It is easy to point the finger of blame. But I prefer the word cause as I prefer reason to excuse. There is a larger picture than what happened to me. Life on Mother’s farm was a barren landscape emotionally. I cannot begin to tell the stories of my siblings except where they intersected with mine.There was a drought of love and kindness. Healthy nurturing was absent. Mistakes were met with uncontrolled rage, whippings, and verbal carnage.

If there was one advantage to being “the baby” it was that I sat in a place of observing, being forever too young. But I witnessed savage punishment and years later was told about the worst of it before I came along.

My parents had a silent war in play for all the time I knew them and we children were the collateral damage. I called it the cold war after the Cold War between the USA and USSR. There were no winners, only survivors. Each of us made it out the best we could and went on to lead seriously dysfunctional lives.

So the parents are to blame then. Simple; end of story.

I think not. It is easy to lay blame. Then I can hate them and move on. But I do not hate them. Being a by-product of their inability to parent has brought me more questions than answers. What sort of environment were they the product of? I think it matters. At what point do we set our per-conceived ideas aside and seek real answers? I grew up believing my parents did not love me. I tried to win their love until they passed from this earth, and I failed. What I sought, they were incapable of, at least in the context I yearned for. But what I sought was the same as the child in me sought always, love me, I will do anything, just love me, please.

I believe Mother suffered Borderline Personality Disorder. If so, she probably suffered as much as I suffered being her child. I am diagnosed with the same disorder. It feels like suffering is just part of the deal. I used to say my mother was the greatest martyr ever. What if she was just suffering and had no way out that she could see?

As I stumble along my own journey to insight into how I became the person who caused suffering in my children’s lives from loss and abandonment I can see a similar path my mother trod. And I see it is possible she did love me under her layers of armor against a cruel world. She was not capable of acting on that love.

I am not the hateful monster I have been labeled. I am a woman lost in the muck and mire of a life I inadvertently created, a life I would not wish on my enemies.

Perception is everything. Knowledge is power. Leave the blaming for the rain that spoiled a picnic rather than the complex people who cross our paths. Blame only perverts the truth.

If just putting it behind me and being happy were a possibility I would have done it the night I left home. How does one dismantle a lifetime of learning all negative messages about ones self and simply wake up smiling and positive. I tried. I failed. It seemed clear to me I was too stupid, too weak, and had no willpower.

It was clear my husband felt it was possible. “Whatever it is,” he’d try to comfort me, “just let it go and be happy.” I’m sure he meant well. But the woman-child my childhood raised up to unleash on the world was created with pain and fear and sexual abuse. I was constructed with a million little tapes that informed me daily that I was nothing, or I was evil, or I was stupid. I imagined people were after me, the same repetitious nightmares that began in early childhood played sometimes 3 times a night. Always it began at the barn basement door. When I opened it the daylight stretched across partially clad bodies. I let go of the door and turned and ran like the wind feeling my feet land on solid clumps of grass and earth and propelling me up the little hill to safety. In the dream I reached the top of the hill, flapped my little arms and soared to the top of the Catalpa Tree. Looking behind I would see the darkness behind me fade away. I would awake only to fall asleep and start again.

I could no more leave childhood behind than I could swim the Pacific. It was me. I was it. Together we trod through the days faking “normal.” and trying to figure out what was wrong with me that there was no “normal.”

At this time in my life I often long to “let it go” as it were, just be happy. I am 66 and have invested as many years in surviving and getting to know and change me. I still battle the negative tapes in my head and the bits of paranoid thinking. For that reason burying and forgetting the trauma, even if possible, could mean losing so much progress I have made and continue to make in DBT.

A further reason to keep it alive and in process is because I will not abandon my quest to shed light on the effects of early childhood sexualization and abuse. Had there not been a solid rule of silence in my generation, I might have been spared many of the lasting effects of my childhood. It is possible I could have engaged with my children better, settled down to a job and home and “normalcy.” and by now be a regular grandma with scads of family in my life.

I find joy with what is, yes, but I must go further. Some 57,000+ children are sexually abused, many for years, every year IN THE UNITED STATES! Will I lend my experience strength and hope to those children or turn and walk away? And keep in mind these 57,000 children are ADDED to the long, long lists from previous years. Indeed there are millions of people residing in the USA who were victims.

I have already been put out of the family for talking. My enemies need none of my compassion and concern. But victims do. They have no choice.

I spent much of my life running from me; I am not running now.

