Parenting Boys as an SA Survivor

Words by Kamilah Willingham

Someone asked me recently how being a survivor of sexual violence affects me as a mother. It immediately struck me as both an important question and one that I wanted absolutely nothing to do with. How do I carry some of the ugliest experiences of my life into the most beautiful and sacred thing I’ve ever done? Hard pass. I’d rather keep them separate, thanks. 

I know it’s delusional to think that it’s even possible to keep them separate, but until recently it’s felt like a harmless and rather comforting delusion, so I’ve held onto it. The question was an inconvenience, though, and it lingered in my mind for weeks uncovering a quiet tension that’s become hard to ignore.  

One of the first lessons I learned in motherhood, from the moment that little zygote began commandeering my body, was that not everything is in my control. Sometimes, for the love of everything beautiful and true, we have to let go of the illusion of control and surrender to reality. It’s a hard lesson, and I’m continually revisiting it.  

As a doula, I have different versions of the same conversation with clients who dread bringing their own unwanted experiences into motherhood with them: the things you are afraid to think about, the things you push out of your mind because you don’t want them to come up during pregnancy or labor or postpartum—they’re already here, love. And the only way they can harm you is if you refuse to acknowledge them and let them work in the shadows of your awareness. 

There is such liberation, such relief to be found in finally looking the ugly things in the eye, going right to the center of that scary, painful thing and finding some estranged part of your own truth. I’ve experienced it, and I’ve seen it in childbirth at that moment when a woman finds the strength she didn’t know she had and births herself as well. The moment you surrender your illusions is the moment you become truly empowered. I suppose it’s time for me to revisit that hard lesson once again and follow my own advice, as humbling and exasperating as it is. 

What greets me when I look into the center of the uncomfortable thing I’d hoped to avoid is a memory that’s haunted me for over a decade: the face of a mother who appeared to be completely broken. She was staring at her hands folded in her lap, avoiding my gaze while the father sat behind her, looking somber but light by comparison. One of her sons glared at me as if he could cut right through me with his eyes. Her other son and his attorneys sat with their backs to her, facing me.  I was trying to find my bearings on the witness stand, where I’d been called to testify at his felony sexual assault trial.

“Don’t look at him,” The prosecutor had told me. “Don’t look at the jury. Just look at me.” But nothing in her eyes resonated with me except for an anxious determination to win and perhaps a well-founded worry that her star witness was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

My plan to survive the day was simple: I’d leave an un-feeling shell of myself on the stand to fetch memories and answer questions while I drifted somewhere outside my body, outside the sterile courtroom and the already-skeptical, scientific gazes of the jurors, far from him and the rest of them. But the sight of his mother, the gravity of her presence, captured me. 

I’d heard such loving things about her when her son and I were friends—she was a smart, beautiful Black woman and a writer, like me.  At some point she wrote a statement that was published on her son’s crisis PR website next to a baby photo of him —a statement about a heartbroken mother standing by her special, innocent, precious boy against the malignant, lying slut who had inexplicably made it her purpose to destroy him. They were the same misogynistic cliches that are deployed in defense of virtually every man in her son’s position because it doesn’t matter if they’re true, what matters is that they’re familiar and effective. I didn’t take it personally; I wasn’t the first or only woman to say I’d been harmed by her son, I was just the loudest.  

She was the only person in the courtroom who wasn’t looking at me while I testified. Maybe she couldn’t look at me. I do believe that on some level she saw her son, though, and loved him enough for it to break her. Statistically, it’s not unlikely that she was also a survivor of some kind of violence at the hands of a man. And yet she did everything in her power, I’m sure, to protect her son and all his coddled entitlement from the consequences of his actions—from being socially and professionally shunned, from being shackled and caged like an animal by the state. I understood that this was her imperative as a mother and I couldn’t fault her for it. 

I felt for her and the impossible weight of the burden she carried. I don’t think it’s fair that mothers are assigned such a lone and disproportionate responsibility for their children, as women at large are for the actions of men. It’s either the victims, the women who date and marry them, or the mothers who raised them who are to be scrutinized. No one ever says oh, I bet his dad didn’t hold him enough when he was little. His father must be so ashamed. Generally, we assume the father wasn’t fully present—we don’t expect him to be—and we move on to the more compelling target: Some woman is always to blame. 

So while the son declared his innocence, the brother raged on his behalf, and the father was simply there, all the shame and blame and culpability were thrust at me. And while I vehemently rejected it, it occurred to me when I saw her that the mother had absorbed it. 

