She was the moment before dawn.
It was a Saturday in the spring. The weather was moderate. Kids in the neighborhood were playing. There were trips to the store and rocks glasses full of clinking ice cubes soaked in scotch and water...a little something to help the adults put away the groceries. There were the towels to fold and the school project to finish up.
She waited until just after they left for town. She knew they would be gone a few hours. She unlocked the chain-linked gate and met her girlfriend outside. They walked up the steps that led up to his trailer and knocked a few times, opening the door before an answer came. He was inside. A 60 year-old man with children of his own, one of which was 15 years her senior....the playboy of the town on whom she had a deep, longstanding, childhood crush.
It was the usual scene. He was in his underclothes with a stained white t-shirt. A half-smile emerged from his semi-toothless mouth. He smelled like booze and body odor. She could see he was hard underneath his underwear, and it made her tingle. She looked past the spit cups of tobacco lying out across the counter-tops with last-nights pizza crumbs, pushing past into the living room where he was setting up the VHS with porn. She laid down in her spot, just on top of his left shoulder with his left arm wrapped around her as they started fucking on the TV screen. Her girlfriend was in her usual spot on his right shoulder with his right arm wrapped around her. The two girls laid there, one on each of his shoulders on the dirty shag carpet. They looked across his chest at each other, looking into each other's eyes as he slid one hand down each of the girl's shorts, putting one finger inside each of them, one on his right and one on his left. He laid there, on the dirty shag carpet of his worn-down trailer, with spit cups and pizza crumbs, fingering both of the ten-year-old girls as the porn rolled on. Occasionally, he'd pay attention to one of them, kissing on them...tickling their flat chest, giving them some well-earned tongue through his half-toothed smile. They had to earn it, though. They couldn't just get attention for free. It cost them a self-initiated penis-grab or a lick or a suck. But if a girl initiated it, it was met with reward.
Twenty-five years later, she was in her therapist's office.
"I was 29 before I had my first orgasm." My broken voice piercing the silence.
"Mmm hmm." She said. Her feminine energy was inviting, safe. There was nothing that couldn't be said. "Why do you think that is?" She asked me.
"I learned how to escape my own body. I learned when the abuse was going on how to divorce myself from myself. I liked being touched, and I felt that nobody could understand that. Nobody except her...my ten-year old girlfriend who was abused with me....and him, our abuser. We had both had our sexuality turned on way too soon, and once it was turned on, we couldn't turn it off. Initially, the first time, he was predatory in nature. He forced himself. I was afraid, but I didn't know what to do. After the first time, once I surrendered to being touched, I was different. I had changed. I found my friend and we went back for more. I wanted to be touched, to be tickled. I wanted the sexual attention. It was something I couldn't accept in myself, and it was something I couldn't share with anyone else. But, it was true."
"Go on..." She told me.
"I learned how to be two people. I learned how to be the little girl who enjoyed being touched and attended to. At the same time, I could still be the ten-year-old big sister....the over-achiever. I learned how to hide parts of me from myself. Once you learn how to hide one part of you ...the part that you cannot accept in yourself...that gives you a playbook of how to hide other things..."
"When did it stop?" She asked.
I was silent. Out of everything to be shameful for, this was the most difficult for me.
"Well, that's the thing. I got involved with his son when I was 14, the one I had the childhood crush on. He was much older than I was, and it was considered abusive because I was so young and he was so much older. But, it didn't feel abusive. It felt like he saved me. He saved me from the toothless man who smelled like booze. And the shag carpet. And the pizza crumbs. I felt loved. Even though every social norm tells me that what happened was wrong, even now....25 years later, I feel gratitude for him."
She was silent for a moment. There was a heaviness in the air.
"Things are not always black and white. There is beauty inside of pain, and there is pain inside of beauty sometimes. It's not wrong to feel gratitude, and if that's what you feel for him, then feel it. Don't let anyone tell you how to feel," She said. The tears rolled down my cheeks softly. Those words were the words I needed to hear. I needed to express everything, even the shame I felt for having gratitude, and I needed to expose everything in order to receive permission to feel my feelings. Permission to know that my feelings are never right, and they are never wrong...they are just feelings. Somehow, somewhere in that process the two parts of me became one again. The scab had finally been ripped off, the wound was debrided, and finally the two halves of my whole self were allowed to join again and to start healing.
There has to be a certain quality in the air for someone to finally speak their painful truth...their shame...their self-doubt, into existence. First off, the benefit of speaking it into the open has to outweigh the cost of keeping it to yourself. And, because you've learned how to keep your secret locked down inside for years often covering it up with layer upon layer of coping mechanisms...addiction and controlling behaviors and game playing and not letting your heart get involved...that is just your status quo...it's easy to do. You're a master at it. Secondly, it has to be safe for you to speak your truth. The environment that meets this horrible secret that has lived inside of you cannot accuse you. It cannot shame you. It has to allow the truth to be revealed, and then kindly, gently, pull that truth away from you into the sea of suffering.
My son and I had a conversation the other day in the wake of the #metoo conversations that have started surfacing all over the internet, along with the daily news stories uncovering yet another high profile sexual predator/victim situation.
"Mom, what I don't get is why they say they were ashamed....I mean if they were victims and they did nothing wrong, then why feel shame?" He asked me.
