tedi’s story

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. (John 3:16)

“You were so ugly the nurses in the hospital called you Monkey. I called you Peanut. I felt so sorry for you when you were born, you didn’t even weigh five pounds. I always felt responsible for that. I didn’t want to be pregnant. Your father and I were not getting along at the time and I was going to leave him. So much did I want to leave him that I even tried to abort you three times. Thank God it didn’t work though because as it turned out I loved you the best.”

This is how I was welcomed into the world. I do not know how old I was when I first became conscious and aware of what had been said to me all my time on this earth. I can tell you that when I figured out the meaning of those words (those words and so many others just like them) I felt pure rage for the woman who gave birth to me.

I was born in 1944 when my brother was four. I remember almost nothing of him until I was much older. My dad was in the navy and so he didn’t live with us on a regular basis until I had been alone with my mom much too long. All I can remember is being told how hard she had it, how everybody in dad’s family hated her because she was from the wrong side of the tracks. “They hate you too cause you’re a girl and girls don’t count in this family.” Dad’s brother had nine girls trying to have a boy baby because his brother did. He drank, and abused them all.

Mom would say to me over and over, “Don’t worry, I love you. Momma loves her sad unwanted little baby best. I’ll never let anybody hurt you, never! You’re mine and nobody else will ever have you or hurt you.” She told me she liked to call me her china doll. She told me my skin was so white and see-through that she could count the veins all over my body. My hair was also white and she said she used to love to wash it and keep me clean. She would keep me safe forever. She would keep me safe from men, from the world, from all things evil and bad. Nothing bad would ever happen to me, she wouldn’t let it. She kept me with her at all times after I was born and at the same time if she had had her way, I would have never been born. I can never remember being held lovingly or being loved.

As I have studied to understand what is wrong with me, I see what I am saying is true. Neither of my parents was capable of loving. As a child I had a saying in my head about my mom. It went, “Mothers eat their young.” Imagine my surprise when I grew up and learned that some species actually do!

My mom used to sit me down in a chair from time to time and tell me she hated me. She would say, “I hate you, tedi, I do all I can for you and it is still not enough. You hate me too. You must. You never want to help me. You are hateful, you are willful, and you have always been ungrateful. God, I don’t know what I am going to do with you, you never cooperate with anything, you fight everything I try to do for you. I really hate you.”

One day when she sat me in the chair, in order to stop her flow of words, as soon as she started with “I hate you tedi” I said with all my force, “Well momma I hate you too.” She never did that to me again, but it was too much for me. When I got to my room I beat and beat and beat on myself, my legs, my stomach, and then my head. I beat my head because it would not shut up. It kept saying over and over, “I hate you too momma, I hate you too momma.” Then I crawled into my closet with my pillow to be safe but instead I placed the pillow over my face and screamed and screamed while beating my head against the wall. When I was exhausted I crawled into bed and passed out.

I attempted suicide when I was ten by taking a bottle of thirty aspirins, expecting not to be able to ever wake up again. The intent to die was very definite then. The next morning I was very surprised to have to get up and get dressed to go to school. Not only was I still alive but also my ears rang for a week. It was as if my head was inside a seashell, with the sound of the sea in my ears and my head in a big barrel. I believe it was soon after I had told my mother I hated her. I could not stand having said that to her.

Once when my sister and I were much older, were doing the dishes together, dad was drunk and told us that he always liked to put his mouth on us between our legs when we were babies. He told us how he loved kissing on us there, we were so small, innocent and sweet smelling. I can tell you we were not when he finished with us.

My sister is the only other person I can remember trying to help and to love decently until I was able to have much healing in my spirit, mind, soul, and body. One time when we were kids I was told to watch her for a brief period of time between our parents coming and going. At some point I had told her to do something, and she gave me a sharp “no!” and I proceeded to chase her through the house with a hairbrush. When I rounded the corner into the kitchen chasing her, dad had her in his arms and she was clinging to him as if her life depended on it. I did not even know he was in the house. He was always there when you had no idea he was anywhere around. I remember looking at them and thinking, “Dear God, I’m just like my mother.” Nobody said anything, and I went into the bathroom and threw up. I don’t know what made me sicker, what I had wanted to do to my sister with that brush or seeing her in my dad’s arms. He was drunk and I was fearfully thinking, “Is he doing to her what he’s doing to me?”

I believe from that time on I knew I was not mother material. I began then and there asking God not to let me have any children. I meant it. Between the abuse I had taken and there never being enough of anything to go around, not food, not clothing, not things and especially not good love, I did not want to be responsible for bringing a child into this world. I didn’t think the world was a very safe place.

My dad only sexually abused me once while I was old enough to do anything about it. He treated me like his wife and my mother encouraged it. I can’t say which one of my parents I hated most. The incident was in the summer between seventh and eighth grade, the night before going back to school. The summer was over, and I had managed to stay out of trouble, but I was very lonely and could hardly wait to get back to school. After my dad molested me. What had been eagerness to return to school turned into a living nightmare. I could not break through that haziness, that heaviness, the black cloud that I had awakened to the first day of the eighth grade. I was at school, had no idea how I arrived there, stumbling around in the halls, trying to find my home room, being bumped and pushed by other kids trying to change classes and find their rooms. At school that year I just sat in class, did not even try to be there and was pretty much left alone as I recall. I went through two eighth grades, and almost two ninth grades that way, never being present.

I quit school at sixteen, halfway through the year. I really did try to keep house and be some kind of person, it didn’t work though. Dad was always there drinking, mom was never satisfied still. I couldn’t get anywhere this way, and I knew it. All I can ever remember wanting was a home of my own. I was more miserable than ever so when school started up the next year, I went back. There I was seventeen and in the ninth grade (starting school at the age I did I should have been a senior); but I couldn’t afford to care about that, at least I was out of the house. I never have finished school or gotten my GED.

About this time, my mom and I went to a Lutheran church in the neighborhood for a while. I sang in the choir and had a good time. I loved the lightness going and doing at church made in me. I loved taking communion. Mom received a letter with a red hand on it saying she needed to give more money, and she never went back. I went some more but soon ran away to get married. I had met a boy by the name of Keith while in the second ninth grade. He came over to the house a couple of times until dad forbade him to come back. I didn’t even know him, but he spoke to me a few times, I liked that. He also took me to choir practice a couple of times. It was getting close to the end of the school year and since dad had forbidden me to see him again and I wanted out, when Keith asked me to go to Georgia with him and get married I did. We certainly didn’t have to get married. I had never even been tempted to have sex with him or anybody for that matter. (My way to have sex was with myself and nobody else, that way I thought I had all my problems solved around my sexuality.) I did not know that way was a sin also. I did not know sex and sexual things were optional. After we were married I did go back to school and pick up my report card. I had passed, and that made me feel really good.

The first night Keith and I were married and together to have sex I told him, “I don’t care what you do to me, just don’t get me pregnant.” Within three months I went to the doctor for feeling sick to my stomach and he told me I was pregnant. I was honestly shocked and furious. I had never even been on a real date, and now I was going to have a baby. I remember telling the powers that be I would try to love and keep a girl, but if I had a boy, I would not even try to raise him. I would let Keith and his family raise him. I had a girl.

When I married him the uproar in the family was terrific. Finally it was decided, (by my mom, dad and brother sitting around the table discussing me as though I was not there) that they as well let the marriage stand. One of them said, “She will probably just run off and do it again if we tried to have the marriage annulled.” I sat on the couch in the front room wanting to say I didn’t really want to be married, but I didn’t know how to say this, so, I said nothing. Anyway, I had had sex, and that made me totally not any good now. When I was dismissed mom told me to get my things packed and get out, and dad told me I would never be welcomed in his house again. My brother said nothing, but I thought I saw pain in his eyes when our eyes met. I gathered my things and left. Keith was parked down the street and around the corner waiting for me. I cried all the way back to the apartment. This was the day after we had gotten married. It was a Sunday afternoon. As a parting shot that day dad had said, “I give you six months and you’ll be begging to come home.” Therefore I stayed in that marriage much longer than I would have if I had not been trying to show him I could stay married.

My pregnancy was awful. I threw up the whole nine months, couldn’t keep anything down. I even quit smoking cigarettes as they made me sick also. I finally just quit eating, and drank milk constantly. The only food I could keep down was packaged sugar food (sweet rolls, anything that was individually wrapped and didn’t cost more than a quarter.) I was using my cigarette money to buy the sweets with. I could also eat rice krispies without any sugar on them later in my pregnancy. We had a little neighborhood store right across the street from where we lived. I went there once a day. The apartment we could afford was so filthy I could not eat anything that came from that kitchen. I didn’t ever eat in that apartment, I ate outside. The apartment was $25 dollars a month, and we lived there until the baby was born. I didn’t go to a doctor again until the end of my pregnancy and then I went to a clinic someone at Keith’s job had told him about. We paid one hundred dollars to have the baby.

At first I had tried to clean the apartment, but I had never seen dirt that would not clean up. It was ground in or something, I could not get it to clean or to smell good. I finally just gave up even trying. I was too sick to care. Keith would come home from work and cook and eat out of that kitchen. I never understood how he could do that until I saw his parent’s house, where he grew up and what he had lived in. Dirt and alcohol. Both his parents were total alcoholics. They died from their alcoholism years after we divorced. One thing about my mom, she had kept a clean house. The old saying ‘you could eat off her floors,’ was true for her, you could. Even after she went to work, she had me keep her house that clean.

