My Teenaged Daughter is Out All Night

“You gotta be careful. This ain’t Disneyland around here. There are some bad people who are just looking for a pretty little girl like you.”

I am startled by the words of a middle-aged portly man that seems to have appeared out of nowhere. A man at a gas station who has approached my car and could be one of the “bad people” he is trying to warn me about for all I know.

I am not a little girl. I am a twenty-four-year-old woman who has just fled her home and family, leaving behind everything she has ever known, to escape from an abusive marriage. I know about bad people, my husband is one of them.

I know what it is like to spend every day walking on eggshells so as not to disrupt the ticking time bomb who sits sullenly in front of a blaring television screen. I know what it is like to be afraid to talk about your day, to be afraid to let your husband know that you spoke to other people, that you had lunch with a friend, that you did anything that was not expressly tied to your relationship with him.

I know what it is like to hide in a closet knowing that he will eventually find you in your tiny apartment and when he does the punishment will be worse because you resisted. I know what it is like to have a gun held to your temple while he asks you to promise that you will never leave. Because if you leave he will be forced to kill you. But you know if you stay he will also kill you. There is no winning in this game.

So when this stranger approaches my car and tells me how bad the world can be and how much danger I am in, I want to scream in his face that I already fucking know! I want to tell him that the worst fear I have ever felt was in my own home, so forgive me if I am not acting appropriately timid and frightened at the prospect of moving to the Sunshine State. I want to tell him to fuck off before I punch him in the face. But instead, I thank him and climb back in my car fuming all the while.

Last week my seventeen-year-old daughter took a job at a pizza parlor. I assumed she’d be working the counter taking orders and answering the phone or maybe making pizzas. I assumed that her hours would last until maybe ten o’clock at night. I was dead wrong.

My daughter came home to tell me that she was working third shift. That they really needed people to work from 10:00 p.m. until 5:00 a.m. This was just during the summer while they were really busy, just until school started again.

I am not happy about her news, but I know that she wants the job. I know that she needs to pay for her car expenses and insurance, I know that she is tired of the non-structure of her last few months due to the pandemic and being out of school. I tell her that I will have to think about it.

I don’t want her out that late. I don’t want to spend my nights worrying that the pizza parlor will be robbed at three in the morning and that my daughter will be held at gunpoint. Then she drops the real bomb. She won’t be working the counter all the time. They need delivery drivers and she wants to be one. The drivers are the ones who make the real money. The difference in pay is huge. Counter help makes $8.00/hr while delivery drivers make $15-$20 per hour depending on tips, not counting the reimbursement for their gas.

I thought about telling my daughter that she absolutely could not take the job. Then I thought about why I didn’t want her to take the job. I didn’t want her going to strangers’ houses at night. I didn’t like not knowing exactly where she was at all times. I didn’t want her to have a car emergency and not know what to do. I didn’t want her exposed to people who were drunk or partying or doing drugs (who else orders pizza at 3:00 a.m.?). I feared for her safety. Then I asked myself a more important question.

Would I let her do this if she were a boy? If I had a son instead of a daughter, would I let him take the job?

I knew that the answer was yes. I knew that the only reason I hesitated was that my daughter was female. I know firsthand how dangerous the world is for girls and women, and I know that fear is what keeps so many of us stuck in situations that we had rather leave. Fear keeps us in jobs that pay too little. Fear keeps us in relationships that don’t work. Fear keeps us in line, keeps us timid, keeps us from speaking out against those who create and support the systems that endanger us in the first place. And I know that most of the time that fear is unwarranted. I know that women are killed more often by domestic violence than at the hands of a stranger.

I also know that 100% of the delivery drivers at my daughter’s new place of employment are teenage boys. The boys are making over twice as much as their female counterparts at the pizza parlor because their parents aren’t afraid to let them do deliveries. The fear of “bad men” is already hurting the earning potential of these female employees as early as high school.

If I didn’t let my daughter take a job she clearly wanted and was well qualified for because she was born female (something she has zero control over), would she internalize that message and take it forward into future jobs? Would she start to believe that she shouldn’t try for the riskier or more difficult jobs in life even when they paid more or were more to her liking because the field happened to be dominated by men?

Most importantly, did I want to teach my daughter that because she is female, she will always have to live in fear of men?

In the end, I accepted her decision to take the job and I helped her prepare for risky situations. We talked through potential scenarios and how to react. We talked about the safety precautions her workplace practices and how important it is for her to follow the guidelines. We talked about the fact that someone may use a pizza delivery to lure her to their home and how to recognize when something doesn’t seem right. I told her to use her intuition and get out of situations that made her gut clench. I told her she could always call me no matter the time of night and she never had to deliver a pizza to a person that made her uncomfortable.

I bought her a safety kit for her car. I bought her a spray bottle of mace. She makes sure that her phone is well-charged and that she has plenty of gas before going to work. When she gets home from work, she shares with me the details of the difficult deliveries and I am always listening for clues that she is being careful, that she isn’t taking unnecessary risks.

I know that being female in this world will always be risky, and there is little I can do about that fact. But I refuse to send my daughter the message that this is her fault. I refuse to tell her that she should accept half the pay at her job in order to stay safe, because honestly, there is no way for a woman or anyone else to remain completely safe. I refuse to make the actions of “bad people” the responsibility of my daughter.

I want my daughter to be prepared for the adult world she will enter in less than a year. I want her to learn how to keep herself safe and to have confidence that she can care for herself. I want her to dream fearlessly and take chances and be her whole and true self. I want to her love her femaleness and not think of it as a burden. I want her to embrace life with an open heart, an open mind, and a willing spirit. But I want all of this to come from a place of experience and knowledge, not a place of naivete.

My daughter is strong, determined, and smart. I am proud of her spunk. I am proud that she believes in herself. I am fearful every single night when she goes to work, but that is my problem, not hers. If we are ever to loosen the grip that patriarchy has on our country, we first have to wrestle with our own fears and beliefs and not pass those on to our daughters.