You are the boss of your body.

Everything my 7 year old and her splinter taught me about consent and the cost of silence.

My youngest knows her No.

Last weekend, her pointer finger gathered a splinter, one of those microscopic shards that no middle-age eyes can see but that tested her patience with pain.

When she first showed me, I admit I didn’t do anything.

When my kids were smaller, I infused them with perky mottos I hoped would protect them against potential abuse. They loved me to read them My Body Belongs to Me and I smugly relished the idea that I was raising girls who would easily spot and deter predators.

But when my daughter was 2, I started to notice that this may have backfired when I chased my crusty-nailed toddler around the house with the nail clippers while she bellowed, eyes wide: “I THE BOSS TO MY BODY!”

So I’ve learned that the battle to remove a splinter is a worthless one. There is no match for my 7 year old’s determination. Much to her satisfaction, every past splinter has eventually found its own way out without aid.

But this time, after one day, she wakes up with a yellow pus-filled blister covering the tip of her finger, encasing the splinter – a small planet sprung from nothing overnight.

I immediately grab a safety pin and puff up with Serious Mom Voice: “We have to drain that.”

She looks stunned – whether it’s the sight of the pin or just her surprise that I’d dare test her resolve. “It just needs a poke,” I say, showing her on my own finger. “See? Easy.”

She grimaces and takes the pin herself, gives it about a 5% try, just grazing the edge of the bubble, then yowls with pain, “NO WAY. This HURTS. I am NOT doing that.”

I used to think I was good at learning things. Yet despite almost 11 years of parenting, I continue to make choices almost every day in some dim hope that things will go differently. That my steely Gemini with a will of titanium will choose today to adhere to my adult reasoning and manipulation.

So I drop into fierce battle with her for more than two days. We argue and shout and cry. I throw out every move I have to convince her to let me near her.

False promises: “It will hurt for a moment, then all the pain will stop.”

Fear-mongering: “If you don’t drain it, we’ll have to go to the doctor and they won’t be as nice as I am.”

Terror: “If it gets worse, we’ll have to go to the ER!”

My youngest babe gives no fucks.

Howl at the moon I’ll come find you.

It occurs to me that if we were living in pioneer times, she’d be the one to go out to the field and chop her own finger off, if only to save herself the pain of succumbing to the expectations of others.

I briefly contemplate popping the blister while she sleeps, then decide against when shining the flashlight in her face inevitably wakes her up.

I debate getting her dad to hold her down while I deliver a ninja sneak attack.

Mostly though, I spend these days trying to understand where I’ve gone wrong in parenthood. I hear my mom inside my head with one of her bewildered responses to my girls’ behavior, something like, “I would just never have allowed that.”

Somehow I’ve become a parent who allows defiance! Whose child won’t abide basic first-aid care, who will surely lose a finger and be unable to write properly as a result. Who will go septic because her mom wasn’t brave enough to pull the damn splinter out in the first place.

I’ve lost all control, hold no authority. I’ve failed the important task of instilling fear into this small person’s mind. I hold no power to silence dissent.

This is what my brain sounds like at 2am on day 3 of Splintergate.

The next day, the school nurse calls, mortified, gently chastising me: “This finger is really infected. Have you considered taking her to the doctor?”

I pick her up from school, she climbs into the car with a smile, holding her pointer away from her like a rotten fruit, delicately buckling herself in despite how much it hurts.

I let her know I’m really sorry it has to be this way. That I know it’s really going to hurt and be scary. She is unfazed, happy to leave school early for a quiet drive without her sister.

Her doctor looks quite shocked by the state of the finger but ultimately decides to do nothing other than prescribe antibiotics.

I blink for a moment, then ask again if she’s going to drain it. She shakes her head. “We’d need a few people to hold her down, which would be kind of…upsetting.”

She looks knowingly to me while my daughter buries her face in a book she’s already read three times. “Sure,” I reply, unclear what else I should say.

I realize with a sinking shame that I came here hoping that this is exactly what they’d do – administer a minor medical trauma on my behalf so I could leave the battle with my headstrong kid behind.

The story would be so much better that way. I wouldn’t be a miserable failure of a mom but actually a compassionate, sensitive one who didn’t want to cause pain for my child but trusted in the expertise of a professional to do so.

Not to mention, I’ve been holding medical intervention as a thinly veiled threat to my daughter for days now. With this kind gesture of trauma-informed care, the doctor has now effectively shown my ass.

My kid looks at me casually. “So, are we leaving now?”

I glower into my empty coffee mug and we head to the pharmacy.

The next morning, I watch in the bathroom doorway as my decisive, efficient 7 year old takes a pair of sewing scissors and diligently snips a hole in the blister. A revolting greenish outpouring leaks into the sink as she squeezes.

“Gross,” she says to herself, as though I’m not even there.

*

My No has been harder to find.

At my daughter’s age, I certainly had no access to it. Around then, I was sent to sleepaway camp for the first time. Unable to properly sunscreen myself, I burned beyond-lobster red and developed several giant blisters of my own across my back. I feel now for the poor teenage counselors who had to pin me down to my bunkbed and drain them while I wept.

But no questions were asked. Nothing explained. Whether it was spoken or not, no choice ever occurred to me.

My compliance was assumed in silence – by those who cared for me and by me.

In Girlhood,

Melissa Febos

names this force in the life of young girls explicitly:

The call is coming from inside the house. That is, patriarchal coercion is a ghost. A specter that possessed me as a girl and possesses me still, that squeezes a yes out of my mouth when my body says no.¹

This last week, as my small human met me unapologetically with her consistent and forceful No, I’ve been reviewing my own history of saying Yes against my body’s better judgment:

The yes to summer camp, to the blister intervention.

