A Child’s Body by Sarah Ruth Jansen
A police officer pulls me out of school my first day of first grade. Or is it my second day? Am I called to the front office, or does she march into our classroom? Do I even go to school that day, or does my mother drive me to the Irvine police station in her ocean blue Acura Integra, rolling through the suburban stop signs because, “the rules are different in California?”
My father helped her pick out the manual transmission car, which transported us from the saguaro-studded Sonoran Desert to Orange County, 500 miles away from him. I long for my Arizonan father that day, for him to rock me in his arms and say, “It’s not your fault.”
I will not remember the police interviews. All I will recall is the forensic exam – a stranger probing my private places with gloved fingers, with swabs, with fluorescent light. With everything but feeling.
***
Thirty-three years later, my resting heart rate still soars in doctors’ offices. Sitting on the exam table, I sense the physician searching for evidence of a crime, even though she isn’t. Even though she’s just trying to treat me. “Your reflexes are good,” she says, a euphemism I often hear in response to my hyper vigilance in hospitals. I never put it down on a single medical record – the years I spent in therapy.
***
The child counselor, Suzanne, gives me Tang before each session. (I’ve hated orange-flavored anything ever since.) After the hardest group therapy sessions, our mothers buy us cream pie at Coco’s, each sugary bite buoyant in my mouth. One of the girls never comes to Coco’s, because her rapist is her daddy, and his parenting time starts after our sessions. (A court will find him “not guilty.”) At least my rapist is my thirty-year-old cousin–in-law. He has his own house, separate from mine.
“Let’s write a letter to Ray to tell him how you feel,” Suzanne says in her high voice. Why does she talk to me like I’m a baby? The only word I learned to spell in kindergarten in Tucson was “it,” so she pens the letter for me, a letter to nobody, because we won’t ever send it. His wife, my cousin Anne, recently mailed us Ray’s lie detector test (he passed), along with her pen-written prayer that someday God would “reveal His purpose” and “give meaning to this assault on our family.”
“I don’t like it when you lie like that. Tell Anne the truth,” I speak to Suzanne as though I am addressing Ray. I thought we were friends, Ray. I trusted you.
Rosy-cheeked Suzanne writes down my words, then tries to make eye contact. “What’re you thinking?”
“Can I play with the sandbox?” I stare down at my white tutu and red tights, an old recital costume I insist on wearing to therapy. I want to tell Suzanne that only a year ago I’d tapped across a stage in a leotard, my face bright with pink blush and bruise-hued eyeshadow, a halo of big brown curls on my head.
My father videotaped my recitals. He also unwittingly videotaped Ray – Ray watching me swim in our inflatable pool, in banana bikini bottoms that would later go “missing” at his home. “You’re so ugly you’ll break the camera,” my father quipped while zooming in on Ray, the camcorder pounding like a heartbeat as his handsome face filled the frame. Ray is attractive in a SoCal surfer sort of way that won him the trust of the households whose windows he washed. He even turned his high school hobby into a career – cleaning windows, peering into other people’s lives, watching and waiting.
“It seems to me you have a deep, dark secret,” Suzanne coos as I shovel sand on top of a doll, submerging her body. “You can tell me your secret, honey.”
“I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to talk about this.” I miss Ray. I miss daddy.
***
I do not make progress in therapy. I begin taking long showers at all hours, scrubbing my skin with steaming soap. Whenever we visit the sea, my mother carries me across the beach, to a clean towel where I can watch the waves, free from sand. At friends’ houses I disappear into the restroom, where I wash my stinky feet in the sink. I redden with shame when their parents discover the trail of water on the tile or the disheveled hand towels or the missing soap.
During these same years, the early 1990’s, Ray and Anne have a second baby boy and build a successful commercial cleaning business. As their company clears dirt and grime from skyscraper windows, I wash my body. Over and over and over again.
***
“You ought to smile more,” my first grade teacher, Mrs. Rose, says. “There’s so much to smile about.”
Except there isn’t. There is nothing at all to smile about. Eventually, I stop talking altogether. I hate my deep voice.
In third grade my teacher, Mrs. K., describes me for a psychological evaluation. I am “not right” and “not like a regular child.” I am humorless. I am no fun. I may be blacking out. I may not be able to bring myself back. My handwriting is “indicative of my behavior – it does not conform to the lines or space it is written on.”
