We support your (lack of) choice… sort of.
When I was in high school, my aunt and cousin came to visit my nuclear family in Montana. As anyone who’s ever experienced a Flathead summer knows, there is no more fantastic a time and place in the world. We hiked, we swam in the lake, we ate ice cream and picked huckleberries. I got sunburned.
One afternoon, I was walking around with my cousin, an adorable toddler at the time, in a town next to mine. I remember walking down the block and worrying that I might have gotten swimmer’s itch, because my skin felt very tight and itchy. As we continued walking, I noticed several strangers staring at me from across the street — my skin was crawling, but it wasn’t from a rash. As a self-conscious teenager, I assumed something must be terribly wrong with my clothes: had my shorts ripped? was my bra showing? Did I have chocolate ice cream all over my face? I checked, finding my clothing was largely intact. So, I picked up the pace as we walked back towards our parents, trying to shrug off the feeling. A few minutes later, I noticed a woman gave me a nasty look as she passed us, just before we reached both of our mothers waiting at the car.
Later that evening, I sat in my room thinking about why people had been staring at me and my cousin. I always looked young for my age: perhaps someone thought I was too young to be babysitting? That couldn’t have been it; pairs of much younger kids regularly wandered around small towns back then. The more I thought about it, the more I failed to make heads or tails of what about me and my cousin caught so many people’s attention.
Eventually, another idea occurred to me. Could it be that people thought my cousin was my son? Were their dirty looks a sign that they disapproved of teenagers having children? This, from the valley where pro-adoption, anti-abortion advertisements cover the highway billboards? I paced my room, getting more and more angry the more I thought about all of the times I’d heard friends at school or strangers on the radio talking about all the options girls had in the event of an unplanned pregnancy. I remembered all of the talk of churches and families supporting the young women who chose to have those unplanned babies. I couldn’t square those sentiments with the looks I got that day.
The more I thought about it, though, the more I wondered if the looks I got were just about my age, or if they had something to do with my cousin being mixed-race. Western Montana is very, very white. So white that Richard Spencer, the guy who was leading the white supremacist rallies in DC days after the election, has recently enjoyed calling Whitefish his home (not that Whitefish has particularly enjoyed hosting Spencer, but that’s another story). So white that random strangers on the street thought it was acceptable to stare at me and my cousin as we walked down the street. Maybe it wasn’t meant to be rude; maybe it wasn’t about race at all. All I knew was that I’d walked down those streets alone dozens of times and never been stared at like that.
I tried to think of other reasons people might have stared at me, but anything other than my age or my cousin’s race didn’t seem like it would have caught multiple strangers’ attentions in that way. Either way, I felt physically ill. How did they know who I was, or how old I was, or whether or not this kid was my kid? And who were they to judge me even if they did know these things? I’d known for a long time that small town life could be hard for people who were different. What I hadn’t experienced was the judgement small-town strangers based only on the way a person looked, before those people knew anything at all about the person at hand.