Mommy lost her virginity at sixteen.

Or maybe seventeen.

She doesn't really remember anymore.

She doesn't remember much of that day, actually.

 

That was a stuffy little town.

Mommy didn't have much freedom.

(It's challenging when you essentially know everyone.)

So, Mommy drank.

 

Mommy considers herself dumb looking back.

Maybe if she hadn't been drinking that night, she would remember.

Maybe it wouldn't have happened.

Not then.

 

But Mommy did drink.

In fact, Mommy drank so much, she got drunk.

She swore she was fine.

So, her best friend left.

 

Mommy stayed, though.

She stayed in the car with that man.

The man who was twenty or thirty.

He couldn't possibly harm her.

 

He was distraught.

Mommy wanted to help him.

And Mommy did.

Mommy helped him wash away his pain under the glow of the Burger King sign.

 

Mommy swears she never said no.

She promises me that it was her own fault.

But she also says she never said yes, either.

And the dark shadows of being victimized never fully left her eyes.

 

Mommy lost her virginity at the age of sixteen.

Or maybe seventeen.

She doesn't really remember anymore.

That's what she tells me.

 

She doesn't tell me she was raped.

She would never say that outright.

My mother can't allow herself to believe that.

So she has tortured herself for years over it.

 

My mother shows classic symptoms of rape victims.

I can't help her, though.

I can't help someone who refuses it.

She claims she wouldn't need it.

 

My mother has ignored it for over thirty years.

In her twenty years with my father, she's never told him.

She lives under a veil of ignorance.

Her days are spent behind a wall of avoidance.

 

Mommy lost her virginity at the age of sixteen.

Or maybe seventeen.

That's what she tells me.

Of course, does rape even count?