We’re out here, in numbers that boggle the mind, struggling constantly to sweep the damage of our lives into neat hidden piles, safely into a corner, hoping no one will notice. Survivors are we, kindred spirits that share the tragic bond of child abuse.
Some stories aren’t safe to tell to outsiders; if reading about this subject makes you uncomfortable, please feel free to skip this post. I fully understand.
Even for me, there is little I can inject in the way of sarcasm or a few humorous remarks that could ever soften the words, or facts, of this topic. Be well-aware that I certainly have no intentions of providing details of my father’s invasion and robbery of my childhood innocence. If, like myself, you are a survivor reading this, you can well identify with my reasoning. Each one of us has lived through various degrees of child abuse with the offensive contact leaving behind mental and physical scars.
Like so many others who, at some point in their lives, choose to speak out about their experiences, I’ve been asked why I made that decision and what I hoped to gain. Actually, my late mother, unwittingly, prodded me on to make my choice when I became her caregiver several years ago. My only goal is to effect some type of understanding, if not closure, as to why parents, or anyone else, elect to directly hurt a child. My mother’s actions were in-direct, she chose to just look the other way and pretend it wasn’t happening; my father’s were deliberate.
Ironic, isn’t it? Life comes full circle and, suddenly, you become the “parent” for someone who played a crucial role in your childhood trauma.
Studies have been done in an attempt to determine what causes someone to be abusive. Dorothy Law Nolte’s poem, “Children Learn What They Live” is a fair gauge for the research into the mind of someone who abuses a child. People who were themselves raised in a dysfunctional home often repeat the destructive behaviors as they go through life, inflicting some, if not all, of the same pain they suffered in their early years on another, usually a child. As these untreated patterns of negative behavior perpetuate themselves, I’ve often wondered if, for some people, it becomes an excuse for them to continue imposing their twisted torment on people in their lives.
My parents evolved from radically different backgrounds. My father’s childhood was a mixture of privilege and divorce, my mother’s was one of poverty. Leaving home during his mother’s second, of three, marriages, my father joined the U.S. Navy at the age of seventeen, an escape from what he deemed “improprieties” during the residency of husband #2, a man who adopted both my father and his brother then rapidly up and disappeared once my father left home. One more, hasty, divorce soon followed.
Somewhere, in my father’s history, lie the seeds for his growth into an abuser, sadly, the same applied to my mother.
Growing up through the Depression did not allow my mother many advantages as she and her family existed on public assistance coined back then as relief. Mom was raised by a bitter mother who was left on her own to care for five children after her husband abandoned the family. My grandparents were complete opposites; a headstrong Italian man married to a rigid young Irish woman, each wanting to change the other to their way of thinking, and living, with no room for compromise. Being poor had long-term effects on my mother. That, in itself, was the basis of her shortcomings as a parent although I cannot minimize the difficulty of the hard life she endured. The fear of indigence can cause people to make horrible choices in order to survive and my mother did just that. Her only child became the casualty in those decisions.
Fear of reprisal in some form can keep most secrets.. but not all. A victim of child abuse endures mental re-programming from their offender in addition to the physical assault which leaves very deep scars. “Tell someone, go ahead! No one will ever believe you and then you and your mother will be living out in the street.” I heard that one time too many and one day…I did tell and no one believed me. He was so right. The most hideous part of it all was that my own mother refused to listen because she too had been threatened with expulsion from our home should she intervene on my behalf.
All I knew is that I wanted it to STOP!
At that point, a frightened, desperate nine year old, told her nun-teacher and she, in turn sent me to our parish priest. My mother was immediately called to come to the office of rosy-faced Father Sullivan who looked like he had been drinking too much altar wine. I sat, in tears, as my mother denied knowledge of anything I had related and proceeded to speak, almost sing, in praise of my father.
There I sat, dumbfounded and confused, only to be admonished by that holy man for “speaking with exaggeration” about my father and attempting to destroy my parents marriage. The priest curtly reminded me that “divorce was against the rules of the Church.” I was then advised not to miss going to Confession at the end of that week and made to sit outside the door of that office while the priest questioned my mother as to life at home and why I was an only child (as she later related to me); exactly what she told him, I’ll never know but I’m sure it wasn’t the truth.
Mother was advised to pray and see that I did the same; the priest even alerted my teacher to offer special prayers in class for me each day. Embarrassment then compounded a wrongful situation and I had to deal with the shameful looks of classmates who whispered behind my back when prayers were finished. The abuse continued, for several years, as did my mother’s avoidance of the crime; she kept turning her back on what she knew was wrong, remaining complicit, for its duration.
The madness came to a halt when, at age 13, I went to a relative for help. No longer afraid, I stood up for myself and someone finally listened, someone cared enough to step in and stop the hurt. My actions had repercussions; life at home would never be the same as I dealt with two angry parents who blamed me for upsetting their lives as they went on to become the focal point of extended family criticism. Through it all, I took back some of the power that was taken from me and was secure knowing that the abuse had, at last, ended.
How many others are there, like myself, who are, or were a caregiver for an abusive parent, suffering from Alzheimer’s or another affliction? As if the punishment that was endured through childhood wasn’t enough, just as you learn to function as a reasonable, balanced human being, life comes full circle and, on a daily basis, dangles the memories of those painful early years in front of you.
All that you have labored to keep in the past is there each time you look into the eyes of someone who was supposed to love you and keep you from harm’s way and the resentment, at times, is absolutely overwhelming. The anger you feel is difficult to control while, at the same time, you desperately wait for one moment of recognition, one chance for that parent to look at you and say…”I’m sorry.” In my mother’s case, that moment never surfaced but my father did make an attempt to seek forgiveness before his death and followed up with a note he left behind; not the closure one hopes for but better than none at all.
As survivors we seek acceptance and we tend to overcompensate in our lives, always trying to step out of the shadows of the past and become whole again. This is not an easy task when there are times you just want to share your scars with the rest of the world to avoid being judged or criticized for trying to be perfect in all that you do. We live with feelings of dissociation, flashbacks, nightmares and inadequacy. No, we aren’t perfect, no one is but.. when you go through life feeling like damaged goods, that quest to always be seen in the most positive light is never-ending.
Talk about it to anyone with an open ear and mind; reach out to others and learn that you are not alone. Talk to me, I’m a good listener and would never turn my back on you. I’m here to help someone else through their pain; together we can grow beyond the hurt.
