You Should Smile More

Once when my daughter was seven we were walking to a nearby playground with one of her little friends. The girls were holding hands and skipping ahead of me, not too far, no more than twenty feet or so. They knew to stop at the corners and wait for me to catch up. Every so often they would run back to tell me something amazing — “Isn’t that incredible, Mommy? Can you even believe that?” — then they’d take off skipping again.

This was the era when my daughter was using air quotes incorrectly and I wasn’t stopping her because it cracked me up, every time. She’d come into the kitchen and tell me she was “hungry” — but she really was hungry. She’d draw pictures of us under rainbows, or riding on unicorns. She was writing letters to the Tooth Fairy, and wishing on stars.

I had a bag full of snacks and water, bandaids and alcohol wipes, sunscreen and an extra sweatshirt — the way you do when you’re the mother of kids — a blanket and a book in case I might end up with a little time to read while they played at the park. Doubtful, but I used to carry books around “just in case” all the time back then.

We turned the corner onto Main Street, the playground was just a couple of blocks ahead. City Hall was coming up on our right, we’d have to cross the street to get to the playground. There were two men standing by a tree near the crosswalk. I saw them see the girls. I saw one of them say something to the other, and watched them look around. I picked up my pace — I didn’t want to assume there was a problem, but my sensors were going off.

I was about fifteen feet away from the girls, thirty feet away from the men. The girls were between us, caught up in their own world, not skipping now, but talking intensely. I saw one of the men saunter toward the girls saying something, while the other one laughed — and I watched the girls come to a stop. My daughter looked over her shoulder for me in slow motion. I was running before I knew I was running.

I was yelling, too — HEY! GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM THEM! — those were the words that came thundering out of my mouth. I was surprised they were not riding on a blast of flames. I was surprised those men were not incinerated on the spot where they stood. The one guy just looked me up and down as I came to an enraged halt in front of the girls.

“Look at you. You are fine, baby,” he drawled, chuckling. “You should smile more.”

The girls understood this was serious. The other man had walked over and was standing a few feet away from his buddy, also amused. I had an arm up between the girls and these men, the way my grandmother did when I rode in the bucket seat of her car when I was little, and she’d have to stop short. As if the arm of someone who loves you can save you from danger, or from death. Maybe it can. The rage was so intense I felt I could have taken on both those bastards, right there in front of City Hall. “You’re sick,” I said quietly, “These girls are SEVEN. These are children. Go fuck yourself sideways.”

I heard my daughter make a little squeak, something that sounded like she was surprised I was using the forbidden F-word (twice), and also proud of me. Then I turned around, took the girls by the hands, tightly, and walked with them to the playground. They weren’t skipping anymore, they weren’t laughing, either, but they looked impressed. They were wide-eyed and staring at me like I had wings. I wished I did. I wished I could pick them up and fly them somewhere safe, but there’s nowhere safe for children in this world.

Just ask Deepak Chopra.

Here’s a tip for a lot of women — if you want to study The Divine Feminine, my advice would be to study with a woman. Otherwise you run the risk of learning that your job is to soften endlessly around the constructs that serve men — and any anger/concern/resentment/confusion/questioning you may experience around that idea — is an invitation to explore your resistance more deeply.

LO fucking L. Do you know how many straight, male “spiritual teachers” are trying to teach women to be grateful for the patriarchy? They’re saying “comply or die” but dressing it up in “love and light.” Why are you giving them your money? If you keep centering these men, they will keep teaching you to gaslight yourself, which is the opposite of healing. Do you do it because they have names like Deepak and Bikram and you assume they are bringing you ancient Eastern wisdom? If they are white men, do you do it because they are dripping in mala beads they bought off Amazon (the website, to be clear, not the rainforest)? Is it because they’re men and you feel men make better experts?

There are a lot of men who are more comfortable taking up space, that is true. There are a lot of men who do not spend a wild and incalculable amount of time — time they will never get back — agonizing over what to charge for their courses and workshops and retreats, because they don’t doubt the value of their contributions or hesitate to put a hefty price tag on their time, even if they are not particularly qualified to be teaching, preaching, proselytizing, etc, about whatever it is they’re selling.

They are products of the culture in which we all exist. You can feed that culture or starve it, but if you feed it, do not be surprised when your “spiritual teacher” sends emails to his pedo buddy saying, “The universe is a human construct. No such thing. Cute girls are aware when they make noises.” Don’t be surprised when you find out they’ve fleeced people out of their life savings. Don’t let it blow your house down when you find out the charismatic leader of a his own “brand” of yoga, the one who talked about alignment on the mat and off, has a whole secret life going on, and an inability to be accountable for the harm he’s caused, ahimsa be damned. Don’t be shocked when there are so many rape allegations and sexual harassment lawsuits they flee the country to avoid an arrest warrant and a $7 million judgement against them.

