There was once a little girl who had a special friend she
liked to spend time with. One night when
she was spending the night with her friend the girl found a monster in the
night. She awoke in her friend’s room,
but her friend wasn’t there. She walked
down the hallway and heard strange noises coming from the basement. Walking down into that room, the girl saw her
friend and her friend’s father. Her
friend’s father was doing something the girl didn’t understand to her friend,
but it didn’t look like her friend liked it.
And it didn’t look like something any grown up should be doing to a
child. So the girl ran across the room
and yelled at the man to stop. The man
turned to look at the girl and stared.
He said “I am a man of God. If
this was wrong then God would strike me down.”
He was quiet for a moment then he pointed at the girl. “If you tell
anyone I’ll hurt your brothers. You have
to do what I tell you from now on.” And
that was when the girl understood that monsters hide behind familiar faces.
When I
decided to start blogging about what I can remember about my childhood trauma I
decided to use a narrative method. It
allows me to talk about what happened and how it felt without fully pouring
into that madness. There are huge chunks
in my memory from around the ages of 7-10 and I’m guessing that’s when the
abuse happened, but the truth is I just can’t remember. It’s funny what the human mind will do to
protect itself. In my case I
forgot. I learned to ignore things that
didn’t make sense because looking at things too closely would tear down those
walls my mind put up. Forgetting worked
for over twenty years, and then things started coming back. Small things came to me: I remembered I inexplicably stopped talking
to my friend in middle school and never got into another conversation with her
until the night we were leaving high school.
I started having dreams about that house. I started to notice things I had done since childhood
– never leaving my bedroom door closed, sleepwalking, and always keeping my
finger nails long enough to scratch if need be.
Looking at these things now they all speak the same language: possible escape. If they door was open I might be able to get
away. Sleepwalking got me out without me
even being aware of it. And those
fingernails could be quite effective in warning someone off.
There was a
counselor I was working with that I was going to talk to about the trauma once
my cancer surgery was done. But. He died unexpectedly and I feel like I’m
dangling in the wind now. It is HARD to
find someone to open up to about this.
This is not fun to talk about. It
hurts to write about it. But I don’t
want to be a victim to that man of God anymore.
He has no power over me. And so I’m
going to write. Until I can find another
counselor who I feel safe with and won’t make my trauma worse, I will
write. Because this anger/grief/shame/not-feeling-safe
needs an outlet. Writing about this
feels like talking about the ghost of my childhood. I don’t know if I tried to talk to anyone
about it when I was a child, but I do know I escaped into books. Words helped me to survive then and they will
now.
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