After my sister and mother silenced me, the house went silent also. Neither my father or mother looked at me. But the first Monday evening Mother got ready for her church circle meeting. I was appalled that she could leave me alone with Dad. I will never forget watching her go to the front door. Her hand on the knob. she turned and looked at me, undecided perhaps, then walked out.

I could not sit in my usual spot and watch TV and Dad at the same time. Nor did I dare shower and retreat to my room. With only a heavy curtain for a door, I would be trapped. The evening passed one long minute at a time until Mother reappeared and I felt safe going to bed.

Sleep was nigh impossible. My mind churned. What did I do to cause Dad to do that? Did I smile wrong? Was I too friendly? Was it wearing my pajamas and cheap pink quilted bathrobe from the shower to the bedroom? Of course he would not hurt me, he admitted to being in my room but said he was just trying to show me how much he loved me. I was a horrid girl to accuse him, but I felt it, I remembered every part of it. The record played on a loop throughout the night and I startled awake at every shift in the air.

I began drinking, lost my babysitting job and took to hanging out in Fredonia, a college town a few miles away until 3 in the morning; I did not tell my parents I lost my job.

Bad news was on the horizon already though. My sister Joyce came to the house to plead with our parents to do something to stop brother Dennis from stalking sister Valerie. They turned her away, naturally. But Joyce did manage to get me away from the farm and the relative safety of her home for a summer job. Valerie had moved to Rochester to put distance between she and her stalker. Joyce was sure, as Dennis had molester Rozella, Sheila, Sharon, Charlene, and was now stalking Val, he would turn to me, the last little sister he had. He was 35.

I met another very nice boy. Geoffrey. A gentleman and headed to dental school in, either Toronto or Montreal, I enjoyed his company, but I was now a “bad girl” and again I was baffled by his not making a move on me. Was there something wrong with him? Or me?

One evening my future husband, Fred showed up with an engagement ring. He said he could not bear the thought of losing me. I jumped at the chance.

Fred wanted to drop out of college. But with the draft in place and the Vietnam War raging, he was sure he would immediately be taken. He said if we married he would be safe. At the end of summer, when it was time to return to the farm and super-hyper-vigilance against Dad, Dennis, and Reed I cooked up a plan with Fred to claim I was pregnant and we had to marry.

I dropped out of my senior year about two weeks in and Mother bundled me out the door and gleefully I left my childhood hell behind. Or so I imagined. The reality was it all went with me; I was who my experiences created, a paranoid, angry, reclusive woman-child with only crude coping mechanisms to get me by but in truth no longer worked.

Nightmares haunted my nights and I was constantly aware of people out to get me. Of course there was nobody lurking behind me. my neck hairs prickled constantly just the same. It was a hell of a life I had jumped into.

It has been voiced by my ex-husband, (to cover his own bad acts I assume) that the worst thing to ever happen to me was being poor. It is laughable that he even believes he is an authority on my childhood. He remains a ridiculous, pompous fool. If only that had been my major stumbling block.

Being the youngest in a family of twenty children I was forever watching siblings depart the home for fairer climes. The spring of 1969 brought that to a close as the last of my siblings graduated and moved on to build their own lives. Yes, I looked forward to my turn. Why would I not?

I felt the empty house shift. Mother moved into the room vacated by my brother Reed. I removed the curtain between the two sides of my sister’s and my room. It was all mine now.

Valerie had been a silent presence for a very long time napping for hours after school and on weekends. Looking back I understand she had major depression. It had been a while since we had communicated, played games together, laughed. And then she was gone and I missed her being there.

Reed I did not miss. He was still intimidating me with his suggestive sexual glances and innuendo.

Otherwise life was much the same as I had known for many years. Dad sat stone silent in his chair beside the red and white metal kitchen table. Mother sat silently with correspondence or nodding off at the larger cherry (?) dining table a few feet away. The only spark of light flickered at company or a favorite TV show. I stayed to myself a lot.

I was 16 and life stretched out before me; I welcomed my turn to leave the cold damp cement walls of our basement home and the parents who were not parents at all but stone guardians of a well breached fortress. I would do better.

One day in the waning days of winter, 1970, my father stopped me at the entryway to the house. He clumsily stuffed paper money into my hand. “This will be our little secret. Don’t tell Ma.” he said with a twinkle. I felt as though I had waited an eternity for my Dad to show some sign of affection. Indeed, I had waited years.

