My Story, Part VIX. Perhaps The End. For Now.

Okay. So I've written about the sort of family that abuse can take hold in. I've written about being abused. I've written about how it has affected me as a child, a teenager, an adult, a mother, with my children, with my husband (peripherally, at least) and with myself.
What's left?
Not much, I would think, except for the fact that it has and will affect everything in my life for the rest of my life and I know it. But I do know it. And because I had a wonderful therapist and spent years going to a 12-step survivor group and because I am a thinking person and because I have done a lot of reading (and I haven't mentioned it, but the book The Courage To Heal is a mighty work of help for anyone who was sexually abused and is also helpful for anyone who loves a person who was sexually abused), I think I can recognize when I am reacting blindly to a situation because of my abuse and when I am not.
Most of the time. Sometimes. Certainly not always.
My therapist pointed out to me once that the anger I was feeling in the days in which she was treating me probably wasn't anger at all. It was sadness and sorrow.
"How do you feel when you're angry?" she asked me.
"Powerful," I had to admit. Because I did. Even though I hated waking up filled with an unreasonable and horrible anger and even though I knew it was toxic and harmful not only to me but especially to my children and my husband, I still liked, on some level, feeling that power that anger gives you.
"And how do you feel when you're sad, when you're very, very sad?" she asked me.
"Weak. Terrible. Vulnerable."
She sat back and waited for me to figure it out.
"Your anger was important when you were young," she finally said. "It served a purpose. It did make you feel as if you had power. But now- you don't need that power. You're the adult. You can allow yourself to feel sad about what you went through. You can allow yourself to grieve over the losses you suffered through the abuse."
Wow, I thought. Wow.
And eventually, and slowly, as I integrated this information, this insight, the anger dissipated. To be followed, of course, by probably a year's worth of grieving, of sobbing and weeping and gnashing of teeth and yes, I probably rended a garment once or twice.
Phew. The hurricane of emotions which overtook me for those years was something else. I had to go through it all. The anger, yes, and the sorrow and the grief and the sense of loss and the realizations- all of it. I had to feel every bit of it. There was no stopping it. Once you get on that train, you can't jump off before you get to the station. And you also can't get out of baking cupcakes for the children's classes for Valentine's Day and you can't get out of cooking dinner or scrubbing toilets or giving birth or doing the million and one things that life requires you to do when your ticket's been punched for the journey of life.
So I did it. I somehow managed to do it all, the journey of the life I was currently living and the exploration journey of the life I had lived which had led me to the current journey and I will frankly say that:
(a) I don't think I did a very good job as a mother or wife during those years, and
(b) I can't go back and do it again.

I also can't go back and say "What if the abuse had never happened? What sort of person would I be?"
But being human, I do. I wonder about that. Not too much. It's a moot point but I really wish I knew which parts of me are there due to my own natural soup of genes and which are there because I was sexually abused as a child. Or hell, what sort of person would I be if my birth father hadn't been a drunk? If my mother's father hadn't made her so afraid to ask for help? If my mother hadn't suffered depression or had been able to get help for it?
You see, it all goes back and back and back and at this point, I'm not blaming. I'm just...wondering.
Who would I be if my parents had been healthy people who could have had some energy left over to offer their children more affection and more positive reinforcement? If I had had parents who showed love and affection to each other instead of poisoned, thinly veiled resentment and, oh well, I'll go ahead and say it- hatred for each other?
Who would I be if I hadn't spent time on my knees praying for release from the abuse with no answer?
Who would I be if I hadn't spent years and years and years quite literally in a state of fear?
That's the main question I ask because that seems to sum it all up.
Would I be the sort of person who believes in herself and the world and has a little more trust? Would I be able to experience joy and pleasure as a human birthright instead of immediately looking around to see what horror is about to befall me? Would I be able to go through life feeling less guilty and therefore far more productive and capable? Would I be less afraid of change? Would I be less apt to be self-loathing? Would I have wasted so much of my life suffering for no apparent reason other than the need to suffer? Would I be able to love and give of myself more freely?
Oh. On that one- YOU BET! And I know it and I hate the fact that my abuser robbed not me, but the ones I love of my ability to love as fully and openly as I would like to, as they deserve.
I hate him for that.

So have I ever confronted the man?
In my dreams, a million times. I tell him to get away from me! To not touch me!
Physically and in real life?
Not really.
One Friday night, back in the days when Mr. Moon and I went out every Friday night and one of my younger brothers was with us, he told me a story about something his father (my abuser) had done to him. I don't even remember what it was now. But it made me so horribly angry, so violently enraged that I got up, went to the owner of the restaurant where we were and asked him if I could use his phone in the office to make a long-distance call. This was in the days before cell phones. He said, "Sure," and with my brother behind me, I got the number from information of my stepfather (I hated even saying his name out loud) and I called him.
I gave him holy hell. I told him that what he had done to me had scarred me for life and that what he'd done to my brothers had scarred them for life and that he was evil and that if he ever touched another child (and this was way too late, but I said it anyway) I would find him and I would kill him.
He was confused. He first said he'd done nothing to any of us. Nothing.
Then, when I handed him examples on a flaming tray of silver, he said something which seemed to indicate that I'd never really minded what he'd done. That in fact, I'd probably enjoyed it.
My blood boils as I type this.
I remember when I talked to my therapist about confronting. She'd said that to her mind, it wasn't necessary. That when confronted, abusers typically at first denied and then did exactly what my stepfather had done to me- try to shift the blame to the victim and then claim they'd enjoyed it.
So I guess the man had gotten the Sexual Abuser's Handbook and had the responses memorized but I'm glad I did that, made that call on a Friday night. My brother appreciated it. I know he did.
And isn't it funny that I could never find the courage to confront on any level for myself, but I could, for my baby brother?
I'm not fooling myself. I did it for me, too. But my rage for my brother fueled my ability to do it.

