So thankful for my helicopter parents
This Thanksgiving, college students will return to their families for turkey and tiffs. They will finish the semester out of their childhood bedrooms, longing for the independence they had just weeks before. At 23, I’m no stranger to this angst. But this Thanksgiving, I’m grateful for the hovering of my helicopter parents.
Where I come from, it’s not unusual for girls to go missing. I was told over and over again that Sacramento was the second capital of sex trafficking.
They always said the word “capital.” Sacramento, the capital of California and the capital of sex trafficking, once removed. I remember hearing stories about teenage girls getting snatched from the Safeway or the shopping mall. Joan Didion and Greta Gerwig got out, but how many of our native daughters have been stolen?
Laci Peterson went missing in 2002 on Christmas Eve in Modesto. Laci went to college with Kristin Smart. Kristin went to a party one night in 1996, and never made it back to her dorm in San Luis Obispo. Kristin is not to be confused Elizabeth Smart, the most famous survivor of a kidnapping since Jaycee Lee Dugard.
Jaycee went missing in the county over from me in 1991. I would vacation in South Lake Tahoe, just south of where Phillip Garrido abducted her at 11 years old, as she walked to the school bus stop. I was born in 1997, the same year Jaycee delivered her second daughter in a shed.
During these years, my parents didn’t let me take the bus to school. They also didn’t tell me why.
To find the truth, I had to turn on the TV. I remember watching the search for Natalee Holloway. I would have been 8. She was 18, and on a trip celebrating her high school graduation. The fact that she was pretty and blonde is essential. To make the news, you have to be pretty and white and at least middle class. Natalee ticked all the boxes, and yet, her disappearance still received the Greek chorus of victim blaming we usually reserve for rape victims. I went off to college primed to channel the anger I felt on behalf of these victims.
In college at Sarah Lawrence, I took courses like Political Economy of Women, Slavery: A Literary History, and Body Politics. My junior year I was selected to be a visiting student at the University of Oxford. One of the dons there told me I have “a kind of cherchez la femme on the edge.” He loved that I was a feminist from America. I think he imagined me burning my bra in the streets. But I do not attend protests or rallies, I travel alone. This is a radical act.
As a daughter, it is also a selfish thing to do. My parents are horrified by the stranger in the street who calls me an expletive because I will not flirt, and again when a different man follows me home one night, screaming at me. Still, I am undeterred.
In Ireland, I go for a hike on a remote island. When I make it back to my hotel in Dublin, my room’s landline is already ringing. “Jamie, are you OK?” It’s my father. “Yes, I’m so sorry, my phone died.” “I have to call the police, they’re out looking for you.”
He hangs up, and my iPhone, now plugged in, begins to light up with text messages:
Are there other women around on the trail? Jamie, are you okay? Please text we are seriously considering calling the police.
JAMIE PLEASE CALL HOME WE ARE SO WORRIED WE LOVE YOU
When I get them back on the phone, my dad is crying with happy tears and so is my mom. She wants to send chocolates to the police, who held off on the search since I could theoretically still be on the trail. “He was so nice,” my mom says.
“I feel so bad thinking about all I put you through.”
“Are you kidding? This is the best day of my life ... If you were in America, they wouldn’t have even taken our calls yet.” That’s when I begin to sob. As much as it’s claustrophobic to have helicopter parents, what a gift to never go missing. It’s intense, their worry, but also nice to know that they could mobilize police from literally half a world away. I know now that if I go missing, someone will look. And not just my parents. Whether or not it’s fair, I’m white and I attended an elite college. I have so much privilege that my existence cannot be easily erased.
Two months after this happens, I will discover that I grew up exactly 9.4 miles away from the most notorious serial rapist in the history of California.
Joseph James DeAngelo was living in a tract style home in the next town over from me. When he was arrested, I wondered if we ever intersected. I have no idea what would have happened if our paths had crossed, but I’m so glad they didn’t.