Three Hidden Boards comes from my own childhood experience. By comparison with the terrible sexual violence endured by so many girls and women, the incident might appear relatively insignificant. And therein lies something I find profoundly disturbing. Across cultures, generations, and social circumstances, girls learn to accommodate the inappropriate advances, insinuations, intrusions, and abuses of trust by men whose authority or affection they have been taught to accept. The more ordinary these encounters appear, the more easily their consequences are dismissed. Yet a seemingly minor trespass can enter the developing psyche, shaping a girl's relationship with her body, her instincts, her sense of safety, and her understanding of power long before she has language for what occurred.

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As a social researcher and through decades of private depth work with women, I encountered this pattern with remarkable consistency. In my own practice, I cannot recall a single woman whose life history, when explored, did not reveal some experience of inappropriate sexual attention or violated boundaries, frequently involving someone within the trusted circle of family or relationship. These histories emerged incidentally, through the ordinary exploration of a life, even when the women had come to work with me for entirely different reasons. I have often wondered what this tells us about the cultural inheritance of womanhood, and about the countless experiences that never acquire sufficient gravity to be recognized for the damage they leave behind.

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Watching the women who survived Jeffrey Epstein's exploitation come forward with such extraordinary courage brought my own long-buried memory into renewed consciousness, and eventually into this song. Their experiences were far more devastating than mine, yet I recognized something terribly familiar in the surrounding silence, the protection afforded power, and the astonishing burden placed upon women to establish that what happened to them deserves to be taken seriously. Even as survivors seek accountability, the institutions entrusted with protecting them continue to face questions about their failures. How many generations of women have carried the consequences of experiences that society found easier to minimize, excuse, or leave unexamined? And how much of that history continues to live, quietly and consequentially, within the women themselves?