And I guess that's all I have to say about the subject right now. Maybe I'll write more later. Maybe twenty minutes after I post this. Maybe not for a year. I don't know.
But I do know that everything I write about, every thing I think, every action I take, every choice I make, every dream I don't allow myself to have, every dream I do, is in some way related to the way I was raised up and treated as a child.

That's the bottom line.

I hate it when people say to me, either right out loud, or as an inferred statement, that it's time I "got over it." That what happened to me has happened to so many. And so many have gone through much worse! And forgiven their parents! Their abusers! And have lived happy, normal lives.
I want to scratch their eyeballs out. I want to say, WELL GOOD FOR THEM! I want to ask them what they're hiding. Why they're defending my abuser. Were they abused and are they refusing to admit it? Or did they abuse someone?
I don't want to go through life crying poor, poor me. But I refuse to pretend that nothing ever happened to me or that if it did, it didn't affect me or even if it did affect me, it happened so long ago that really, I should let it all go.

I look at it like this: If you starve a child, quite literally starve her when she's very, very young and in the process of growing brain cells and bones and teeth, she will not develop as she should. She may grow up and she may even look normal when she begins to get proper nutrition. But that brain, those bones, those teeth- they'll never be as strong and healthy as they should have been. Never.
And children who were abused were starved of their rights to grow up without fear, without shame, without help, without hope, without joy, without knowing in their souls that love can be healthy and sane and good.
And even when they grow up and move out they will never have the true and real basis to recover all of these things.

I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm just a bitter and unloving person and I would be, no matter how I was raised.
But I don't think so.
I think at heart, my heart is good. I think I have talents, I think I have a wicked sense of humor, and I think that I have even taken the skills and defenses that I needed to survive as a child and have been able to use some of them in productive and healthy ways. I think I have a genetic predisposition to depression that would be here even if I had never been abused or if my father had been a healthy part of my life. I think I have a wonderful, amazing life. I think I somehow managed to raise four kids who are the most incredible human beings I have the honor to know. I think I have, by some miracle, been blessed to have been loved by this man I call my husband who has stood by me through so much shit, offering his hand, his heart, his steadfastness.

I think I am luckier than most.

And what I want to say is that if one person who has read this has recognized parts of his or her own story and who can think to him or herself, "Oh. Maybe that's why," gets help then it will have been worth the weird pain I've experienced, going back to search my memory to tell it.
And if one person reads it and wonders if a child he or she knows is going through what I went through and does something to stop an abuser, to protect a child, then it will have been so much more than worth it.

Childhood sexual abuse was a hot, hot topic years ago. Oprah talked about. Roseanne talked about it. It got a lot of attention and there was a lot of light shone on the subject.
And then the next celebrity cause came about and it dropped off the radar again and people stopped talking about it.
But you know what didn't stop?
The sexual abuse of children.
That did not stop. Believe me.
And I don't know if it ever will. But the more people know about the subject, the more people can recognize the symptoms of its happening.
So here I am, saying this is how it happened to me.
Pay attention. Not just in your own family, but in the families of people you might know. Neighbors, relatives, that weird little kid down the block who can never look you in the eyes.
Please.
And if it happened to you, know that it wasn't your fault. It isn't your shame. And that if your abuser is still alive, he's probably still abusing and to not speak up is allowing him to do to other kids what he did to you.

Now. Thank you to every one who listened to this story. Who took the time to read it. Who thought about it. Who commented on it or didn't.
Thank you to my friends who have known my story but not in such detail, who have held me up when I was drowning, who have made me laugh when I was sorrowful, who have listened when they probably did not want to listen.
And mostly thank you to my husband and my children who have allowed this crippled woman to try and find her feet, her heart, and who have had to suffer through this awful journey with me and who still love me.
I beg their forgiveness for whatever mistakes I've made (and do still make), whether due to the fact I was abused or just the fact that I didn't give them what they needed through selfishness or blindness.
I thank my children for the healing they have given me in so many ways I couldn't begin to tell them but which started from the moments of their conceptions.
And I thank my husband who has put up with more shit than any one man should be expected to, who has definitely listened when he had heard it all before again and again and again and who has taken the punishment he did not deserve and who still claims to love me and shows that he does, every day.
I owe so much to so many and I honestly doubt I would be here without them.

All right. I'm not accepting an academy award and I'm not even finishing up a book. But acknowledgments must be made.
And now it's time to move on and do the best I can with who I am and try, each day to remember love and compassion and to pick up the trash and to cook the greens and to grow the tomatoes and to get ready for the grandbaby and get back to work on a book and well, just to be me.

And to write about it all. Every glorious, boring, amazing, prosaic, strange, lovely and plain day of it.

Thanks for listening.