If when Joey, my nephew, attacked me when I was 12 and he was 17 would have been the last sexual assault of my childhood there would still have been long term damage to my future. I didn’t just cry great wrenching sobs because he put his hands in my panties and groped me, that was just the event. And people can say what they will about what they would have done in my shoes, and people have, two of my granddaughters had their macho opinions, just as I did to my mother when she said the twenty children “just happened.” But these conclusions are entirely unrealistic. Sexual assault is not an event that a person can solve with such easy answers. At least some, if not many, of my mothers many pregnancies were the result of marital rape, though back then it was just a husbands right as the owner of his property. At what point would she or could she kick him in the nuts and say “Enough already?”

I cried for other reasons. When he apologized, and he did so immediately when I began to cry he said my brother Keith had said I would not mind. It hurt to be thought of that way and passed on like an old pair of sneakers you don’t wear anymore.

I cried because a year earlier I had warned Reed off telling him “If you ever touch me again I will scream so loud the whole world will hear me.” and I ran like the devil himself were chasing me, back to the house and the relative safety of being around people. I had thought then that that part of my life was over. Carl and Keith had left home and Reed did not touch me again, I watched my back, and I expect he took me seriously though for years he used his eyes to send me come hither messages and check out my boobs. I had to live with my fear of him.

But it had not been the end. Now here was Joey on a balmy Sunday evening when we played hide-and-seek, running and laughing and it was never going to end. Who would be next? I went back to the house slightly more broken and filled with shame for what was done to me and thought of me. The pain and hopelessness were unimaginable.

Why go over this? Because most people never get beyond the point where they decide whether or not to believe the victim or the perpetrator. Well it’s a toss up isn’t it? How do we decide? Well, on the one hand you have this nice, funny, intelligent man and then here is this girl talking icky sex stuff I do not want to hear and besides, didn’t she lie about taking the last cookie? She’s obviously lying now. End of story. Shame on me.

I was already super timid and shy, afraid of my own shadow, shame-filled, full of distrust and anger, detached from reality much of the time, and feeling hopeless and helpless. I was 12.

For years I studied my father’s face, looking for some trace of the man I new as a toddler. I would tear up with joy whenever I heard him laugh at Red Skelton because the laugh took me back to better times. Sometimes when Joey’s dad Eddy came to the house they would pull out their memories and roar with laughter and I loved it. I wished it was me that made him laugh, like when I was little, but that man had left long ago. When I was 13 Dad yelled at me to get the damn cat off the table and I stopped in my tracks, it was the first time my own father had spoken directly to me in so many years. I felt relief and panic and uncertainty and shame because Dad should not have needed to tell me to get the cat off the table. I was bad.

A few years later Valerie and Reed graduated from high school and moved away. Now it was just me left at home and Mother began serving me Carnation Instant breakfast on school mornings. I liked them OK but it marked a dramatic shift in home life. Another shift was dad slipping me money in secret. I hated Ma, and I took the money to be gifts showing he loved me and now there was more money and he wanted me to be happy. I still had a deep need for a father and oh how proud I was that he loved me.

Looking back, I had that same proud feeling walking hand in hand with my brother Carl because, yes, somebody did love me. I was wrong both times.

One day I came into the house and stepped into a landmine. Dad was attacking mother verbally and Ma looked as anguished as I had ever seen her, and trust me she had been shedding her tears in rivers for years. That day was different. When I walked into the scene and stopped short at the misery in the room my father waved his arm toward me and said “There is the chief cook and bottle washer,” and continued his tirade against Ma’s cooking, her housekeeping, her everything.

I longed to go to Ma and comfort her. I just stood there for a moment then tried to become invisible as I left the room and all their misery behind.

A few days later, there was Dad waking me from the throws of slumber with a full blown kiss. I put my hands against his chest and pushed him back. He stumbled out of the room and I sat all night with my back to the cold, damp basement walls listening as he paced the floor. Mother came home from her church circle meeting and went to bed and still I sat and listened, terrified he would return. I did not sleep. Neither did my father.

I called the sister that had been raped by my brother and she came. When I got home from school she pounced with all the conviction of a righteous person. For 2 weeks I dared not be alone with Dad, so I tagged along wherever my sister and Ma went. They did a lot of whispering and head shaking at me. What could have possessed her? Did she need a psychiatrist? No, that would make her worse. I think I cried solid for the whole two weeks. Neither Ma or Dad or Sheila spoke directly to me. They either stared at me or when I caught them staring, turn their heads away. I felt like slime.

