daughter of the moon, a brave soul, a hunter, a wife, a mother, a writer, a woman.
Elizabeth She
We wore robes everywhere, and flowers in our hair. We made sand castles on Venice Beach. We painted our house bright orange and yellow and red and named it Rainbow Flower. Our bathroom featured a mural of giant mushrooms and fairies with glow-in-the-dark stars and a crescent moon. We skinny-dipped on Oregon beaches. We drank alcohol, smoked pot. My brother surfed before he could walk. And Jimi Hendrix played with agonizing consistency in our house, driving me to a seven-year-old’s distraction. I still can’t listen to ‘Foxy Lady’ without cringing. And the smell of marijuana makes me ill.
My mother was raised Catholic. When my parents divorced (I was six), she ran hell-bent for leather in the opposite direction. Suddenly realizing that being a good girl nets you nothing, she tried the other extreme: sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. My good little Catholic mom drank and fucked like a sailor. For her birthday, we made her a macrame bell system over her bed that she rang with her toe when she orgasmed.
Sexual innuendos came fast and furious in our house. The randier a joke, the funnier it was. No matter that neither my baby brother (six years younger) nor I knew what the hell we were laughing at. For my tenth birthday, my mom organized a striptease for me and my friends, with bawdy music from The Stingand racy nightgowns. I learned to masturbate with my Chatty Cathy. Sex is fun.
Sex is a game. Sex is sport.
The free love movement was a wonderful theory. My parents and their friends were reacting to war, to violence, to governmental betrayal. They wanted a better world, and thought free love was a way to achieve it. Make Love Not War. All You Need Is Love.
Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines free love as ‘sexual relations without any commitments by either partner.’ But let’s break it down.
Free. Definition number fifteen states: ‘open to all comers.’ Oh, yeah, baby. That was definitely how my parents’ circle of friends was operating in the sixties and seventies. The good dictionary goes on to say, ‘
Love. Definition number seven: ‘copulation.’ That’s it-no need to read further.
Free love meant sex, and lots of it. Free love meant you did it anywhere and everywhere to prove you were hip, unencumbered by society’s rules. Countering her strict religious upbringing, my mother was born again, as a twentieth-century fox. She slept with a fifteen-year-old, a twenty-year-old, a musician or three, a forty-year-old accountant. I heard her sexual ecstasies from my bedroom. The bells over her bed rang frequently.
I was a wild child of a newly minted wild child.
Hippies were outside of society, better than society. I still remember a family friend saying I was too good to like a certain black-humored movie. My mother chirped right up. ‘She’s not good. She’s bad.’ Good is bad and bad is good. No wonder I’m in therapy.
I have an immediate negative response to people who smoke pot and wear bell-bottoms. Unfortunately for me, my college campus is full of people who nostalgically look at the sixties as the pinnacle of our century. But they weren’t there. They weren’t even born. They didn’t see the day after the wild orgy, when my four-year-old brother wandered into the kitchen for a snack, and had to dodge the flying wine bottle my mother was throwing at her drummer boyfriend. Yeah, we were free. Free to fuck our siblings, or drink screwdrivers until we puked.
But not free to say no.
The free love movement, in practice, set me up for a lifetime of sexual, emotional and physical abuse. I learned that sex is a should. If someone wanted to sleep with me, I let him. It didn’t matter-never mattered-if I didn’t want to. Free only went one way. And love meant sex.
If you ask me, free love ain’t either. It’s not love, and it’s not free. I’ve been paying the price for thirty years.
When I was in the third grade, my babysitter ran away from home to live with us, staying more than a year. Several teenage boys started hanging around, and some girls, adding to the hormonal stew. We called them The Teenagers. Suddenly I had older siblings, and I loved it. I was free to act like a kid, not the responsible elder taking care of my mother. And my mom got to be even more of a wild child-experimental, free and easy. No worries.
One day my babysitter’s friend Ceoff said we should bond. He sliced my hand, then his, and smeared our blood together. I was nine. He was on acid. My new blood brother leered at me when his girlfriend left the room.
My mother’s brother also leered at me, as did a few of my father’s friends. There was nowhere, after I developed breasts, that I was safe.
My dad felt free to comment on strangers’ bodies-even those of twelve-year-olds. And I wonder why I’ve always hated mine?
What I learned as a child of the sixties-fuck everything that moves and let it fuck you-has definitely shaped my adulthood. Want to screw on the beach? Want to fuck under the desk at work? in the alley? on the side of the road? in the car driving eighty miles an hour?
Sure.
My function on earth, said society, said the hippies, said my mother, was to be fuckable. Extremely fuckable. Did I want sex? Who cares? Open your legs and let me in or I’ll call you a square, mainstream, conservative. God forbid.
My brother and I saw our mother say yes to everyone, so we learned to say yes to everyone, even strangers. When I was fourteen, I was molested by a talent agent. When my brother was twelve, he was molested by his best friend’s father.
Sex. Not simple, not easy, not free. And not love.
My mom routinely took us to the Fox Theatre to watch movies. We popped our own popcorn and smuggled in thermoses of Callo wine (unless we were boycotting). Once she dragged us to
My brother cried for a month with nightmares, and twenty years later, I still vividly remember those violent images. Some things are too graphic for kids to see, but we saw them, and later tried them, or at least consented to them.
It may be why, years later, I beg a boyfriend to whip me. And, more recently, why I throw up when a new friend wants to shop in a sex store.
No boundaries, no guidance, no protection. Nothing was sacred.
And yet, as a kid, everyone envied me my mother. She let me do anything I wanted. I could roam the streets after midnight on a school night, or fuck a classmate on an open field after a football game. All she wanted was the details, which she promptly passed on to her friends, along with the size of my brother’s dick.
My hippie mother even suggested people for me to sleep with, didn’t understand when I wouldn’t, especially if it was someone she wanted. She saw nothing wrong with the local mechanic taking pictures of me naked. After all, he took some of her.
Neither parent provided protection. I think my mom naively believed that all you do need is love, that love will
