Everything Seemed Innocent

published October 24, 2025 in WestWord

In 1974 we served cheese-baked olives and parsley-stuffed mushrooms caps and poured carafes of Chablis as men brushed their hands against our thirteen-year-old bottoms and we smiled because our moms told us they didn’t mean any harm, it was just what happened to pretty girls like us.

In the summer we made halter tops out of bandanas and wore Dr. Scholl’s sandals and licked BombPops while our moms sat at the kitchen table, smoking and drinking coffee.

We curled our eyelashes, dabbed Clearasil on our t-zones and let our best friends show us how to insert tampons. At night we slow danced with pillows, certain we were boyfriend-ready. But French kissing was sloppy, and we didn’t count on holding our mouths open for that long, but the boys did it, so we did too. And it wasn’t just our tongues they wanted—their hands roamed over our 34A boobs and disappeared under the waists of our Calvin Klein jeans until we said no and they said why and we said just because and they smiled with those dimples and dreamy eyes and said But you’re so pretty and in a small voice we said, You really think so? and they said The prettiest, and then we let them, we didn’t know why, but we let them do what they wanted.

Before long we were in college where fraternity boys poured Everclear in their famous punch so that the freshman girls would pass out and the boys could rape them. We found boyfriends and stayed together too long because someone told us that we needed someone to hold us.

Later we got jobs and met for Happy Hours and complained about our bosses and talked about the summer days when we didn’t realize how great we had it because now we had kids and our husbands worked late and we laid awake at night worrying about strange men offering our kids candy or luring them into cars with the promise of puppies. We worried about other things, too like shootings and freak accidents and childhood cancer, and now that our daughters were old enough to date, we just knew that alcohol and unprotected sex would follow, all the things our parents said not to do yet we did anyway because we were young and free but now it was worse because fentanyl and Rufi which we didn’t have back in the day when everything seemed so innocent but wasn’t if we really thought about it.

And then the kids packed up their hoodies and cargo pants and baseball caps, all the items that had passed through our hands over the years—sweatpants and concert t-shirts and cropped tops that we’d stuffed into wash machines and pulled warm out of dryers. And we packed up the car and drove them to college, swallowing the lumps in our throats as we pulled them close and breathed in the last of their apple shampoo smell and counted the days until Thanksgiving when we’d fill the fridge and make their favorite foods. We didn’t need to, but we checked on them in the middle of the night, adjusted their blankets, kissed their foreheads. We wondered what kind of secrets they had and if they’d done things with boys that they regretted. Did they do it because they wanted to or because people told them to? We wondered if, somewhere in all this, we’d been good mothers.

And now it’s 2025 and the kids live far away but they visit often, and they cozy up to us on the couch where we nursed them and they help us with our computers and phones and they turn on the kettle and serve us tea and ginger snaps and sometimes we just sit, quiet, and they slip their adult hands in ours and kiss our wrinkled cheeks and we feel safe, we do, safer than we ever did.