School personnel speculate that my “black-outs” are actually seizures. Seizures? I thought you had to shake to have a seizure, and I don’t shake.
I am stone still.
I am somewhere else.
***
“Your daughter’s brain is like Swiss cheese,” a school administrator discusses the results of an IQ test with my mother. The pair sit in a trailer with modern decor, a temporary office as the school expands to accommodate enrollment growth. (Next door, in another trailer, I take my turn reading the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn out loud in monotone to my third-grade class. The exercise is excruciating, as though Mrs. K is trying to exterminate any bookworm larvae before they flourish.)
My mother scrutinizes the test results, crossing and uncrossing her legs, her freckled flesh peeking through runs in her pantyhose, which carries the scent of Chanel No. 5. “We were going to put her in developmental first grade, but then her father and I divorced, and I moved, and –”
The administrator raises her voice. “You’ll notice her abstract reasoning is genius-level.”
My mother freezes. “Genius” is not one of the words an educator has ever used to describe her daughter. She hopes my teachers will start to see what she sees – a child with an old soul and an inquisitive mind.
“Intellectually she’s operating at the level of a fourteen-year-old, but there are holes in her social and cognitive functioning. Like Swiss cheese.” The administrator smiles. “Your daughter used that analogy to describe herself. Quite creative for an eight-year-old.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I’m referring you to the Child Development Center at the university.” She hands my mother a business card just as a jackhammer roars to life outside.
“What will they do?”
“Administer tests. Make recommendations. Provide whatever services Sarah needs.”
“But haven’t we already done that?”
“Ms. Jansen, I won’t lie to you. You seem like a nice person.” The administrator’s eyes lock with hers. “I’ve seen kids like Sarah, and most of them don’t graduate from high school. Most of them become drug addicts.”
After the meeting, my mother releases my medical, educational, and counseling records to a team of child development specialists.
***
As part of their study, the Child Development Center designs a test to gauge my classmates’ perceptions of me. The center mails a letter to Mrs. K, requesting that she administer a “Sociometric Exercise” to her class, on the condition that she has no “personal objections or other reservations.”
It could be a Milgram-esque obedience experiment, but it isn’t. It is a peer popularity test.
I don’t recollect Mrs. K. ever giving the survey to my class, but I know she did, because, three decades later, I discover her handwritten results in a storage bin in my sister’s basement.
***
I wait until I get home to open the bin. I take my time with the family photographs. In one, my sister and our friend frolic naked in the bathtub while I sit grimly on the toilet seat, fully dressed, my arms crossed tightly over my lap. In another, I ride the merry-go-round at Disneyland with the solemnity of a soldier. In the background, Mickey and Minnie Mouse swing dance together in “the happiest place on Earth.”
I find the survey results at the bottom of the bin, buried beneath a dog-eared metalogic textbook. Out of twenty-seven classmates, two nominated me “least liked” and nine voted me “most shy.” Nobody nominated me “most liked.” (1)
I feel like I am falling, like the floor beneath me has disintegrated suddenly, without warning. This is why I wasn’t smiling back then. This is what I was up against.
All my life, I’ve been told I’m “too serious,” as though levity and laughter are a state of nature rather than the result of feeling safe in the world. I scour the Child Development Center’s lengthy report. There is no mention of the rapes or the possibility of trauma, as though sexual assault is extraneous to the real task of … of what? What were they looking for?
Even though Ray plunged his fingers inside my vagina and ejaculated on my body – an act our federal government defines as ‘rape’ – somehow, in the minds of adults, I’d been “patted” inappropriately, a fatherly touch that went too far. A transgression, to be sure, but nothing serious. My unpopularity, my “Swiss cheese brain” – those were on me.
I phone my mother to ask her about the survey.
“That’s why I put you in the Waldorf school,” she says with ire. Then she whispers: “Can you imagine what it would have been like for you to return to that class after they ranked you?”
I cannot. Why was my community so eager to put the problem on me, a child? A child cannot consent to what she does not understand. A child cannot deflect the blame and shame fired at her.
