There are a few days that come to mind as extraordinary in their importance. What defines what is important? The day I married my husband, both times I gave birth to two beautiful boys. The day I got my period.
There is one day, though, that had it not ever transpired, I know, without tangibly knowing why, I would not be here inhabiting this place in this particular life. I am the daughter of a paradox, my father was part John Lennon, part pedophiliac sexual abuser. The family that surrounded him defended his actions, those actions beginning when I was three, culminating in his abduction and rape of me in a motel when I was ten years old. Extricating myself from this web of enmeshed family sickness was not easy. I remember vividly at seven, lying underneath my father as he used my body, I must get out of here. I was trembling and humiliated to be spread before the man who was supposed to hold me sacred. Overwhelmed, I then became one with the ceiling.
I buried the knowledge that I had to get out. I waited. In second grade, I first told about the abuse, I was threatened by my father who stood naked and looming over me. He told me I had ratted him out and had better go back and tell my grandmother, his mother, that my mother-long gone by then-had “put me up to it.” They hated her, so it was perfect. I saw his naked body and his angry face and I did just what he said. Thus my grandfather labeled me a liar, there was screaming and blood, I was shamed to the core, again. At seven, he fed me shrooms. I was terrified, tripping with my molesting father.
I was nineteen. In a relationship. With a boy that was not as bad as my father, but not much better. Drugs were central to life that year, ecstasy specifically, as it seemed to be an anathema to the abandonment by my mother, at two, and the incestuous rape I endured. My sexual abuse manifested in me as sexual acting out. I had no boundaries around my body, or in my mind. I used drugs and then felt sexually powerful. I was speaking through my actions. It was my language of pain.
I was always seeking, seeking love, seeking peaceful sleep, seeking a mother, seeking a real family where fathers were safe. My boyfriend at the time asked me to spend the summer 1500 miles north in beautiful Door County, Wisconsin. Despite the guilt trips and histrionics of my father’s mother, who was raising me with my grandfather then, I left. I left the horses on the farm where we lived, horses that had been my saving grace for fourteen years. I left their warm noses, there empathic eyes. Walking out of those French doors would alter the trajectory of my life indelibly, eventually leading me to children, my soul mate, and emancipation from the legacy of my raping father.
After laying under my own father, unable to protect myself, swallowing the shame, the terror back into myself, how could I know later that I had a right to myself? Incest and rape made me think I surely had no future in this world, in my body, in my self. Yet, there was a tiny seedling I held in my heart. A spark lived even as my father raped me, and it was one of wanting, a vision, a psychic collage of a vibrant future, filled with laughing children, stars and color, hearts that loved, hearts that mended, safe hands. This propelled me along fiercely, I never let it go. I came close a few times, but I did not let go. No matter what he took from me, what my mind and spirit held he could never take. Something within me has always known wholeness. Something within me recognized wholeness early on, that is why I believe I was able to see it in and feel it to begin with. I recognized it because it was already in me. I decided to be ready to accept my goodness. I decided to leave home, on every level. It is a process. Some days I am still leaving a little more.
