Reflections from a Rape Survivor on Sex, Pregnancy, and Raising My Son

I am a mother, and I am also a rape survivor.

This traumatic experience has become a critical part of my personal narrative. There was me from before and then me that has existed every day after. The 13th anniversary of “every day after” has only just passed. I became a rape survivor on January 16, 2006, while I was studying abroad halfway around the world. I had no friends or family with me.  

Every January, I fight like hell to not fixate the entire month on that traumatic event. I can say that each year the anniversary date gets easier, the month of January less abrasive. But even if I ever get to a point where I no longer remember the exact date or can usher in the New Year without automatically associating January with my sexual assault, the trauma and memory are always there. I see it and feel it frequently.

As a rape survivor, my worldview and lens are impacted. I know what power, control, dominance, helplessness, and shame look like. Worse, I know what they feel like. My body has been a crime scene.

I was only twenty years old when I was raped by an acquaintance in his dorm room. We had been with friends out on campus, but not somewhere with a public bathroom. He offered to let me use his. The moment before the dorm room door closed was the last moment I was that version of myself. Once I was over the threshold, life went sideways.

For a while, I couldn’t even call it rape. I didn’t report it in any legal or formal way. The first person I told was my then boyfriend, on a public payphone in the middle of the campus using a calling card. I had to turn my back to the sidewalk so no one could see me cry. My voice shook into the receiver. I gripped the metal coil wire, the sweat of my palms making it slippery and hot. The exposure of having to say those words out loud and in a public space was like being stripped bare all over again.  

After a few days of calling him constantly for reassurance and support, he told me he didn’t want to talk about my rape anymore. His line of questions and obvious doubt during that period of time made me realize he didn’t believe me. I inferred he thought I had cheated on him and called it rape. He wouldn’t say one way or the other. It just became a topic not to be discussed. I found myself confused, replaying both the assault and the way I had described the event. Wondering how it could be that my boyfriend wouldn’t believe me.

This was my first lesson in remaining silent.

I buried the assault as deeply I could, but it came out in my controlled eating and obsessive exercise, in depression and homesickness. I hid in my room and lacked focus and received poor grades. For a time, I thought when I returned to the states the trauma would be left behind. I had a delusional sense that maybe when I returned home, it would be just like it never happened. Like the entire semester had been a bad dream. But there were pictures and journal entries as evidence that I had, in fact, gone and come home. My rape was real.

I carried on as normally as possible, holding back the truth from myself and others, for a long time. It was more than a year later when I finally sought counseling. Through counseling, I moved from rape victim to rape survivor but I had a lot of processing to do.

My rape caused me to see sex as a physiological event that was very different than it had been before. One singular night, one extreme experience, and the way I understood the deepest form of physical intimacy between people changed forever. I feared dating and relationships because I now feared sex. I feared having to explain or share what happened that night on January 16, 2006. I feared potential judgment, blame, and shame. And I feared being seen as broken or damaged.

One of the other devastating results was that I feared the idea of becoming a mother.

All my life, I had imagined being a mom. As a little girl, I wanted six kids. By high school, I had pared that back to four. The only fear of motherhood I had ever considered was the potential for pain in the process of giving birth. But in my twenties, following my rape, my anxiety around becoming a mother had to do with conceiving instead.

My anxiety became about having to share my body with my partner repeatedly and frequently in an effort to get pregnant. Then, I would have to share my body with the child themselves. With a person growing inside of me, I wondered how I might cope with that lack of physical control over my body. Would that powerlessness resemble the moments where I was unable to fend off the man who raped me? Would it, in turn, make me resentful of pregnancy or my child? I wanted to glow with that pregnancy light that you always heard about. I wanted to love being pregnant and see it as an amazing experience and journey. But I feared that this, too, would be taken from me as a result of my trauma.

As I grappled with the anxiety over conception and pregnancy, I also felt anxious over the gender of my future hypothetical child. What if I had a girl?

I felt real fear that if I gave birth to a daughter, there would be a high likelihood she would be a victim of sexual assault. 1 in 3 women experiences sexual violence in their lifetime. I was terrified that I would be unable to protect her in that moment of indescribable vulnerability and powerlessness. I was afraid there would be a moment where my little girl would likely become someone else entirely as the result of sexual violence. She would join her mother as a rape survivor.

Of course, I also hated myself for wanting to have boys simply because they seemed safer, less risky. Not entirely risk-free, of course. Far from it. 1 out of 6 men is raped. I hated myself for feeling like my mind was betraying women, by wanting sons. Because statistically, they would be safer. My fear and trauma were crippling and disorienting.

My maternal instinct to protect my still unconceived and hypothetical child(ren) was real.

Ten years later, in my early 30s, motherhood again began to seem attainable. Still, the post-traumatic burden was there. We decided to not find out what gender child we were having. Part of that was out of the excitement and unpredictably of not knowing. For me, the other part of it was for my peace of mind. If I knew in advance what we were having, I would have focused even more on their place and mine within the conversation of how gender meets consent and sexual violence.

As it turns out, I came to have a son. Within his first year, I started to imagine him older, as a teen maybe, hanging out in the house after school with friends. I would imagine walking by the room as they played video games and hearing one of them casually remark that they “raped” the other player as though “kicking their butt” wouldn’t suffice. And I would stop dead in my tracks. Wondering how to respond.

Here he was, this fabulous bundle of love, fresh into his existence, and I was already terrified of how “rape” would enter into our dialogue.

Because I know that it will. “Rape” as a topic is inevitable. Not only because as a rape survivor it is a part of my narrative, but also because as his mother, I have a responsibility to teach him right from wrong. The young man who raped me was someone’s son. He may or may not have been taught about such things as consent, boundaries, or the appropriation of power and control. As a rape survivor and mother of a son, my responsibility to ensure my son knows about these things weighs heavily on me.

My son is only three now, but then suddenly, he’ll be eighteen. I’ll blink and he’ll be twenty-three, and living away from home and offered opportunities for parties and social gatherings where I have no control. Then thirty-three. At thirty-three, I certainly hope he’s not looking back at twenty-three or eighteen with any doubt about his behavior, the actions of people he was with, or the results of those actions. He’s only three right now, but I intend to teach him as he grows into a man.

I want to raise him to be someone other than what society defines as a man.

As a mother and rape survivor, I vow to do my absolute best to:

• Give him the knowledge that the only body he has the right to is his own.  
• Show him how to listen and how to hear what others tell him. These are not the same, so I must teach him both.
• Provide him with the courage to stand up for what is right and against what is wrong.
• Strengthen his voice as a force for justice.
• Teach him that we are ALL equal.
• Offer him the opportunity to hear real people’s stories and experiences.
• Shape his empathy and compassion for others.
• Invite healthy role models into his life to guide him.
• And from the beginning, illustrate how to love consensually and with respect.

I want my son and others like him to set an example for the rest of his generation of men so they don’t prey on women. May my son and others like him narrow the divide between women and men and truly bring equality by going against those who believe otherwise. May he and his peers believe their mothers, sisters, cousins, nieces, granddaughters, friends and even strangers when they tell them they have been raped.

I’ll work tirelessly to raise my son in this way so he may know that his place is to stand up for others’ daughters and not stand over them or hold them down.