Childhood Sexual Abuse. My Story, Part I. The Ground is Prepared

Several of the blogs I read have dealt with sexual abuse lately and I feel the pain of the writers of these posts. I'm not saying that in a Bill Clinton type of way. I'm saying it in a I know exactly how you feel way. Because I was sexually abused as a child too.

It's not hard for me to say the words, "I was sexually abused as a child." It used to be, a long, long time ago. But when my oldest child turned the age I had been when my abuse started, I freaked and found myself desperate for help and I went to a sexual abuse survivor's group mostly to find out who the best therapist in town was to go to for that help and between the group and the therapist I learned one thing above all others: the abuse had not been my fault and therefore, there was no shame in talking about it. No shame for me, anyway.

And I think the time has come now to talk about it here. To shed some light on some of the reasons I am the way I am. Not so that I may be known better but because I know there are so many people who were sexually abused as children who go through life trying to deal with their own pain and they feel so alone. And many of the people who were abused, even though they get help, may not be in a place yet where they can see that there is a future which won't be so scarred by that abuse that it sometimes seems as if there is no reason to keep on trying to get better when the healing comes with so much pain. Because we all, no matter what form our abuse came in, whether our abuser was one or many, a male or a female, whether we remember every detail or merely the blurriest outlines, deal with the same issues.

And I want to shed some light on the darkness of this subject. I want to discuss it from the perspective of my experience and my life because that is the perspective I have. The lens through which I view it, as I say. I have heard enough of other survivors' stories, though, to know that we all have the same story when you get down to the bottom of it. And so mine is as valid as any and now I'm going to write about it.

I think this is going to take several posts. I am going to use the male pronoun when I discuss abusers in general although some of the people who sexually abuse children are women. My abuser was male and the majority are, so it will make it easier for me to say "he" and "his" but the facts do not change if an abuser was female.
I may go back and edit as I write more because another thing I have discovered is that there is no end to the layers of the foul onion of sexual abuse and the effect it has on a child. No end at all.

In fact, there can be no definitive beginning, either. Because there has to be fertile ground for a sexual predator to be able to plant his evil. A perfectly healthy child in a perfectly healthy family is far less at risk (although never is there a time or place when a sexual predator cannot figure out a way to get what he or she wants) than a child in a situation where, almost like fate, a series of events have made the way smooth for abuse. Events that may have occurred long before he came into the picture, and so it was with me.

My father was a very seriously practicing alcoholic. That, of course, is an entire other story and this is not the time I will be telling it. But he's part of the abuse because the way he drank and the way he became when he was drunk caused my mother to have to leave him when I was five. And she took me and my little brother, who was just-turned-three to Roseland, Florida where my grandparents lived because she had no other place to go.
And with the help of our grandparents who first took us into their home and then built us a house of our own, we started a new life in that tiny village. And although we were far away and safe at last from my father's rages and violence, his drunkeness and his gun, I, as a little girl, missed my daddy. Like a dog who always comes back to the owner who beats him, I missed my daddy, plain and simple. He had been the only daddy I ever had and I loved him. I knew he wasn't right, I knew there were secrets in our house when we lived in a suburb of Chattanooga that even as a tiny child I had to protect. But still. The fact remains, I missed him horribly and with a soul-wrenching sorrow that was my companion every moment of every day and night.

And no one talked about him in my presence. In those days, that's the way it was. It was as if he had never existed. And I somehow knew not to bring him up to my mother (perhaps the fact that she burned her wedding gown gave me some instruction in this matter) but I went around with a huge hole inside of me where a father should have been. In the early sixties, divorce was still uncommon and every little girl had a daddy but me. Or so it seemed. Even the poor fishermen's kids had a daddy. He might get drunk and chase their mama around the kitchen table with a knife on Friday night, but he was there on Friday night, in the kitchen, in their lives. Not saying I wanted a daddy like that, I'm just saying that divorce was uncommon and fatherless children were definitely in the minority. I felt somehow shamed by the fact that I had no father. It was only one of the many things which made me feel different from everyone else, but it was a big thing.

Okay. I'm skipping about ten thousand of the layers of this onion because this is a blog, not a book. But I'm trying to hit the highpoints, not get bogged down into the the details of the thises nd thatses. But yes, I missed my daddy. I wanted a man in our lives who would be like a daddy. I had my grandfather, but as I have said, he was far from affectionate. I knew he loved me, but he was cold. He was distant. He was easily critical. He was not that man whom you knew would love you forever and ever, the one who would look at you and see only the best of you. He was, in short, not a daddy.

My mother got a job teaching school, she found friends, she took care of my brother and me. And for awhile, things seemed if not perfect, at least okay. I had a rough time in school, though. My mother was a teacher there and not a popular one. I loved reading. I was fat. I was weird. I was teacher's pet. I wore glasses. But I had a few friends and I loved Roseland with its river and woods and trees to climb and dirt roads to play marbles in.

