by Patricia A. Gassaway

My daughter is a fierce warrior who fights professionally in Thailand. Recently I had a dream with images that seem to express the conflicting emotions I have about being the mother of a fighter like Sylvie.

Sylvie and I pull large cleavers down through slabs of blubber and beef that hang in a room. We slice off thin pieces that fold off the sides of our hands, then tear at the flesh with our teeth. My attention is caught by a bloody head hanging from a hook. Its skin is stripped off. I finally recognize it as the head of a killer whale. Its huge eye is watching me.

When she was 11, Sylvie read aloud to me one of her diary entries:

Death is not dying. Death is the ending of mortality. Death is your transportation into immortality. And transformation.

I was amazed and wrote it down so I would remember. That’s the same year that Sylvie was raped by three boys as she walked home from a friend’s house across town. She kept it a secret for eight years because, she told me, she wanted her life to be “normal,” which I take to mean that she didn’t want to be treated differently after it happened than how she was treated before it happened. I don’t know if hers was a wise decision, but it strikes me as fierce.

Sylvie was 19 when her father Steve and I found out about it. She used Steve’s computer to email a rape victim that she could survive because Sylvie had survived her rape. Discovering that Sylvie had been raped when she was 11 years old turned my life upside-down. It shook me to the core. It shredded my experience of the world, my personal history, my assumption that our family was close and we knew one another. Long afterwards, I remembered an incident when young Sylvie wouldn’t tell me why she was crying because, she said, it might make me think I was a bad mother. When I learned of her rape, I did think I was a bad mother—for not keeping her safe, for not intuiting that this had happened to her, for not noticing that her life had changed irrevocably when she was 11 years old.

After I learned she had been raped, every chance I had to be alone I would curl into a fetal position on the floor and sob. For me, it had just happened. For Sylvie, it was a thing of the past. She clearly didn’t want to talk about it.

The therapist I went to see told me Sylvie was amazingly resilient to have held that pain at such a young age, and for so long. He said she was emotionally and spiritually strong, and that her strength must have come from her family, which meant I was a good mother who had nurtured that in her. He said that she had kept the rape secret because she loved us and wanted to spare us the pain that she was enduring. He praised her for not hurting herself more than she had, with cuttings and small burns. He told me that Sylvie’s rape was not my story to tell—it was her story, and when she was ready to tell it, she would. The fact that her parents had found out accidentally did not mean we had the right to tell Sylvie’s brothers, or anyone else, for that matter. Of course, I had already shared my suffering with my best friends before I even saw the therapist.

Sylvie wrote about the rape on her blog many years later. That’s when her brothers learned of it, on a Thanksgiving Day not long ago. Sylvie had called to warn them ahead of time that her blog contained difficult material. They walked around tight-lipped that holiday. We still can’t talk about it.

Sylvie is who she is because of her experiences and how she has dealt with them. This is true for all of us. Had she not been raped, would she be a fighter? Had she not met Kevin at Sarah Lawrence College, would she be a fighter? Had she not had three older brothers, would she be a fighter? She has sparred verbally with friends, family, and even strangers since she was very young. Who Sylvie is seems intrinsically tied to testing herself constantly—physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually. Now she seeks to fight any opponent who believes herself a good match in the highly controlled environment of a ring. She’s fierce, but in a quiet way. Sylvie is a warrior, proving her courage again and again, honing the skill of physical and mental dominance over other warriors.

When Sylvie started training in Muay Thai, I wasn’t alarmed. I had taken karate as a young adult and knew the pleasure of a body moving in a martial art.

Steve and I flew to New York to watch her train and attended one of her earliest fights. I had scratched and bit other kids when I was really young, and my mother had slapped me across the face once when I was a child. But this wasn’t like that. It didn’t involve anger. Still, I felt anxious until the fight was over.

As Sylvie became more interested in fighting, I wondered why she wanted to hurt other people. I flinched whenever her kicks landed, and felt bad for the girls that she knocked out. She was becoming more aggressive, which I knew she needed to do if she was going to fight well, but it unnerved me to see her moving across the ring like a huge spider toward a younger girl. Then she started fighting opponents much bigger than she is. I began to fear for Sylvie’s safety.

Muay Thai is brutal. I hate to see my daughter get cut in a fight. When I watch a video where blood is streaming down her face and hear Sylvie and Kevin laugh as she walks towards the doctor for stitches, I feel like I’m watching a different species altogether. I move away from pain, but Sylvie moves into it. She says cheerfully, “Oh, yeah, that hurts,” as she shows her viewers how to push the blood out of a knot on her shin. For Sylvie and Kevin, it’s a sport, a game. I struggle to understand.

I know that human beings are violent and aggressive, that we’re animals. I wanted to kill those boys who had raped Sylvie, when I learned of it. I can see that Muay Thai explores that part of ourselves in a controlled environment. Sylvie, and others in martial arts, help us learn how to deal with aggression by asserting dominance where the rules are known and accepted—fighters train for confrontation, welcome it, embrace it. I have seen 150 of Sylvie’s fights and training videos, and I marvel at her analytical skills in breaking down technique into steps to be learned, her honesty about mistakes she’s made, her genuine respect for the champions and trainers who work with her, and for her opponents.

Her determination has led Sylvie to acquire skills that I appreciate when I see her in the ring. I admire her ability to learn Thai and speak it fluently, to navigate her way in a foreign country and culture. I even admire her insistence in carving out a place for herself (and all women) in a male-dominated sport. Sylvie and Kevin record the names and fight records of Thai women fighters so they are not lost in history. She gets respect because she’s earned it.

I’m her mother. Sylvie doesn’t like it when I worry about her. I’m not a big worrier, but it seems to me that every fight puts her in harm’s way. And she fights a lot.

Sylvie claims I don’t worry about her brothers when they do dangerous things, which isn’t true. Her oldest brother Gabriel is running the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in a few weeks, and I’ve declared myself officially worried about it. That means I realize he could be hurt, or even killed, so I take a deep breath and tell myself to accept whatever comes. That’s how I worry. I’m proud as hell of Gabe for doing what he loves, and I could bust a gut with pride (as my Kansas father might have said) over Sylvie doing what she loves.

I take more breaths when I contemplate Sylvie because she fights more often. I reserve the right to take those breaths.