I was thirteen when my grandmother told me about my mom’s rape. We were
sitting at the dining room table at my grandmother’s house playing double
solitaire after my mom had gone to bed.

This was unusual. I loved my grandmother, but we weren’t close. She was in
her eighties when I was in middle school, and had only recently retired
from a fifty-year career as an antiques appraiser. She spoke with an
affected accent that made her sound like New England gentry despite
spending most of her life in a middle-class suburb of Philadelphia. She
thought the Stephen King novels I read were ruining my mind. Even if I had
felt like having a heart-to-heart with her, it would have been difficult.
She was so hard of hearing that when she had her aids in you still had to
look her straight in the eye and practically shout to be understood.

I don’t know how the subject of my mother’s rape came up. I do remember
that she started by saying, “Don’t ever tell your mother I told you this.”

My mother was in high school. She was out drinking with some friends. At
some point she ended up alone with a group of boys. They raped her. They.
Plural. My ancient, antiques-obsessed grandmother who never wore gold
jewelry because she thought it was tacky used the phrase “gang rape.”

My grandmother didn’t cry as she told me this, but her eyes were wet behind
her glasses. “She was just a child,” she said. “She hadn’t even gotten her
period yet.”

I was too young, and too confused to ask any questions. The fact that my
grandmother and I never had anything close to such a personal conversation
made the moment feel fragile. My mother’s personality was a 10,000 piece
jigsaw puzzle of a cloudless blue sky, and my grandmother had just clicked
a small part of it into place. I didn’t want to ruin things or make her
regret her confession by reacting the wrong way so I just said, “That’s
horrible,” and promised not to tell my mom what I knew.

That year a storm was building in my mother’s life and I was only vaguely
aware of the warning signs. She suffered from bipolar disorder and had
always been unpredictable. That was one reason I lived with my dad most of
the time and only saw her a couple days a week. What I didn’t know was that
she was also an alcoholic who had been sober for most of my childhood
following years of drinking that were marked by suicide attempts, her
divorce from my father, and several failed stints in rehab. When we went to
visit my grandmother that time she had already started slipping back into
addiction.

I only knew that her behavior had become more erratic. She had forgotten to
pick me up from my dad’s a few times. And sometimes when I stayed with her
she would spontaneously announce that we were going to my grandmother’s
house, making the three –hour
drive late at night without any regard for whether I had school the next
day, a habit I found both unsettling and thrilling. My grandmother,
however, must have sensed what was going on. If I had to guess why she
confided in me when she did it would be because she knew what it meant to
suffer as the loved one of a person in the throes of addiction. Maybe she
thought knowing about my mother’s own trauma might help give me a way of
understanding the devastation that was to come.

* * *

My mother’s life, and our relationship, fell apart a year after that visit.
Her drinking took over, and she lost her job and her apartment. She moved
to another state and in with a boyfriend who hit her, but eventually left
him and got sober for good. I was proud of her but at that point our
relationship was beyond repair. When she died unexpectedly of pneumonia
when I was twenty-seven, I had not seen her in two years.

I’ve thought about my mother’s rape and what it meant in the twenty years
since I first learned about it, but I never asked her what happened. I kept
my grandmother’s secret. Recently though, a couple of things occurred that
made me think of my mother and the way women endure trauma.

One is that Hillary Clinton’s book What Happened came out. You
don’t even have to like Hillary Clinton to recognize that it’s insane to
argue about the first female candidate for President having the temerity to
write a book about her experience. This argument wasn’t just between the
Right and the Left. In a review of her book titled “Hillary Looks Back in
Anger” the editor of the New Yorker David Remnick noted that
Clinton “ . . . is not the first candidate to win the popular vote but lose the election. She is the fifth.” He then went on to describe the
various ways the other candidates chose to deal with their losses, none of
which involved writing a book. Al Gore, for instance, “travelled the world
giving lectures and making a documentary about climate change, and, in
2007, shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change.” The implication is clear: Doesn’t she have anything better
to do?

The rhetoric surrounding the release of Clinton’s book reminded me so much
of the way we talk about women with regards to sexual trauma. Indeed, the
story of the election is, among other things, the story of an accused
rapist and admitted sexual predator using gender-based attacks,
humiliation, and the threat of physical violence to defeat his female
opponent. The idea that the woman at the center of this story should be
condemned for daring to tell her version of events both disturbed and
infuriated me. What message does it send to other women who aren’t as rich,
who aren’t as powerful, who aren’t as white, when they see one of the most
accomplished women in all of U.S. history being told, essentially, to shut
up and go away? Being told that her experiences don’t matter. No one wants
to hear about them. No matter that plenty of people do in fact want to hear
about them. We live in a society that not only revels in the destruction of
women, but wants them to know that if they dare to rise up from the ashes
of that destruction there will be someone waiting with a blowtorch ready to
set them on fire again.

