Anonymous

When I left the hospital the night that he was admitted, I sat in the parking lot gasping with big ugly sobs and looking for someone to blame — beginning with myself. I'm his mother, and I'm the only consistent parent he's ever had. As I finally made my way home, with tears streaming down my face and my mouth open in a silent scream of pain, all I could ask myself was "what have I done?" How could I have allowed my son to be hurt so deeply, and in so many ways?

I thought I knew everything I needed to know about personal style and fashion until I started teaching elementary school. I had more fashion lessons this year than a makeover-show contestant, courtesy of 6-year-old girls.

"The biggest boy assured me they would be. But the ball play got even more intense. Were they aiming the ball at my kids or was it just my imagination?"

I don't recall meeting my first love. It seems he was always with me.

For more than 20 years, I believed I was a slut. A shameful, vile, one-time slut, but a slut all the same. It was you, Mr White Canterbury shorts, that led me to believe this. But, since reading the letter from Brock Turner’s victim, I realized, what you did, Mr White Canterbury Shorts, was in fact rape.

Yelling. Throwing things. Name-calling. The only thing that holds me back from calling my teenager’s behavior abuse is that they are my child.

How is it possible to be an accidental fluffer on a porn set? The first time I realized I was a fluffer by default was during a gig at Adventure Studios.

I spent seventeen years in an abusive relationship. Not only do I the physical scars to prove it, I carefully tote a heavy heap of emotional scars. Humiliation, fear, and shame were poured into my heart for years, by a person that claimed to love me - my mother.

I remained silent, after I was sexually harassed at work. I was terrified if I spoke up I would lose my job for making a mountain out of a molehill.

All of the men I met were married, and wanted to stay married. They said they loved their wives, and most said they were happy; yet the sex at home had diminished and they were men after all and needed their desire fulfilled. Besides the eye-rolling common excuse for infidelity, I believed they were telling the truth about loving their wives.