I was two years and 10 months old when all twenty of us children and our parents went gleefully off to NYC on a big Greyhound bus as winners of a nationwide contest for the largest living family in the USA sponsored by the American Toy Fair. I have snatches of memories of the event. I know they are my memories and not a result of other people talking about the trip because they are complete with feelings and my own thoughts. The other children talking about things endlessly for a while after the trip may have helped the memories stick, but they were exclusively my memories. Now, if I were to seem to remember long tales of the trip, it would be questionable. But I make no such claim.

I seem to have a vague memory of strange people coming to the farm and taking pictures. There was excitement in the air I breathed and a flurry of activity getting everyone bathed and dressed and picture ready. I felt the excitement rather than remember the event with any clarity.

I remember a few brief moments on the 400 mile bus trip. My sister Beverly was asleep snoring with her mouth open and someone put a banana in her mouth, I don’t remember who. I laughed and apparently I was the first thing Bev saw when she opened her eyes because our faces were very close and she screamed at me “What are you laughing about,” or some words to that effect. I was ordered to go sit with Ma and Dad and I clearly remember both sadness and my fingers clinging to the seats as I weaved my way forward on the moving vehicle.

I remember being in my Dad’s arms outside and looking down at tiny toy cars below and asking him if I could have one. My brother Keith, who would have been about eight, laughed and told me they were real cars. I remember nothing more about that particular outing. I learned much later that was the Empire State Building.

I remember breakfast at a huge table with siblings and Ma and Dad. I heard someone say that Valerie was lost. She being the sister closest in age I felt scared, probably not so much by the words, but by the sudden chaos that ensued. (She had gotten locked in a bathroom.)

I remember a very heavy curtain we were lined up behind. It was very dark. Some one told us to stay away from the chimp. Charlene did not listen and the chimp kicked her in the gut. I do not clearly remember a scream, but I remember the look in her eyes as she doubled over in pain. I also remember my initial reaction to the monkey’s antics was a laugh. Charlene was mad. I learned much later that it was The Today Show and J. Fred Muggs was the celebrity chimp who had a history of attacking people. In 2007 I learned he was retired and living in Florida.

I remember a big bride doll in a room where we were told we could pick out a toy. I half carried, half dragged the doll away and a man said I could not have it. I cried.

Those are the bits and pieces I have always remembered. The rest of the events, including the trips out to different locations for photos, I do not recall at all. I expect for a 2 year old it was all just tiresome. We met Norman Vincent Peale on the steps of his church, another photo op, but that too is a blank.

I remember nothing of the trip home. I do not remember being given a doll, all the girls got a doll. That was all we got. The boys got something, I do not remember what.

The aftermath of the trip was never clear to me. My life went back to normal. It is only years later, decades later that things have fallen into place, at least to a degree.

One thing I do remember was excitement whenever a truck came through the culverts on Lake Avenue just below our house. Someone would scoop me up in their arms and we all raced to the top of the hill under the Chestnut tree to see if it might be the truckload of toys we had been promised. How could I forget it. It happened often beginning with hoots and hollers and ending with sad faces all around. The promised truck never came. Nor did Ma’s prizes she won as a game show contestant. Nothing came.

In 2006 I chanced upon some writing that Dad had dated 1958, two years after the trip. In it he was trying to figure out why our family had been sent packing. There had been a rush to get us out of town before somebody found out about something. In his writing he laid out a sketchy timeline of what events in NYC that he knew about including some of the older kids activities. He came to no conclusion. Something had happened to their dream trip and he had no idea what. Also in 2006 Valerie told me she had tried to ask the older siblings about the trip but they all refused to talk about it. Apparently she remembered much more than I had.

I have never tried to put my life in context of what events may have caused other events or led to more trauma in the family. But life went to “hell in a handbasket” so to speak. Within the year I had lost my dad, though he sat there in stony silence before my eyes, been led into a life of regular incest, well, prostitution really because they paid me a quarter, and in the years to follow a succession of what must have felt like abandonment. Many of my siblings either quit school and left home before they were eighteen or went to live elsewhere to graduate. Two of my brothers who were happy to use me for there little games left when they were sixteen and they acted like they didn’t know me after that, and pretty much all of them, once they left they stayed away, some for years before they returned to visit. One sister and one brother I would have first met in NYC, but I do not remember that. When I met them a few years later I remember denying they were siblings. They were complete strangers.

The DeGolier family was never one big happy family at any time. The photos taken of all of us together parading around NYC were a farce. An incredibly huge lie, public and in the end humiliating for those old enough to feel it.

At first I thought perhaps the first lie, that all members of the family were still living, was the thing that got us sent home with nothing. But if that were the case, Dad would not have been still mulling it over two years later. If one of my brothers had attacked a woman or young girl or got caught stalking little blonde girls around hallways in the hotel like his future wife says she watched him stalk little blonde girls around campgrounds for fifty years, I would think there would have been some criminal action. (Shirley told Wanda and I about her fifty years of torment in the fall of 2008 while sitting at a picnic table at Popehaven campground in Randolph, NY.) Just think, all those little girls over all those years being stalked and very possibly frightened for there lives and nobody tried to stop him.

The whole town of Brocton probably knew our big dream trip had gone awry. It puts more things in context that I remember from my growing up years. Like meeting someone and them asking “You’re one of the DeGolier girls aren’t you?” and peering over glasses to inspect closer. Of course, I learned in 2007 when I had a book event in my hometown that there were indeed people who knew about incest on the farm, they told me they could not legally do anything. What happened in the home was nobody’s business. Except of course we were there business when it came to juicy gossip.

