I have spoken before of my unanswered childhood prayers for rescue from the sexual, verbal, and physical abuse of my early years. I believed completely in Jesus love for his little children. And when I would look around at the horizon after my prayers I fully expected to see someone, sent by Jesus, come to rescue me.

When no one came, I did not stop believing in God. I stopped believing in me. Just as my parents rejected me and each brother in turn had used me and walked away, God and Jesus rejected me. I was not a “good” girl. I was tainted, soiled, unlovable, unworthy of the time and effort it took to save me. At eleven years old when menstruations began, I believed that god was killing me. For several days I walked around thinking I was dying because I was such a wicked girl. With 12 older sisters I had no idea it was a natural process of growing up.

I stopped praying for a savior. I was alone and would have to fight for myself. I was more terrified of my parents because of having to witness savage beatings of older siblings than I was of the abusers. I learned to watch my back. I also learned to people please and be who anyone wanted me to be to get along, to be loved.

After my father tried to join the parade of male abusers when I was 16 and he was 70, I dropped out of school and ran away to be married in order to escape not only him, but another brother who had just attacked his fifth sister and would no doubt be at my door next. I knew there was no one to protect me, especially not Jesus. He already knew all my dirty secrets.

But the boy I left home with, who had been my childhood sweetheart did not love me either. He abandoned me and our children over and over and over. Did I learn to leave him. No, I learned again that I was not lovable, and filled with so many dirty secrets, I never dared to tell, I lived as two people, the good girl and the bad girl. The torment was impossible to live with, but it was all I had.

I began to pray again. I picked up my Bible and began to read from cover to cover (I skipped a couple of the harder books) and I began to learn what a good Christian woman was like, how to be a good wife and mother, a good person. But my husband still abandoned me. So I read the Bible a second time and I prayed for change. But my husband told me I would never change and because he never said exactly what he meant I should change I picked up every magazine I could with the word change on the cover. I got up and made him breakfast and a lunch to go to work and always had dinner on the table at the right time and I kept the children clean and tidy as well as the house. I dieted incessantly though I was not fat. I quit soap-operas because they depressed me. In the end I married my “husband” because I thought I needed to stop living in sin.

Before I married him, though, there was another nightmarish encounter with religion. We only had two children at the time, we lived in a house with rats, no running water, no toilet that worked, no stove to cook on and I dragged pond water in buckets to wash clothes in an old wringer washer until the wiring caught fire one day. I did not get out for weeks at a time. Fred brought home groceries on Friday evening and I saw no one for weeks at a time. We did not have a phone either.

One day some women from the Jehovah’s Witnesses came by that we had been studying with. One lady told me that I would be responsible for my two children’s eternal deaths when Armageddon came in 1975 because I was not worshipping God correctly and out preaching his word. I was and had always been living a nightmare. I was twenty and hopeless with two children, a man who did not want me, a daily life unbearable, and a childhood that still played with my insides no matter how I tried to bury it. And now God would annihilate me and my children.

I began having nightmares about the end times and being left behind with my children with all the wicked people because you see, I was wicked too. I lived in fear and despair, alone and unwanted, as I had always done. I had a breakdown. My two children went into a foster home for a few weeks and I went into a hospital where they drug you mindless and line you up naked for a hose down in lieu of a shower. Fortunately, I was a crybaby and an aid took pity on me and let me take a real shower. but the horror of that place will always live with me. Fortunately, I discovered I was not crazy. I spent my time there getting my GED.

Eventually I was alone. My husband had found someone else and now they were raising my kids. He shut me out, replaced me with someone more palatable I suppose. I suppose whatever I had lacked, she had had. I doubt I will ever know.

I began to drink, got into a verbally abusive relationship went to AA eventually and again turned to God. Someone told me to go the the Baptist Church downtown and get up and walk down front when they asked who would like to accept Jesus as their savior. So, with tears streaming I walked to the front and a man sent me into a room where a woman sat at a table. She began to ask me questions about my faith and I asked her why she was asking me these things. I came to find Jesus. She said “I have to ask these questions to find out if you are the right sort of person for our church.” And I began to sob hopelessly and hopeless. I knew the horrid person I was. They would not want me. And I ran out. Funny though, they regularly sent me money begging letters.

I went back to the AA Club and stood outside in the dark crying my eyes out. Again God rejected me.

My fear and longing for God turned to hate, pure and unrelenting. I often went down to the ocean at dawn to scream my hatred into the surf and tell him what a useless and cruel thing he was. And when anyone brought up scripture I told them what I thought.

But in AA you need to choose a higher power. I chose one who would be like a good father and never drop me, and I still called him God but it was a horrid relationship with very little meaning.

It was not until I was taking a course in Humanities that the idea of God’s existence began to erode. It was 1992 and I was researching a term paper. It had not previously occurred to me that god might be a myth like Zeus on Mt. Olympus. And when I read the part about hell being an invention of man to keep people subservient, and the artwork for hell was taken from Dante’s Towering Inferno and the gargoyles also were to frighten people I began to see a new perspective.

Now of course, I have been reading books by professors who teach in universities and I am slightly relieved to discover that God and Jesus never rejected me. They were a fantasy that helped screw me over from the beginning.

The good news is I do not hate god anymore for what he let happen. And I do not see a reason to hate me anymore for not being a “good” girl. When you are 3 1/2 and you find yourself lying atop a grown man with a penis pressed between your tubby little legs masturbating, just how is your life, your mind, and your heart supposed to go and grow and develop into a “normal” person?

The belief in God and Jesus love was just another obstacle in my journey, and quite a big one. so I still hate religion. But I am content in my atheism and I am fairly certain there will be no last minute reversal on my deathbed because I am afraid of hell. You see, if God did exist, he has already done enough damage to me and all my descendants. So I will not be calling on him to put me through more torture. hahaha

Can you imagine what my life could have been without the abuse? Because millions of children suffer the effects and aftereffects of childhood abuse, and no place do I see a God stepping in to help.