One weekend toward the end of my pregnancy I left the apartment, ran away really. Keith wanted sex and I said no, that I felt too sick, and he got a little pushy, so I got in the car and drove to a park in my area. It was raining. I stood at the railing; face up to the rain, it felt so good. I was very heavy with my child (although I couldn’t eat much I still gained forty pounds.) I looked down into the St. John’s River and wanted so much to fall in and sink to the bottom. It was twilight and very steamy, foggy even, as it was gently raining in the aftermath of a very hot July day. I was asking to die. I have asked for that most of my life because I didn’t know what living meant. I wasn’t violent or even angry, I was simply asking God to take me and my unborn baby to Himself. I had not officially met God at this time so I didn’t even know if he was listening. I looked to the right and out of the mist walked a man, coming toward me, dressed in khaki, even a khaki hat. At first I was frightened and then I was at peace. He smiled at me and then disappeared. When I got back in my car to drive home, many hours had passed and I was not aware of time passing at all!

My daughter was born at the end of July in St. Vincent’s hospital. I had wanted to try to nurse her although it made me feel squeamish, but unbeknownst to me my mother had told the nurses to give me the shot that makes your milk dry up. Keith had called them when he was waiting for the baby to be born. Also, when Keith was told he had a girl, he stomped his foot and left the hospital. I woke up to mom and dad. I was shocked and furious. Dad was drunk and mom would not shut up: she kept giving everybody orders, including the doctors. I did not want them there; I did not want them as part of my life again. They always brought total confusion to my life, and I did not want them in it.

The nurses would not let me go home with the baby until I had named her. I wanted out of there and away from my parents so I gave the sister standing there my mother’s name, my sister’s name, and my last name. I had not held my baby much while mom was there, which was all the time. I couldn’t wait to get home alone with her, without mom and dad’s interference. When I became pregnant I had weighed 98 pounds, and when I had the baby and left the hospital three days later I weighed 95 pounds and was so depressed I could hardly stand it. I had probably been depressed all my life, but now I was aware of it.

Now that I am supposed to be ‘of age’ I think I should have to apologize for some of the choices I have made. But I never realized I could maker choices until I was over 45 years of age, and now sometimes even at 50 I’m not sure it’s ok to make choices. People do not always believe this statement, but I assure you it’s true in the abused. They have no background for learning to make choices. They mostly copy behavior from others, hoping that something or someone will help them. Hoping desperately that they can make themselves understood, so that they can be helped, having no place to begin. Sometimes I have to remind myself why I am writing this. That was how I started being able to heal and find myself. Reading books and finding statements that were true for me, then, learning to pray about them and asking God to show me if they were indeed true for me. Nothing was ever true for me my whole life. Nothing was ever true for me. When I heard God’s word was truth, I went for it like a drowning man. It helped immediately. But I am getting ahead of myself.

For some reason, work I think, Keith was not able to take me home from the hospital, and my parents did. I saw very little of Keith in the hospital, I never knew why, and I didn’t ask. I did not want my parents to see the apartment. They took one look at it and said I could not take that baby to live in that squalor. They told me to get my things together (which was very little,) and took Lisa and me to their house. I was crazy inside but I thought they were right; I didn’t want my baby living in that apartment either. It was a long time until I got my baby to myself and by then I was afraid of the responsibility of her. Totally afraid that I would be totally responsible for her. I didn’t know about God and His help. Dad helped Keith and I to get into a house for a hundred dollars down and $97.00 a month. We stayed there until I finally left him. I was so sure that I was never going to have another baby that I wouldn’t have sex with him. He took a liking to a neighbor and I told him to do whatever he wanted. I truly knew that I would never be a part of bringing another child into this world. This world is not a safe place. I never asked what he did about his sexuality.

I probably never would have left him if he had not started correcting Lisa in a way I could not tolerate. Yelling too loud at her for something trivial, being on her about something all the time…and then one evening he hit her on her back over her right kidney and left a detailed handprint. I was in the kitchen cooking and I heard a pain-filled scream. I ran in and asked what had happened. He was sitting there drinking a beer and said, “ I told her twice to not touch the TV knobs and she did it anyway, so I spanked her.” I told him, “That is not how you spank a child, you are never to hit her on her skin, do you hear me?” By the time supper was ready her back was swelling from the blow. I said nothing more. I did not eat supper; I fed her, bathed her, and got her ready for bed. I thought all night long, “What should I do? What should I do?” The next morning right after Keith went to work I called dad and asked him if he would come and get us. I did not say why, and he didn’t ask. When Keith came home that night everything was gone accept what wasn’t paid for. We never had gotten much.

Lisa was sleeping in the same baby bed in which we had all slept. Keith drank a lot; in fact he became one of my father’s drinking buddies if we were around him at all. I had not started drinking yet. I drank on occasion, but was not an alcoholic at this time. I practically never saw Keith again, only once in court. He was told to pay child support; he never did. My dad turned him into the armed forces and he joined the Army. The government then sent alimony and child support payments to me. It was the first regular money I ever had. I was 21 years old, and Lisa was three. I tried to go to technical school at night for a while but I still could not learn anything so I quit. I was 21 years old, had a baby, had never held a job, and was living back in my parents’ house again. I did not feel divorced because I had never felt married. I did not legally divorce Keith until he was out of the Army.

Eventually I took a job at a soda fountain. That’s where my husband Joe and I met. He came in one morning for a cup of strong coffee and an alka-seltzer. I should have known right then but I didn’t know to look for the signs of being a drinker. Joe and I didn’t date for a year though we saw each other often because he boarded a horse at my family’s place. We did begin to take my daughter and a lot of the neighborhood kids to the drive-in movies in the back of his pick-up. While we always had beer around I do not think we were alcoholics yet. One statement I always say about Joe and I is, when we met we drank together, then we became full-fledged drunks together and the best part is, we sobered up together.

After about a year I moved out of mom and dad’s house and rented a place on my own. Joe asked me out, just the two of us. We started becoming more serious but he hadn’t filed for divorce although he had been away from his wife for over a year. I had been divorced for two years, away from my first husband for about five years. We had both said we never wanted to get married again when we met, so we really took our time. Finally he said we might as well marry as we were practically living together. Joe is the only man I have ever had sexual intercourse with outside of wedlock. Neither one of us thought very much of ourselves for behaving that way. I was never sober or present but I went though all the motions fairly effectively, I think. I do know I liked Joe from the first time I laid eyes on him. I had never met a man who knew how to take care of himself and his own living quarters. I was impressed. He kept his apartment spotless and cooked better than I did. We got married and we both started drinking more although I don’t know why. The disease of alcoholism I guess. Maybe we neither one knew how to do life or be adult. He worked swing shift and I was still at the drug store.

After about a year of not really getting anywhere, my brother and his wife were going to move to Denver, as she had grown up there, and they were both in their early thirties and not really getting anywhere either. They said, “Why don’t you go with us? There is nothing keeping you here.” After a lot of thought we decided to sell our mobile home and go. Joe and I had been married a little over a year.

We arrived in Denver with my daughter Lisa, about nine hundred dollars, no job, no place to stay, and thought for sure that we hated the big city. Somehow we made it but don’t ask me how. Just as the money was running out Joe got a job from an ad in the newspaper. It was cold and snowing and he had to work outside, but he didn’t care, at least he was working again. He stayed at that job nineteen years. He loves working outside. He found a little white house for rent at $110.00 a month through a guy at work. We thought that amount was outrageous but found out that for Denver that was cheap. Joe started working, I found a job in a drug store, and Lisa went to school. She was miserable, hated Denver, and was really homesick. I was scared but so relieved to really be away from my parents I could not believe my good fortune.

Later, mom and dad came out for a visit. I became very upset because they were coming out for a visit so soon. I had finally gotten away from them and here they came again. I made the bloodiest suicide attempt I have ever made. They were due in on Friday night or Saturday morning.

Friday night I drank all I could hold, and took a handful of Librium. It was late and everybody was asleep. Joe had gone to sleep on the couch in the front room (passed out from too much drink?) after complaining about having to buy Lisa some new school clothes. I filled the bathtub with hot water, cut my wrists, lay back, and hoped never to wake up. I woke up some hours later when the water turned cold. I let the water out of the tub, staggered into the bedroom with my arms throbbing, wrapped a sheet around me and passed out. My wrists started bleeding again when they warmed up. The water turning cold must’ve waked me and stopped the blood flow. In the morning Lisa found me early, she had gone to the bathroom and there was blood in the tub, blood all over the place. She woke Joe and they took me to the doctor. He cleaned my cuts, took a couple stitches, then the doctor tried to talk to me but I was having none of his talk. I told him I was going to be late for work. He did give me another prescription for Librium. I did not tell him I had taken a whole bottle to get the courage to do what I had done the night before, or that I had drunk all I could hold either.

I had called work and told them I was going to be late. I went in to work, and when I left I started drinking and stayed drunk until mom and dad left town, except for when I was at work.

The Sunday after mom and dad left Joe and Lisa were out in the garage working on Lisa’s bike. I could see them from where I stood doing the dishes, and knew I was going to try to kill myself again. I knew they would do better if I were out of the picture. I figured I had saved enough pills to do the job.

I looked to the left and on the wall above the phone there was a suicide prevention telephone number listed with the other emergency numbers. I dried my hands, and called the number. I told whoever answered the phone what I had done the week before and that I was pretty sure I was going to do it again. She said, “Hold on a minute, I’ll let you talk to a counselor.” I almost hung up, but I didn’t. A man came on the phone, sounded concerned, said he could help me, but said he also needed to get a little more information. I gave him details about what I had done to myself. He asked if I thought my husband would bring me in to see him that night and I said, “No, he’s not speaking to me.” He said, “I’ll come and get you.” I said I would walk instead, and he asked me to give him an hour to finish with the person he was seeing right then.

I finished the dishes, got dressed, told Joe I was going over to my sister’s and took my time walking there. When I got there I waited about forty-five minutes until this guy named Bob came out and asked me if I could please wait a little longer. I started to get up and go and he knelt down on one knee in front of me and begged me to wait just a little longer. “If it gets dark I’ll take you home,” he said. I was shocked that he would do such behavior, and embarrassed, but I said I would wait. Finally I saw him for about an hour. I didn’t have a lot to say since I had said most of what I had to say on the phone earlier. He said it would be good if he could see me a couple times a week to start and then we could slack off as I started to feel better. He drove me home. Joe and Lisa were sleeping. I felt honored and relieved that someone was finally going to listen to me at last. The second time I saw him, as I was leaving, he put his hand out to me. Nobody had ever done that to me before. I looked at it for quite a long time and then I took it. He said. “I’ll help you.” I did not know then what I now know about myself. I did not realize how unloved and un-loveable my life had left me, how totally outside my experiences I had learned to live.