All my school years I felt the sting of being a DeGolier. I do not know how much might have been due to a bad reputation inherited from older siblings, I do know the feeling of being inspected as though there might be a telltale sign. Maybe that is where I began to perceive the word DeGolier branded on my forehead.

At Owen’s Drug Store I was always, yes always, followed by one owner or the other. Those dark hawk eyes peering around every corner until I exited.

In kindergarten my very old teacher Mrs. Furman told the whole class she had waited for the last DeGolier child to come through her class before she retired thus making a spectacle of me. Then a week later she shamed me in front of the class for not remembering to say “Yes, Ma’am.” I had never been taught that. I hated school. I was always to be known as the last of the DeGolier girls, never Janeen, I was just a DeGolier girl, it seemed that that was enough for people to know. There was no me as an individual. I hated being one of the DeGolier girls.

Ma hated Nurse Gardener, the school nurse. Whenever there were lice found on anyone, the DeGolier family would be called to the nurses office over the loudspeaker. I did not at first feel the impact of that, at first it was just a chance to see my siblings. At that time there were still quite a few of us in school. But the result was always the same. Mother would drag that damned old fine tooth comb through our scalp cussing and swearing and not at all gently, find nothing, and phone Nurse Gardener to tell her off. I do not recall if we ever had lice, if we did I do not remember it. But I read that lice liked clean heads and ours only got washed once a week along with our bodies. We did not have a real bathtub. We were dirty though, sleeping 3 and 4 to a bed and a couple kids wetting the bed every night, not the freshest kids in town for sure.

Eventually Nurse Gardener gave up and stopped calling us all to the office over the public speaker.

Childhood was one long trauma with intermittent sunny days. One of the biggest, or perhaps just the stupidest lie about my life was when my ex-husband told my children that the worst thing that ever happened to me as a child was being poor. like he was some kind of authority on the inner workings of the DeGolier family. He may have gotten me confused with my sister Valerie who he escorted to the Junior Prom. She told me once that when she left home she vowed to never be hungry again, like Scarlett O’Hara in gone With the Wind I guess, and she set her sights on money. She said she remembered always having been hungry as a child. When I left home I was searching for love, someday, someway, someone would love me. Valerie and I both felt the sting of knowing we were not loved, but for her being poor was, for whatever reason, a bigger thing. I did not feel the poverty as much as I felt the cold emptiness of home, the silence and hate, and the fear. I wanted the relative safety of someone’s loving arms. I just wanted love. I dreamed of five acres and a garden and chickens and maybe a milk cow and raise my family on healthy food and fresh air.

It was actually my husband who had yearned for money. He used to take us for long Sunday drives and we nearly always ended up slowly passing all the fine houses in the rich section of Charlotte with Fred complaining that he should have that. I came to hate those trips. I felt sad for the life we could have had if only he could just be content to be just him. There was nothing particularly appealing about a man always focusing on what he didn’t have and probably never would. But then he met Cindi. She “came from money” in his words and could introduce him to the right people. In effect he married for money. Well, more power to him, but pinning his quest for money on me was rather cruel. He did not know me very well.

And he certainly did not know my family except as an outsider who saw the masks all around. He was best friends with my brother Reed, though, a rather smarmy man who’s sexual appetites outraged many people from family to barmaids. Funny story. Reed had nude parties at his house in Mayville, NY. One day Wanda and Homer were out riding with Ma and Dad and decided to drop in on him. I cannot imagine the shock when they pulled up and began getting out of the car. But I do remember Mother cussing up a stream when I drove her up the beach in Daytona during Bike Week and a girl in the pickup truck ahead of us ripped off her blouse and shook her breasts about. She was soooo angry that I took her to such an awful place. But Reed was everybody’s darling, as was Denis, so I imagine there was no cussing at him.

Well, I have gone on and on now, and it is all true and a bit pathetic as well as traumatic. Did I have time to worry about being poor? No, I was busy surviving a pretty much unlivable life.

Stereotypes are a convenience. When someone says “an old farmer” in a book I picture a gray haired man, sun and age wrinkled. well tanned in dusty overalls, maybe sitting on his trusty John Deere. When someone says “baby of the family” one may see temper tantrums and tears and everybody placating a small tyrant or at least everyone cherishing and making a fuss over “the baby.”

Stereotypes are not real life. There are ‘farmers” who look like business men and there are youngest children who are not “spoiled.” And there are large families who are not cohesive groups, everyone looking after everyone else, laughter and singing, and sociable unto themselves.

I was born the twentieth child (and that is not even clear according to my birth record in Brocton, NY) I grew up knowing my rank as the twentieth child only to discover I may have been the 21st live birth of my mother and suddenly feeling displaced. Add to that a news article that came to light when I was in my fifties proclaiming my sister Valerie as the twentieth child. Still, I was the baby of the family and carried the burden as best I could.

The first few years held some good and some bad. Some of the bad I do not recall. My sister Rozzella was tasked with my care as next in line to receive one of Mother’s babies. She would have been thirteen. Most people would agree, far too young for motherhood but I had formed a bond with her. She told me in 2006 my crib was placed in the only space available, a far corner closet in the girls room where they could hear the mice all night long. she remembers thinking what a horrible place to put a baby. And my mother in 1995 proudly bragged to me that she had never had to hold me since I was 2 weeks old for my bottle was always propped on a pillow. She said it in a huff because I was holding my five month old beloved granddaughter to give her a bottle. It was truly unnecessary in her eyes, but perhaps she had never felt what I felt when I held a baby, especially my own and my children’s.

