The night I said that little word, “yes” to the therapist’s query had I ever been sexually molested as a child began when I left work at Denny’s restaurant on the beachside in Daytona. I had moved out of Bob’s house and into a motel, but that is not where I headed after work that evening. Instead I found myself driving towards Bob’s in a sort of frenzy. I walked in his front door and headed straight to my old room without a word. He had a girl with him. They were preparing dinner together, I walked past them. it didn’t matter. I had not had feelings for Bob for a very long time, he was cruel in his tirades of verbal abuse that had often lasted into the night with him interrogating me about who I was cheating on him with. Bob was a very insecure man. I had never cheated on anyone, but he was certain, if only he could dredge up the right proof, he could catch me in my lies.

When I got to my room I began looking for my things. They were gone and I couldn’t think why. I was crying and blubbering and terribly confused. I think now I was desperate to put my pieces back together. I was torn inside. The book I had ripped apart in my motel room had ripped my insides apart and I could not fathom what to do to get me back together. Perhaps I sought in my confusion to go back to a moment before my tightly held secrets had been exposed to me. I do not know.

Bob’s girlfriend was bright and probably a little scared of me. She called the police. I remember driving away and parking in a little strip mall down the street. But the police spotted my old 66 Chevy, a car hard to miss in 1988. They discovered the car had no registration and a tag from another car. Bob gave me the car and I had not yet taken care of the legal stuff.

I was wracked with grief and open wide with emotions flooding out like the stream of tears down my cheeks. I felt helpless and hopeless and very afraid. I could hear the officers talking about what to do with me. there I was in my disheveled Denny’s uniform in the backseat of a police car, a broken lump of humanity with no way to stop the tears or the snot that hung from my nose.

They took me to an outpatient psychiatric clinic for evaluation. A couple hours later out came the one word I had needed to say to someone. Yes. I had been molested as a child. Yes.

I felt both shame and relief. What next? What do I do now? Who am I now that the secret is out of me? I told my story that night mixed in with bouts of anguished sobbing and moments when a calmness seemed to sneak in and after a couple of hours the tears stopped and I sat in silence. The therapist was silent also for a moment and then she said the most magical words. “It was not your fault.” I did not entirely believe that. I had lived with the guilt for so long. I had single handedly broken so many people, and here was this stranger telling me I was not to blame; it was both bitter and sweet and I tried the sweet on for size.

I soon picked up another white chip in AA and I was in therapy. I still worked at Denny’s and I almost lived in AA rooms only going home to sleep and eat. I made a point of attending women’s speaker meetings and began to hear versions of my own past spoken from the podium. I was not alone. I was truly, truly not alone anymore.

Now that some of the bad stuff weighing me down for years was shed to the best of my ability, there was a little room for the good stuff to find a home. Little bits of hope grew into mountains and I was truly on the path to recovery.

But then I started telling other people. I told Bob. His macho response was to beat up my brothers. Of course he was all talk. But he was not able to show any empathy for me. I told my friend Lynn who had taken me to my first AA meeting. She had no empathy either. She said it was too bad that my Dad died thinking I thought that he molested me. And for the thousandth time I found myself reviewing that night when he came to my room and grabbed and kissed me on the mouth and I tried to figure out what I had done to make him do that to me. I told my AA sponsor and she told me it was not my fault that I was such a pretty little girl. putting the blame solidly on me and not the boys, There is no girl too ugly to molest. Sexual abuse is about opportunity, finding easy prey, not looks and sex. But my sponsor told me about the Rape Crisis Center. I made an appointment. It was intense, and there were many days I drove home from there trying to shut out the voices in my head. Shh, Don’t talk. Never tell anyone what goes on in this house. I would crawl into bed exhausted and pull the covers up over my head to hide from the haunting whispers in my head.

A couple of years later I told one of my daughters. She put forth the idea that some people make up stories to excuse having lived a bad life. With that denial I was crushed in a new way. I had felt sure that if people knew the truth there could be some healing and perhaps forgiveness of my erratic behavior, perhaps some empathy. I told my ex-husband. he was silent. Eventually I learned that he did not believe me either and told my children I was “crazy” and “looney-tunes”. He also told my children, or some at least that I had a great childhood with nothing more wrong than being poor. He is friends with my brother Reed to this day, and threw the mother of his children solidly under the bus. No empathy from him.

My hopes were dashed that I might make my children understand that I was broken, not evil. I was damaged very early in my life, unable to form bonds, unable to get close to people, unable to build a foundation under me, always on the run from what I held secret inside.

I still try, because it is still unbearable that my children do not know the real me or that the trauma in my childhood really happened. I have survived it and learned to thrive in small ways at last, but the people I lost are still lost to me.

I do not blame my children for not knowing who to believe. At the same time, I can only live the life I was dealt and that began with incest and much violence and rage. To think me a liar when I am not is to make me that other person, hateful and evil and lazy and callous… And I am not that other person that is hated. I am me, and I continue on that same journey to be the best me I can.

Millions of people have gone through and will go through the anguish of not being believed. People would very often prefer to believe victims and survivors are liars. Problem solved. The child/adult lied, end of story, what an awful child/adult. otherwise something must be done, some effort made, an abuser to confront, accuse, stop, perhaps prosecute.

Every few minutes in the USA another child is added to the statistics of sexual abuse. Silencing the children is to directly aid in further abuse.

It was not my fault. Ten years ago I was accused of breaking the family I grew up in. The youngest child had broken the whole family. the youngest child who was passed from one brother to the next like an old pair of shoes they no longer wanted broke the DeGolier family. My children grew up hearing that all the terrible things their father did was because I was “crazy.” In my unstable life I have been an easy scapegoat for other people’s bad acts. None of it was mine to pay for. But I paid dearly in trying for years to prove I was not that other person people loved to hate or be mad at.

I will be happy now. I will smile a lot and laugh a lot and be OK with me. I have paid my share and many others shares and I am done.