In the autumn of 1988 I was the biggest mess I had ever been. I could not explain my behaviors even to myself. The word my ex-husband had used on me for so long, “crazy,” now seemed to apply in full. It was the word I used when I sought help from the school psychologist in the autumn of 1966. It was the word I had heard applied to older siblings, some who had resided at Gowanda State Hospital, and some who had not. It was a word I feared and hated.

crazy 1. adjective Mentally deranged or unstable; insane. Webster I feared that insanity ran in my family. I was the fifth of twenty children to stay at a state hospital. I was 20 and went because I thought I was crazy. It did not take me long to recognize the difference between me and the other residents of the hospital. The only good to come out of my stay was that I rejected my definition of the word crazy for myself and a few people I met there.

Abuse ran in my family. Everything from beatings and verbal tirades to the insidiousness of never being held or told “I love you.” Fear and division ruled with an iron fist. I saw, I heard, I felt, and I was afraid.

I like the word “unstable” as a definition for crazy. Life was always unstable from the night my father rejected me with a sound spanking I did not deserve when I was 3 1/2 thus ending the good times of childhood. (My sister Sheila instigated that event, knowing I would get a spanking, still thinking it funny 30 years later. She was unstable too.

Then there was incest, and I will only say it was everywhere. All of the youngest six girls were molested by brothers, though they will mostly excuse it or say it didn’t happen or say “just forget it.”

I was talking about the autumn of 1988. I was thirty five and very unstable. I was in an abusive relationship with a man I had proven to myself I could not get away from. Something always brought me back like a moth to a flame. Looking back I think I did not know what to do without abuse to survive. In fact, and I have reviewed this many times in astonishment and anguish, the last time I had left him I landed back in Carolina again, got an apartment and a job, had saved up 900 dollars in the bank and life was pleasant. I was able to see my kids on weekends. I was happy. Then the instability came crashing in the door. I had an obsessive need to contact him. The feeling was so unbearable I called to make an appointment with someone. I told the voice on the phone I was frightened that I would go back to Bob and I did not want to go. But they had no available appointments and in a matter of days there was Bob, come to take me back to Florida. It was autumn of1987 and the beginning of a bout of severe depression and self-loathing I could only try to survive.

In the year leading up to the fall of 88 I slept and worked and drank and slept and worked and drank, I had alcohol poisoning brought on by me trying to “have fun” and ended up in the emergency room asking if I was going to die that night. I had a bout of unemployment then tried to get a job but never got closer than the parking lot. then I got a job and went in the first day (restaurant) and the manager said nobody else showed up and could I handle it alone for a couple of hours. I grabbed my purse and left. No I could not handle it, could he not tell I was unstable? I drove home crying and scared and angry and confused at myself. Was I crazy? I walked in the door and saw a knife on the counter. I picked it up. What kept me from using it I do not know, fear of pain, the thought of blood which would likely make me pass out, perhaps some thread of hope in the form of children coming to visit for the summer months? I put down the knife.

I got a job and the children came for a visit. I put on the mask I had always used so nobody would see the mess underneath. When the summer was over and I drove the children home to Carolina I was certain of my next step. I would give up my rights to the children and take my life. It was not a threat I made or a plea for help. I told nobody. I could not go on with a life that had always been a sort of torture chamber where I spun around and around and around seeking escape only to find another torture chamber beyond. It was not even a decision as decisions go, weighing the pros and cons; it was a sort of knowing inside that I had reached the end at last and I would go. I did not even have a plan or a method in mind. I had reached a point where those things were not a concern.

Lynn, a waitress I worked with invited me to an AA meeting. It was September 13th 1988. She said there were lots of people who had overcome alcohol and serious problems. She showed me the reading in the meditation book for that day. It was about people’s pain being familiar and people stay in it though it is not comfortable. Over a lifetime I had perfected coping skills I had no use for without abuse in my life. I still had no idea how to live outside the box I had grown accustomed to.

AA saved me, but not just from alcohol. I was suddenly thrust into the midst of people struggling with the same things I was, alcohol, childhood abuse, incest and many other things. For the first time ever I was not alone. I belonged somewhere. And ever so slowly I began to remove my mask inside the walls of AA. Hope had intervened.

Along with the good feelings though, entered masses of confusion. For the first time I was facing myself, confronting reality with a fine mix of anger, relief, desperation and learning that perhaps I was not evil incarnate who had destroyed everyone and everything I ever touched. Still, it was a beginning of something.

I had to move out of Bob’s house. We had lived as separate people for many months and it was time to end it for good. I began to pack my things and as I separated newspapers to wrap my glassware in, I noticed an article about a woman who wrote a book with her therapist about her childhood incest. I stopped packing and drove to the store to buy the book, then I drove to the liquor store. In my room at a motel on the beachside I drank cried and read for two days. I was angry. How dare she bring this up! How dare she force this issue out into the open! And I was sad, for her, for me. When I was finished reading I tore the book into tiny pieces and scattered it around the room and I cried and paced and cried and drank. I stomped on the pieces of pages and cursed the woman who wrote it.

I had done the right thing by my family of origin, the keepers of incest; I had buried my incest deep within, never out of sight, and it haunted my dreams at night, but I had vowed at 16 years of age to never tell another soul about my shame, and now here it was in my face, in my head, whatever would I do with it now? Keep it to myself.

I did the best I could to tuck it all away again, out of sight, but it did not fit neatly in it’s box and the cover no longer fit. Little bits kept slipping out into my consciousness driving me a little mad at times. My life had always been unstable, no feeling of security or a sense of foundation under my feet but fighting harder than ever to bury the real me so nobody would find out was a battle neither of us could win, the real Janeen nor the masked Janeen.

Next is a run in with police over driving an illegal car while emotional unfit, a forced visit to an emergency room shrink (it was either that or jail) and the first time I said it out loud, the word “Yes” when asked if I had ever been molested.

Keeping in mind the fact that I did not know about the period of time when therapists were seemingly convincing clients they had been molested, when the therapist asked the straight forward question “Were you ever sexually abused as a child?” I could barely get the word out. Yes, I whispered after standing at the window sobbing for an eternity while a thunderstorm raged outside. For me, there is no question that any one coaxed me to say I was molested yet that has been brought up to me by people trying very hard to keep the reality of childhood sexual abuse in it’s dark corner. Yes, some therapists made grave mistakes and yes, some clients were convinced of things that did not happen, but the vast majority of cases are real and destructive to the children of such trauma and to the adults they eventually become if they do not succumb to suicide first.

I was 35 years old. Except for AA there was no lifeboat in sight. I embraced it and hung on for dear life.

More to come: when I began to tell people, I never dreamed my reality would be so cruelly used against me.