In a hard worked farm family a new mouth to feed might be a novelty for a little while but soon to become just another mouth to feed. I am pretty certain Mother resented having yet another girl when more boys were what were needed and wanted. True to her word I have no memory of her ever holding me and through the years no feeling of bonding. She was always a stranger to me in many ways.

Dad liked me, perhaps even loved me when I was very small. After working in the fields all day he would bounce me on his foot and sing ditties to me and we would laugh and snuggle and he was just wonderful. That all ended when I was 3 1/2. But there was more to it than the event of his vicious spanking, there was a running feud over the management of the children. There were not enough boys and far too many girls and Dad said the girls needed to stay in the house and learn the girlie things, cooking, sewing, cleaning etc. and the boys were to work the farm. Ma revolted and said the girls could work the farm with the boys so she sent the older ones out to the fields. Dad got mad. Ma got mad. At some point they agreed the boys would be under Dad’s management and the girls were mother’s property.

Around the same time there was a 4-H meeting at the house and Dad was minding me and Valerie and gave us some chocolate milk. Ma came out and had a fit over the big glasses of milk right before bedtime and words were said. All I remember was Ma telling Dad to leave the girls alone. perhaps there was more to it that chocolate milk, but I do not remember any time in my childhood when they were at all nice to each other.

Then one night (Sheila bragged in 1989 about instigating it) I ran downstairs and gleefully planted a second goodnight kiss on my loving, wonderful father’s cheek and he instantly flipped me over his knee and spanked me very hard. “you’re too old for this sort of stuff,” is what I remember him saying. I cried all the way up the stairs walking between my siblings standing there watching my walk of shame and hurt. No one offered comfort. My heart was broken.

My relationship with my father ended at that time. He did not speak to me nor acknowledge my presence. I was cut off with a razor sharp knife and i missed him every day though he was right there in the house.

In 2006 I asked my sister Charlene why she hated me. She told me, in mournful soft tones, that she hated me because Dad played with me and all she got was kicked out of the way. I imagine jealousy is what got me spanked, and jealousy is what set me apart and alone when I crawled into bed crying and shattered with no person lending comfort. I was 3 1/2 and lonely. It was a short step to becoming completely vulnerable to sexual abuse.

I won’t go into too much detail. But I am trying to set the stage. It was sometime in the wintry months everyone was inside, the living room was full of my siblings and Mother nd Father sat at the dining table reading. I was carrying my NYC Doll (each of the girls got a doll from NYC) by the hair and the body fell to the floor. I began to cry. One of my older brothers came over smiling and said if I stopped crying we would play a game together, just the two of us.

I felt great happiness. I stopped crying and he took my hand. I remember feeling so proud that my brother liked me and wanted to play a game with only me. Individual attention was rare. I remember passing through the dining room; Ma looked up at us and smiled. I wonder to this day if she knew what was happening, or if she was just relieved to have the child attended to with no effort from her. I walked on, hand in hand with my big brother, through the kitchen, through the pantry, up the stairwell and into his bedroom still smiling and happy.

Little girls wore dresses mostly back then. Mine was blue. My brother reached under my dress and pulled my panties down all the time coaxing and comforting and smiling. He laid down and pulled me on top of him and put something between my legs. My mind must have shut it out then because the next thing I remember was being nudged out the door and hearing the door latch fall back into place.

Laundry hung in the upstairs hallway drying on lines as it always did in winter. I stood there for what seems like eternity between the sheets with the scent of laundry soap in my nostrils. I could neither move forward or backward. I could not move at all. I had a terrible secret that I could tell no one and I stood very much alone except for my brother who was now behind the closed door.

This is how sexual abuse happens in large and small families. I have been told it could not have happened, someone would have known. Maybe somebody did know. The youngest 6 girls in the family were molested by an older brother. Some of us by more than one. Of course someone knew, some of the same girls were there in the house that day who had already been molested.

The truth may be that we do not want to know. One of my elder sisters once told me that sexual abuse and incest in families has always gone on and it can never be stopped. Can that be true? My heart broke when I heard those words, but I fail to see how it can be eliminated.

My brothers were broken too. No, it does not excuse them, but it does explain things about them and their own plight in a family of fear and savage beatings where no love ever touched the floors and walls let alone the children and only the echoing silence to keep us company.

The three sisters who had helped care for me left home between age 3-5, Wanda, Ardys, Rozzella. The next older sister, Sharon left after a violent scene with Ma when she was sixteen and I eight. But she often chased me away from her because Ma used her for a punching bag and Sharon told me to stay away or I might get what she got. So at five I was pretty much on my own to fend for myself against horrible odds. The sexual abuse continued for years and Charlene used me for a punching bag. Well, if Ma could have one, she could too. But the meals came regular and there were clean clothes and a roof and heat in winter and rules to follow and Ma and Dad sitting in creepy silence at the kitchen table. We called it the cold war. They never spoke to each other or any of us unless a need arose or company came. Then we could all pretend to be normal for a while until we sadly watched the car going out the drive and all went quiet and we retreated into our separate corners like fighters in a ring. We waited for the next bell to come to life.

My life was a lie. As a child I was both the baby of the family who according to stereotype, would have been spoiled and pampered and the little girl who was being sexually used by her brothers in secret. I could tell no one. There was no one to tell. When there is no safe person to tell, you just cringe and bear it.

When I was sixteen I was both the girl who’s father had “courted” with gifts I mistook for love and made to look like a vicious liar, though the lie that spread through the family never reached my ears until 1995 when my sister Valerie finally asked me what happened with Dad. Nearly 30 years that lie stood as a testament to my character and nobody thought to ask me if it were true.