During one of our early appointment times, Bob asked me if I wanted him to hold me at the end of a session. I jumped at the chance. I had been telling him of some of my abuse, although not crying or anything. He sat in this big wooden rocking chair, he was a big man and the idea of being held and rocked by him (by anybody) seemed wonderful. It happened a couple of times just like I had imagined, and then he touched my breast. I felt sick but I didn’t say anything. I thought, gees, even preachers do that sort of thing, is nothing sacred? I kept my appointments and now they were only once a week. Soon we graduated to the floor of his office and he started touching me between the legs, and said I could touch him too. I finally did, although I cannot say I wanted to, I felt obligated to. At first he kept telling me my touch was too hard, almost painful, so I lightened my touch. It was awful; I have almost no words for it.

I drank, and then drank some more. For years I never seemed drunk. I was never sober but never appeared drunk either. God, it was insane. After about a year of this “therapy” I told Bob, “I think my father molested me.” He said, “You probably asked for it.” I never brought the subject up again.

I eventually left Bob and the abusive relationship I was in, but the damage had been done. My daughter Lisa hated Bob and that place from the very beginning. By the time summer came Lisa was still very homesick and with all the upheaval in our lives when my parents called and asked if she could spend the summer with them, against my knowing better, and her begging to go, I said yes. I did tell her to stay away from ‘grandpa’ when he was drunk. I also told my mom to keep an eye on her and to not let dad be alone with her. Feeble, huh? I put her on the plane a fairly normal (we were none of us ever allowed to be normal, I only know that now) 10-year-old and when I picked her up three months later I did not recognize my own daughter. She had gained almost 25 pounds and had a cowered slump to her body that had never been there before. She was also very quiet, not normal for her.

A couple of weeks before her birthday in the summer I had sent her a doll. I called to wish her a happy birthday, and see if she liked her doll. At first everything sounded all right, and then she sounded strained and started crying, saying she was homesick for me. I said, “Well honey, don’t worry, that’s no problem, we’ll just get your ticket bumped up and bring you back her a little early.” She told them what I had said and got dad on the phone and then he talked it out of us, saying, “She’s just overcome hearing your voice, we’re doing just fine, she’ll be fine, she’ll be home in a couple weeks.” When we hung up Lisa was still crying. I told Joe I didn’t like the sound of that phone call. I cried myself to sleep that night knowing I should never have let her go to those people no matter what. Later, after she had been home for a while I asked her if grandpa had touched her wrong or anything while she was staying in Florida for the summer. She said “No.” She couldn’t trust me. Later when she was away from my home she told my sister some of what had happened to her. The part I can’t stand is that he had touched her before we had even moved away from Florida. He had also been sexual with her when she was a baby. I think I thought I had protected her.

Joe had gone to work for a week in Colorado Springs and Lisa and I took that week and completely repainted her bedroom, bought her new sheets, curtains, and spread to match. I still have a picture of her in her room when we were all finished with it. We both really liked it. The first night she begged me to sleep with her in her new room. I tried but couldn’t do it. For hours I cried in my room, trying to convince myself it would be ok to go into her room, lay on her bed with her and be close like that. I couldn’t do it. Finally the next night, I went into her room, lay down beside her, joked about some of the things we had done while getting the room painted, patted her, kissed her forehead, and told her I loved her. She wanted me to stay, but I couldn’t, so I went to my own room. I never did feel ok about not being able to stay with her, at least until she fell asleep.

We had moved into a better house by now with three bedrooms. One day while Joe was at work I moved him into the spare bedroom. At first he resented me for it, and then he started liking it, and we have been that way ever since. It’s like we now have the ‘rooms of our own’ that we never had. Joe and I have always needed our own space. I truly believe that is why we have managed to stay together all these years. He has really been there for me as I have been writing this down and seeing what I have really done in my life. I was afraid he might leave me after he read it. We had some adjustments to make and through the grace of God we are better than ever. He was willing to see his role in the mess of my life also. He, too, has been sexually abused and didn’t even realize that truth until later as I started coming to grips with my own abuse. We have always had trouble sharing feelings with one another, but we were so much alike we didn’t know we were not ok. We miss each other very much if we are not there but we don’t actually try to get our needs met through one another. We simply enjoy being with each other. This has taken years to happen. I realize now our way of being together is not for everyone. He has been committed to being there and taking care of me in the way a man’s role used to be. Since this has never happened before in my life it had taken me years to realize how important and valuable he is to me. At this writing we have been together over twenty-five years. If you have had trouble trying to have and maintain relationships like I have, then maybe you can appreciate this fact for the miracle it is.

Another time Joe’s ex-wife called to say his daughter had been sexually abused and could she some live with us? Joe and I had asked to have her before when we had first married and had been turned down. Her name was Lucille and she had begged to come and live with us before, and we had very much wanted her. Within two days I was on a plane on my way to go get her. At the airport, she said she had changed her mind, but I convinced her to give it a try. Well, it didn’t work out. She wanted from Joe what he didn’t have, and she kept telling me she loved me and thanking me for getting her out of Florida and all the while telling my daughter instead that she hated me. This situation broke Joe and I apart. She was sixteen when I went to get her and the day she turned eighteen she left my home. About 25 years later we learned that she killed herself when she was 35; that’s a whole other story. Joe and I had separated, Lucille stayed with Lisa and I. Joe left about three months before Lucille did. When there was only Lisa and I left she started acting out really bad, stealing my car and cigarettes, having boys in the apartment when I was at work. I gave her an ultimatum when she was fourteen and she chose to leave my home. Joe and I got back together after about a year apart, but we didn’t remarry until much later. When Lisa left my home I cannot even try to describe what I was like. One part of me knew it was best for her and another part of me died thinking about her all alone and with no protection. We had never had any, maybe she could do better alone. That’s when I started trying to learn to pray. For the first time in my life my head was quiet from time to time through learning how to pray.

I was working at a credit office, seeing Bob once a week, covering the suicide hotline nights and weekends and trying to get Lisa ready to take dance lessons, something she had always wanted to do. I had very little money but I knew it was important to try to give her something she liked to do. When she started acting out, I felt inside me a rage that my mother had always had toward me so I knew I was going to do anything I could to make her behave. Something in me knew I didn’t have the right to physically restrain her and that’s all I could think to do. I did get her to see a woman counselor a couple times, but it didn’t help. I was afraid of what I might do to her to try to get her to behave, to act right. Here I was, doing what I was doing and wanting her to act right. When Lisa left she stayed with her stepsister for a while (I did not know this at the time) and then she and another girl rode to Florida with truckers. She stayed with mom and dad for about a year. Mom had called me when she got to their house. She went to school, started losing weight and doing pretty good. After about a year she ran away from them. They called me to tell me to get the police to start looking for her from the Colorado end of the country, and to tell me that dad was looking for her from the Florida end. I said, “No.” Dad started cussing and ranting and raving, “What kind of fucking mother are you anyway?” I hung up on them. For two years I did not know where Lisa was, and all I could do was ask God to keep her safe, which I did. Then a week before Thanksgiving she called. I asked if she wanted to come over for dinner, and she did. It was strained and awful but that was the beginning of us trying to heal. It’s been incredible and IT HAS BEEN WORTH IT.

My ignorance has hurt my child. Has she paid for my sins? I believe she has. My lifestyle was all I knew but believe me it was not good enough. I am so very sorry now I did not really know who God was sooner. Satan used every trick in his book to keep me in darkness, blindness, and away from the love of my Everlasting Father and healthy, loving relationships. Although it worked for much of my life it had not really worked since I sobered up. Through His grace I have been ever walking toward the Light of His Love and His Will for me and my life. I have always been so afraid of touch that when Lisa was a baby and I had to bathe her I was terribly afraid to wash between her legs because I was afraid I would make her feel something she was not supposed to feel. MY daughter has problems today and at the same time she is healing also. I cannot ask for anything more for her or me. She has been water baptized and baptized with the Holy Spirit. She is married, second time, to a man who she is trying to love and allow herself to be loved by. I thank God for that for her. She has had a hysterectomy in the last year while trying to get pregnant. Is that a direct result of my asking that she not be able to have children when we were both as lot younger? I asked God to not let any of our offspring be able to have children because we were all so evil. Has he granted my request? I was not a “Christian” when I prayed that particular prayer. Was it more like a curse or a vow? I don’t know, I only know I asked that of God when I was very young out of a deep hatred for the ignorance and inadequacies in my family. I pray especially for the next generation now. I hope they have a chance with God in spite of who their parents are. I pray my prayers will be used to bring this about for the next generation.

I hope that my daughter and others will learn from my recovery. A few months ago Lisa asked to read my story as I am writing it. I did not know what to do, so I prayed and asked a good friend and mentor, and she thought it could be used by the Lord to help her. I don’t know yet if it will help or not. With all my relationships I’ve always known that my love was contaminated. I have always tried to have people in my life while not being part of the relationship personally because I was so contaminated. I have always been an object, even to myself. I have no way of knowing if what’s between my legs will ever be able to actually become connected to me. I know I have never shared myself sexually with another person physically; and at the same time I have probably shared myself sexually with everybody else I have ever met without even knowing it, by trying to live outside myself. I realize something very important to my healing: I DID NOT SIN BY SHARING MYSELF SEXUALLY WITH PEOPLE THAT NEVER SHOULD HAVE BEEN SEXUAL WITH ME TO BEGIN WITH. Nobody would let me say this truth of mine. Nobody!

