Excavation
digging up, revealing, exhumation - brushing off the dirt to fly
On this first day of 2025, in this first post, I wasn’t sure where to begin. After several starts and many more deletes than I care to admit, I decided to venture into my own archives of writing. It was in those files that I exhumed whole bodies of words that lay dormant because I’d done nothing with them; words that remained in a file because of fear. Fucking fear. Of what? Others’ opinions of me? Yes. Exactly that.
I’ve decided that’s not fair to my work. Today is as good as any for ripping off the bandage to a wound I fabricated, long ago, out of fear. In my most favorite Toni Morrison novel, Song of Solomon, Guitar says to Milkman, “Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”
There is no wound.
Time to fly.
{ from 2016 }
When my daughter climbs into the tub each night, toting her fairies that need to be bathed as well, I am reminded of the Sharon Olds poem titled, “Fish Story,” in which the speaker likens her daughter’s body to a “…glittering eel / who used to be a shrimp in her sea / this woman she once had firmly in her body.”
I marvel over every square centimeter of my daughter’s flesh, a body I once held inside my own. The way the water runs down over her shoulders, the soft curve of her knees, the mound of her belly, the one freckle on her back. I’m even in awe at the symmetry of her sex; the beautifully perfect, as Olds writes: "that whole / glazed torso like a fish, / the firm slit a noncommittal fish mouth / smiling neither way.” She is flawless. Whole. Tabula rasa.
Keeping her this way forever is impossible, and tantamount to keeping a hollowed out egg whole. Eventually, she’ll crack—my only wish is that when she breaks, it’s because she chose to leap.
Social media is on a loop of the story of the rape on the Stanford campus by that worthless piece of shit, and how he was only sentenced to six months in jail for his actions. My heart wraps its arms around that young woman, and my hair bristles at the thought. You know the thought.
And then my next thought: what if what happened to me, happens to her? What if at six she is taught a game of fellatio by the babysitter’s son? And what if at fifteen she is groomed by a man decades her senior, lead down a slippery-slope. And what if she then finds herself trapped in a place she doesn’t know how to escape until one day the levee holding the secret back breaks, flooding her world with charges filed, confusion, and new defined words: statutory rape. And what if she becomes that girl. That girl that has to give a detailed statement to authorities in a cold clinical room about every single thing that happened. That girl upon which rumors are constructed, the weight of which nearly crushes. That girl who loses friends because people, teenagers especially, take sides. That girl that gets an education in a brand of humiliation most adults have never traversed. What if?
The little girl I put to bed every night, the one to which I sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “You Are My Sunshine” —she knows nothing of dark corners in this life. And because I’ve been broken, because the shards of my experiences have been buried and unearthed over and over, I have vowed to prepare her the best way I know how. I search for the right words that a three year-old will make sense of, and if I can’t find them - I create them. I teach her the names that map the landscape of her body. Names that will give her agency. Later, I will speak to her about consensual exploration and non-consensual violence. And later still, I will teach her about pleasure under a desired touch.
In the years that followed the year I was fifteen, I was not perfect. When I flew off to college there was plenty of illicit fun, dangerous even—but in every single one of those reckless instances, I was making a choice for myself. I chose the sex. I chose the drugs. I chose. For better or worse, I was the madame of my world exploring, enjoying and living out the consequences of life.
It was all me.
That is all I want for my little mermaid; with measured risk and a lucid mind, she is afforded the choice as to what happens. So I model respect and consent for each others’ bodies. When she asks me to stop tickling her, I oblige. When she insists on washing her own vulva, I step back. And when she parrots my words - my body, my choice - I say a silent prayer that this becomes her truth, her history. That when the ugly world casts its line, hook baited ready to pierce, because I know one day it will, my daughter will see the bob above the surface and know. Know to make the right choice.