When I left home, though I had not married Fred yet, I began using his last name as though we had married and that was a lie that I did not care about. I had to get away from home by any means. But the lie had its own punishment. I had carried the taint of childhood right out the door with me and no matter how far away I got it felt like everyone who looked at me knew instantly that I was tainted. It were as though the name DeGolier were stamped on my forehead.

There are always lies when husbands, or wives, get a new mate. Well, I assume so anyway. My husband was no different. I will not go into specifics. When my marriage was ending my husband admitted he had been trying to make me hate him and making things difficult for me so that I would pack up and return to NY. He did not know that there was nothing to return to. He took the car saying he needed it more and left me to work and try to care for four children with no washer and dryer so we had to make the trek 10 blocks to the laundry carrying one child and pulling a wagon of laundry. then we had to make another trek to the grocery store.

Looking back, that was the easy part. It became impossible when the landlord evicted us because we were five people living in a one bedroom apartment, the housing authority was only helping the aged and the disabled, and my mother refused to help because in Dad’s words “I would only take that damn fool back” he referred to my husband. Oh, and as it was in those days, when I asked for a raise at work the boss said I was a woman with children, go to welfare. Perhaps there was another choice, perhaps if Fred had paid his share of support, but I was backed against the wall. I took the kids to Fred’s place for him to care for thinking he needed to understand the mess we were in.

OK, that was a bit of explaining what no one has wanted to here, my side of the story.

Suffice it to say, my children were told not to listen to any bad stuff about Dad and his new gal, it was just sour grapes, after all. My one daughter was gaslighted with declarations that what she remembered from childhood never happened, it was just me telling tales.

Meanwhile Fred and his little bit of stuff could and did say anything they wanted about me while they were raising Fred’s “motherless children” in Cindi’s words. Every bad thing that ever happened was my fault because I was crazy. I heard little snippets all through the years and I had to live with the lies. And so did my children.

Meanwhile, I was a mess. I became obsessed with setting the facts straight, but in the end I just had to tuck it all inside and live with other peoples lies.

Most people do not necessarily want the truth. They decide how they want things to be and they take that as the truth. When I revisited NY in 2006 my sister Charlene apologized to me for not warning me about the minister who molested her. It seems that over the years around the campfires at the family reunion I was much discussed, not talked to of course, because I had not been there in many years. The conclusion was that “Whatever happened to mess up Janeen” was that the minister had sexually assaulted me.

It was a lie of course. I told the truth, not that anyone heard me, so making up their own lie to cover the shameful truth was logical. I laughed and told Charlene that the minister had never touched me. I made clear what happened to me and I am pretty sure she spun it her own way.

Lies are a thief. They steal the truth and twist and mangle it and you seldom get to set it straight. You live with it and you die with it and all the people who knew only the lies about you can shake their heads in wonder at the life you lived and perhaps even how awful you were. What happened to Janeen? Ask. Valerie asked. I told her the truth. Sadly she asked if there were alcohol or tongue so she could put it in perspective. Alcohol would excuse Dad apparently and tongue would mean it was sexual and not just plain ordinary horrifying abuse of your sixteen year old daughter.

My granddaughter a few years ago asked me about something she heard about me. It was a breath of fresh air. She had heard that I killed my mother just by saying I love you. Of course people had to twist and turn every little thing into something bad about me. If I had to guess, I would say Joyce started that one, but I do not know. She was incredibly cruel to me in the last years of her life. It was she who called social services on me to report I was abusing my sister Wanda. Wanda was livid. We went together to try to do something about the harassments by the family, but we were not believed. It is a fantastical story after all, and the easiest route is to believe the abuse. The social worker looked at me like I was a maggot. Lies, when told the right way, can soon be set in concrete with no proof at all.

The true story about my mother’s death? The last time she had abused me viciously she was a frail 89 year old but her tongue could slice and dice her enemy in a split second. I vowed to myself I would not see her again, ever. So when I got the call that she was dying at first I said I would not go to see her. I was in training as a truck driver and out on the road in southern PA. But I could not follow through. No matter how cruel my mother had been, I would get re-routed and go to the hospital. I called and my niece put me on the phone with her. She could not talk. I could only hear her labored breathing. I said the only thing I could say to a dying mother. I love you, I lied. I lied to a dying woman, what else could I have done?

A few minutes later my niece called and said she had passed. She said it was like she had been waiting for me, the only child who had not checked in to say goodbye.

I could run down a list of lies against me, big and little and I am sure many that I do not know about. Why was I painted in such dark colors by the very people who are supposed to support and care, family?

I hate lies. It is easy to see why. When I was a child I believed liars went to hell. Now I know that it is insidious lies that can make a person’s life hell on earth.

In the early years of recovery from childhood abuse, too much numbing alcohol, and the reality I had to face that my children were not coming home to me, I often was able to “forget” the DeGolier family existed only to be reminded by some event or word that, yes, I had siblings. These were the times when I was forced by the weight of recovery to take a respite and recede into my dark protective cave. When the voices shushing me overwhelmed my courage to heal therapy was impossible. I could go for a few weeks sometimes, but I always had to take breaks from confronting the demons in my head, the voices of Mother and Joan in particular telling me to be quiet. I had no right to speak about the family. Not even to heal.

My children were always in my mind. there was no respite from the fact that I had lost them to their dad and step-mother. I had been telling people, in my delusion, that we shared custody and they would be back soon. that was 5 years after they left. Without the alcohol to escape to, there was nothing to do but face the reality. Before AA, when my children came for summer vacation, I stayed sober and threw myself into being “Mom” and showing them a good time, they were the center and the priority. But the moment they were gone again, I sunk into numbing alcohol. I even tried pot a couple of times back then, to ease the pain and the passage to once again not being “Mom.”