And I reveled in the idea that we had a secret from Ma who had a way of ending all joy lest we get drunk on happiness. I still remember the evening she told Dad to never mind the girls, and soon after he retreated from me completely; I’d felt the abandonment deeply as he had been the bright spot in my life up to the age of about three.

I took the money gift as Dad’s way of showing he did love me and now with only myself left he could afford to show it. About once a week these “chance” meetings occurred at the entryway. ten, fifteen dollars in my pocket, Daddy did love me after all, and Mother be damned.

A few weeks later I entered the house after school to a bitter scene. Mother and Dad still sat in their allotted spaces. Dad was hurling viscous insults at Mother, years of pent up, twisted and cruel daggers. I had watched Mother weep in stone silence all my short life. I had watched her tears run freely into the bread dough she kneaded for our supper, her plum red face of pain a mask I will never unsee. But there before me was a face I could not turn away from. For the first time ever I wanted to go to her, comfort her, protect her. I could not move.

“There is the chief cook around here,” Dad flung at her. “I’m done eating the damn slop you cook up.” He was pointing at me. My mind did cartwheel’s trying to extricate myself from the room but I could not ever go far enough to end the nightmare scene.

I was confused. Why did Dad say that? I didn’t do that much cooking. But I felt somehow as if I had betrayed Mother. Who was the bad guy? Were they both or neither?

Silence returned swiftly. In one avalanche Mother had cried a lifetime of tears and Dad had spoken a lifetime of cruelty.

One night soon after, I took my shower and went to bed at ten as usual on a school night. Ma was at her church circle meeting. It was a Monday. Dad was watching the TV. I was drifting off to sleep when I felt the mattress shift and the old metal springs groan. Startled I sat upright, my father’s hands clenched my arms at the shoulder and his mouth pressed into mine. I felt his wet tongue, all in an instant and I placed my palms against his chest and pushed him off me. He rose and stumbled from the room. I cowered against the cold cement wall staring into the dark until daybreak my mind doing flip flops trying to take in what had happened. I could not.

A day later I called my sister Sheila and she arrived the next day. I chose her because she had been raped by our brother and had his baby. I felt sure she would help me.

I arrived home from school but remained outside. I watched Sheila come striding at me, her arms swinging in anger. “Shame on you, Janeen. How could you say that about your father? You’re his little girl, he would never do anything to hurt you!”

For the two weeks she remained she and Mother took turns alternately chastising me, gazing their shaking heads at me, and asking each other whatever could be wrong with me? Of course they didn’t speak too much directly to me. After all, if you ask the victim they will just tell you the same lame story about the respected old man who’d never hurt me sticking his tongue between my lips. No use going with that line, is there?

At the end of two weeks I was sufficiently silenced outwardly while inside me skin everything had shifted. When Sheila said her good-byes she could not resist sending one more dagger my way. “Well, at least my trip was not wasted.” she said referring of course to her booking speaking engagements at area churches to garner money for her “charity.”

Inside me I shed my last tear, silent and alone and decided to be just as bad as they said I was. After a lifetime of sexual abuse I gave in to the idea that all any man wanted was sex any time, any way, with anybody.

Oddly a very nice boy, a drummer in a high school band broke up with me because of sex. I was astounded to learn he was not ready for sex, his mother would kill him if he messed up his future. Really? A man who was not all about sex?

But I didn’t take the hint.

I began drinking at my babysitting job, got caught and fired.

Tomorrow I will relate the further events that led up to my running off to marry Fred. He gave me an engagement ring. Surely that meant something.

(A rough draft)

This book will be divided into four parts. First I must tell what happened. It is not an easy story to tell but without the acceptance of the account of my beginnings there is no story but a woman continually torn and battered and set adrift by her own choices and failings, selfishness, manipulation, self pity and irresponsibility. Many believe that is all there is to me. I alone can answer because those who also know better will never tell. I stand against many judges.

Part two navigates the minefield of adult life with no tools, skills, or knowledge but the now ill-fitting coping skills of childhood, paranoid thinking, hyper-vigilance, and the old tapes I now unwittingly played for myself of uselessness, incompetence, sheer badness to the core, and the never ending fear that everyone who looked upon my face could see my inner blackness attached to a family whose name was etched on my forehead forever.

Each Day a New Beginning

Nobody told me how hard and lonely change is. –Joan Gilbertson
Pain, repeatedly experienced, indicates a need for self-assessment, an inventory
of our behavior. Honest self-appraisal may well call for change, a change in
attitude perhaps, a change in specific behavior in some instances, or maybe a
change in direction. We get off the right path occasionally, but go merrily on
our way until barriers surface, doors close, and experiences become painful.
Most of us willingly wallow in our pain a while, not because we like it, but
because its familiarity offers security. We find some comfort in our pain because
at least it holds no surprises.