In writing your own story you get a chance to get real to yourself. I remember when I could not even begin to see what my story or my life looked like. I could not put pen to paper when I sobered up thirteen years ago, nor did I want to. It was too overwhelming. Most of us are afraid to write our own stories; the truth is we know that nobody really wants to hear them. Write your story, see your own truth. Feeling feelings will not kill you. It’s how you will be able to claim your healing. God is the perfect gentleman; He will not flood your senses. If He does it will only be in total purity, nothing unwanted can get to you when He is being with you intimately, I promise. You can space, block, slide, checkout, disassociate, or whatever works for you as long as you need to sneak up on yourself. With each memory ask for the strength to take a little more of yourself into your own center. TO BE! I am certain, for myself, I would never have been able to exist if I had not allowed myself to become willing to look at what happened to me. Of course there is fear, please don’t let it stop you. All my life I have had to live a double life. Until I was healing and not hiding, this had been a disadvantage to me; now in healing it is the very gift that has enabled me to heal. I have been living a very simple looking life while going through the nightmare of my remembering and coming to what is true for me today. I am coming into being integrated, now. It has taken a full ten years. Little by little I have learned how to face my past, stand still, don’t run, and my Lord has stayed with me through it all.

The hook for me was because my innocence and sexuality were taken from me so early in life that it ‘set me up’ to ‘have to have it right’ in me, to be looking for that part of me all my life. I have been trying to be present and get this part of me ‘right’ ever since I can remember. I am sorry I have always been so ashamed of being a sexual being with sexual feelings. I hate that nobody could help me and at the same time knowing that many people have helped me, by being for me. I was so afraid of people I could not let anybody help me. I’m learning now I am OK. I also understand that I am a human being, and that too is OK. Being a human being today means to me that I have faults and I am able to make mistakes without having to think that the world will come to an end because of them, and more importantly I have the God-given ability for much joy and pleasure. Now I am grown-up enough and brave enough to believe it will be all right if I choose to share what I have discovered to be true about myself with others. What a miracle!

Joanna's Story

When I was two, my first abuser came into my life. He was soon to become my stepfather, and by all accounts, it was to be the worst thing that could have happened to us. He was physically abusive to my mother, beating her nearly every day. He beat us as often as he could find excuses for, which meant that if we left our shoes in the living room, even out of sight under the couch, we’d get a beating. The abuse wasn’t just physical, though.

He started molesting me very quickly, inserting his fingers in my vagina while I was in the tub, and then washing my privates with soap – leaving me burning and stinging for hours afterwards. He would lie on top of me at night, although I can’t say for sure what he did; those memories are still blocked, waiting for a day when I can cope with what was done.

My older brother began raping me when I was about 6, attempting penetration even while I was crying that it hurt, and telling him to stop. My brother also “loaned me out” to his friends when he told them what he was doing. I remember one time, when I was 12 – my brother had finally succeeded in actually penetrating me long before. He was in the act of raping me out in the tent we had set up in the yard. My stepfather stuck his head in, and watched, telling my brother, “Just don’t let your mother find out.” Clearly, there was no respite in sight.

I also had 3 uncles who molested me to a lesser extent; making me sit on their laps while they had erections, groping me whenever they got a clear shot at me…things like that. Between my stepfather, my brother and my uncles, I would be molested until I was 21 years old, although the memories were blocked as rapidly as they could form. It would be a while before I remembered what had happened to me while I was growing up.

When I was 19, I got married to an abusive man. At 23, I found out I was pregnant, which was all I ever wanted. I had dreams of being a mother to lots of children, breastfeeding and nurturing them closely while they grew into adults. My husband was not kind or helpful, although he took great pride in having “knocked me up.” He berated me and made me feel very uncomfortable, and hit me as well.

When I went into labor, things moved along very well, right up until my son passed my cervix. The doctor felt that I had overdone it on the Kegel exercises, because my muscles locked up and would not release, regardless of the effort on my doctor’s part - massage, coaching…. Nothing worked. He finally had to give up and give me an episiotomy. My belief is that my body was afraid to allow my son into the world, fighting to keep him inside, where it was safe. My body knew the world as a very painful and unsafe place. I think that as much as I wanted to hold him, I wanted to keep him away from the things I knew were out here.

After the birth, I remember being completely filled with joy that I had this beautiful son. I looked forward to the days, months and years of breastfeeding him. That dream never came true, though. I only managed to nurse him for 3 months, finally giving up because he wasn’t gaining weight even though he ate constantly. I couldn’t make enough milk to sustain him, and was forced to feed him formula. That was a blow I thought I’d never survive. My body was failing me yet again…. I couldn’t even feed my son.

It was when my son was 3 weeks old that the memories started coming back. They began slowly, but cascaded faster and faster into my life. My wonderful doctor handed me a card at one of our numerous visits, telling me that he thought these people could help me. Apparently, he realized that something was going on that I couldn't talk about with him… He saw the symptoms, yet I’d never told him a thing about my history, or what I was going through. I had no idea what he meant, but decided he might be right. It turned out that “these people” ran an organization for survivors of abuse. With their help, I joined a support group, and used the book, The Courage To Heal (Bass & Davis.)

I tried therapy, but chose the wrong person. I had always believed in God, and I wanted a therapist who would include those beliefs in my “treatment.” I found a counselor who was also a minister. I remember the day I tried to tell him what had happened to me. He asked me, “Is it in the past?” I answered that it was, and he told me, “Then it’s over. You have to move on.” That was it… the entire amount of help I would receive from him. I don’t blame God for this man’s refusal to help me –I think it’s just that some people can’t believe that our past affects us in such strong ways. I wrote to him a few years ago, telling him how hard it was for me to tell him my secret, and what damage his response did to me. He denied saying what he did.

I stayed with my friends in my support group, muddling through as best I could. It was difficult, at best, but I worked hard at becoming what should have been the most natural thing in the world: a mother to my child.

When my son was 1 year old, my husband and I divorced. I was raped about 3 months later. The man I met around the same time was wonderful, supportive, and loving. He stood by me through the entire ordeal, and helped me throughout my pregnancy. When I went into labor this time, I knew it would be easier, and that I would succeed in a drug- and intervention-free delivery, and I would be able to finally win out over the problems that kept me from breastfeeding my son.

The birth went faster and easier than my first, with no episiotomy, though I couldn’t relax and enjoy the birth of my second son, either. And as it turned out, once again I couldn’t breastfeed. I had the same struggles, the same heartache, and the same result: a son who was actually losing weight, and a painful decision to feed him formula at 6 weeks.

The man who stood by me throughout this time soon became my husband. I made another go at therapy, and this time, made some progress. My therapist worked with me for almost a year, and I dealt with my memories as best I could. I started having flashbacks regularly, and that was the worst part. At one of my support group meetings, however, I was told that my therapist had moved out of state. She hadn’t told me goodbye; she hadn’t even told me that there were plans to move. She just left without a word. I was devastated, and didn’t think I could trust anyone again.

When my kids were 5 and 7, I found another therapist. I believe God brings people into our lives who will make a huge impact. The first question I asked her after we sat down on her comfy cushions was, “You aren’t planning to move out of town, are you?” She got a funny look on her face, and said, “No, we won’t ever move. We love it here. Why?” I explained what the last therapist had done. Cathy promised that wouldn’t happen with her, and we began to forge a relationship that lasted professionally for 2 years. We’re still friends all these years later. God was wonderful, bringing her into my life. She has been a gift to me.

One of Cathy’s methods of therapy included EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. At first, I was nervous about trying it. I didn’t want to give up control of what I experienced, and it sounded to me like I might have to. As it turned out, it was the best decision I’ve ever made. This technique was so effective for me; I really was dealing with things for the first time. EMDR was the trick, for me, in bringing those memories out and letting me take the emphasis off of them.

Simply put, I was asked to concentrate on the worst part of a memory while moving my eyes rapidly from side to side. Cathy had a “stick” with a light on the end for my eyes to follow, to make the movement easier. After each 30 second set of eye movements, I would be asked, “What came up?” Usually, an image, thought, emotion, or physical sensation, all of which are common, would have come to me. If I said, "I'm really angry," Cathy suggested concentrating on the anger in the next set. We’d do this as many times as it took to “bring me down,” and leave me feeling no more anger, or whatever it was I had to deal with. It was a little scary, at times, but it was the single, most effective thing I tried. I would recommend it highly for anyone.

After 8 years of trying to have another baby, my husband and I gave up. We’d never used birth control; in fact, in all my life, I’ve never used it. I didn’t get pregnant easily, it was obvious. I went back to school, got a job, and seemed to be settling in with my new life. My sons were 8 and 10, and things were leveling out. And then I got pregnant.

This time, I decided that I wanted a midwife. My first doctor had joined the Peace Corps, and while I was thrilled he was helping so many people, I wasn’t happy he was gone. My second doctor was a jerk, and I knew I didn’t want to go back to him. Kim, however, was just what I needed. She listened to me; she made me feel like I knew what I was doing and talking about. She never once left me feeling like I had no clue what was happening. She would even let my husband deliver our baby. We were thrilled.

I had 2 hours and twenty minutes of labor this time, and although it was the worst pain of my entire life, I was so much more relaxed and in control than the last two times. I actually was able to enjoy this birth, and the videotape shows me smiling and happy throughout. My husband did, in fact, deliver our son, and it was a joyous day for both of us. This son was not, however, destined to be entirely breastfed, either. I had to give up and use formula, once again, at 3 weeks.

I went back for more EMDR, this time focusing on my feeling of failure. The end result is that I don’t feel as though I’m a complete loss as a mother simply because I couldn’t breastfeed my children. It helped a great deal in relieving the stress surrounding that part of my life.

