couch, the couch my mom was sitting on grieving the loss of her daughter's virginity.
I can't remember much about the 3-hour intervention, but I do remember my mom telling me if we were going to be so irresponsible, I could count her out if I ever got pregnant and needed a babysitter. I'd asked my mom to put me on birth control years ago for my acne. An excuse I stole from my friends. I really just wanted to have sex without wondering whether or not I'd get my period every single month, and my mom knew that. She said no. And at the same time, my mom’s favorite story was about my grandma getting pregnant with her at 16 and how it ruined her life.
Purity culture is a belief system that my parents and not even my public school sex education would escape. Avoid premarital sex. Easily rolls off the tongue yet barren of nuance, a belief system I would later come to understand as directly responsible for the shadows of sexual violence and coercion affecting not just me. No distinction between consensual or non-consensual, pleasurable or unpleasurable, fun or not fun. I guess it never occurred to them that there was a difference. It was all bad. And I had to find out for myself.
My mom’s now-forgiven naivete as she cried on my bedroom couch kept her from grieving all the times I'd woken up naked, his arousal against my body, confused about what had happened, knowing I wasn't the one who had taken my clothes off or the time when we were fighting and on the verge of yet another breakup and he removed the condom right before he went without me knowing. Crying in the bathroom with the leftovers down my leg, an almost indiscernible yet unforgettable yell echoes, "good luck trying to leave me now." My mom didn't have to grieve that. Neither did my dad nor my boyfriend nor the church nor my 7th grade science teacher who was somehow fit to teach me about dissecting owl pellets and abstinence-only sex education.
I am the one with the grief of not knowing what it meant to be violated over and over by someone you love dearly (as much as a 16-year-old knows how), not knowing what consensual sex was, what it felt like, sounded like, looked like. All of it off-limits, so any kind of sex would do - the kind where I left my body just to get him off, hoping this would satisfy his craving for me until I could muster up the energy to fade away again for long enough, the kind where I would give until the emptiness ate me alive because the only sense of control I had was through the boundary-less offering of my body that would keep him around for just a little longer.
It was the kind of sex that I kept telling myself wasn’t that bad yet the ghosts of it lingered in my dreams until almost 15 years later.
Hollie Williams
A seeker, writer, deconstructor, unapologetic deep feeler finding my way back to Self and Earth through less socially acceptable paths. My current muse is my once repressed sexuality, a product of 20+ years of indoctrination by Evangelical Christianity in the American South - a special breed of cult. Unrelatedly, my mom named me after an 80s model on the Price is Right but added an i-e at the end for a lil flair.