These are the words which struck home. “Most of us willingly wallow in our pain a while, not because we like it, but
because its familiarity offers security. We find some comfort in our pain because
at least it holds no surprises.” It was an answer to a question I had not thought I asked in my tortured, suicidal state. Someone knew I wallowed in pain, never wanting to, but because it was as familiar and ever-present as my own hated name. I had to know more.

The last section is my journey through Dialectic Behavioral Therapy from the day I headed to Monarch Behavioral Center in September of 2017 absolutely devastated at realizing I was not safe with me. I went in begging for relief. I had heard of DBT and asked if it would work for me. That day began my twelfth and hopefully my final hospital admission for depression and wanting to die since the age of 20. I am now 66. After 18 months of learning and applying new skills for living my hope for a future grows.

It begins. I adjust my chair height, pull up a blank word document, turn on Enya, and hesitate at the name my page is given; Untitled 2. It is apt for a girl who lived in the shadows afraid of being discovered, afraid of being named. It is also apt for the woman at last in charge of her own narrative.

Who will I be? I have been named many things; Liar, Crazy, Lazy, Taker, Hater, Loony. I am accused of many things also and I am here to clear my name. In the end I will name me a name befitting a woman who has endured a lifetime of abuse on mere threads of hope that faded and fled my grasp only to reappear as the dawn of a new day or the spring greening of a landscape or a moment of defiance at those who laid me low.

I am not alone. For many years I thought I was alone in my plight and to think it is to live it, Cloaked in my silent nightmare of pain and shame and guilt and fear I walked on the edge of insanity never imagining there were millions who walked parallel paths to my own. Also alone, we crossed paths many times without seeing, or feeling a kinship between us.

How could so many be silenced so thoroughly? Entrenched in silent shame our selves buried in the debris of childhood abuses never to feel the bright light of truth shine down on us we buried our baggage deep inside only to feel it regurgitate like a bitter pill to be swallowed again and again lest someone discover our darkness.

A virtual army of victims and survivors, those who lost and those who healed, and those who died unable to hold the thread of hope that runs through all of us. How many times did I say “Don’t let the Bastards win,” in a moment of darkness of which there were many.

I do not have an easy answer for why or how I have lived. It is a mystery with years of suicidal thoughts haunting my journey. So I will tell my story in the hopes that others will find an answer and I will finally know who I am.

When I look back over the desolation my journey to survival and then to recovery has wrought. From my unregulated emotions to paranoid thinking and beyond. I had no tools to cope in any grown-up way and my children and all who tried to be close to me suffered. I could no more form close bonds with my children than I could fly no matter how I craved that closeness.

Alone-ness engulfed me. And I sought safety from every hint of pain or abandonment. Florida became my “safe-space” where the traumas of childhood, failure. and loss could recede to a comfort level I could survive. Still, I fell apart over and over again. I sought refuge in relationships, all abusive to one degree or another. I sought comfort in alcohol but it too failed me.

I am responsible for so much pain and sober and aware, I face it every day, often more than once a day.

No matter my childhood, no matter my journey through my adult years, there is only one person I can be, my baggage is mine and mine alone.

I am sorry for the pain I caused being me. This is who I am, who I have always been for better or worse, and whom I will be for the rest of my life, a woman still learning how to live, cope, deal with the strangest of circumstances.

Seven years of the most formative years of childhood I was sexually used. Age 3 1/2 when Carl recruited me until age 11 when I warned Reed off. Carl passed me on to Keith who eventually passed me on to Joey, my older nephew. Reed clued his friend Fred in, “She won’t mind,” was the message. I was 15 then and hunting desperately for “love,” having no clue what that felt like.

I did mind. Nobody cared. I met my first full grown penis in my brother’s bed at 3 1/2. Of course I minded. I minded the use of my body, the dark silence I sank into, and the way each of these people discarded me when they were done with me.

Joey apologized immediately when I began to cry. I’d thought I was free of that particular activity. I was 12 then and gathered the hopelessness about me like a cloak hiding my pain, my shame, my uselessness as a person, other than my body parts.

Then at 16, dear old Dad, gave it a try. Renewed trauma sent me running for my life into marriage.