Each of the births was easier than the one before it, but I still couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t making milk. With lots of soul searching and effort at getting to the bottom of the problem, I am reasonably sure it is related to the abuse I suffered as a child and young adult. I don’t know why I’m so sure of that, but my heart tells me that it’s true. I think that, because my breasts were seen as sexual items, my body couldn’t stand to let my sons use them, even if it was for the original, God-intended purpose. So they shut down, refusing to let me be hurt again. I can only hope that, if I were to have another baby, I could finally overcome whatever block is left in there, and be able to truly nurture my child the way I always wanted to…. freely, completely, and with no painful decision to make. Our bonding suffered, our lives together suffered… because of the things I experienced as a child.

Having God in my life, effective therapy, and the love of a kind and gentle man has helped me come to a place where I can at least feel free to love my children, and give them what they need: safety and a place where they’re free to be themselves.
Healing is possible – there is hope.

Erica's Story

My parents were ahead of their time. Though I am technically a Baby Boomer, I have always felt a greater kinship with those that are a few years younger than me. When the characteristics of Generation X are compared with the Boomers, I identify more with the former, and I never could quite figure out why until I looked at my parents’ lives. They were both artists, and the social revolution of the sixties and seventies, which blew through our culture leaving so many warped and wounded children in its wake, manifested itself just that much earlier in the art community and on the university campuses where they taught. I was acutely aware that there were quite a few behaviors and topics of discussion that were normal in my house that would shock my friends at school. It made me feel schizophrenic and frightened that I would do or say something way over the top without even realizing it. The atmosphere was wide open and sexually supercharged. I don’t remember not knowing about sex, and it seemed to be the entire goal of adult life. There was lots of alcohol and switching of partners and fighting about sex. It was overwhelming and exciting and I couldn’t wait to grow up and find out what it was that had such enormous power over the adults around me. If it could make grown-ups act so strangely, then clearly sex must be the most incredible thing in the world. Men wanted women’s bodies, and that gave women power.

Modesty was the only sin. Sexual reticence was a major character flaw, I was taught. That the vast majority of this “sexual experimentation” was indulged in by my father and various grad students and other professors’ wives didn’t strike me as imbalanced or unfair in any way, for I was also taught at home that my mother was either crazy or stupid. Looking at their marriage from my present vantage point, sixteen years married and the beneficiary of much therapy, I see that all the rhetoric about sexual freedom and finding the muse was a shabby cover-up for garden-variety adultery. Though I call it garden-variety, my feelings about this betrayal are anything but benign, because I live permanently with how it has distorted me as a woman, wife and mother. It cost me my girlhood, pleasure in my femininity, and the ability to trust my husband, among other things. And it set me up for the first sexual predator that came along.

My father was by far the most powerful person in our home, and, for survival, I adopted his view of the world. I learned to see my body as my currency. It was what I had to surrender to be wanted. My mother taught me to be careful of the tender feelings of men, but no one taught me that I had the right to say no to sexual advances, or that I might want to. When I look at the way young women are now encouraged to dress and express their sexuality, I am troubled. I’ve been there, and, rather than setting me free, it turned out to be a terrible prison that I’ve spent an enormous amount of energy freeing myself from. I want to run up to them and plead with them not to buy into the notion that their sexuality is a currency to be exchanged for a cheap and transitory power. Torn between wanting to preserve my integrity and privacy, and the desire to be valued by men, I began experimenting sexually when I was ten. My roadmap were the porno magazines my older brother gave me, and my partners were boys and girls my age or a little older, my parents’ friends’ kids.

I was twelve when I was seduced by an older man, a med student who was the son of some casual friends of my parents. Years later, he told me that it had taken him an hour to penetrate me, thought I don’t remember it. He also introduced me to oral sex and anal sex, afterwards telling me that the girls he dated wouldn’t let him do some of the things I had. It was all very antiseptic, very calculated, though I had no frame of reference to know if it should be different. I had my first pregnancy scare when I was thirteen. It took me quite a long time in therapy to see the relationship as anything other than my ‘first boyfriend’. It wasn’t until I began imagining my own children being treated this way that I began to see it differently. When I think about someone doing this to one of my kids, I think of how hard it would be to find the pieces of that guy when I got through with him.

In high school and college, I was obsessed with being wanted by men. My radar was finely tuned and always on: if a guy was attracted to me, I branded him a loser. If a guy was at all indifferent, I needed to find out why, to make him want me. And I had no protective barriers. Having a boyfriend eased the anxiety somewhat, but I was still always looking. Looking for the man who would make me feel wanted. My friendships with women were distorted, too. I saw them as dangerous competitors.

The summer after my sophomore year in college, I became pregnant. This was before single motherhood became fashionable, and I didn’t believe I had any other choice but abortion. I did not want to kill my baby, but I believed that once I had given birth I would no longer be desirable to men. After all, wasn’t that what had happened to my mother? My father had wanted her, pursued her, until she had his child, and then she was undesirable to him. Finding a man to love me (and my body was the only thing I believed I had to attract and hold him) was the overriding principle of my life. It felt like the difference between life and death. I dutifully marched myself down to Planned Parenthood and a doctor stuck a hose in me and sucked out my child.

The unexpected outcome of having an abortion was that I stopped caring so much if a man wanted me. I stopped caring about pretty much everything. A part of me that was young and hopeful died and, as winter’s darkness turned the midwestern landscape to gray, so did my interior garden fade. The ‘girl’ had been sucked out of me, too. Though I wouldn’t have told anyone at the time, I now saw human relationships almost entirely in economic terms. I had something men wanted, and I was going to parlay that into as much power as I could. I was not going to ever let myself be vulnerable again.

Given my mental state, it is not surprising that I didn’t give the next guy I met a lot of thought. Nor is it that difficult to understand why it took me years more of running to realize he was the man I wanted to marry. And it has taken me years of marriage to discover I was in love with him.

From the time I was thirteen, I wanted to be a mother. Even through the years of college and working after, when everything was supposed to be career and climbing some stupid ladder, it was what I dreamed about. Almost immediately after marrying Bill, the desire to get pregnant became overwhelming. I wanted a baby so badly, but he wasn’t ready. I bought every book I could find on pregnancy and watched Berry Brazelton’s parenting show on cable TV. When I finally did get accidentally pregnant, I was ecstatic. I thought I knew so much about pregnancy, but what I didn’t know was what was done to women in the name of modern medicine. I thought if I went into see a doctor and said I wanted natural childbirth, that’d be what I got. I wanted to deliver my own baby more than anything, to finally feel, perhaps, like I was a ‘real’ woman.

Four weeks before the end of a healthy pregnancy, my Dr. discovered that my baby had turned breech. A c-section was quickly scheduled. My protests were met with assurances that a vaginal birth would leave my baby dead or retarded and I must stop being so selfish by trying for what was, after all, window dressing. It was implied, and I believed it, that to feel bad about this would make my baby feel unloved and was proof of my selfishness. Once again, I dutifully climbed up on a table and let a Dr. cut my child out of me. I came home with this baby and a frozen heart. I couldn’t sleep, even when he did. I went through the motions, feeling raped, feeling defrauded, and feeling like I was not a real woman. Hidden deep in all this pain however, was a twinge of relief. Since I hadn’t given birth vaginally, that part of me was still unchanged. I had delayed making myself sexually undesirable to my husband, and he might still want me. In my thinking, men did not want women who were mothers. Mothers were used up. Yet, in a way, I was still “unspoiled”. My husband was completely unaware of all this, since I wouldn’t have dared to utter it to another person.

Then my father went nuts. Literally. He, at 67, had his first clinically significant psychotic episode from the undiagnosed manic depression that had shaped his whole life, unbeknownst to any of us. And it set me free. If he was nuts, then I no longer had to see the world through the lenses he’d given me. I got myself into therapy, and began the long, exhausting process of revisiting my past, of looking at my history with a sympathetic other. About this time, I also began to read about cesarean sections and the feelings women experience, and discovered that I was normal. As relief flooded through me, and I began to let the tears out, I took my first deep breath in months. And I set about planning the birth I had always dreamed of.

By the time I became pregnant with my second child, I had pretty much gotten up the courage to attempt a home birth. Actually, it was more out of fear that the hospital bureaucracy would again supercede my desires, and I’d be treated as an ”obstetrical cripple” because of my previous surgery. Twenty hours of active labor and four hours of pushing would have earned me another trip to the surgical suite under an MD’s care, but I had wonderful, caring midwives who believed in me, and I gave birth to my child. During the labor, my hidden fear about “overstretching” resurfaced. I had been pushing for so long, and I finally tried to speak about it, but all I could say was “I’m scared”. Then I looked around the room and realized that I only had two options: to throw in the towel and head to the hospital for another surgery, or forge ahead and risk losing my desirability by pushing the baby out. No one in that room was going to be able to rescue me, and I wanted so dearly to “give birth” rather than “be delivered.” A half hour later I was holding my sweet son and feeling a surge of something that I’d never felt before: true power. Power that comes from having done something difficult and important, not the false power that is conferred by some man wanting to use my body. It was the culmination of the months of uncertainty that had begun with my daring to act on the best information I could gather in deciding a home birth was a reasonable option, despite the doomsayers with advanced degrees. God used the birth of my first child and the loss of a lifetime of dreams to take away the walls of unreality I’d built to survive my childhood. He used the second to begin reconstruction. In the process He planted seeds of compassion and humility. I put off resuming sex with my husband as long as I could and did kegels like mad, but I never dared ask him if he liked sex with me less. I tried to drown out the constant, nagging fear that he would leave me because I no longer attracted him or pleased him. Even if I had, and he had reassured me, I would have believed that someday he was going to run off with someone younger.

My third labor and birth was the sort that women would forfeit body parts to experience. I had learned something from the previous two births. I had learned to relax into it, so much so that I was able to doze between contractions. I essentially woke up ready to deliver, and the midwife didn’t even get her coat off before my daughter slid into the world. I was the first to notice she was the daughter I had longed for, that I had wondered if I was too unworthy as a woman to deserve. Again, fear too deep to name dogged me, but each birth restored a damaged part of me. I sat in my rocker for a month with my daughter, so incredibly delighted I didn’t want to move.