During my early years in AA I picked up a number of white chips to begin again. One was after a particularly heavy drunk. I sat by the window on Mullally St. in Holly Hill, Fl, moaning along to a Barbara Streisand album on the record player and sinking ever deeper into self pity and thinking, “If anybody knew my pain…” In a sudden flash of anger I grabbed the record off the turntable and smashed it. I was sick of me. I was sick to death of me.

I believe that was my last white chip for a number of years. I suppose I used AA to numb my pain. I often went to 2 or 3 meetings a day but it was time well spent. I heard stories that were hard to listen to, and I know much harder to tell. I heard stories of courage and anguish, acceptance and deep denial, overcoming and going under. I heard stories from men who were sexually abused as well as women. I felt their pain and their triumph and sometimes even their joy. I came to believe I too could heal. Every story they told gave me hope and however small that strand of hope, or however large, I grabbed on with both hands and ran with it. It was all I had, and I would take all I could get.

Life was hard. Recovery from sexual abuse of the kind I had survived, while coming to terms with the loss of my children and trying to tuck all that pain away so that I could work as a waitress and smile and laugh and cajole good tips out of the customers was a constant battle. When I lost, it was the job I lost, dealing with the rest was just what I had to put first.

In the years I lived on Mullaly St my sister Sheila would bring Mother to me for a few weeks every spring. Sheila hated Mother. But she would forever try to be the good daughter and take care of her. It was sad really, because she had no great ability to keep those loose ends tucked in and her pain and hatred seeped out all over Mother. One spring early on in AA she brought mother to stay and they had a rip-roaring fight in the living room over whether Ma had the right to tell Sheila it was time to sleep. It was 1am and I lay in my bed with a pillow over my head traumatized to have my little haven from life come alive with the horrid past splattered over my walls.

Then Sheila stormed out and stayed away all the next day until Ma was half mad with wondering what had caused the tirade. Looking back from here I doubt she had ever faced what she had helped do to Sheila and did not tie Sheila’s treatment of her to childhood. And Sheila had been through so much she probably would never fully recover from. She would always be the friendly clowning lady who went over the top to show she was fine only to crash and burn time and time again. But that day I found myself comforting Mother, trying to ease her pain, and it made me so very angry, as much as she had done to me, and now I must help her feel better. The DeGolier family, a fine mess.

After that whenever Sheila called and put the phone on speaker with Ma’s voice next to hers I would crumble to the floor in torment and trepidation. I would crumble, the world I built around me, the cave I always retreated to for safety, even the distance between worlds, them in NC and me in Florida disappeared in a tornado of emotion. When Mother was with me in Florida I was kind to her, but when I went out to an AA meeting I would often just drive up the coast road, beating the steering wheel till I bruised my clenched fists and screaming out my pain to the wind that carried it out to sea. Then I would tuck in all that rage and return to Ma, meek and innocent she seemed, waiting for me to return and enter back into some mind numbing conversation about family, or how ghastly it was that history studies in schools were being altered. But as a waitress I had many years of practiced smiling and laughing around all sorts of people, and pretending to have a good time with the mother who helped throw me to the wolves was just what I had to get through in that moment.

Sheila and Ma, especially together, were frightening for me, but no matter how I tried, I could not escape them always reaching out to me. One evening early on in AA, Sheila showed up on the porch of the AA club on Foote St in Daytona. She had called me the day before and offered to rescue me. She would house me and clothe me and buy me a new car if I came to live with her while she sent me to college. I tried to say no nicely but she insisted. I finally said a firm no and said goodbye. When I went out to the porch to see what she wanted she said “I just drove 500 miles without sleep to tell you I love you. Now I have to drive 500 miles back and go directly to work without sleep.” She hugged me and walked away. I began to cry uncontrollably. She was like a ghost haunting me. I could not return to my own apartment that night. She knew where I lived. A friend, Martha, let me sleep on her sofa, but for days I watched my back, and my front, and all places in my peripheral vision for any sign of her. A few days later she began sending me little cards and notes. they came five days a week in my mailbox. “I love you.” “You are an angel.” “You are special.” She was stalking me and every day I cringed at checking my mailbox. After the first few I stopped reading them and tossed them straight into the trash. You see, it was she and Ma who had thrown me on the scrap heap after my dad accosted me in my bedroom when I was 16. It took them two weeks of shaming me and berating me and shaking their heads in wonder at me to shut me up about sexual assault for the next 19 years. They sealed the secrets inside me as sure as if they had licked the envelope. I learned in 1995 from my sister, Valerie that a lie had gone through the family that I had claimed sexual abuse because I did not want to be stuck at home caring for my aging parents. Scapegoating me began early to cover over other peoples crimes.

Relationships became another place to hide from me when I could not look at myself anymore. Each was abusive in its own way and looking back from now, I cringe at the relationships I got into and stayed in long after the early glow had passed. It was an addiction all its own, any port in a storm, but the storm always followed me. The storm was me, I carried it everywhere.

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.

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.

And then I was old. It was suddenly too late for so many things I thought there was time for. Like the woman in Shangri-La crossing the invisible line and disintegrating into dust.

No, it was not that dramatic. It only feels that way on the inside because so many pieces lay at my feet with no hope to mend. They will lie there still when I have left this earth because they are not in my control. There is no glue for hearts.

For decades I ran frantic back and forth from safe haven to the battlefield and back again trying to mend and make amends and all the time thinking I needed to get “home” to my children before it’s too late and never knowing it was too late long ago.