I referred to my story. Not the details, but the seeking of approval and attention from a 60-year old predator. The wandering out and across the street where two girls willingly entered a broken-down trailer knowing what was coming next. I told him that sexuality is part of our humanity, and once it is turned on, it cannot be turned off. I told him that when you are 10 years old, and you are sexual, you don't feel understood. Other kids are worried about sleepovers and TV shows and grape hubba-bubba, and you are wondering when you are going to get touched again....and there is only one person who knows you like to get touched...the man who touched you to begin with. The shame comes in the repeated returning to get more. It's like you're turned on, prematurely and in full force, while others are waiting for the slow, natural process to take place.
As an adult, I think of all the ways that this abuse has affected me. I think of my girlfriend who found heroin, had a daughter, and died of an overdose 10 years before I had the courage to make it in to my therapist's chair. I think of how I missed out on my coming-of-age...when the lights are flicked on abruptly and sharply, it circumvents the gradual natural process of becoming a sexual being. I think of the Smashing Pumpkins club concert I wasn't allowed to attend with my high school girlfriends as a teenager....when I thought to myself..."It's not like I'm going to get raped. And, if I do get raped, it's nothing that hasn't already happened..."
I think of the anger I carried for years...towards anyone I could find to be angry at...the blaming and the shaming that I would never allow myself to speak, yet they were present in my words, my actions, in all of my being. I think of the flashbacks I had for years when I was in my early 20s, how I had to to keep my eyes open during sex so that I could focus on the person with me, knowing I was in my 20s and consensual...not ten years old with breast buds and baby teeth. I think of the memories I held down and away from me that would start bubbling up in my young adult years at the most inopportune times. A smell, a feeling...and all of the sudden I would be back remembering something that I had tried so hard to forget. I think of that powerful, first orgasm I had when I was 29. I think of the fact that I propagated with someone I knew was a little crazy, but he was just enough crazy that people would stay away from his children...his kids would never be victims. I think of the gratitude I still posses for the man thousands of miles away from me, with a beautiful family of his own...the man who knew in his soul what was happening to me, and he reached out and saved me, taking on risks of his own in doing so.
Cat calls and misogynistic remarks and occasional hand-grabs are the daily norm in our society by asshole men. They are often tolerated because the women experiencing these insults have already lived through much deeper trauma. The damage seems like a few pennies when there are already thousands of dollars worth of shame mounted against her, shame that she has carried for years....shame that has shaped her life and her choices. Choosing to look into that shame took me 25 years and a female therapist that I could say anything to, and she wouldn't judge me. She listened to me, as if it was a story she had heard a thousand times before, and she held out her hands and let me put that shame and anger into them. She washed it away, cleansing all of my soul by allowing me to speak my truth, my experience, and to revisit that 10 year old child that still lived inside of me. She showed me how to stop divorcing myself from myself. She taught me to allow myself to fill up all of me, to become truly present inside of my own being, to engage instead of escape. She allowed me a place to look at that beautiful little soiled girl and speak into her. She showed me that although I felt alone, I was far from it.
Of reported cases, one in five girls and one in twenty boys are victims of sexual child abuse in America. That statistic is according to The National Center of Victims Of Crime. My case wasn't reported. My girlfriend's case wasn't reported. I would venture to say that those numbers are very, very soft. It took me 25 years and a lot of broken relationships and self-sabotage to get to the point where I could speak about it openly...using my grown-woman voice. By that time, he had probably abused hundreds of girls.
One in three women are sexually harassed at work...but we all know that's a lie. I would venture to say that probably every woman that I know has been sexually harassed at work at one time or another. And I know some bad-ass bitches... Upstanding men who do not victimize or misogynize women are staggered by this. But as women, we look at it as if it's skittles in an ocean in narcotics....like, 'Pffft....yeah. Of course the workplace is violent and hostile towards women....' It's so common, it's just not even mentioned anymore. Sometimes, as a woman, that's just chalked-up to the price you pay for the cost of doing business. You want to play, you got to put on your big-girl panties and just take it.
Four hundred people will read this post in the first week it is posted, a large portion of which identify with being abused as a child, well before the stage of puberty sets in...years before your first period or spermarche. For men, it must be doubly confusing if your abuser was a man and you identify with being heterosexual. And, almost every woman reading this will identify with being in situations that are against you, where your sexuality and your humanity are on one side of the road, while your ambition and your skill remain on the other.
Maybe sometimes it takes something real and powerful and over-the-top to light a fire under us....like maybe a man in the highest office of our nation, a position reserved for the finest, most powerful, most talented. A man who has so obviously and blatantly been abusive towards women, women who represent one-half of the population he has sworn to serve. A man who in every way violates the respect of the position that he holds. A man stained with such a deep and offensive track record of bragging about how he has been a predator...that the scales of justice are finally being tipped in favor of speaking out...not just about him, but about all predatory men. I was an observer during the women's march in DC. I took my children, and we walked and we watched...not as active participants, but as intrigued observers looking close-up at a revolution. As we walked, I felt the feminine energy running through me. I felt the collective strength and pain of thousands of women as they peacefully walked the streets of DC, with an energy that said they were done tolerating this. They were done divorcing themselves from themselves..cognitive dissonance was behind them, and they could keep silent no more. Each woman with her own story, her own light. We have all experienced the beautiful unfolding of truth since then, in the media...in the news...online...and within ourselves.
Let her tell her story, all of it. Let her stop holding onto the shame and the denial and the layers and let her expose herself and rid herself of that prison which she has held onto. She is your mother. She is your sister. She is your daughter. Meet her with open arms. Allow her to speak her truth. Put her pain in your hands and carry it away from her, out to the sea of suffering. She is soiled no more.
Now, we are all finally talking.