When I was forty- two weeks pregnant with my fourth child, the midwife did a heavy-duty manual exam to see if we could get things going, and discovered that I was having another breech baby. We were living in Dallas at the time, and had no back-up doctor, and not much time to make any decisions. We decided to have another home-birth as planned, since we both thought this baby would be relatively small. I remember that labor as a time of song and being overwhelmed with a supernatural peace. While not quite as quick as the previous baby, the breech birth was in some ways less difficult. When it was all over and we weighed my “littlest” baby, she was a full pound heavier than my firstborn breech, the one who doctors said I could never have delivered myself. I laughed such a laugh of freedom, and of pleasure, and yes, of power. Each birth brought me a piece of myself that had been distorted by fear and shame. Other women are no longer competitors. I learned, in a way much deeper than just head-knowledge, that women are powerful, whether or not someone “wants” them.

Lisa's Story

I am a survivor of both childhood sexual abuse and Rape as a young adult, but I am so much more than that. I am a woman, a mother, a wife, and a daughter. I am a soul. I have had many experiences in my life, some of which have been incredibly painful, some of which have been amazingly joyous. I have experienced love and hate, acceptance and rejection, protection and violation and so much more; so much that words escape me. As I write this, I ask myself, “What can I share? What can I offer?”

I can tell you that I have been on a healing journey for a longtime. Some of my healing has been specific to recovering from sexual abuse. Most of my healing has been about discovering me. My journey has been about seeking, and so, it has been a necessary and an important part of my process to move beyond the labeling of "survivor". Sure, I have had to admit and face the fact that I have been violated sexually. And in doing so I have learned that violation has many forms and presents in the subtlest of ways. Violation is self-hate, self-abuse, criticism, betrayal, deception, manipulation, judgment, cruelty, hostility, and all the places in my soul that I have separated from. I have learned that it doesn't t really matter, in the long run, what form violation takes, whether it is blatant or subtle, violation impacts the spirit regardless. It is the spirit, along with the wounded child, that needs attention and healing. It is through connection to my spirit that I have found healing.

My journey has been a journey to find myself, to become whole again, to reclaim all the parts of me that I either denied, cast aside, or was just unconscious of. It has been a journey to reclaim who I am in all my flaws and divinity and to learn to like that person. It has been a journey of self-discovery through self-responsibility - a process of looking at all the experiences I have had, both painful and joyous, and seeing the choices I have made and the intentions I have held, then seeing how I have created these experiences and finding the reasons for doing so. It has not been easy. It is not easy or pleasant to look at a painful experience and ask- "For what reason did I bring that into my life?” It is incredibly challenging to look at a person who has been cruel and unloving and ask - " What in me brings that person's hate or cruelty to me?” But these are questions that have been instrumental for me because they have been freeing. They have taken me away from being a victim and maintaining a position as a victim, and brought me back to myself.

A main part of my journey back to wholeness has been my work with a spiritual helper. Doing my healing through a spiritual path has broadened my perspective about everything and shaken up my perspective about everything. I have learned about spiritual law (self-responsibility, brotherhood/sisterhood, cause and effect), when in my life I am aligned with spiritual law, when I am disconnected, and what manifests. Some of the most intense work I have done is with a woman in Toronto, named Sagewalker.

She has offered a transformative process called, “Stages of Initiation, Divine Sexuality,” which focuses on one's expression of sexuality, to see where one is connected and disconnected from God. My personal work with Sage has been so helpful. I actually feel that I am reclaiming who I am. I actually feel that I am disconnecting more and more from those places in me that were drawn to, attached to, and connected to abuse. She has helped me to see the gifts in the challenges and helped me to honor and hold sacred the lessons that life brings to me. She has helped me to have compassion and love for myself.

When I think of myself as a mother, it is very clear that motherhood has been instrumental in my healing. The challenges and blessing that I have experienced as a mother are not only a part of my larger journey back to wholeness. They are also clearly related to my recovery from sexual abuse. When I contemplate how motherhood relates to my recovery from sexual abuse, I immediately think about the birth of my first child, my son. Before his actual birth, I still had the association of sex as violation. After he was born, I was able to see and feel the connection between sex/intercourse and life. I remember thinking to myself, " So this is what sex is meant for." It was as if the violation of rape dissolved once my son emerged from my body. It was so incredible and so freeing. It was amazing how immediate the letting go process was once I had a different association. I feel so grateful for that experience. Now that he is older, six and a half, I am aware of how important it is for me to teach him how to honor someone's boundaries and how to respect the word “NO.” I often ask myself how to teach him these important life lessons without tainting it with my own wounds or projecting my perpetrator onto him.

The issues and challenges that come up for me with my daughter are totally different than those with my son. I am acutely aware of how people respond to her. I have an overwhelming need to protect her and keep her safe physically. I want to insure that she likes her body, that she not experience shame about her sexuality or femininity. I wish for her to experience herself in a way that I did not experience as a child and that I am still seeking to experience as an adult. I also ask myself how I can bring my gifts and wisdom to her and show the world to her through the woman's eyes, rather than through the wounds.

One thing for sure about having kids, they bring up so much. Just when I thought I had it all figured out and all worked through, my kids remind me that I am still healing, and that my journey continues.

Today, as I reflect on my words to you, I have faith that I can heal and find the pleasure and self-love that I have been seeking for so long. I wish each and every one of you the best as you continue your own healing.

Sarah's Story

I don’t remember how old I was when my dad started fondling me. I know I was always a very shy and withdrawn child. My dad was a heavy drinker and also read and looked at pornographic magazines.

My mom tried to instill her values in her children. I have two sisters and one brother. I went to private school for eight years. We went to church regularly (just Mom and children – Dad didn’t go), and also to prayer meetings at my grandparents’.

It seems ever since I can remember, I’ve always been very shy. I did not have a friend in school until I was in third grade. I always remember feeling inferior to my classmates.

About the abuse, my dad never had intercourse with me. He would fondle me and tell me to put his finger where it felt good. He would look at and touch my vagina under the covers at bedtime. I think I struggled so much with my abuse because a lot of times it felt good.

I remember one time carrying a blanket to the TV room, hoping my dad would fondle me underneath. One night I remember my mom had gone to bed, and we were up watching TV, my dad pulling me aside in the hallway and whispering to me to put his finger where it felt good. I did.

Sometimes I dreaded him coming to our room at night because I knew what he was going to do. I think sometimes I would turn over or pretend I was asleep if I didn’t want him touching me. Then he would go and touch my older sister. Sometimes I welcomed him touching me because it felt good, but it did make me feel shameful. He never made me touch him or have sex with him. I don’t know if he got aroused while touching me. I never saw his penis.

I guess my older sister got tired of him doing that, and she told my mom. I will never forget the day my mom called me to her room because she needed to talk with me. I just couldn’t go. She called me again, and I remember her asking me if Daddy had been touching me, and I told her yes. I remember feeling so ashamed I just wanted to disappear. I guess I felt like I was the one to blame because at times it was enjoyable.

She said to tell her if he ever did that again, and asked if I thought she should divorce him. (I don’t remember her asking me the latter question, but she told me she did.) I said yes, and my sister said no. I must have been nine years old. I guess my mom confronted him, because he never touched me again. I remember him starting to spend time with my younger sister and I wondered if he were doing that to her now. He would also tease me and try to make me jealous of my younger sister.

After my mom talked with me, it was never discussed again. I tried to forget about it and go on with life. I remember always feeling like something was wrong with me, like I was damaged somehow and not as good or worth as much as other people.

I started to act out during my teen years. It started in eighth grade. I stopped trying. I was always a good student and got good grades, but I started hanging around with another girl who had a lot of problems and we got into a lot of trouble at school. We would smoke and try to drink, disobeyed the teachers and just acted defiant. We were asked not to come back to the school.

Ninth grade was one of the worst years of my life. In addition to already being a difficult time in a girl’s life, I had to make the transition to public school after being sheltered in a small, private school. It was culture shock, and I didn’t go to school for the first two weeks. I was so scared. I would feel nauseous every morning, and got sick a lot of times. I skipped a lot of school my ninth grade year. I don’t know how I passed, but I did.

I was in a special class for kids with emotional problems. We would smoke before school, and I started smoking pot.

My tenth grade year was better, but I still skipped classes and didn’t try very hard, although I did like high school. I failed that year and was held back. I finished half a year and quit.

My parents were very disapproving and said I had to get a job. I worked part-time at K-Mart. That didn’t last too long, six months at the most. I just wanted to party, get high and drunk and hang out with my friends.

I was also becoming very promiscuous. It started in eighth grade, maybe ninth. It was like I couldn’t say no to guys. I did not have a very good reputation and I was so ashamed of it. I knew I was a good girl, and I knew better, but I couldn’t say no. So many times I remember not wanting to have sex, but just going along with it. I even slept with my best friend at the time’s boyfriend.

I was very self-destructive. I really hated myself and the things I did. I would get depressed a lot and just sit in my room and cry, and wonder what was wrong with me. I knew, though, that it was related to what my dad did to me.

I remember wanting to talk about it, and I did share it with a close friend for the first time when I was 15, maybe. She cried for me, but I just sat there thinking I should be crying too. But I was too detached from my real feelings.

My depression grew, and I was out of control. My parents could not control me and wanted to try to scare me. I ended up in juvenile detention for a few days. I think that was the most depressed I ever was or would be. I cried all the time. The whole time I was there I cried because I knew I didn’t belong there. It was very scary.

After that, I think I tried to do better, but soon fell back into my old ways. I would stay out all night, and did not listen to my parents. I ran away twice, once in ninth grade and again when I was 15 or 16. The first time I did not even want to run away, but a girl I was a friend with at the time did. So, I just went along with her. I was sick I was so scared. I just wanted to go home. Luckily a few days later a girl talked me into calling my parents.

