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My Mother, The Wolf

The Establishment
The Establishment
Published in
7 min readMay 7, 2016

By Oriana Koren

Content warning: sexual violence

I.

May 18, 2011
There is a place, a room inside of my head where there is a strange and debilitating darkness. The darkness is consuming. It leaves me feeling lonely and sullen, separate from everyone else. Why does it exist? And what exactly is in there?

By the time I am three, I have already mastered dissociation. It’s easy as long as I can find an interesting spot on the ceiling to focus my eyes on, then as if by magic, I slip out of my body through the top of my head and watch how the sunlight makes the pink bathroom tiles glitter a bit. I see only what I want to see and in that moment, what I want to see is the sunlight dancing on the tiles, not my mother carefully studying, opening, and peeling through that part of my body I don’t have a word for yet.

By the time I am five, I get used to being on my back, in that way we talk about being on our backs as women — exploring sexuality, discovering pleasure — but I only vaguely understand what sex or “touching” is or that I have a say in who has access to my vagina. I understand clearly that what is happening makes me uncomfortable and confused. When I am on my back, half here, half floating away, I learn to believe that when a mommy is worried that someone has “touched” her daughter…

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The Establishment
The Establishment

Published in The Establishment

The archives of culture + politics site, The Establishment. Media funded and founded by women — Nikki Gloudeman, Kelley Calkins and Katie Tandy with Ijeoma Oluo, Ruchika Tulshyan and Jessica Sutherland. The conversation is much more interesting when everyone has a voice.

The Establishment
The Establishment

Written by The Establishment

The conversation is much more interesting when everyone has a voice. Media funded & run by women; new content daily.