After a Public Shaming, Reclaiming My Dignity
Lisa T. McElroy is an associate professor of law at the Drexel University Thomas R. Kline School of Law.
She wrote this for The Washington Post.
Three weeks ago, when I sat my teenage daughters down to deliver the difficult news, I said, “Girls, I have to tell you something upsetting.”
My younger daughter’s face went still, and she took a deep breath. Then she asked the hard question.
“Mommy, are you sick?”
And in that moment, I knew I had to lie — not about being sick (thank goodness, I’m healthy as a horse) but about being okay.
Yes, announcing an imminent mastectomy would have been preferable to explaining what had happened to me.
“No, honey, I’m not sick,” I answered. “No, what I have to tell you isn’t nearly that bad.”
I answered her as her mother, as her protector for life. I wanted her to believe, to know, that public humiliation was not as bad as cancer. I needed her to feel that everything was going to be all right.
But it wasn’t until I began to write this essay, many days later, that I came to believe that what I told her was true. What I had to tell her about myself was not nearly as bad as a cancer diagnosis — and my chances of recovery? One hundred percent.
When a Web site broke the news on April 3 that, instead of posting an Internet link to an article about writing legal briefs, I had inadvertently sent my law school students a link to a porn site, I thought I could never recover. (And if you’re hoping to find out here how that happened, among the many possibilities that have been raised by gleeful commentators, I’m sorry to tell you you’re going to be disappointed.)
Even before the story hit the Web, I was in terrible shape; when I learned a few days earlier what I had done, I was mortified.
To read the rest, click here.
Photo Credit: Ryan McGuire (Creative Commons Zero)