When I was in junior high, the boys snapped our bras and commented on our bodies and made fun of the girl with the largest breasts, relentlessly. (I remember her with perfect clarity.)

We never said a word about any of it to teachers or parents or administration because it was simply “the way boys were.”

It never even crossed my mind to complain, though I hated it, and was terrified, and hated the feeling of their hands on my back, their fingers on my skin. I hated the humiliation and the feeling of wanting to protect myself but never knowing who and when the wrong boy would come around.

We pulled our shoulders in to hide. It didn’t work.

How many teachers saw it? How many didn’t care? Why wasn’t our humiliation enough?

At my job in high school as a busser, when the restaurant manager cornered me at 11pm against a wall and said, “There is one way you won’t get fired,” pressing his dick against my thigh, I shoved him as hard as I could and ran.

I reported him to the owners.

It didn’t happen again but the man was not fired, because men will be men, I guess, and “he had been there a really long time.”

I spoke to the other female employees and he had done it to all of them, too. They said, “You just have to avoid him, but don’t complain again. If you do, they’ll fire you.”

It was the way it was, again.

I learned how much I mattered, fast.

One night in my 20s I was sitting on a barstool when a man walked up to me and slid his hand up my skirt and between my legs but I didn’t say anything because boys will be boys and I believed my humiliation wasn’t enough.

To fight.

The night I was almost raped in the cellar of a bar I didn’t say anything either because boys are that way and I was drunk, you know, and I shouldn’t have believed the bar owner when he said he had something to show me, some fine wine, something – I should have known better.

A teacher in my daughter’s class was chatting with another teacher about a fifteen-year-old girl who got drunk at a party and was sexually assaulted and the teacher said, “Well you can’t fix stupid.”

My daughter is fifteen.

My daughter heard that.

You better believe that teacher will be handled. Nobody is going to snap my girl’s fucking bra, literally or figuratively, and SHE WILL SEE US CARE.

But it ain’t much in the larger cesspool of this nation right now, as hordes of white men systematically deconstruct women’s healthcare. Guess it makes sense though. I mean, given history, or the other day, when I was talking to a man about Trump’s pussy grabbing comment and the man said “it wasn’t enough to dismiss him entirely.”

Oh. How strange. I thought it would be.

I wonder why we’ve never been enough.

I wonder why the violation of our bodies has never mattered to the world enough to speak out against its objectification and use and destruction.

I wonder why a pussy-grabbing president is alright with us, even 53% of white women voters.

A majority.

I wonder when we, as women, started believing we weren’t enough either: to fight for, to protect.

And boys are “just that way.”

I wonder why we sit by and let this shit slide, why we all grew up getting our bras snapped and our tits groped and our pussies grabbed and aren’t setting this whole motherfucking place on fire.

We will never be enough for them.

We better become enough for ourselves.

We better raise daughters and sons who give one single fuck about the safety, dignity, power and value of a woman’s life, body, health, mind.

It won’t come to us from them. It will only come through us ONTO them.

But hey, you know, women are like that.

We keep fighting.

I’m tired today though. Words of my daughter sent me down my own little history of pussy-grabbing and I didn’t even tell it all, and I’m 38 years old in a nation that doesn’t think pussy-grabbing is a deal-breaker, and is enacting laws to prove it, and I have daughters who still aren’t enough.

But you know what?

At least she thought to complain, and at least I am willing to burn the motherfucker to the ground, even if my fire barely reaches beyond my fingers.

These are dark days for the likes of us, but keep going. I see you.

See me. See our daughters. See tomorrow, possibly in flames.

My youngest child will be three in June. He still sleeps in our bed. If you think my parental rights should be revoked or are going to comment about all the ways you successfully got YOUR sweet gem out of the bed, please send me an email and tell me everything in great detail, but be sure to do so with a tone of pretentious disdain for the likes of me. I swear I’ll read it.

I’ll read it with all my heart.

You can be very sure I will not delete it.

For the rest of us, the “co-sleepers” by choice or necessity or simply because we are losers, I’d like to share with you fifteen ways I’ve tried to get some personal space at night, because I think there are some really good ideas here.

1. We tried “deciding” not to have a fourth kid, but then we did, because newborn breath is intoxicating and we forgot they become toddlers.
2. Then we tried “sleep training,” but the sound of his crying was sad at the level of Goose dying in Top Gun, so we gave that shit up before any real effort.
3. We tried putting him in a bed near our bed but the child can walk, so he walks to the nightstand, scales it, and crawls between us, which he calls his “pot,” or, for the non-toddler world: “spot.”
4. About 10 times a night, I shove him as far as possible to the other side, against my husband, because then the toddler gets the physical closeness he craves while I get the NOBODY FUCKING TOUCHING ME which I crave, but as soon as I move him, he spins his legs out and sticks them on my chest, using my husband’s head as a pillow and my boobs as a footrest.
5. I’ve tried trying to convince the toddler to go sleep with his siblings in some other room, but he just looks at me and says, “No thanks, mama. I stay here with you.” And then I stare at him slack-jawed, because how could anything so adorable be so annoying?
6. I’ve tried creating the classic Wall of Pillows, but the toddler simply launches himself over the pillow wall back into his “pot,” which is zero centimeters from my body.
7. Sometimes I put a pillow over my head, thinking if I turn the room black and drown out the sound, I’ll forget there is a 30-pound sweating, snoring machine wedged against my shoulder blades, but the toddler seems to think this is a “hide and seek” game, so as soon as he sees this, he lifts one corner of the pillow, victoriously shouting BOO in my ear. And then he gets back into his pot.
8. I’ve tried sleeping in the other kids’ room but their beds are covered in stuffed animals and I’m 90% sure the sheets haven’t been changed in three years, since that is the exact amount of time it’s been since an actual kid has slept in those beds. (They prefer to sleep together in the living room or on our bedroom floor because apparently “co-sleeping” is a family disease.)
9. Since the actual pillow wall doesn’t work, I’ve created a psychological boundary made of wishful thinking and broken dreams. In short, I simply will him with all my might to get the hell on the other side of the bed. This does not work at all.
10. Whispering “holy fuck somebody help me” repeatedly. Nobody hears it, and nobody cares.
11. Announcing to my husband, “I am so glad we aren’t having any more kids.” This would be a lot more believable if I weren’t crying four hours later over a newborn onesie I found in the back of a dresser.
12. Declaring with great fervor and a very serious face: “For sure we are going to Ikea this weekend to let Arlo pick out some bedding for HIS bed, which will be on the floor no matter what by Sunday and he’ll never be in this bed again!” But then I forget Saturday morning or on Sunday evening he has a bath and is wearing flannel pajamas with purple dinosaurs on them and I think, “Oh my god you’re my last baby. I SHALL NEVER KICK YOU OUT.”
13. I’ve tried Zen-like full radical acceptance of the present moment.
14. But I can’t because the present moment sucks. A toddler just kicked me in my butt crack.
15. Pretending my co-sleeping is actually some sort of deep overarching parental philosophy when actually it’s just that I like my babies there more than I hate them there but also sometimes I hate them there with all my soul but am too lazy to change it and those sweaty little cuddly heads complicate the shit out of the whole thing.

In other words, I have no idea what I’m doing here.

If anyone needs more helpful parenting idea lists, just let me know. I’m here to serve.

Maybe next week I’ll do potty training. I have endless ideas that don’t work on that one either.

the sweaty toddler head in question

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