The same week Hillary’s book came out I heard Kesha’s song “Praying.” It’s
the first single off of her new album Rainbow, the first one she’s
released since a New York court ruled she would have to honor a contract
requiring her to continue putting out music on an imprint of Sony run by a
producer named Dr. Luke who she has accused of raping and abusing her.

In its largely positive review of her album, Pitchfork describes
“Praying” as “ . . . a pro forma piano ballad . . . It works more as a
statement than a song.” I can’t speak to whether “Praying” is technically
any good or not. Taken out of context I can see how lyrics like, “After
everything you’ve done / I can thank you for how strong I have become”
would seem unsophisticated. “Praying” isn’t a generic pop ballad, however.
It’s not about learning to love again after a breakup or pursuing your
dreams no matter what. It’s a song about abuse, and finding strength not
only in its wake, but in the wake of the realization that there won’t be
any consequences for your abuser. It’s about finding a way to live with the
unbearable truth that even if you’re brave enough to speak out about what’s
been done to you, you might still be left alone.

I listened to “Praying” over and over, not knowing at first why it affected
me so much. Part of the reason was that the song felt like a further
rebuttal to the kind of criticism being leveraged against Hillary Clinton.
Clinton’s book and Kesha’s song are more than just examples of women
finding a way to turn their pain into art. They’re acts of finding grace in
the face of horrible situations, and those who would have women quietly
disappear after we’ve been victims of trauma or abuse or misogyny or
oppression want to deny us this grace and the power other women can derive
from it.

In the midst of all this, I thought about my mother and wondered how she
managed to live with what happened to her. Especially after trying, more
than once, not to. There was so much I still didn’t know. What happened to
the boys that raped her? Were they ever caught? Did she tell anyone when it
happened or did she wait until years later? More than anything I wanted to
know how being raped affected her. What was she like before and what was
she like after?

There was only one person who could answer these questions. My father had
died less than two years after my mother did; my grandmother over a decade
before. I called my mom’s older sister Maryanne. We had been close when I
was younger, but now we rarely spoke. When I asked her about my mother’s
rape though she was generous and open. She didn’t ask why I wanted to know
or tell me it was too upsetting to talk about.

This is what I learned: My mother was fifteen when she was raped. She’d
been pretty and popular, a cheerleader, and had gone to a party with some
friends. She’d had too much to drink and went upstairs to a bedroom to lie
down. Some older boys from her school, seniors, followed her into the
bedroom and raped her.

“It was more than one,” my aunt said. “But I don’t know how many. It could
have been two, it could have been a hundred. Well,” she conceded, “it
probably wasn’t a hundred.”

Her friends had taken her home. She’d made them promise not to tell anyone
what happened. She didn’t tell anyone for a year, but Maryanne
said it was obvious something was wrong. She stopped going to school and my
grandmother was frustrated because she couldn’t make her, not knowing it
was because my mother didn’t want to face her rapists in the halls every
day or all of the other kids who knew what had happened. Eventually she
confided in Maryanne, but she would never say who had done it. Her friends
wouldn’t either. One of them was at my father’s funeral. Maryanne said she
had asked her if, after all these years she would tell her who had raped my
mother, and she refused.

My mother started going to a psychiatrist, but she wouldn’t talk about the
rape and he didn’t encourage her to.

I asked Maryanne if she was different after it happened, if it changed her
personality.

“Yes,” Maryanne said. “She was sad all the time.” Before she was raped, she
had been happy and funny, full of life. After is when she started drinking
all the time, ruining family functions.

“I know you and your mother didn’t have an easy relationship,” Maryanne
said, “but I want you to know she was a wonderful person.”

I know how wonderful my mother was. She was emotionally volatile in a way
that often made me feel like she was the child and I was the adult. She
called me names when she got mad at me and would even lock herself in her
room. But she also tucked notes into the lunches she packed for me with
cartoons she drew of the two of us and her cat Winston. Her kitchen wall
was papered with drawings I made and tests I got As on that she’d helped me
study for. I was hurt so badly when she fell apart only because I adored
her so much.

Maryanne told me that in the years before my mother died she started seeing
a female therapist who specialized in women’s issues who she trusted enough
to talk to about her rape. I’d sometimes wondered how she found the
strength to get sober again when she did, after she’d lost so much.
Discovering that opening up to someone about her rape played such a big
part in her recovery shed light on a period of my mother’s life that had
been enshrouded in darkness. It gave me an understanding of her I had not
had before. It also gave me an understanding of how powerful finding a way
to recount our experiences to others can be.

For women, the society we live in is not going to give us peace or justice.
The people who hurt us will likely not be punished and too often we will
lose even when we’re right. Things will be done to us that have the power
to shatter our souls and we have to look everywhere we can for evidence
that we can come through them unbroken. My mother lost a lot because of
what happened to her, but she didn’t lose everything. In the end, she had
her sobriety and the grace and self-respect that allowed her to attain it.
And now her daughter has the example she set. Of a woman who told her
story, who didn’t keep quiet, who survived.