Do ask yourself why you would continue to study with people like that.

I’d give you all the SA warnings now, but we live in the timeline of the Epstein files. It seems survivors can share anything and no one really cares, except in Europe where they launch investigations and take legal action. There’s nothing I’m about to say that rises to the level of some of the things I’ve read in the last few days, but I am going to talk about my own experiences as a girl, a woman, and a survivor in this world. Please stop here if you need to, we all need to be gentle with ourselves right now (and always).

If you’re a man who is not a survivor of abuse, though, these are things you should know.

Photo by Robert Sachowski on Unsplash

The first time I saw a penis I was in Central Park. I was eight years old, I was sketching with my third grade class, off with my best friend because we’d found a pretty tree, and this man decided to show two little girls what an erect penis looks like, and what masturbation looks like, too. He laughed maniacally when we grabbed our sketchbooks and ran screaming for our teacher. I don’t know if they called our parents, but I can tell you there was no conversation about it after. It was just a thing that happened.

The second time I saw a penis it belonged to a man in a raincoat on a public bus. I was ten years old, on my way to school. He made eye contact with me, and then glanced down meaningfully, like we were sharing a secret. I looked down in his lap and didn’t understand what I was looking at — and then I did. But I didn’t understand why, and I still don’t. What kind of sick man gets off on showing his erection to a child?

The first time a man grabbed me I was thirteen, in a stairwell on my way to ballet. I had braces. My favorite color was purple. I drew horses in the margins of my notebook. I was a kid. He grabbed me from behind, put one hand over my mouth, the other between my legs while he shoved his hips into me and told me not to move, okay? I’m glad he asked because it snapped my brain out of freeze mode and brought me back to a place where there were options.

I bit his hand and elbowed him in the ribs and yelled NO as loudly as I could. No, I will not just stand here and let you do this to me. I sobbed and stared at him in horror as I crab-walked up the stairwell away from him as fast as I could, determined not to turn my back on him again. I watched him run down the stairs and out the door.

My mother didn’t come to the studio to get me when they called to tell her. These were just the kinds of things that happened in the world, there was nothing she could do to save me.

I am not going to talk about being assaulted when I was sixteen, though I could. I didn’t get away that time. I blamed myself because I drank too much. I blamed myself because my best friend said I was probably flirting. I blamed myself because I should have known better. I blamed myself because that’s what the culture taught me to do. He was a grown man. He got a sixteen-year-old drunk, on purpose. I said no. I begged. I fought. It didn’t matter. I’ve written about these things before.

I am going to say that children are not safe in this world, and they are made to know it quickly. I am going to say that when you have children in this world, all you want to do is keep them safe, unless there is something very, very wrong with you.

Here’s the other part. It isn’t just strangers, it’s your parents’ friends. It’s the husbands of the women who are best friends with your mother. The women who call themselves your aunt even though they aren’t. Their husbands show up at your house when you are home alone. The same husbands who laugh with your stepdad and have dinner at your dining room table regularly.

They pretend they’re looking for your mom. They might come in, or they might hover by the front door, making you feel uncomfortable for reasons you don’t understand. You think it’s you. Why are you so awkward? Why can’t you be normal? Then they lean in and kiss you on the mouth, and you’re twelve.

Or they get your phone number somehow, the phone that rings just in your room, and they call. They want to surprise your parents with something, and they’ll ask your opinion. Then they’ll ask how school is going. You’ve been trained to be polite, so you answer. Then they’ll share something weirdly personal and their voice will start to sound funny, and you’ll say you have to go. They’ll ask you to stay on the phone for just a few more minutes and you won’t know why until you’re older, and it suddenly occurs to you one day and you feel sick.

One night when you’re sixteen, a friend of your parents’ will offer to take you around a college town you’re interested in, a place you’ve applied to. You’ll think you’re safe but you’ll be wrong.

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One morning way back in 2012, when my son was six and my daughter was almost four — back when Barack Obama was president — I got a phone call. It was early, too early for calls, but it was the young woman (and by that I mean twenty-six, not twelve) who opened my yoga studio in the mornings. She was a friend, or so I thought at the time. It was just after 6am, but I was up, making pancakes. My kids were at the dining room table.

I picked up and put the phone on speaker so I could flip the pancakes that were flashing little air pockets at me.

“Everything okay?”

“Ummm, no,” she said, “There’s a mountain lion in the courtyard and the police are here and Fish and Game are on the way.”