I’m pretty sure I sobbed and threw up that morning before I dragged myself into the courthouse to submit to being theatrically vivisected by attorneys. But the pain on that mother’s face was devastating in a way that I could only begin to comprehend, and it has haunted me ever since. 

I feel no bitterness against her for standing by her son, or even against the coalition of mothers of accused men who very powerfully led the backlash against the campus anti-rape movement, of which I found myself on the front lines. Those mothers created their own counter-movement out of desperation and necessity—anything to protect their sons. I felt sorry for those mothers then, as appalling as some of the positions they took were, and I feel for them even more now that I have two sons of my own. 

I’ve never felt so fiercely protective as when I held each of my baby boys in my arms for the first time. Our children come into the world so vulnerable—and there’s a specific vulnerability that is felt by mothers of Black boys in America. I worried about the ways they might be harmed by the world before they were even born. And then when I gave birth I had to confront the physical sensation that an enormous part of me, which might as well have been my whole heart, was now living outside of my body. Their vulnerability was my vulnerability, and my imperative.  I knew that I’d hold them close to me and share my warmth and nourishment with them for as long as I could, and that I’d do anything in my power to protect them. But gradually, as sure as they will grow into their own identities, they’ll go out into a world that is as violent as it is full of beauty and opportunity. 

How do you raise children in the larger context of extreme violence that’s celebrated in America? I am raising kind, respectful, thoughtful boys at home, but I am doing so in the context of American masculinity and prevailing ideals of what power and success look like—and that looks like the exercise of dominion over others. They will learn this from peers and from the culture, from history books and by simply looking around at who’s in power and how they hold onto it. Another comforting and untenable delusion is the idea that there will never be a force or an influence in their lives more powerful than mine.

How does being a survivor affect me as a mother? This is the truth: My experiences have made me stronger and wiser. I’ve lived through some of my worst nightmares and fought past the point where I thought there was nothing left in me—now I know what I’m capable of. I know that I will always find in me what I need to love my children through any storm, and to fight for them if need be, just as I fought for myself. And in the continual work of healing, I’ve found a softness and a warmth in myself that is deeply generative and nourishing; I’ve learned so much more about what it means to be whole, and about what it means to love. I’ve learned to love myself better, and now I can love my children better, too. These are gifts that I’m grateful to share with them—and I think they will be fuller, wiser, and stronger for it. 

And. The part that I feel so uncomfortably vulnerable admitting is that my experiences have also made me more afraid. Because I’ve seen what other people are capable of, even with the best of intentions. I’ve seen how deeply the foundational violence of American society penetrates our culture and institutions like spores in the air, and how thoroughly it can crush a person or make them its agent. I haven’t met a single person who is immune to it; I have no immunity that I can pass to my children.

I’m afraid of the things that I can’t control. I’m afraid that, one way or another, I won’t be able to keep the violence of the world we live in from reaching my children. I want to protect my sons from patriarchy and what it does to men and boys, from how it carves them out and and turns soft things inside them into sharp, outward facing things. 

It’s all too much. Of course I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to talk about it, dwell on it, imagine it. It stresses me out and it pisses me off, honestly. A better and more just world is possible, but here we are. Here I am. Isn’t it enough to lose sleep over what might befall my precious boys? Must I also carry the fear of who they could become? 

I refuse to parent my children from a place of fear. But the fear is there and it’s inescapable. And I know that fear, unacknowledged, will subvert my ability to see clearly and effectively address what I can do – because that’s what it does!

I want to know and understand my kids for who they are so that I can love them, really love them, and be the kind of mother they deserve.  They’re the best people I know; they’re delightful, they make such a sweet mess of things, they’re so special, so like me and yet so strange and uniquely their own people, and I adore them more than I could ever express. And I don’t get to preserve their innocence forever—none of us do. I don’t get to determine who they become and I cannot protect them forever from suffering. But I can love them with my eyes open, and stay aware of what we’re up against both outside and within ourselves.

I can teach them how to hold onto themselves as they enter the world. I can show them how to keep their own eyes open to the context they are growing up in, what it demands of them, and how they feel themselves responding to it. I can share with them the tools I’ve forged to navigate life with a strong inner compass, and help them find their own. 

I hope that by being honest with myself and conscious of my own fears and vulnerabilities, I can keep them from quietly dominating the way that I show up as a mother and as my own person in the world.  If this is also a skill that I can share with my children, I believe they’ll be alright.

Kamilah Willingham is a writer, doula and herbalist in Los Angeles. She is drawn to complex truths and questions of power, intimacy, love, motherhood and our relationship with the natural world. Her work grows out of more than a decade devoted to civil rights, confronting sexual and institutional violence through law and policy, advocacy and storytelling.