I’d come straight from the Funny Farm where I grew amongst the other wild children of my cold and distant parents where sex and incest were ok to do but not to talk about and my eyes witnessed horror and my brain took in cruel words and my heart learned not to love too much and my body tried to disappear into the woodwork. Mistakenly, I thought if I just get away from that place and those people I would be OK, normal like all the people who must live behind all the little curtained windows in all the other houses in town. I was wrong.

I must have packed unaware all my coping mechanisms along with my clothes and books and sentimental oddities because there they were when I got to where I escaped to for me to use against enemies no longer with me. I didn’t know why I sat in my new safe place peering out the window lest someone find me out, I did not know why I needed my boyfriend to return from work to go outside and hang the laundry. Paranoia suddenly works on nothing when you have watched your back since childhood and now have no reason to watch your back. Like breathing in and breathing out, someone is still out to get you.

Most people might agree that it is needless to say that I had no sense of self or safety, my mind could not reason away my fears or begin to build a foundation or work out why I could not just be.

I was a child when my children entered my life still dependent and needy and sunk in the past that followed me everywhere. When I was pregnant with the eldest I was still having nightmares about my brother coming to attack me and I would in my sleep be pinching me to wake me up before he could open the front door and just as his hand was on the knob I would get to the door and lock it just as I woke in a sweat as though I had been running a marathon. Always these nightmares came after my boyfriend, we were not married yet, left for work and I lay in bed to curtail the morning sickness. I could not tell him. I would lose him. He didn’t understand why I could not just “be OK” and neither did I. It was 150 miles between my brother and i, and a much greater distance between Fred and I.

People like me should not have children. It only perpetuates the trauma from one generation to the next and on and on ad-infinitum. If I believed in “sin” that would be my greatest, not abortion, not pre-marital sex, and certainly not incest or hate or lying or stealing. But I did not know how broken I was.

It is true that many people come from horrid childhoods and prosper and build stable families and live some sort of normalcy. I did not. I did not choose to not be OK. And no matter how I tried, I could not get it right even for the children I loved so much. Emotionally I was erratic, I had no control, needed to run for cover at the slightest threat. I wonder why.

Having me for a mother, leaving out the fact my children had a cold step-mother and father who filled them with religious crap and lies, would have been a kind of torment for them. I expect it was worse than having no mother at all.

But now it is today and I have had three years of emotion regulation therapy and at 68 yrs old I have what feels like the most solid foundation of my whole life, the most settled emotions, as well as the clearest view I can possibly have of the misery I brought my children.

I remember the day I finally had to accept that I may never see my daughters again. I understood on some level why they had the right to make that choice. I had made that choice, out of self-preservation, to never see my mother again. I did not see her again, and if I had to make the choice over again it would probably be the same. My mother never chose to change or apologize.

I can give my children no less freedom to cut me out of their lives. It is that simple.

Do you feel sorry for me? Don’t bother. Pity never helped anyone progress. I know because I was sunk in it all the years of struggling to fix what was wrong with me.

“If you had my life, you’d drink too.” I would moan drunkenly to the tune of Barbara Streisand’s album. One day I had enough of me and ripped the LP off the player and broke it in a dozen pieces.

I do not know what drives me to keep getting up and trying when so much has failed. Perhaps it is that interminable and sometimes annoying hope. I do not know what else to blame it on. It has brought me this far. It can see me through whatever comes next.

Back to my statement about having children. I firmly believe victims of severe trauma need to fix themselves before they bring in more children who will almost undoubtedly need some sort of fixing later on. But for those who already have children, be open and honest about who you are and what you went through as best you can according to how much they will listen. Let them know that above all else you are there for them as best you can be. I ran from my disabilities instead of facing them. Well, I faced them on some level, but I was not open with my children. I kept faking “normalcy” while my insides were a shambles. It was not right and certainly not helpful to them or myself.

I wish I could prove my life actually happened, but so many people with agendas of their own claim it never did. The family I grew up in, my mother, some of my sisters and brothers because they cannot face the truth. My first husband has to believe I was just a horrid person so his choices look reasonable and I take the blame. In the end, if I want any life at all, I just have to accept that my life is what I am still recovering from. I and I alone need to face it in order to change me.

I wrote to my brothers finally, and my ex-husband asking for an apology. I never expected to get one. But I am glad I made contact about the wrongs they did. I have had to live with it. I do not see a reason why they should not also live with it in some small measure.

Finally, I still feel young, and freer than ever before. yesterday I walked a 3 mile trail twice. I have miles to go before i sleep.

I have spoken before of my unanswered childhood prayers for rescue from the sexual, verbal, and physical abuse of my early years. I believed completely in Jesus love for his little children. And when I would look around at the horizon after my prayers I fully expected to see someone, sent by Jesus, come to rescue me.

When no one came, I did not stop believing in God. I stopped believing in me. Just as my parents rejected me and each brother in turn had used me and walked away, God and Jesus rejected me. I was not a “good” girl. I was tainted, soiled, unlovable, unworthy of the time and effort it took to save me. At eleven years old when menstruations began, I believed that god was killing me. For several days I walked around thinking I was dying because I was such a wicked girl. With 12 older sisters I had no idea it was a natural process of growing up.

I stopped praying for a savior. I was alone and would have to fight for myself. I was more terrified of my parents because of having to witness savage beatings of older siblings than I was of the abusers. I learned to watch my back. I also learned to people please and be who anyone wanted me to be to get along, to be loved.

After my father tried to join the parade of male abusers when I was 16 and he was 70, I dropped out of school and ran away to be married in order to escape not only him, but another brother who had just attacked his fifth sister and would no doubt be at my door next. I knew there was no one to protect me, especially not Jesus. He already knew all my dirty secrets.