***
In fourth and fifth grade at the Waldorf School, I recite my poems at school plays. I write about trees, the feel of their rough bark on my skin, the stickiness of their sap, and the rocking of their branches. We visit Sequoia National Park on a school field trip, where I meet the tree giants – such big, benevolent beings. Their sweet, peppery scent soothes me.
At the Waldorf school, education is tactile, even kinetic. It is something I feel in my body and spirit. We don’t just read stories. We paint and perform them. Every morning we play maple wood recorders together and sing, “Let the sun be there. Let us all take care. So we sleep at night. Let the sun shine bright.” We learn to spell words by standing in a circle and tossing a hacky sack to each other, one toss for each letter, as though we are invoking the word and conjuring it into being. There are no peer popularity tests, no shame for being different. There is something else. There is hope.
Thus begins my conviction that education can save a person. I am an educator today. I still hold this belief.
And yet, this thing isn’t done. It is never done.
***
It is 2015, two years before the #MeToo movement, when I feel impelled to track down the police report.
A young, female detective leads me into a windowless, twenty-by-twenty stucco room. A light shines in my eyes. She hands me a thick, musky file, “Take your time.” I wait for her to leave, but she doesn’t budge. I shift uncomfortably and look at the closed door. “I have to be present. This report cannot leave this department.”
“His name is spelled wrong.”
“What?”
“You’ve spelled his name wrong.” I scribble the correct spelling on a notepad and push it across the table.
“We’ll fix that.” She nods vigorously, “Absolutely, we will.”
I read the file, expressionless. All is as I remember it. A six-year-old’s testimony against a thirty-year-old man. The man’s polygraph test in place of a police interview, the evidence “insufficient” to issue an arrest warrant. Nowhere does the file reference what I learned about years later – the earlier allegation of sexual assault, from a stripper at Ray’s bachelor party.
I want to scream, but I remain silent. I can feel the detective’s eyes on me, as though I am a suspect hauled in for questioning. Finally, I close the file and hand it back to her. It is hers, not mine. And yet – what has she done with it?
The truth, my testimony, lives in a fucking filing cabinet.
Her face relaxes into something softer. “This wasn’t the best police work. I knew the detective on this case. She was my mentor, and she was a great detective. I’m so sorry.”
I nod my head. I don’t say, “what do you mean?” or “can you explain?” Because the detective on my case believed me. She said I was “the most reliable child witness” she’d ever interviewed, because my story never changed. Not even a little, no matter how much she questioned me. Whatever held her back from building a case against Ray wasn’t want of testimony but lack of law and infrastructure to turn allegations into a sufficiency of evidence.
Even if I never get justice, maybe this is enough, this secret admission. This burdensome guilt is no longer mine. When I walk out of the station and into a warm Southern California afternoon, I feel lighter. A few years later California will relax the statute of limitations on civil lawsuits against child sexual abusers. (2) But I won’t sue the man who raped me when I was six. Because the law will seem like one more way to shift responsibility onto the victim, to task her, rather than the DA, with prosecuting criminals.
***
The summer of my thirteenth year I join my maternal aunt’s family for their annual vacation in Laguna Beach. My cousin Joy and I spend the day bodyboarding, the waves working their way into our prepubescent bodies. We are loose and lithe.
A few years ago I started a new drug, “Prozac,” to treat a supposed serotonin deficiency in my brain. All those tests. The MRI scan. And finally, some peace. Real peace. No more incessant worrying about contamination, no more pathological guilt about doing something morally wrong.
I burrow my bare feet into the warm sand as Joy tumbles onto the beach blanket beside me, her straw hair lashing her face. Her wave-blue eyes water over.
“The devil raped me,” she says. Joy is twelve years old.
“Are you sure?” I say.
“Yes.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t Ray?”
“It was the devil.” Joy bites her bottom lip. They are red like strawberries. Red like blood. Anybody could have raped Joy. Any friend or family member or neighbor. But she’d rather it be the devil than it be anybody. Anybody but anybody.
When Ray’s wife – my cousin, Anne – was Joy’s age, she told her mother what a neighbor did to her. My aunt’s response was to continue her relationship with the neighbor, as though nothing had happened.
Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. What about daughters? How are we to love them?
