Like the incest there was anger that I pretended was not there. It was wrong and I must not feel it. After all, I was the bad girl, what right did I have to be angry? But angry I was. It was like an extra appendage, always there but just barely out of sight. It began about the time menstruation began and I walked around thinking God was killing me for my wicked ways. What else could it be? With twelve older sisters I had no clue of what this new horror was in my life but death coming for me. I was eleven years old.

You can call it the beginning of PMS if you like, I never timed my outbursts of rage to see if there were a correlation. I did not know about PMS or anything else for sure about what was happening to me. A brown paper covered box appeared like magic on my bed once a month so I assumed there was something natural about this awful circumstance. No more was said about it. The silence created the new shame in me, like incest it was secret, silent, and never to be discussed.

My first full blown rage, that point where latent and ever present anger erupts all over whomever is present, was when I tried to stab Valerie with a fork. I was 11 and I cannot tell you why it happened. Valerie had always tried to protect me as best a little girl can protect a little sister. But that is how rages are. They land on people at random mostly because there is no way to get at the true source of anger because you must be a good girl and keep silent. I regretted that incident immediately. Valerie was the person I trusted most though I trusted no person to any great degree.

Rages mostly die as they come, suddenly, leaving behind shame and guilt and regret, and yes, the horror that you did, said, were that person who you see rarely, your deeper self. The next rage event I was 15. I was combing my hair in front of my mirror in my bedroom when suddenly, looking at that face looking back at me, I began to scream, loud, blood-curdling screams at that face, that person I loathed so much, me. I did not break the mirror with my rage though I hit that face several times very hard.

My next rage event I was also 15 as near as I can remember. I stood at the far end of the farthest farm field clinging to the barbed wire fence screaming until I was hoarse. I wanted out, but there was no way out, and I screamed and cried and screamed into the empty fields beyond for some relief, any relief. No one came.

When I at last returned to the house my father said I just needed a good spanking and Ma asked why I had been skipping school. The principal called and reported me for my many days of visiting Margie’s house instead of the classroom. With Margie I felt like a cared for child, I could feel that I had a Mom of sorts for a short time anyway. She was so lovely in her heart and her ways, kind and gentle with me like I watched my mother being kind and gentle in her flower bed. She was a bright spot in an otherwise dismal world. I was forbidden to replace my schooling with visits to Margie. I was 16 when Margie died. Another mom had left me.

It was savage the way she wasted away from cancer as cancer patients mostly did in those days and I was not there. My sister Sheila convinced me she was not dying and I went to Florida for the summer with her. It is not all Sheila’s fault, I played my part in the lie by wanting to believe it. I wanted so much to believe so I took the word of a nurse, Sheila, instead of the doctors who operated on Margie. When I returned Margie was a pile of bones, nothing more of the woman I knew. She passed away soon after but she stopped to say goodbye three nights later. Margie stood at the end of the bed, she smiled and evaporated, not like in the movies all dramatic. Her husband told me she thought of me as another daughter. There were no other words that could have comforted me more.

Fits of rage haunted me. I was always surprised when it came, seemingly out of nowhere, but of course it was out of the constant strain of anger held in check just under the surface. I was afraid to be angry avoiding it at all costs no matter the circumstance. I turned into a doormat and a people pleaser and yes, in many ways a martyr, like my mother.

No matter how “good” I tried to be bouts of rage spattered yucky stuff all over anyone near, mostly my family, my children. At this moment I feel the shame rising in my cheeks at those memories. My children, more than anyone else paid a price for the ongoing crisis inside of me. They would not have known it was not about them, that it was left over from a time I dared not talk about in a place I dared not remember.

And that is the point of speaking about it. That was the point when I first talked about it in the early 1990’s. I wanted my children to know that my mess had nothing to do with them. I told their father and suggested therapy for me and the children. I never dreamed he would call me a liar and proceed to vilify me. In fact I was naïve enough to think that because I lived my life, was actually there, I would be believed. But it does not work that way with incest and sexual assault. The victim is portrayed as the villain, as I was very soon to discover thus adding more fuel to my already angry insides.

The lie was that it never happened, but somehow I was the liar, the bad person, making excuses for having been a bad person.

If my mind had not already been mangled by the real and horrific events of my childhood, this new twist would have. The lies about me from Fred and Cindi had always made me a little crazy and defensive, feeling like I could never set the record straight because nobody wanted to hear my “sour grapes” against the lies. That was part of Fred’s protection. How could he be the “Great Man” in Cindi’s and our children’s eyes without spreading a little manure over me? I think this new revelation was just another tool to use to prove that I was “crazy” instead of being a reason for my behaviors.

Anger piled on top of mountains of anger and there was no place to put it, no way to resolve it, just try to win my children’s favor over and over and over until I was half mad from the resentment and rejection, and hate that returned to me.

Finally, with no way to ever win, I accepted that the rift between my daughters and I was forever. I let go of the hope I had always clung to, and did my best to live in that reality. That was in 2011.

Since then I have done much healing work. I have been working at healing for decades now and there is indeed a light at the end of the tunnel. And there is hope again.

There is still work to be done on me and that is OK. I do not expect a graduation date from this intense training. I have peace at last and I want very much to keep it.

I was an emotional wreck. I was not then and certainly am not now “crazy.” I was broken. I am now much less broken. And I am enough.