But the boy I left home with, who had been my childhood sweetheart did not love me either. He abandoned me and our children over and over and over. Did I learn to leave him. No, I learned again that I was not lovable, and filled with so many dirty secrets, I never dared to tell, I lived as two people, the good girl and the bad girl. The torment was impossible to live with, but it was all I had.

I began to pray again. I picked up my Bible and began to read from cover to cover (I skipped a couple of the harder books) and I began to learn what a good Christian woman was like, how to be a good wife and mother, a good person. But my husband still abandoned me. So I read the Bible a second time and I prayed for change. But my husband told me I would never change and because he never said exactly what he meant I should change I picked up every magazine I could with the word change on the cover. I got up and made him breakfast and a lunch to go to work and always had dinner on the table at the right time and I kept the children clean and tidy as well as the house. I dieted incessantly though I was not fat. I quit soap-operas because they depressed me. In the end I married my “husband” because I thought I needed to stop living in sin.

Before I married him, though, there was another nightmarish encounter with religion. We only had two children at the time, we lived in a house with rats, no running water, no toilet that worked, no stove to cook on and I dragged pond water in buckets to wash clothes in an old wringer washer until the wiring caught fire one day. I did not get out for weeks at a time. Fred brought home groceries on Friday evening and I saw no one for weeks at a time. We did not have a phone either.

One day some women from the Jehovah’s Witnesses came by that we had been studying with. One lady told me that I would be responsible for my two children’s eternal deaths when Armageddon came in 1975 because I was not worshipping God correctly and out preaching his word. I was and had always been living a nightmare. I was twenty and hopeless with two children, a man who did not want me, a daily life unbearable, and a childhood that still played with my insides no matter how I tried to bury it. And now God would annihilate me and my children.

I began having nightmares about the end times and being left behind with my children with all the wicked people because you see, I was wicked too. I lived in fear and despair, alone and unwanted, as I had always done. I had a breakdown. My two children went into a foster home for a few weeks and I went into a hospital where they drug you mindless and line you up naked for a hose down in lieu of a shower. Fortunately, I was a crybaby and an aid took pity on me and let me take a real shower. but the horror of that place will always live with me. Fortunately, I discovered I was not crazy. I spent my time there getting my GED.

Eventually I was alone. My husband had found someone else and now they were raising my kids. He shut me out, replaced me with someone more palatable I suppose. I suppose whatever I had lacked, she had had. I doubt I will ever know.

I began to drink, got into a verbally abusive relationship went to AA eventually and again turned to God. Someone told me to go the the Baptist Church downtown and get up and walk down front when they asked who would like to accept Jesus as their savior. So, with tears streaming I walked to the front and a man sent me into a room where a woman sat at a table. She began to ask me questions about my faith and I asked her why she was asking me these things. I came to find Jesus. She said “I have to ask these questions to find out if you are the right sort of person for our church.” And I began to sob hopelessly and hopeless. I knew the horrid person I was. They would not want me. And I ran out. Funny though, they regularly sent me money begging letters.

I went back to the AA Club and stood outside in the dark crying my eyes out. Again God rejected me.

My fear and longing for God turned to hate, pure and unrelenting. I often went down to the ocean at dawn to scream my hatred into the surf and tell him what a useless and cruel thing he was. And when anyone brought up scripture I told them what I thought.

But in AA you need to choose a higher power. I chose one who would be like a good father and never drop me, and I still called him God but it was a horrid relationship with very little meaning.

It was not until I was taking a course in Humanities that the idea of God’s existence began to erode. It was 1992 and I was researching a term paper. It had not previously occurred to me that god might be a myth like Zeus on Mt. Olympus. And when I read the part about hell being an invention of man to keep people subservient, and the artwork for hell was taken from Dante’s Towering Inferno and the gargoyles also were to frighten people I began to see a new perspective.

Now of course, I have been reading books by professors who teach in universities and I am slightly relieved to discover that God and Jesus never rejected me. They were a fantasy that helped screw me over from the beginning.

The good news is I do not hate god anymore for what he let happen. And I do not see a reason to hate me anymore for not being a “good” girl. When you are 3 1/2 and you find yourself lying atop a grown man with a penis pressed between your tubby little legs masturbating, just how is your life, your mind, and your heart supposed to go and grow and develop into a “normal” person?

The belief in God and Jesus love was just another obstacle in my journey, and quite a big one. so I still hate religion. But I am content in my atheism and I am fairly certain there will be no last minute reversal on my deathbed because I am afraid of hell. You see, if God did exist, he has already done enough damage to me and all my descendants. So I will not be calling on him to put me through more torture. hahaha

Can you imagine what my life could have been without the abuse? Because millions of children suffer the effects and aftereffects of childhood abuse, and no place do I see a God stepping in to help.

After a long hiatus I return renewed.

It is no longer other people who silence me. It is I intimidatingly insecure and afraid, unbidden I cultivate a hundred reasons not to write, and I succeed for I am oh so clever and know all my buttons to push.

Shh. It’s a secret.

Shh. Don’t upset Ma and Dad.

Shhhame on you.

Shh. What is wrong with you?

Shh. “You don’t ever tell anyone what goes on in this family.” A direct word for word quote from Ma, chief collaborator when I was 13 and tried to see a phycologist to ask if I were “crazy.”

Why do I return to this? You may well ask. It is because by the time I am done writing several more people will have been sexually victimized whether man, woman, or child. And also because all I have, perhaps all I have ever had of value to offer others is my own hard fought experience.

What do you suppose happens to victims of sexual crimes? How many care? After all can they not just put it behind them and move on? Yes, so very simple, if they just get over it then I am not called on to take any action or change any belief or way of life or friend. I gave my best advice. hush. get over it. Put it behind.

