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In this world, our daughters have no chance

By MELANIE HUBBARD
Published April 24, 2005

"I do not want to find what I am looking for."

That was going to be the first line of this piece, after I had walked the woods with the searchers, after I had searched my own soul for a response to the disappearance of 13-year-old Sarah Lunde. I know her mother as a cheery face at the local nursery; I buy flowers from her once a month. But just as I was putting on my woolen socks, my hiking boots, my husband came in with the news: A body had been found, almost certainly Sarah's.

I am not one of these people who hold out hope after the report of a missing girl. I am not ever thinking, "Oh, she's alive - desperate, traumatized beyond human comprehension, but alive." Or, "She's lost," "She's run away." No. But then I am not the mother. I am a mother, a fine distinction.

I am the finder in my household. When keys are missing, glasses, wallets - call me. I have a good sense of where I've seen things, where they were last, where they should be, where they would be if a certain rather quirky but predictable course of action had been taken. And so I find things, and when I do I feel brilliant, powerful; ah, so very right when all the world is wrong.

Psychics say that events leave traces, that the universe adjusts in subtle but detectable ways to every presence, every act. I believe it. I've read of human trackers, who perceive not only footprints but turned, bruised leaves, fire-warm earth, a flattened spot where someone has lain for a night. Plants twist and grow imperceptibly, and perhaps the very rocks do cry out. And so I thought I'd track.

Oedipus seeks the secret of his being, his origin in murder and incest, because his city is gripped with a pestilence. He is both brave and foolhardy, for he finally discovers the horror he himself is, and blinds his eyes. I have usually thought of the eye-blinding scene as a sort of self-punishment: You father-murderer, you motherf---, you must die or at least exile yourself from a common humanity. But blind Tiresias, the mysterious old man advising him, sees all. And so perhaps Oedipus' blindness becomes an inward sight to compensate for a denial so destructive it threatened the polis.

We are that polis, that city wracked with disease. My little town, Sarah Lunde's little town, harbors 24 registered sex offenders. How many does your town have?

I have a daughter. I do not take my eyes off her. Or, I do, very briefly. She may be in one part of the yard while I am in another, pulling weeds, cutting roses - and Mac, my husband, will come out and immediately demand, "Where is she?" Which is hypervigilant, yes. But he lost a son to an accident 30 years ago, and he recently lost that son's grown brother, unable to live, after all, without his little brother.

We lock the doors to our house so often, we lock each other out.

I did not attend the memorial service, though I am acquainted with Kelly May, the mother of Sarah Lunde. I didn't think I could stand to have God explained to me. I didn't think I could stand to let the momentousness of what has happened - to Sarah, but no less to Kelly - really hit me. Perhaps I wish to maintain a level of denial, or perhaps I have set a boundary that allows me to write, to sit and sort without dissolving into tears and rage. I did the tears and rage over Carlie Brucia; I did a holy dance for her and for myself one morning, damning the senselessness, connecting with her terror, the sear pain, and the numb shock, of her body being ripped apart. A friend of mine teaches at her school; we haven't discussed it.

The spectacle of Carlie's abduction, the surveillance video played over and over on TV, brought home how like pornography our national discourse is. We simply watch it. The loop is beyond fascinating; we cannot get enough. And the female victim never has a chance. Both the predator and the narratives of the news demand closure, climax: death. And so our girls grow into women under psychological siege. We are victims, we are prey.

I should take a self-defense class, but I can't quite bring myself to imagine the scene, to let abduction be a part of my reality. I used to box; I am physically aggressive; if anyone were to threaten my daughter I would not hesitate to kill him; and I would risk the consequences. So. A mother's rage.

Which is derived from the rage of an adolescent girl, growing up angry in a society as comfortable with Hooters as with the improbability of a female president. The perpetrators and potential perps in our society are not aberrations: They are expressions of the rule.

It says, fundamentally: It is terrible to be weak. It is terrible to be powerless, dependent, vulnerable. And then it labels those attributes "feminine." And then the society sets about to kill or oppress that which is feminine or weak within it. Children are the final frontier, and we are doing well at killing them.

They say girls die when they hit adolescence; they die inside, become depressed, and never fully recover. Somehow boys do not suffer in this way. Is it any wonder? The female tragedy has been going on for so long that there is a Greek myth to explain it, the story of Persephone, a vivacious young woman who is abducted by Hades, the god of the underworld, one day when she is out picking flowers.

Imagine the scene: fields of poppies, say, blood red, paper-thin, splotched with black in each center. Fields and fields of them. Persephone is alone, perfectly happy, and then the reality of her sex comes upon her: She is subject, she is overtaken, overwhelmed - sealed up in the underworld in a kind of tomb. Hades keeps her all winter while her mother, Demeter, goddess of the Earth's goodness, weeps over her and blights the flowers into the cold, hard ground. Hades and Demeter strike a deal: picture the adults haggling over the fate of a young woman, perhaps agreeing on a wedding price. Hades will allow Persephone to join her mother for half the year; then she must return.

We don't pay much attention to that myth anymore, perhaps because in this can-do culture, it offers no solutions. It simply explains what is. But the myth shows up in my dreams - that is, my nightmares - and it shows up in the nightmares of young women I know, college-age women who can admit and begin to come to terms with the truth.

We imagine our own abductions. A dark man enters the house, fiercely, swiftly, without mercy, like a natural force. He is rapist, he is death. His sex is a scythe, and we are culled. The "dark man," for the record, isn't black. In my case, he's usually a lanky, scruffy blond, the kind of day-worker you might find at a construction site: drifter, smoker, sweat-stained, dirt-stained. When someone is raping and killing you in your dreams, you can get a good look. He comes whenever I am about to do something extraordinarily good for myself.

- Melanie Hubbard, a professor of English and writing at the University of Tampa, writes frequently for Floridian.

[Last modified April 21, 2005, 09:15:04]