ENDING ABUSE

Chapter 1

Shock

People told me I would write a book about this. I’d laugh and shrug it off. But lately, it’s been showing up in my journals, my dreams, and my collages. Is this the beginning of a book?

On April 7, l992 memories came back to me of childhood sexual abuse. How melodramatic that sounds! Still, there has hardly been a day since then when I haven’t written down what was happening to me, or what was going on. I now have forty-one journals chronicling the past three and a half years – certainly enough words for a book. Many times I’ve thought the world should know the horrors of coping with the after-effects of sexual abuse. The world should know what it's like for my kids to suffer because of what I went through, what it's like to go through the justice system, what it's like to wonder if you're going over the edge, what it's like to feel the pain it was never safe to feel while you were being abused.

I don't know how to write a book, but I think starting it must be the hardest part. Ideas have been hopping into my head. Two weeks ago I was walking down the street, and I thought, I'll start my book like this: If I had died in early l992, my obituary would have read something like this: and then I'd write what my life was like before April l992 and what it's been like since my memories came back. The next day, I thought, I'll dedicate this book to my sister, who didn't make it. Last week I wrote in my journal: “This is a book written out of despair and hopelessness. I don't have the energy to fight any more. Maybe in writing this book someone will pick up where I left off and fight for those of us who cannot.”

I've summarized my journals. I didn't know why, but maybe the bigger picture I'm trying to believe in is telling me I do have something worth writing about. I've been trying for three and a half years to come to terms with the enormity of what has happened to me. I thought if I could only get it down on paper, I could accept it and get on with my life. But it doesn't work that way. It's never over.

Yesterday I decided I would write twenty books if I had to. Nobody has to read them, but if writing each volume helps me come to terms with it, then it will be worth it. This morning I knew I had to start today.

Shock.

That is what I felt that first day when images of someone touching me, images of me masturbating somebody, started playing in my mind. I paced the kitchen. I stood in my bedroom pushing my hands against the sides of my head, trying to make them stop. I didn't know what was happening. I wrote on the first page of a yellow book that was to become Journal #l:

Scared to write it down. Want to tell the whole world. Don't tell anyone. . . . Want to have a bath all the time. I'm dirty. I hate them but I love them. Was it just me or was it my sisters too? I'm going to throw up. Is that why she died; she rebelled? Why me? Why didn't she do anything? Why can't I do anything now? Smoke, smoke, smoke. Try to be good. Keep a sheet between us or blankets or anything. Don't touch me. Totally numb, don't feel. Lots of friends but no one to tell. Every guy wants the same thing. In the car. In the bed. In the basement. . . . I'm doing just fine. I can control. I'll gag. I'll throw up. Where are you God? Getting sick. Running away. Move. Religion. Quit acting like a child. Quit crying or I'll give you something to cry about.

The next day's journal entry read: “Dreamt that I'm lost. Running before an adult finds me. Always as though I'm in the wrong. Don't want to remember. The car, my bed, top of the bunk bed, the bushes. Need someone to talk to. How old was I? Why me? I'm a blob I've lost myself . . .