But it does not go behind because it has become me and I have become it. Because in that moment my brain was changed, life interrupted, detours taken in hopes of mere survival. In that moment I became some other person with no more choice of who or what I will be. I am numb, I am alone, I am frightened, I am muted, and one day I will look back and see that that was the day my ability to trust disappeared along with my ability to form close associations with people.

After that day I stood outside the family looking in no longer a part of but apart from while all my years wishing for a family that was just out of reach.

I tried to put it behind me. I tried to get on with my life. I tried to cover it all up for the sake of others who never gave it a second thought or care. But there were two me’s, no not split personality, but the fake me on the outside trying to be good and kind and diligent and responsible and on the inside the broken, frightened little girl still looking for someone to love and care. War ensued and inside my little girl screamed her terror while I smiled and served breakfast to my kids. At night there were nightmares, horrid, shameful nightmares that left me shaken and ashamed at dawn while trying sweetly to see my husband off to work with a well packed lunch and a kiss. But all along the way my insides crept out in outbursts of anguish. See me! And I would tuck it back in where it belonged and tamp it down and get on with my life.

And back it came. Like a dead body without enough weight it resurfaced time and again. It was an almost daily battle between me and me just to survive with some semblance of life.

Eventually my life lay in utter ruin and the dam broke and poured me out into the light. I was 35. My husband and children belonged to someone else. I was addicted to the alcohol, my savior that kept the pain at bay and there was no way to tuck the past back in and move on.

I eventually joined AA and learned how to get through the pain without a drink.

I am still healing. A few weeks ago I wrote letters to my brothers asking for an apology. But none are man enough to say I’m sorry. I also wrote to my husband, father of my children asking for an apology for his part, but I do not expect an answer. It is so much easier to just let people think I am crazy and telling stories for attention, or to excuse my own bad behaviors, or just to be mean as the spoiled brat I am.

But I lived my life; I survived my life when the odds were against me; I will not now abdicate my seat to ease other peoples consciences over what they chose to do.

So I have a true choice now. I can spend what is left of my time on earth reaching out to other victims and survivors and be miserable doing it, or I can do the same reaching out in a joyous and grateful manner. Either way my past is my future, inseparable as it always has been from who and what I am.

“To study psychological trauma is to come face to face both with human
vulnerability in the natural world and with the capacity for evil in human nature. To study psychological trauma means bearing witness to horrible events. When the events are natural disasters or “acts of God,” those who bear witness sympathize readily with the victim. But when the traumatic events are of human design, those who bear witness are caught in the conflict between victim and perpetrator. It is morally impossible to remain
neutral in this conflict. The bystander is forced to take sides.

It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering. Leo Eitinger, a psychiatrist who has studied survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, describes the cruel conflict of interest
between victim and bystander: “War and victims are something the community wants to forget; a veil of oblivion is drawn over everything painful and unpleasant. We find the two sides face to face; on one side the victims who perhaps wish to forget but cannot, and on the other all those with strong, often unconscious motives who very intensely both wish to forget and succeed in doing so. The contrast . . . is frequently very painful for both sides. The weakest one . . . remains the losing party in this silent and unequal dialogue.”

In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens. To this end, he marshals an impressive array of arguments, from the most blatant denial to the most sophisticated
and elegant rationalization. After every atrocity one can expect to hear the same predictable apologies: it never happened; the victim lies; the victim exaggerates; the victim brought it upon herself; and in any case, it is time to forget the past and move on.

The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail.
The perpetrator’s arguments prove irresistible when the bystander faces them in isolation. Without a supportive social environment, the bystander usually succumbs to the temptation to look the other way. This is true even when the victim is an idealized and valued member of society. Soldiers in every war, even those who have been regarded as heroes, complain bitterly that no one wants to know the real truth about war.

When the victim is already devalued (a woman, a child), she may find that the most traumatic events of her life take place outside the realm of socially validated reality. Her experience becomes unspeakable.”

Trauma and Recovery
Judith Herman, M. D.

I cringe to think this passage would apply to me if I were not educated from an early age and quite familiar with man-made atrocities, yet it helps me to see, if but a glimpse, what the vast sea of people feel who cannot bring themselves to believe my life was as I say. They get to choose. They get to take the softer easier road of non-belief. They get to ease their minds and let it go and forget and move on because of course my story never happened. Of course, the accused is innocent, of course, he/she would never…

And yet it happened and the only one to pay is the victim who has already paid and paid and paid. We are the ones to come to drink and drug, or have too much sex, or freeze our hearts and bodies. We are the ones who feel the shame and the guilt and cannot trust or let down our guard. We are the ones who come to believe in the deepest part of us, that we are bad, soiled, evil.

It is all backwards and upside down. And it is vile.

It never occurred to me when I first began to tell my life story that I would not be believed. I was there, it was my body, my mind, my heart, and yet the cards were stacked in favor of my brothers from the beginning, before the beginning just by the fact that people will rather believe these atrocities do not happen.

But atrocities do happen. And someone has to pay. So far, it is nearly always the victim, even more so if he/she dares to speak out. The perpetrators live their lives secure in the fact that victims are rarely believed. They get away with it and never care a whit about those they have broken.

When my sister, Valerie died several of my brothers were over heard at her memorial discussing how bad it would be if people were to find out what they had done. Where was their care for the tortured sister? But they were worried about me and my speaking out so boldly.

I see now there is little I can do. It makes me angry. It makes me sad. It makes my heart hurt for the many millions of abused children who do now, and always will grow up broken inside, while the perpetrators smile sweetly and say “Who, me?”