Over the next few months, I go to church less and less, until I stop going altogether. Concepts like ‘hell’ and ‘crucifixion’ trouble me. Joy’s mother, my aunt, sends me a birthday card the following spring. Scrawled inside: “Sarah Ruth, your cross necklace is on backorder, so I’ve sent you a check instead.” I buy tampons with the money, because I’m too ashamed to tell my mother my child’s body is now a woman’s body.
My period does not last. Nor do my curves or the triple digits on the scale. Even when my starvation diet causes fainting spells, nobody worries, not even my physician. Because they don’t see the unpretty part. They don’t see the calorie calculations clicking away like a Geiger counter in my brain, stealing my vital energy.
They don’t see the holes.
***
In my early twenties I attend Joy’s wedding. My cousin’s white lace wedding dress hangs from her skeletal body. Her skin is badly jaundiced. The rumors of her eating disorder are true. She should be in a hospital bed rather on the dance floor with her pastor husband. Nobody says a word about her ill-health. Everything is fine. Everything is perfect.
“Why are you wearing sunglasses indoors?” her brother asks me as I linger in the ballroom exitway, staring at the slither of sea outside, the waves washing over the sand. I no longer need Prozac to walk on the beach. I no longer believe my brain has holes. In college I learned about neuroplasticity, the ability of the brain to rewire itself.
“Are you too cool for us?” My cousin interrupts my thoughts again.
I chuckle, reinforcing his assessment. In reality, I don’t want him to see me cry. Ray is here.
After the first dance, Ray approaches me in my tightfitting red dress, getting way too close, a goofy smile on his fifty-year-old face. And it happens again. I lose my voice. I cannot say a single word.
***
“I think you might be depressed,” the graduate advisor tells me. As one of only three senior female faculty members in UCLA’s philosophy department, she maintains a steely exterior that clashes with her “Valley Girl” appearance. In this space, it is okay to not smile. It is okay to be serious or shy or withdrawn. Here, the only thing that matters is your mind, your thoughts. Despite the fact that I did not graduate from my high school, the PhD program admitted me, when I was only twenty years old.
“I don’t want to drop out. I just need a break.” I say listlessly.
“I understand.” She nods solemnly, her blonde curls bouncing up and down her unwrinkled brow. “Take the time you need. We are confident in your abilities.” Just last year I earned the highest score on my graduate exam in symbolic logic. “Abstract reasoning” is not just a category on an IQ test.
“Thank you,” I say, excusing myself.
As I walk down the hall, past the offices and seminar rooms I won’t see for another six months, I realize the graduate advisor’s diagnosis is news to me, so deep is my denial. But I know. Deep down I know. I will have to make a full break from my mother’s family. No more weddings or even funerals. My life depends on it.
I spend the next six months racing mountain bikes, forming myself into a champion mountain biker. Though I rack up injuries – a sprained ankle, cracked ribs, concussions, and stitches – I discover my body. My freakishly skilled and strong body. I eat healthfully for a period of time, only to revert to the hardwired habit of calorie restriction and occasional food binges. But I relate to my eating disorder differently.
It is holding me back, not holding me together.
***
I return to graduate school with renewed confidence, at home in a discipline preoccupied with truth and reasons. A philosopher aspires to form beliefs on the basis of evidence and argument rather than outmoded religious or cultural mores. Most philosophers believe there is Truth, including moral truths, independent of subjective experience or cultural consensus, even independent of God.
Unlike my philosophy professors, my mother’s sisters and their daughters believe I need to be saved, to accept Jesus Christ and “forgiveness” into my heart, to focus less on my education and more on God. Joy and her family are missionaries, who travel to distant countries to convert souls. To sacrifice one’s own well-being for unworthy others, to forgive sins that are never acknowledged. These are the real monsters I grew up with. I want nothing to do with them.
***
When I am thirty-one-years-old, I have a profound spiritual experience. I am in British Columbia on sabbatical from my first philosophy appointment, a nightmare job that has shattered my view of academia. In a moment of desperation, I pray to God, quietly as I fall asleep. Please help me, God. Help me.
The next morning something is different. Actually, everything is different. (This is where words fail me.) But one thing is clear and communicable. My eating disorder is gone, never to return, as though a vital force yanked it up from its roots in my being. Call it grace. Or call it neuroplasticity. I don’t need another proof of the existence of God, philosophical or otherwise. Now I know, their God isn’t God.