The yes to sleeping alone for years, petrified of people breaking into our apartment.

The yes to continue dance even after an instructor called me fat.

The yes of laughing at male attention that felt horrible, from such an early age it feels impossible to imagine how I learned it.

The yes to offers that were actually insistences on physical contact from men, the sex I made space for, knowing it’s easier (safer) to go along with it.

I’m aware these transgressions are in no way unique, that every woman I know has variations on this list, often much more brutal.

But there’s also vacuums of space I’ve allowed simply by staying silent – by going along with what’s expected. From fear of hurting or displeasing others, fear of shame, fear of no longer belonging to the pack. When I didn’t say: I disagree, I don’t want, I don’t like. When I didn’t say, No way. That HURTS. I’m not doing that.

It’s the many ways I’ve transgressed myself that seem the most damaging.

When I didn’t speak up for them as babies or small children. When I let them be uncomfortable so I could be more comfortable.

When I hid behind the safety of my whiteness, my resources, my straight-coded life.

When I shied from direct confrontation with conservative family members. Smiled and changed the subject. My people-pleasing WASPy conflict-avoidant parts leading the charge.

I’ve had to answer to my kids (who clearly do not have these parts) on this lately.

After the election, they both expressed shock and confusion to learn that relatives they adore voted for Trump.

“Why would they do that?”

“I can’t understand it,” I tell them, “and it’s really disappointing.”

“Are you so mad at them?”

“I am, but also I love them, and want to just enjoy my time with them while I can. So I try not to think about it.”

This got me remembering Audre Lorde’s essay, “The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action”:

And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger. But my daughter, when I told her of our topic and my difficulty with it, said, “Tell them about how you’re never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there’s always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don’t speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.”²

I have literally punched my own self in the mouth with my rage, which I see now was the part of me who had succumbed to silence. All the parts of me who were never heard because they did not speak.

They did not speak when my body was mishandled and neglected, when interrupted, when held down. They smiled when told to smile.

It’s not a silence so much as a silencedness.

It’s been fortuitous timing that I spent this past week with

Emily Van Duyne

’s brilliant book, Loving Sylvia Plath – a powerful reminder of what’s at stake.

Van Duyne unpacks the layers of cover-up that have gaslit Sylvia and the rest of us about her story for decades. In an exacting dissection, she presents the evidence of clear intimate partner violence in Plath’s marriage to Ted Hughes. The long history of erasure that followed her death at 30, despite the fame of her poems, many of which were screaming No.

I’m so grateful for this book. Yet I’ve also been heartbroken for Sylvia through this week of stand-off with my daughter. The grief almost maternal now that I’m closer to her mother’s age when she died than to her own.

It’s left an ache chest-deep in me to imagine the human who wrote these lines so entirely unprotected:

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.
Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.³

I can still hear Sylvia’s natural-born wildness, perpetually lit up inside her despite so much of her experience having been snuffed out. It’s a wildness that echoes some of what I see in my own little one.

I am inhabited by a cry.

*

When raising cycle breakers, be warned: It might work.

When I learned I would be a mom to two children born in female bodies, I was so excited. I imagined all the ways I could undo the generational cycles that made living in my own female body feel sometimes miserable. Maybe if I modeled something different for my girls, I could heal the harm done before me.

Be mine.

I envisioned genderless toys and clothing, celebrations of dessert and an embrace of bigger bodies, open and frequent discussions of sex, birth, consent, queerness, pleasure, body parts, menstrual cycles and more.

I’m pleased to report we do actually practice many of these things, sometimes to my kids’ horror and the discomfort of their dad.

But I realize now that I did not anticipate what it might feel like to actually raise a person who assumes full ownership of her body. A deeply feeling human who asks questions and makes demands.

Sitting in her doctor’s office, I don’t think about my early-parenthood intentions. I don’t think about all the times we read My Body Belongs to Me. It isn’t pride I feel at all.

Instead it’s a deep shame that I failed to control my child and a twin shame that I’d hoped a medical professional would do so on my behalf.

The doctor herself sees right through it, eyeing me with a look of near pity that seems to communicate something like, “Did you really think we were in the business of holding down little girls?”

What did I think happens to children who get held down anyway?

I try to imagine my youngest in some of the situations I’ve found myself in: flashed at the library, groped on the subway, pushed around by a boyfriend too drunk to know his own name, called bitch in a car that I had no way to exit.

It’s painful to imagine her in these scenarios, though I feel certain she would abide not a moment of that shit. I imagine her blowing the whole place up. Steadfast, unashamed refusal. Noncompliance as a baseline.

This strength, her willpower is unrelenting but I also understand it’s a precious, vulnerable fire that must be tended. My ability to stoke and protect it despite the ways that it burns me might just be my truest maternal mission.

These kids, my teachers. My tor-mentors.

Of course our standoff this week was practice for both of us in the many thousands of power struggles we will face together in our lives. I can see that now.

How the parts of me who are accustomed to silencedness are the parts who have been making parenthood quite difficult. The parts who still somehow believe I should control my child and how she behaves, that my failure to do so is somehow a failure of my parenting power.

Now, with the cool relief of knowing antibiotics are battling her infection, I put down the battle. I’m so relieved that she ultimately bested me. That she insisted and persevered – not to fight or be brave or to break cycles, but just because she knows she has that right.

A lesson I will learn from her perpetually.

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say?

1. Melissa Febos, Girlhood, 2022.

2. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, 2007.

3. Sylvia Plath, “Elm,” from Ariel: The Restored Edition, 2018.