When I returned to NY in 2006 after many years away I saw first hand the damage to my siblings. I saw my brother Carl break down sobbing anguished still over what Dad did to him. It is hard to still be mad at someone when you can feel their pain in your own gut. But I was not still mad because he used me, but because, as an adult he recruited Jesus to say all was forgiven. I wanted my own acknowledgement and apology.

I and two other adults held Sharon from toppling to the ground in anguish still over Ma’s treatment of her. Her face screwed up in torment, her body shaken, knees gone weak, and the howl of pain still raw in her throat. The saga of her history I witnessed as a child. It were as though Ma hated her. Sharon was, if there is such a thing, the child Ma chose to turn her worst attentions to. I listened to stories of beatings I was not born yet to witness, Dad going after Gordon with a 2×4. Theora beat senseless for accidentally breaking something. I listened as Valerie told the full story of crawling on her belly across Jackson Park in Mayville, NY trying to escape Denis, who was stalking her. Wanda, an awfully nice woman to everyone had tried to commit suicide as a teenager. Her harrowing stories of beatings for nothing more than stepping a foot on the neighbors property when she was six years old ripped my heart open.

I also witnessed the pain in my own children and the widening rift between us, much of it due to my inability to settle and bond and be a part of. Some of it due to the big lie that the DeGolier family life was terrific. It never was. I do not know one sibling who escaped unscathed. My brother Reed says he remembers no beatings, but I saw them. So much denial and the ineffective means to control the past by burying it deep enough.

But there was no place deep enough and the past kept regurgitating like a bad meal.

We live what we learn. Growing up, we did not learn much worth living. Nearly all of my siblings have children who hate or hated them. It is an aftereffect of not being capable of bonding, trusting, and being loved.

My first book I began as an answer to all that pain. It was not the book I planned to write. I had researched and planned a book on what causes families like ours, my parents lives that contributed to the suffering, the culture and world they grew up in. But Wanda, Sharon, and later Ardys and Glora were with me on the book. Everyone who would be against me was already against me and I wanted to show them I did not mean anyone harm, that I had come back to try to repair not separate or condemn.

But when family secrets are thought to be at risk, it was like trying to sweet talk a pit of rattle snakes. They were all shaking their tails and hissing in the beginning and struck most painfully at every clear shot.

I had turned to mush. I took up my position as the “baby of the family” and was once again at the mercy of every foul wind and from Joyce on down my siblings chipped away of what was left of my stability.

Lies flew about like flies on a carcass, fast and furious and with “proof” to back them up. None of those siblings talked directly to me. I must be demolished, run out of town, silenced in any way. Short of murder, but I do not doubt that was thought of by someone, perhaps by the brother who tried murder once, perhaps by my brother who terrified me by trying to drag me to the bottom of the 17′ farm pond when I was a kid. They went through Wanda’s children, telling them their mother was in danger, or their mother was going to wake up one morning and find me hanging in the spare room. Joyce sent me a vicious letter, even chastising me for not liking country music. Everything was thrown at me that could be, including the claim that I had destroyed the family. I was evil, wicked, selfish. Joyce told me the family would welcome me back into the fold if only I would be “one of us” and try to fit in, be one of them.

I did not know that my fate was sealed the day I drove into NYS. Perhaps the day I decided to go back to see what was left of family for me, if anything. Joan had already been on the phone in angry anticipation of me visiting. Fear had awoken the sleeping pit of vipers. When I arrived at the campground I learned that my brother Denis had sat all morning waiting for me, but left because I was late. I had been afraid of Denis most of my life. I had known since I was about 7 that my sister had his baby and that Denis had already messed with two other sisters. And I knew that he molested his own daughter and son and though I had not yet heard the full story, I knew that Valerie had moved away because Denis was stalking her. Denis was part of the reason I dropped out of high school and went to live with Fred. I was the last sister in line for Denis to come after and I had zero faith that Ma or Dad would protect me. They knew Denis’s history, and they always protected him. It was Denis behind the faceless dark figure in my nightmares when I was pregnant with my first child. There was no reason for him to show up unless it was intimidation. When I got my camper set up I went inside and locked the door. I believed at the time I was emotionally strong enough to be OK if he came around.

My siblings, boys and girls alike were survivors. We all survived any way we could. My survival depended on me breaking my silence when I was 35. I am 68, and just now beginning to actively live a life I want to live. Survival was the best I could manage for so long with my overused and mostly ineffective coping skills. I was an emotional wreck. I ran on emotion, I over-reacted to everything, I took everything too personal. I ran away from everything including my own children because I could not, I believed, live through the pain, the pain of another woman being the mother on mother’s day and every holiday, the pain of standing still and facing myself and my inner demons, the pain of the distance growing between my children and I for decades.

I did not know anything but survival and the endless plight to get back to my children before it was too late, and always failing beyond belief.

There is much more to the story of my time in NY. One of my survival mechanisms, though I was not clear headed enough to see how fantastical my thinking had become, grasping at straws to keep some semblance of stability, was bird photography, and there were even lies about that. Too bad, because the truth was so much more bizarre.

We inadvertently pass on to our children the pain of what we cannot fix or manage or put in perspective. My childhood ruled me from its dark little corner with floods of emotions I acted upon instead of being able to put them in there place. I expect my siblings have faced similar issues, though the degree of damage is, I expect, individual. Forgiveness is not an issue. I forgave a long time ago, but I still do not wish to see some of my siblings again. The potential for more abuse is too great a risk be it verbal, emotional, or physical. But I have forgiven and yes, I have forgiven me for all the horrid things I have done on my road of survival.

My life is not what I hoped for, but for the first time I am beyond mere survival and actively living instead of running and cringing and jumping at every emotion that travels through on its ultimate journey to nowhere, because they don’t get much time to stop here anymore.