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| My dad and my brother Joe |
Every
abused kid faces this question: disclose, or live a lie?
Abuse
survivors live like someone sliding down the wrong side of a cheese grater. We
must develop moves that civilians never even need to imagine.
And
it never stops. Getting out of the house is no escape. I could not have
managed, decades ago, when I ran out, that I'd be as old as I am now, and still
making those moves worthy of Shaun White, Olympic snowboard champion.
There
are problems with disclosure, and problems with non-disclosure.
If
you don't disclose, you live a lie. No one can ever have any idea who you are.
If
you disclose, one of the biggest problems is this. Some-not-all civilians exploit
your misfortune to elevate their own status.
"Oh,
you were abused.
Oh,
your abuser was evil. Low class. Stupid. Irredeemable. Less than I, the pure
civilian who would never harm a child. I'm rational. I'm fair. I'm kind. I'm
above-it-all. I do everything right.
And
you, the abuse survivor. You're probably wounded and inferior and dirty and I
need to be magnanimous with you. Did you know that abuse survivors are ninety
percent more likely to be abusers themselves? It's a good thing you never had
kids. And I will be sure never to leave you alone with any kid I have. In fact
I will go out and have a kid just so I can be sure never to leave you alone
with that kid.
If
you and I ever disagree about anything, from a presidential candidate to how
much a tip to leave, I will say something like, 'Well, with your history, I can
understand how you'd say something that stupid.'"
I
wish I could say that it isn't like that, but it is like that.
So,
you don't disclose, and civilians have no idea what you went through, and no
idea who you are, or you do disclose, and civilians have no idea what you went
through and no idea who you are.
A few
things.
The
folks who hurt me are full human beings. They have their own histories, which I
do not feel free to disclose. I can say that every one of them went through
various tracts of Hell that you probably can't even imagine.
The
other day I was chatting with Liron and I mentioned, in passing, just one
biographical event that one of my abusers went through. Liron was aghast. Of
course I'm in the US and she is in Israel, so I'm guessing at her reaction. She
wrote, "Oh, God … " When someone writes "Oh, God dot dot
dot," you gather that what they've heard has overwhelmed them and they
don't know what else to say.
But
then, political being that she is, she followed up with, "But he was
white, so his story is of no importance. White privilege."
Yeah.
The hell that this loved one went through was, well, it was hell. But, he was
white, so it has no importance.
That's
it about my entire family. What courage, what strength, what endurance they
managed to marshal, has no importance. And now, with my brother Joe's recent
death, they are all but all gone. When I'm taking my dirt bath, that history
dies forever, and no one will ever know. And rich, white liberals will slather
over all that history with "white privilege."
Otto
wrote an essay for my blog called "Ripples of Sin." You can read it
at the link below.
Otto
talks about having been an abused kid. Otto is very frank. He does identify his
father as an abuser, and, indeed, a former Nazi officer.
I
knew Otto in high school and I met his dad. I know more details about the abuse
than Otto goes into in that account. They are very tough. You would not want
anyone to do to you what was done to Otto. I wish that, as a seventeen-year-old
girl, I had had superpowers, and I could have rescued my classmate. I did not,
and I regret it. Really. I look back on that time and "not rescuing
Otto" is a big hole in my life story.
When
Otto and I chat now, every now and then, he will mention his dad. Otto may
catch sight, in a wrought iron fence, of a bad weld. Or a good weld. Pretty
much always, Otto's voice is full of admiration for what a great, strong, competent,
proud iron worker his dad was. How much Otto learned by watching his dad work
with iron. Otto is no slouch himself. He learned to work with his hands
somewhere, from someone. His dad.
Me?
One day I went for a walk. Heck, every day I go for a walk. It was summer, and
in Jersey in summer you can assume that on any give afternoon, the sky is
suddenly going to morph from benign, creamy, Disney blue to bruised,
sun-strangling, mammatus clouds.
I was
in an unfamiliar neighborhood, and I had not thought to bring any rain gear.
The storm came up that suddenly. I wasn't really sure how to get back to the
house I was visiting. The rain was pelting down. My shirt was becoming
transparent and I was shivering. My head switched back and forth, disoriented.
Had I turned on this road, in this anonymous suburb, or …???
An
SUV pulled up. It was a family member. Someone who had done some pretty bad
things to me. Things that, if I told you, would make you go, "Oh My God
dot dot dot." This person was aware that I had gone for a walk in an
unfamiliar neighborhood and left without rain gear. This person got into an SUV
and drove around randomly until I was found. I got into the SUV and was given a
safe ride back to shelter.
My
family is the only family that has ever lived in the house in which my brother
Joe just passed away. I'm not asking for replays of memories of that house, and
its now deceased inhabitants: my mother, whose hand I held as she died in my
childhood bedroom, my father, who also died in my childhood bedroom, Joe, Mike,
Phil, who died on my birthday, Antoinette, who died just three years ago as I
was massaging her feet. Even though I am not summoning up these memories, they
are pounding against my eyeballs as if Joe's death had installed a Dolby cinema
projector into my brain.
Yesterday,
I was trying to take a relaxing bath, and all of a sudden I found myself, with
my family, at Fountain Spring Lake. The sky was so blue. The sun struck every
one of the bubbles from the springs pumping out water and turned the bubbles
into baubles, into frothy gems between my little girl toes.
Facebook
friend Rusty said something to me about how I can write about my family with so
much love. Love is what is real. Evil is the absence of God, and its substance
will not withstand. "Weeping may last through the night, but joy comes
with the morning." "The light shines in the darkness, and the
darkness has not overcome it."
Romeo
Dallaire, the United Nations officer who was a peacekeeper in Rwanda during the
genocide, said that he believes in evil, because he witnessed it. He touched
it. And he said he believes in God as well, for the same reason. During the
genocide, he felt the palpable presence of both evil, and God.
As a
child, I witnessed evil, face to face. I recognized that evil is not a person,
it is a force that a person surrenders to, however temporarily.
God,
too, is real. Like Romeo Dallaire, I know that from my encounter with evil. I
encountered God, as well, and no matter how many snarky things atheists and
Christophobes say to me, I know that my God is real.
So
Happy Father's Day. Here's a picture of my dad and my brother Joe.
And
here is Otto's essay:
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