My mother went back to school in the summers in Gainesville to work on a degree in education and my grandparents took care of my brother and me. Having already suffered the abandonment of my father, my mother being gone for eight weeks in the summers was, for lack of a better word, torture. She was my safety, my heart and my home. I feared her leaving us more than anything in the world and although I knew she would come back, her time away seemed endless. I began to eat more than ever, seeking comfort from food. I began sleepwalking. I developed a cough which lingered for months. In short, I was not an emotionally healthy child. I was lonely, I feared abandoment, and I was scared a lot of the time.

And then my mother met a man in Gainesville at the university. She came home, talking about him, and I don't remember when I met him first, but I know I fell in love with him when I did. She'd dated other men, but I hadn't especially liked any of them. This man, though, was different. He was gentle-voiced and he was handsome. He was shy and yet funny. He'd never been married but he seemed to really like children. He was smart and he made my mother happy. I had been trying, ever since she left my father, to make her happy because if she was happy, things were better at our house, she was more loving, less tense. She was prone to depression. I know this now. But when she met C., she began to bloom and when he was around, she was funny and attentive and we all breathed easier and their relationship developed. He would come and visit and he treated my brother and me so well. He took us on boat rides, we all went to the beach, like a family would, and things seemed...oh...so normal. So right. I was so happy to set the table for dinner with four place mats instead of only three. The balance was made proper when he was there. A Mommy Woman, A Father Man, A little girl, a little boy.

He and my mother continued to spend time with each other. He lived several hours away, but would come visit almost every weekend. And then Christmas rolled around, he came and showered us with gifts, and then he disappeared.
My mother, when it became all-too apparent that he wasn't going to show up again, grew depressed with a more persistent and darker suffering than I had ever seen in her and darkness enclosed us all. She would lock herself into her room after school and weep and scream and threaten to kill herself and I would hold my brother outside her door and we had no idea what to do.

(And as a sidenote- I just spoke to this brother today and he declared again, as he always has, that he has no memory of this and that our mother was NOT depressed although the fact that he has been married to a woman who has suffered from suicidal depression for many years he attributes to his loyalty and love for her and thinks it has nothing to do with our mother or his childhood.)

I learned to cook a little, to be able to make our suppers because my mother had no hunger for food and no inclination to cook it. I became, in fact, the little mother, the little caretaker and while other girls were playing with their Easy Bake ovens, I was learning to make actual meals.

I'm skipping so much here. It was just the darkest time. I was probably eight by then and to make matters worse, I was actually in my mother's third grade class. The school in our area was so small that there was no other option but for me to be in her classroom. So I was with her all the time. She managed to get to work every day but she was not, to put it bluntly, a good teacher then. She was so angry. She paddled the "bad" students and this was common in those days but I don't recall any of my other teachers using the paddle nearly as frequently as she did. And it doesn't seem quite right to write about my mother in this way, even now, forty-five or so years later. But I am speaking the truth as I know it and I also know that she was suffering from the disease of depression and in that light, I do not judge her harshly. And in her defense, I will say that the boy she paddled most often is one she actually had a very deep affection for. When his own mother kicked him out of the house at the tender age of nine because he'd been skunk-sprayed, my mother made sure he had access to soap and water, had food and clothing.

Anyway, the depression continued and I had nowhere to turn to for help. I thought about talking to someone but who? My grandfather? Unthinkable. And besides, surely he noticed and yet did nothing. Her friends? I was eight years old. I look back and when I think of myself in those days, I think of a small, worried child who had the problems of a grown-up with no resources at all. The person who was supposed to be there to help me was the person whose troubles were the cause of my pain.

And then school ended for the year and she went back to Gainesville and there she got back with C. and it seemed that everything would be well. Suddenly, the whole relationship was back on again he was there every weekend to visit. He never stayed at our house (how strange- it was perfectly acceptable to beat children in school but definitely not okay to let your boyfriend spend the night- take it from me- some things HAVE changed for the better) but would stay in a motel in Sebastian. My little brother and I would actually walk about half a mile down the road to meet him when we knew it was time for him to show up on Sunday mornings. We loved this man. He seemed like the answer to our dreams. He acted like a father and he was handsome and tall and funny and he treated us so nicely. And above all, again I have to say- he made our mother happy.

I think my mother had to push him to the altar, but push him she did. They got married in our tiny Roseland Gardens Community church with no one there but the minister, his wife (a good friend of my mother's and the best teacher I ever had in my life), my brother and me. That was it. I don't remember much of the wedding itself but I do remember that C. showed up late for the service and I'm sure Mother was afraid he was going to take another run for it. I don't have a good feeling when I think about that wedding. I don't know why. It was what I wanted more than anything in the world. I wanted this man to be my father. I wanted that with all my heart.