I don’t. But I also don’t think “victim” adequately describes my experience. For what it’s worth, he didn’t break any laws (age of consent in Ohio is 16 — my mom looked into it). But claiming victimhood (I tried it on for awhile when I was working to make sense of it) didn’t give me any peace either. I had to reconcile the experience in a way that didn’t slot me (or him) in too limited ways. I didn’t get anything out of my self-examination until I recognized both my responsibility and his coercion. ”

EXACTLY.

Actually it bemuses me when people say that I am “just playing the victim,” because I’m at the point now where I try pretty hard not to do that. I don’t think the birth mother counselor who counseled me was evil–I think she was young and naive and truly trying to help, but was woefully misguided. I don’t think the Christian churches I was brought up in were promoting adoption as a win/win solution just to get more babies for the market–I think, again, they were naive and misguided.

Sometimes there just isn’t any black and white. Sometimes there is just light gray and dark gray. Sometimes there aren’t villians and protagonists–sometimes there’s just two (or several) flawed people coming together and bumping heads.

I wish more people could understand this. I don’t know why so many people have to stereotype everyone and everything they come into contact with.

Anyway, thank you for this post. It meant a lot. You clearly “get it.” And it was brave and very kind of you to take a risk posting about your own experience, just to show us first moms that you understand. Thank you.

You write so beautifully of something I call “sexual martyring.” I started an article about this many years ago and got stuck. Maybe we could finish it together.

Let me just say that I applaud your strength in writing this. Even open Liana made her post about her sexual past password protected because I didn’t want people I didn’t know judging me. It is also hard when people comment and say “I can’t relate to what you went through, but…” It makes one feel so isolated.

But I can say with utter sincerity that I understand your feelings. When we make decisions that were ultimately found to be bad ones, we have to learn to forgive ourselves for our folly and to not live in shame. However with the puritanical way people look at sex in this country, it is easy to get stuck in the dichotomy of clean/dirty that I wrote about in my blog entry called “On Being Clean.”

Sex is a complicated beastie. No one can fault us for not understanding all the rules when we began to play.

Peace.

I couldn’t read the link to Jenna’s it just comes up with a page that says “I Don’t Think So” …..don’t know what that’s all about but hey not everyone is going to be charmed by the delightful Kim.Kim.

If you get the chance please come and see all the glamorous photos of first mothers linked to my post about how first mothers are glamorous.

I love this post, not much seems to have changed for women, I think the fact that you write about these difficult issues helps more than you realize.

Namaste, dearest Dawn.

As someone who doesn’t ‘relate’ to this story in the sense of having had any type of similar experiences - thank you anyway. Because I was never even tempted to be sexually active as a teen, this mindset would never have occurred to me. And it makes so much sense (hell, it makes sense at 30 let alone 16), and now I can add it to the list of things I know I want to tell my (hypothetical) kids.