The second time I ran away, I called my parents to let them know I was okay. So, by age 16 and 17, I didn’t have a job, and I just partied all the time, trying to escape the terrible feelings I had about myself. We drank a lot, and smoked a lot of pot.

One day I had a bad experience. I mixed pot and a prescription drug. I thought I was going to die. After that, I didn’t want to smoke anymore. I started to clean up, and that’s when I started getting anxiety attacks. I thought I was going crazy. One day, in a state of depression, I took a handful of pills and lay down to go to sleep. Thank the Lord my sister came to my room a little later, and I told her what I did. My dad rushed me to the hospital. That’s kind of a blur, but that’s when I finally started to get help. I was in the psychiatric ward for a few days, I think, and I had to talk to a therapist. I would cut myself with razors and burn myself. I had slashes on my wrist at the time (not deep). That’s also when I started dealing with my dad’s drinking. I couldn’t tell the counselor about what he did to me. I had to go see someone either every week or every other week. That’s when I learned how my dad’s drinking affected me.

That and a bad experience with pot and prescription drugs started me on my road to recovery. I smoked pot while taking a prescription drug, and I thought I was going to die. I didn’t want to smoke or drink after that. Then I started getting anxiety attacks. I thought I was going crazy. I didn’t know what was happening to me. I was starting to deal with past issues, some things I didn’t have alcohol or drugs to escape, and I couldn’t suppress my emotions any longer.

My anxiety got very bad and I didn’t want to leave my house. I would get sick after I ate because my nerves were so bad, and I was scared. I started reading about anxiety, and keeping a journal. I tried to start doing good things for myself, taking better care of myself. I didn’t want to take medication for the anxiety because I was too scared, and had stopped seeing the counselor. I would make myself do things, like go to the store or mall, or just for a walk. Gradually I got a little better and was able to get a part-time job.

My mom and I also started to become close during this time. She would pray with me, support me, just loved me, and listened to me. I tried to find another job that I liked better and found a position as a nanny, watching a nine-month-old baby. I really enjoyed this, and it also enabled me to move out with my older sister. I had just turned 18.

I was still struggling with anxiety, but found a boyfriend I really liked. One night he told me he loved me, and I got really scared and didn’t want to see him anymore. I did, but I was scared because I wouldn’t allow myself to love him. I was scared of being hurt and of falling in love. Thankfully, a few months later, we got back together and we’ve been together ever since.

At first it was very hard. We moved in together, although I didn’t feel ready for that. I started to get anxious and depressed again, and started feeling suicidal again. I still had not dealt with the sexual abuse, although I had talked to my boyfriend about it. I even confronted my dad and asked him why he did that, and asked him if that happened to him when he was younger. He said not, that he was sorry, but that it was in the past. I didn’t feel any better after talking to him. I was reading, “The Courage to Heal,” and that’s why I did it.

One night I just broke down with my boyfriend and told him I wanted to die. I knew I needed to get help. I started seeing a counselor, talking about the abuse, and reading everything I could about sexual abuse. Just talking to someone about it helped a lot. I didn’t feel like I was hiding such a shameful secret anymore. I started to accept myself, and forgive myself.

My boyfriend got a job offer in a city about an hour from where we lived at the time (my parents too). So, we moved. A few months later I found out I was pregnant. We moved back and lived with my parents and at my grandfather’s winter home until we could afford our own place.

Having a healthy baby was definitely the most wonderful experience I’ve ever had. I felt fulfillment like I never knew. I felt important and needed. I loved her so deeply and strongly it scared me. I loved staying home with her and taking care of her. Two and a half years later, I was pregnant again. We married when I was almost three months pregnant with the first baby.

We moved again and started being a real family. I’m so happy now. I never thought life could be so wonderful. I have a great relationship with both my parents. I love them deeply, and have forgiven them. My husband has been very supportive of me.

I still get anxiety from time to time, but now very rarely. Last year I started getting anxiety again, and I had to re-evaluate my life and the impact the sexual abuse had on me. It was hard. I saw a counselor for a few months. I still wonder if at times I should continue to see a therapist, as I lack self-confidence and still feel inferior to others at times. Sometimes I feel like I can’t really be myself, like I don’t really know myself.

I’m growing, and I’ve made a ton or progress. I’ll be 30 this year. Looking back, I see how God protected me and helped me. He really loved me when I was a confused and troubled teenager and I would cry out to Him for His help. It wasn’t always easy. We would sing a song at church that went, “Something beautiful, something good, all my confusion, He understood. All I had to offer Him was brokenness and strife, but He made something beautiful of my life.” I would cry singing, because He did make something beautiful of my life. To God be the Glory!

Denise's Story

There is no question that my past abuse history had a major impact on my ability to handle even the thought of having children, my pregnancy, birth and adjustment to parenting.

From the moment I fell pregnant I went into a total depression – even before I knew I was pregnant. I felt exhausted, stressed, and irrational at times. It was really most unfortunate timing since my husband (then fiancé) had just organized a wonderful trip to explore Britain and Europe, and we were to marry in Edinburgh just before New Year. I completely lost energy and any kind of joy or curiosity. Everything just felt extremely tiring and difficult.

Four days after our wedding we crossed the channel to France and I was horribly sick into somebody’s coke cup on board the ferry (much to the delight of the other diners, I am sure!) We gathered together our bits of French grammar and got a pregnancy test on the Champs-Elysees. Both tests were positive. I was quite happy about the pregnancy. It wasn’t totally convenient yet, since we had intended doing a lot more traveling, but we were committed and had intended to start a family soon anyway.

I had secret fears that I possibly couldn’t get pregnant, because I had had a termination when I was twenty-four. I had an IUD inserted and the gynecologist had not put it in correctly. I hadn’t realized because he had said that one could experience some pain for a while… so when it was painful and uncomfortable, I thought it was normal. I was at the point of a nervous breakdown when I realized I was pregnant at that time. I was a dancer with the City Ballet where salaries were extremely low and I was fast realizing that my fiancé at the time was an incurable drug addict and a repeat of the “father” pattern. I became very ill and the doctor suggested the termination. All my fears of being abused and perhaps becoming an abuser or subjecting my child to someone who was an abuser came up. (My mother had also played on my fears a couple of years ago when I told her briefly about what had happened. She said that she was totally anti- abortion and that I would probably never be able to have children now. As usual it was much easier for her to make me out to be a bad person and to disempower me than to face the fact that my Father’s behavior had impacted my life so drastically. )

I was very nauseous and depressed for the rest of our tour. When I got home I knew there was no way I could stay in the same city as my parents. I just didn’t feel safe living in the same town as my father. Bruce was wonderful in that he understood, and he organized for me to move cities.

My parents were coming to the wedding and that threw me even deeper into stress and depression. On the one level, they were being very helpful, especially my mother with the making of the dress and decoration of the venue, but I had no way of feeling okay about my father who had reacted aggressively when I had first mentioned the wedding. I had fears that he wouldn’t be able to handle the jealousy and that he would go mad and stab my husband or me as he had threatened to do for so many years. There was definite underlying tension all the time and he kept going off and sulking or getting horribly drunk and high and there was major tension between him and my mother because he kept ignoring her. There was definitely an element of him behaving like the jilted lover. My mother was bitchy and sarcastic with me and made me cry in front of my friends, because of her jealousy and sense of rejection.

On the day of the wedding the tension grew partly because I refused to let my father give me away and my mother was making a big deal of it. At the reception he waited for Bruce to leave the room and then sidled over to me and in a lecherous way ran his hand across my back while I tried to edge away and then got his fingers inside the edge of my low-back wedding dress. It shocked me so much that I went completely blank for a few seconds. Then I turned around and saw that my mother had seen and that she was glaring at me like it was my fault, as usual.

That was a turning point for me. It just epitomized how it had been for all the years. I knew then that I had to get myself away from these people because nothing was ever going to change with them. No matter how much I fought not to be a victim I was just totally a victim in the family pattern and I would just have to break out completely to change anything. I gave up on the hope of normality on my family.

About a month later I went to meet my midwife, Donna and she asked if there was anything coming up for me and I told her about the abuse from my father. It is funny how people assume that abuse from a parent must be something from a long distance past. On my file she wrote that I had been abused and was still very angry about it- the implication being that I was harping on about something from the ancient past. She referred me to a clinical psychologist who works with her. The first day I went to see her what came out of that session was that it was imperative for me to have a complete break from my parents. I felt so relieved that I was finally getting support from her and from my gynecologist to protect myself and get away from these destructive people. I must say that there is almost a level of resentment that it took me getting pregnant first for anyone to take my plight seriously, so that it comes across that they were more concerned about my baby than me. It always seems that I don’t count! Even when the case went through the court again it was all aimed at the fact that I was pregnant and the baby needed protection, not necessarily me!

Anyway, during that whole thing I became so depressed that sometimes I could hardly move for three days at a time. I would just lie on my bed and fret or sleep or read and was only able to get up to go to the toilet or get food from the kitchen. I wanted to go to the gym or go for walks but I just couldn’t, and then my psychologist advised me to just go with this process since she realized that I had always avoided my feelings by being physically active. The dancing is probably what kept me sane, but it also stopped me thinking or feeling too much. Now it was affecting me so much that when my father tried to phone and I heard his voice while I was at a therapy session I spontaneously threw up. It wasn’t because of pregnancy nausea because I was well past this stage in my pregnancy- it was sheer nerves. I didn’t even speak to him, but it was enough to cause a severe physical reaction. I wrote a letter to my parents telling them not to contact me and I did as much as I could in terms of the court and protection. After that I started slowly feeling a little better but I was still chronically depressed.