It is still hard to be me at 66 still working on the mess I became. I internalized so many wrong messages about me. Marrying Fred was a continuation of the messages I learned about me. I had no notable value. He discarded me repeatedly.

Can anyone tell me at what point I ought to have been able to turn my life around? Was there an age that I passed by when the light should have filtered in and shone my wrong messages for what they were? Sunk in silence and shame and self hate, was there a way to “just put it behind me?”

Now at 66 I do therapy twice a week in an attempt to finally be free of the baggage accumulated from sixty+ years of headed in wrong directions. Yet people try to say my life did not happen. I had a wonderful childhood. The worst thing to happen was poverty.

If I could have been someone else, I would have been. I did the best I could with what I had to work with.

I am no longer ashamed. I respect me. I am proud of my efforts, my courage, my getting up the dozens of times I fell down. I no longer judge me for a life flung out of control by a childhood filled with alternating bouts of sex and rejection.

Before anyone judges my badly lived life, my “crazy” behavior, or deems me unworthy, try putting on my shoes and walking a few feet in them. Tell me if you could have done better.

Of course, you have to believe my life happened first. As the person who lived it, am still living it, I can assure you, it did. I am the only person I can live as.

Vocational Rehab in Ormond Beach Fl sent me for a 3 hour evaluation by a Psychiatrist to decide whether they could help me or not. That was 1992. My case worker was not suppose to divulge the result to me but he felt I ought to have a chance to refute it.

The diagnosis? Anti-social and likely to commit suicide. Truly I had been running on empty for a long time clinging to life like a person clutching a raft in a hurricane. The storm was inside always threatening to throw me under. I used a mind game I’d used in AA. I won’t die today, just for today. I cannot count the number of times I said that to myself. It does not matter. I did not want to die. I wished to end the pain. I wished to not hear the never ending scream that tore through me rarely reaching my lips.

I was angry at the diagnosis. I fought harder to make it not come true. But those were hard years, struggling to accept the reality of my life without alcohol to numb the pain. Also I was reminded of the letter my sister wrote me when I was 11 predicting terrible things would happen to me, but that as a DeGolier I would survive because we DeGoliers were survivors. We had to be didn’t we? It made me angry. I didn’t want to just survive, indeed I was already surviving the terror of repeated sexual abuse of 7 years.

I wanted to live. Sadly it was also at this age that I made my first attempt at suicide. I told no one. I took a full bottle of Bayer aspirin, got very ill and then went in search of something more certain. All I found was glue that warned “fatal if inhaled.” I inhaled. They lied.

Sure enough things got worse. But the letter has made me angry enough to survive many times over, and then to keep reaching for something above and beyond survival. Yes, I wanted to live. I want to live now more than ever. I am picking up new tools in DBT to help me control me, while learning why the tools of survival no longer worked. It truth, the survival tools from childhood quit working when I left home. I was beyond dysfunctional, a train wreck that kept happening over and over like a repetitious nightmare.

My future looks more peaceful from where I now stand. My reactions to triggers, so disproportionate all my life, I am learning to manage.

I accept me as I am, while learning to change what I can about me. I am deeply grateful.

I can only fight one fight though I fall short of my expectations almost daily. So many injustices, man’s inhumanity to man describes them all, but I am encased in my own personal battle to rise each day and smile.

It is better with me than a year ago. A year ago it was better than 5 years ago and so on back through time to the beginning of recovery, the first time I faced head-on the reality of the “thing” that started me on my long, lonesome journey; incest.

I have no proof. Only my brother and I were in that room. My brother will not tell the truth about what he did to the little girl in the blue dress. He has no knowledge of my trauma that day or every day from that moment on.

Yet I am proof if one wishes to give me the benefit of the doubt and look. My life is proof if you want to see it. But most people will not look too closely. Some people are torn by loyalties. Who is lying? They sit on the fence.

I too sat on the fence in my mind, silenced with precision and arguing with only me. Did it happen? Did I get it wrong? AM I crazy? Am I just a bad girl? Born bad? Did I ruin the boys, Dad? And the other argument was memory. My only “evidence” against the growing insanity in my mind.

Eventually I had to get off my self made fence and take care of me. I had to face the truth.

I am still facing it. Radical acceptance demands it to move forward. Other people are not endangered by sitting on the fence or denying outright that my life never happened. They do not need to see it or feel it or do battle with the acres of damage to my mind and heart or the debris stretching out behind me as I struggled to just survive.

Where once I loathed myself for being me, I am now proud. I win.