***
An image pops up on my phone. In it, my mother wears a hair net and hospital gown. She is about to have knee replacement surgery.
Suddenly, voices from my past populate my phone, offering jokes and words of encouragement to my mother. I have accidentally been included in a family text chain.
As I grew more estranged from my mother’s family, she grew closer to them, somehow able to forgive them for what they never acknowledged doing. We have a rule. She won’t speak to me about them or to them about me. No information – the lifeblood of an extended family – will flow back and forth. In practice, my mother struggles to maintain this boundary between me and them, because, she knows, it is also a wall between her and me.
I linger over the group text. Would it have been any different if my cousin had killed me? Would his crimes matter then?
Last year, Anne divorced Ray, after an employee of their company sued him for sexual harassment. (They settled outside of court.) Even after the ejection of Ray from the family, still no apology, no acknowledgment. Because validating my experience would require them to validate theirs, to break ties with abusers, to face unspeakable pain.
Staring at the group text, it hits me. I will not be able to attend my own mother’s funeral, just as my mother did not attend her father’s funeral because I was there, and they were there, and it was too much.
***
“Your reflexes are good,” the urgent care nurse remarks after hammering my patellar tendon. I fidget beside my partner as the nurse scrapes impacted ear wax from his ears.
“You’re hurting me,” he yelps, yanking his head away from her.
“We’re here because we have chest infections,” I interject brusquely. “We need antibiotics, not physicals.”
Later, as we walk home, my partner remarks, “I could feel your distrust from the start. People want to help if you let them.” And we wonder, out loud, what having a child together would look like. All those doctor’s visits. A child’s body growing inside mine.
A child’s body growing inside mine. My chest, clogged with the mucus of infection, burns with a fresh agony. They say the body remembers. My child would live in my body for nine months. Would our child feel it, what I felt for so much of my childhood and young adulthood? My eyes find the sacred saguaros, which color my earliest memories, anchoring me to a place where I existed before I was disbelieved, denied, and discounted.
I fumble with my phone, feeling a prick of the old guilt when I hit “send” on the text, the message that will go out to all the aunts and uncles and cousins I’ve shut out of my life for good, those kin I only ever see on ancestry.com, when our avatars happen to link, signaling a blood relation.
“I do not wish to be part of this chain.”
Sarah Ruth Jansen lives in Tucson, Arizona, where she teaches philosophy at Pima Community College. After receiving her PhD in philosophy from UCLA, Sarah worked as an ancient philosophy scholar before embracing creative writing as her vocation. She is a lover of long bicycle rides, hot days, and desert tortoises.
15 February 2024
Endnotes
(1) Sociometric status testing began in the 1940’s and continues today. Only one study explores the ethics of the practice, and that study suffers from sample bias, because half of the parent participants removed their children from the research for ethical reasons [Perspectives on the ethics of sociometric research with children: How children, peers, and teachers help to inform the debate. (2007). Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 53(1), 53–78. https://doi.org/10.1353/mpq.2007.0002]. Although the likeability rankings are confidential, children frequently discuss their ratings with each other, and some child participants report adverse treatment from their classmates after the test. ‘Consent’ is challenging, because many of the child participants do not understand what they are consenting to. What is worse, if a child chooses to not participate in the testing, her name is not removed from the survey. She still receives a popularity ranking. Proponents of sociometric status testing argue the surveys provide valuable information not obtainable elsewhere. Researchers have found a correlation between a child’s unpopularity and cognitive impairments, aggression, and withdrawal behaviors [Newcomb, A. F., Bukowski, W. M., & Pattee, L. (1993). Children’s Peer Relations: A meta-analytic review of popular, rejected, neglected, controversial, and average sociometric status. Psychological Bulletin, 113(1), 99–128. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.113.1.99]. However, correlation is not causation. It could be that being unliked causes a child to perform worse on cognitive and social tasks, rather than the other way around. Moreover, these studies do not consider how factors like race, gender, socioeconomic status, and trauma influence a child’s perceived likeability.
(2) Los Angeles Times. (2019, October 14). California grants more time for filing child sexual abuse allegations under New Law. Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-13/child-sexual-abuse-allegations-extension-filing-allegations-california-law
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