The day Sheila left she said to Ma “At least it wasn’t a wasted trip.” She had managed to book some church talks and collected donations for a non-existent charity for wayward girls. It just struck me that it was she who wrote me when I was 11 to tell me terrible things were going to happen but that I was a DeGolier and we are survivors. I never imagined I would have to survive her treatment of me. It was she who made up the ‘truth” about me being molested by Reverand Petibon.

Her words stopped my tears and hardened my heart a little bit more. I thought to myself. “If that is what they think of me then that is who I will be.” I set out to be bad. The old “I’ll show you, I’ll hurt me.”

I was 16. Survival was all I had. Normal life was not an option.

I began drinking and lost my babysitting job. Then I began hanging out downtown Fredonia till 3 or 4 in the morning trying to get into trouble. I don’t know if I thought it happened spontaneously like in the movies or what, but I had not the guts or the true inclination towards being “bad.” By then I thought I was just a bad person and that is why these things happened to me, so if I hang out in places dark and shadowy surely bad people would recognize me as a bad person and I would just fall into living a bad life.

I was torn between believing it was all my fault and the slim hope that other people were responsible. I reconstructed the scene with my father dozens of times over the next few years trying to pinpoint my fault in his behavior just as I would do with all the people I came in contact for the next decades, including my husband and children. I made an easy scapegoat.

In fact, my boyfriend Fred gave me a preview of what being a scapegoat was. He had visited my best friend at what was my old babysitting job and came on to her. When I asked him about it he said it happened because I was not there. Did I take the hint? No, I married him. I needed an escape and when he presented me with an engagement ring, he signed on as my hero. I had been dating someone else at the time and Fred said he couldn’t lose me. I suppose I had value as a scapegoat.

Later on he would tell my kids that everything he did wrong was because I was “crazy.” My “hero” became my enemy.

At what point I was to have pulled myself up by the boot-straps financially or in any other way, I do not know. My mind was a mass of conflict as well as my heart. I had no skills, no knowledge of the world, no ability to cope beyond the few survival tools I had left home with that had no real meaning in the outside world. I attracted abuse, I suppose because I had never known anything else.

Two opportunities to speak about the incident with my father came and passed. One day my sister Joyce and her daughter Brenda and my sister Valerie came to the house to beg my parents to do something to stop Denis from molesting the girls. He had been stalking and terrorizing Valerie. Denis was 35 and she was 18. As Brenda, Valerie and I stood by the pond I said Dad had come to my room and kissed me. It was almost a whisper. I had sworn I would never tell anyone again after what Ma and Sheila did to me, but here was what must have felt like a perfect opening. Brenda turned to me and asked what I said, but I had lost the courage to say it again.

The second opportunity came when i visited at my oldest brothers house a week later. My sister in law sent everyone to bed including my two nieces who were my age. It felt out of place for her to request me to stay and make cookies with her. Then she asked if everything were OK at home. Bev was a strict person and not a person one could easily warm to. I immediately smiled and said yes, everything was fine. I could not risk opening that door again to shame and blame and the meanness I must surely have had to have in order to tell such a lie. I wonder if she helped concoct the lie that I lied so that I would not be stuck at home taking care of the old people.

Children are the greatest resource the world has, and they are thrown away by the millions instead of protecting and nurturing and treating them as though they matter. Sure there are great parents out there, and there are many like me who intended to be good parents and missed. Then there are those who will violate their children to the death. And I suspect for every good parent there is also a predator who will be happy to step into any small glitch in the process.

Children. What is the answer? I do not know. I stumble along wanting to help but I do not know how, or maybe I am afraid to try because I have failed everything in my life but Survival 101. For many children survival is all they get. Some do not get that privilege. I am proud at how far I have come despite so much and so many against me.

I keep thinking one answer is in laying out the after-effects of sexual abuse on children. If people could open their eyes and see it unfold in children’s lives and feel the damage for themselves. But there are so many excuses. There are agencies for that sort of thing and other people to take care of it. Most people will not look.

There are no agencies to interfere where it is most needed, in the home. Most sexual predators are known by families, in fact they rely on the families trust to get away with their crime. And of course, incest is a family affair.

In 1995 my mother told me she remembered the night my father molested me. She told me then that she believed me. I asked her why then did she not help me. “I just couldn’t” she said. And then she defended herself by pointing the finger at me for becoming an alcoholic and losing my children. That was the only time I split in two. I was a child and a grown woman driving into town to see my therapist to see how to put me back together.

My life, in spite of being alienated from my daughters, is more together than it has ever been. To some it must seem like I am still circling a dead carcass to see how much more mileage I can get from it, but to me, I am an ever evolving person with a desire, and if I have the courage, the ability to help other people like me. My generation, and those before me, had no voice at all.