November 1st

It's NaNoWriMo Because I Said So

Leave it to me to finally jump on this bandwagon when the ship has already sailed. The train has left the station. The bandwagon has disbanded. Possibly because of the results of last year’s “election,” and resulting suicidal tendencies, or people just wandered off.

But, it’s still November the first because Daylight Savings, and I said so, and I’m BACK bitches. I pity the fool who tries to shut me up now. It’s been almost exactly a year since I’ve been active on this platform, and I use the term “active” loosely, so both of my readers probably didn’t even notice that I peaced out for a while. Notably, since the summertime. Or something like that.

Time to come clean with why the heck I had to do that, even though my soul was screaming for sweet release in the form of written expression. It’s kind of a long story, and one that will probably come out in bits and pieces because, ya know, trauma. Healing is not a straight line; it’s a spiral that hopefully goes up, but definitely goes round and round. Here’s the deal: my daughter, who is nine days shy of twenty years old, was molested by a teacher in the sixth and seventh grades. Junior high. Middle school. You know the hellscape of which I speak. Ironically, her dad and I had chosen that school in hopes that her middle school years would be less traumatic than ours had been, because it was Kindergarten through 8th grade.

Yes, it was a private school, an Episcopalian school in fact, but it was supposed to be different. Their stated mission was inclusion and equity in education, and by that, they meant racial diversity. Since Denver was rapidly gentrifying, the public schools that were previously diverse were on a fast track to becoming either predominantly white or predominantly non-white. We’d had a taste of that when my daughter was in preschool, because our neighborhood DPS school happened to be in the wildly wealthy neighborhood of Crestmoor - just as pretentious as it sounds - and we peasants lived along the busy avenue that formed the northern border.

It’s a unique neighborhood, called Mayfair and Hale, because the CU Med School was the center of it for seventy or eighty years. Hence, the shoddy, slum-lord owned apartments and ‘plexes that line 8th Avenue, which bisects the area, and just down the block from those are Tudor mansions and glorious Victorian mansion-ettes. The slumlords had a steady supply of medical students desperate to live close to the school, and never felt the need to update or fix anything for seventy years. In our little 1950s brick duplex, for example, we couldn’t get them to fix the electrical problems until there was literally electricity arcing out of the fuse box* every time we turned on the kitchen light.

• There were only two fuses in the box, the whole house running off of those, btw.

But I digress. At the public-turned-bougie preschool, four-year-old girls were already judging each other based on clothing and appearance, as well as other superficial, material things, and, I kid you not, gossiping about one another. And Justin Bieber. But that’s another story. Even with great teachers, it only got worse in Kindergarten, so we pulled her nascent bougie ass out of that place come First grade. And then, she didn’t get into her DPS school of choice in the Choice Lottery, so we were scrambling, looking for a place to adequately educate our precocious, compassionate kiddo.

One bonus about Saint Elizabeth’s is that the students wear uniforms. No more clothes-judging little girls who were taught by their trophy wife mothers to view other females as competition, because of unconscious internalized misogyny! That beast is a tough one to slay, but clothing is one of its chief weapons. Don’t get me started.

Anyway, Ella loved the school, loved learning, loved her teachers and friends- up until 6th grade, when she started having anxiety and panic attacks for some unknown reason. We took her to various doctors to rule out any medical issues. We went through at least three different therapists to try and get a bead on what we could do about the symptoms at the very least. We blamed ourselves first, though, because her father and I had divorced during her Third and Fourth grade years. Despite our best efforts to ease the transition and protect her from the worst parts, her life had been upended. In hindsight, I don’t think there’s any way to avoid that, and I don’t think parents should beat themselves up about it, and generally, I don’t.

Halfway through Sixth grade, and around the time her class was doing Theatre as their Specials class (the others were Art and Music), her grades plummeted. She locked herself in her closet for hours when she was at my house, and apparently did the same at her dad’s. She would lash out in anger and then run away crying. She didn’t want to be touched at all, whereas previously we were always very affectionate and snuggled at every opportunity.

I thought, “Wow, adolescence from this perspective is just as hard. ’ Her dad and I thought, geez, I guess the Middle School years just suck, no matter what you do.

Now I know; she couldn’t even articulate what she was going through.

She finally disclosed right before the COVID shutdown in March 2020. The world was in chaos, the police were more incompetent than usual, and the resources available to us were all shut down or unknown. We had no idea what to do, and no one who should have known wouldn’t tell us. Ella started cutting herself and had suicidal ideation. She would lock herself in the bathroom and cry. I would sit on the other side of the door and cry with her.

Towards the end of that summer, my good friend V, whom I hadn’t seen in months, called me to tell me that her daughter had also just disclosed about abuse perpetrated by a family friend- “Uncle J.” My friend told me about the process we needed to go through, not the police or CPS. She is the one who told me about this whole other division of the Police Department, called the Division of Missing and Exploited Children, and despite the misleading name, that’s where we needed to go. When Ella was ready, she would undergo a “forensic interview” with a trained specialist. The transcript would be given to a detective, who would organize it into a clearer format and then pass it to the District Attorney’s office. The DA would then decide whether there was enough evidence to pursue the case, make arrests, and initiate the process of getting justice.

It took three years and the assistance of many more therapists to be ready for that interview.

Because the perpetrator is from a wealthy family, he delayed the trial for a total of two years. Initially, it was supposed to take place in October 2023.

We would get a trial date, and he would find some excuse to vacate it. He refused to take the plea deal, despite the advice of counsel, family, and friends. The plea deal in Colorado is no picnic- it’s mandated ten years in State prison, followed by 10-20 years of intensive parole with mandatory therapy. Going to trial means that if found guilty, the sentence automatically increases to seventeen years, minimum.

A few weeks ago, we finally got our trial, and miraculously, Justice with a capital J. The jury saw through the defense’s bullshit about our divorce being the cause of her accusations against the perpetrator; and the argument that her dad was the real abuser; and the ridiculous theory that I was just a bougie white woman who wanted to get a teacher, who happens to be a person of color, fired because of supposed prejudice. The truth is that none of the parents liked him from the start, and no one dared to say anything because it might make them look racist. In that “liberal” Episcopalian world, it was all about appearances. In retrospect, I was guilty of that too. And I assumed that the Theatre teacher had been thoroughly vetted, just like all of the other teachers. That was my first mistake.

Entonces, I couldn’t say much of anything, especially on the interwebs. And I probably won’t blurt out anything, at least until he’s sentenced. Or, (LOL) this world becomes safe for women and girls to exist.