I thought I’d heard her wrong or she was playing some kind of odd joke on me. My yoga studio was around the corner from the 3rd Street Promenade, a very busy, very populated part of Santa Monica. There were all kinds of restaurants and stores there, businesses on the surrounding blocks, and residential streets in every direction. A mountain lion in the courtyard was like a mountain lion in Times Square. It made no sense.

“Wait. What? A mountain lion, are you serious?”

She was serious. A mountain lion had come down from the Santa Monica Mountains during the night, undoubtedly looking for food. I canceled all the morning classes. After a while someone from the Santa Monica Police Department called to tell me what was happening. They’d closed the gates of the courtyard and set up a perimeter on 2nd Street. The Fire Department was there. Fish and Game were there. They were going to try to subdue the mountain lion by shooting it with a tranquilizer dart. I admit I wondered why they didn’t crush up some pills in a huge steak, but figured they possessed expertise I did not.

Apparently Fish and Game had been tracking the mountain lion population in Southern California for years, which included 275-square miles of range in the Santa Monica Mountains — an area hemmed in by freeways, the ocean, and agricultural land. That isn’t enough habitat for more than 10-15 mountain lions, so when young males grew into adults, they would often be challenged by another adult male in the area. Sometimes they’d make a run for it and end up dead, hit by a car on the freeway. Other times, apparently, they’d end up in the courtyard of my yoga studio.

I felt protective of this big cat. It didn’t seem coincidental that he’d walked into our particular courtyard — how could anything about this entire event feel like happenstance? Animals run on instinct, especially when they’re scared, and I wondered if he felt he might be safe there. It wasn’t his fault there wasn’t enough land for him, or enough food, it was our fault. He was probably a lot more freaked out to be in the courtyard than we were to have him there. I could almost see the scene. All the police, firemen, sirens. I wanted to go over, to see if I could help in some way, but I had my kids, and they weren’t letting anyone into or out of the area, anyway.

They shot the mountain lion with a tranquilizer dart, and he ran for the gate trying to escape, because of course he did. So then they shot him with bullets.

I don’t know why I want to tell you about this right now, except that it’s something to do with accountability or the absence of it. About “gurus” exchanging abhorrent emails with pedophiles because they think they’re above the rules, better than the rules, that their “genius” and their money and their status exempts them. Surely, the peons who study with them will never know. The young women who go to their trauma centers and fork over thousands of dollars to heal don’t run in these circles.

You know all the men who went to the island, and Epstein himself? I promise you they thought things like, these girls are being paid. They’d never get to see an island like this any other way. They’d never meet such powerful, interesting men. There are people in the comments under posts about the files today, saying things like that. Trying to litigate how old a child is. Asking where their parents were. Every survivor sees those comments. I would bet there are desperate kids out there right now, not reporting something because of people and comments like that.

These children saw things and were subjected to depravity no child should ever experience. They were prey, and I promise you these men did not think twice about it. I don’t understand it and I never will, but I know that it’s true. It’s the same thing that enables a man to flash a little girl at the park or on a bus, or rub up against her on a subway, or grab her thirteen-year-old self in a stairwell on her way to ballet class.

It’s the same mechanism that enables a man to drug and rape his wife for years on end, and invite 72 other men in the area to join him…and it’s the same mechanism that makes it possible for 72 other men to exist and say yes to that. Now think about a group of men with billions of dollars and ask yourself what they wouldn’t do if they could.

I don’t understand the desire to destroy someone or something beautiful, defenseless and innocent, but I suspect it comes from a deep, ugly self-loathing. Some sense that you can’t ever be that thing, but you can dominate it. It’s probably why these soulless excuses for men specifically hunt endangered species. They go through life doing whatever they want, knowing they won’t pay the price, because they make the rules.

There’s something about the mountain lion that has to do with the Trumps and Musks and Zucks and Thiels and Epsteins and Chopras and Gates and Bezos of the world taking so much more than they need — and when people start to notice — showing them who’s boss. Making them understand, laws be damned. I wish we could grasp that most of us are the mountain lion, trying to survive in impossible conditions. Trying to find a mate, maybe have a family, find some food and shelter.

It’s not a lot to hope for, but they want it all. No healthcare for us, none that’s affordable, but armed militia on the streets, making us listen if we dare to question their authority. Killing us if we think they don’t mean it.

So here we are, with our rage and our grief and our belief in something so much better than this. The fucking bitches who won’t stop caring. The protesters who won’t mind their own business. The survivors who won’t stop trying to get some justice.

The women who decide they’ve had enough and are done smiling on command.

It’s time to bare our teeth instead.

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