A Memory I Need to Talk About
I get bogged down with other thoughts on my mind. These thoughts take up the majority of my waking hours and I don’t know why I think about them constantly. I have been thinking about this one memory since my dad has passed. I used to strip in my hometown of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. I had people come up to me to tell me that they heard from their grandmother. “Well, I didn’t see your grandma at the club,” I would tell them, and then I would laugh it off. Home was about twenty minutes outside of the city limits. It was a First Nations, so no cab company would pick up rides from the First Nations going into the city and they wouldn’t take rides back to the First Nations either.
I have hitchhiked before.
My father knew that I would do it again.
The first time I hitchhiked, it was dark, cold, and it might have been raining. I remember my parents came to look for me, but I hid in the ditch. I didn’t want to be found. When I was younger, I put my parents through a lot. But that night my dad drove me to work, and I think about this a lot, I think about how much he loved me. I don’t remember what we talked about or if we even talked at all. I remember him driving up to the club and I remember telling him thank you for the ride, Dad. Like always, I remember saying, “See you love you.”
And, you see, that is the thing about sex work in the north,
especially if you are an Indigenous woman.
There is a lot of unsafe ways to do it.
And sometimes those ways put Indigenous women at risk of going missing or murdered. But, also, there are safer ways to engage in sex work and sometimes that means relying on family for rides. And then there’s these dangerous narratives, and the laws supporting those narratives, that presume that an Indigenous woman, especially a young Indigenous woman, is being trafficked and is being trafficked by her family. If my dad had not driven me that night, I know that I would have opted for a more unsafe way to get to work. Who knows if I would have even made it work. And I have been thinking about this car ride.
I want to sit in the car with him one more time
and to tell him thank you for keeping me safe.