I went to antenatal classes as my due date drew near…and then passed…and after a week and a half my midwife started panicking. I wasn’t worried because the baby was moving nicely and I even went to have a stress test to put my midwife’s mind at ease. I was getting ready for the imminent birth and I knew that your birth and psychological history can affect the whole birth process and I realized during therapy that the way it would probably affect me is that I would struggle to let go and lose control. I also knew that the whole nausea thing was a big issue, because for me nausea equals fear. My nerves were expressed in nausea and vomiting as a child. I thought that vomiting during the birth would be traumatic for me. So I prepared a copy of my abuse history and I gave it to my midwife Donna so that she would be aware of things that could trigger off a hold-up. She absolutely floored me by saying that other people give birth and don’t even mention abuse in their past and they get through it. I know that could be interpreted as a positive affirmation from her but it really sounded to me like she was saying that she wasn’t really interested and that I should stop being indulgent and just get on with it. We then had a fight about me having to do more tests etc. when I really felt that I just had to go home and relax so that I could go into labor naturally. She insisted on stimulating my cervix and when I said that I was nervous about the internal examination, she reacted as if I was being childish. I was stressing out as she listened to the baby’s heartbeat and when I stress I tend to hold my breath, so of course the baby’s heartbeat slowed for a few seconds. I tried to explain that I had held my breath and that it was definitely connected and we listened again and it seemed fine, but by the time I got home there was a disagreement going on between Donna (on the phone) and my husband about having to go for more tests. Donna and I got into a fight about destiny and I eventually went for another test just to shut her up, and again it was absolutely fine. By this stage Donna was definitely not my favorite person. I had found her extremely abusive, and she had threatened to withdraw from the birth if I got funny about internal examinations and said that I should get myself a “spiritual midwife” (in a derogatory tone.)

I had said that I wanted my birth to be really spiritual and my psycho-spiritual healer and counselor was going to be at the birth. So I felt that she was knocking my feelings, and spiritually disempowering me. It seemed to me, for some reason that my birth and me were bringing her “stuff” up rather dramatically. I know that she was very busy and stressed and in the process of moving etc. but I found her behavior unacceptable. I had to back down and placate her because I knew that I was about to go into labor and I didn’t have the confidence to do the birth myself, but I was tempted. The internal examinations weren’t originally such a big issue- I was just tense because it was the first one I had had, and because I had heard that cervical stimulation could be sore. As far as I am concerned, anybody gets tense for an internal examination whether they’ve been abused or not. In fact, speaking to other mothers in my antenatal group after the birth, they all said (unsolicited by me) that they found the internal examinations the worst of the whole birth – worse than the pain. I think her style is unfortunate too. She sort of closes her eyes and gets a goofy expression on her face and she kind of grunts, and breathes deeply. I don’t think she is lesbian (not that I have anything against lesbianism – lots of my friends are gay) but one gets that vibe somehow… it just doesn’t feel like a straightforward examination. Maybe it’s because she likes feeling the baby, but it feels creepy. I think midwives should be very aware of how they are doing it.

So I went into labor the next evening after typically cooking a huge pot of soup (the nesting thing.) After about two hours my contractions were getting really painful and were already about 2 minutes apart… so we phoned Donna. My husband first spoke to her because the contractions were too much for me to speak, but she seemed to want more information and then when I spoke to her I found her tone rather sarcastic (maybe because it was one in the morning?) She decided to come but from that moment my contractions slowed down and became less intense…my theory is that speaking to her and feeling the context of our very recent argument my body must have pumped some adrenaline into my system and that retarded the birth process. I was 4 cm dilated when she arrived. The contractions built up again but when I was 8cms something happened that just ground everything to a halt. Not the pain and contractions, but I stopped dilating and the labor didn’t progress – I was in transition for 6 hours!

What also affected me was the following incident: I was on my bed leaning forward on pillows, wearing my gown because it was cold and I was having some really big contractions. Next thing Donna whips up the back of my gown, exposing my bare behind and tells my husband to start massaging me. He, poor dear, had been standing by for weeks with massage oils and couldn’t wait to get started so he pounced from the back energetically …and it just totally freaked me out. I started screaming and told him to leave me alone.

The whole scene just brought up too much stuff all at once; the way my father used to humiliate me and make me pull down my pants and bend over the bath edge and made me stay like that while he looked at my exposed rear, and took his time before he whipped me with his belt…and the way he used to massage me or make me massage him, even in front of my brother as a “safe” way of molesting me in front of others and getting away with it. Waves of anger and resentment and fear filled me, and very little progressed in the labor for a long time. Donna also did an internal examination every hour or so and of course I now felt this was something I was being subjected to against my will or otherwise she would leave…so it was just like an abuse situation, “You’ll let me touch you there or else.” She kept saying things like “I’m going to give you another half an hour and then I’ll check and if nothing’s happening I want to give you drugs to increase the contractions.” So there was this time limit thing and I felt that I was supposed to be performing. She even said that my cervix was lazy! I felt like a disempowered failure…and my body was not okay and not to be trusted.

No one there realized the extent of mental trauma I was going through, because like a “good little girl” I just carried on breathing and toning – like a threatened little girl, and I tried to remain in control at all costs and not show the world what was really going on. About five hours later Donna told Joan (my counselor) that she felt that the hold up might be due to emotional issues. Joan hadn’t even realized what was going on. So Joan did some work with me to try to get me to “be real” and let go and scream if I need to. She tried to get me to use this opportunity to get in touch with the anger and to let it out. I had trained as a child not to scream, cry, or react to pain. I was threatened with another beating if I cried…so the letting go of control thing was nearly impossible, and even when I screamed it felt false.

Even though it was very hard for me, I tried, and after about an hour there seemed to be a breakthrough and things started to progress again. During that hour I lay on my side because I was totally exhausted by now. I think it was about 11 hours into this very active labor. Between contractions I would drift away into a different consciousness. I was still aware of everything but I seemed to drift into the past and into my feelings of resentment. At one stage I am sure I astral traveled…because I saw myself at my father’s work just looking at him in the passage and then drifted away and back into my body for the next contraction.

The whole pushing thing confuses me. I never felt this “overwhelming urge” to push. After a while I started experimenting with pushing gently during the contractions and I found that it helped with the pain. But Donna seemed to think that it was too soon to push, because I wasn’t displaying any urgency. Eventually for me it was just a conscious decision to push. I don’t know if this perhaps due to being a dancer and being very in control? Sarah, the second midwife, arrived during transition and she was amazed when I smiled at her and was very aware of what was going on. She remarked that it was nice to see someone still smiling at this stage. I think I cope exceptionally well with pain because of the physical abuse history as well as years of painful pointwork and physicality as a dancer, and then of course yoga/meditation techniques, as I am a yoga teacher as well.

So there was this weird misunderstanding or hold up as a result. I was waiting for permission and they were waiting for something that never happened. I just eventually said that it feels right to push. I pushed for one and a half hours before Xavier made his appearance into this world. He was a great big 4.1 kilos with a head circumference of 37cms. I was fortunate to have only a very small tear. The whole pushing process was very humiliating as well. I don’t know why midwives think that it’s comfortable to push with someone’s face staring up your fanny. They might be midwives, and to them it’s just another fanny, and they are used to seeing fecal matter and so on, but let me just say that when it’s my birth, it’s my fanny and fecal matter, and it’s all very new to me. Even my non-abused friends agree on this point. I felt very inhibited and they kept carting me around the room onto the bed with a leg up to the side…then back on my back, legs up, pushing on shoulders etc. I finally gave birth in a squat position of course because that was the only semi-private position available to me. When I give birth again I will definitely make sure I am left alone to get on with it myself.

I don’t want to seem horribly ungrateful to Donna and her efforts. At least I managed to have a home birth with no drugs and a partial water birth…I got back into the tub after the head crowned. At least I had a birth that was beautiful by comparison to most, at home, with flowers and candles and aromatherapy oils, etc. I just felt betrayed by her because she from the beginning said that she was very aware of abuse issues, and was into the natural way of birthing, and into empowering women, etc., but when “push came to shove” (if you’ll pardon the pun) we found her very conditioned by her medical background, and not very aware or empowering at all. I think a big factor is that she hasn’t given birth herself…so she doesn’t really know how it feels. No matter how much you read or see, it’s just not the same as doing it yourself.

Attached is a list of points, which my husband and I feel are critically important for any labor, whether the person is a “survivor”, or not. My husband had formulated them through extensive reading, and through our experience. He is a sociology researcher and a great promoter of the natural birth movement and stopping violent birth practices, as well as an advocate of the continuum concept/attachment parenting practices. I didn’t even know one could have a baby at home before I met him. My baby and I are lucky to have such an enlightened and aware dad around. Their bonding has been very special and unusual in this day and age.

I had no problem bonding and Xavier Angel latched on like a little trooper soon after birth. He is now six months old and we have a very good nursing relationship and he is thriving and his weight gain has stayed constant and above average. I have struggled to adjust but it hasn’t been too bad. The postpartum blues thing didn’t hit me in crying fits or anything like that. I just felt totally numb and feelingless for a few days, which was quite scary because I didn’t feel anything for Xavier.

As a mother, at first I was very much in the process of trying to show "I'm fine", "I can do this perfectly," and, “ I AM SUPERMOM!” (Which of course is also a "survivor" side effect.) But looking back now I can see the effects more clearly. One major issue for me is that I felt really watched. I had just come out about the years of abuse, and now I felt that everyone was watching me to see if I was going to abuse my child. This is because of that popular psychology theory (which is very destructive) that became very popular in the seventies, and which I actually read as a child while I was being abused. It made me even more fearful and scared of telling anyone what was happening because I felt branded or ruined for life.

Even as a child I was such a nurturing type of person that the thought that I might one day be a terrible mother was absolutely horrible... my fears regarding that were largely instrumental in my deciding to have an abortion later in life. I have met many other survivors who haven't had children for the same reason. It’s ironic that because of 20 years of my father threatening to kill me I opted to end my own child’s potential life rather than bring it into this “unsafe” planet.

Since I fall into the category of the "good little girl" or “over-achiever” type victim, I have put enormous pressure on myself to be the world's most perfect mother. I have this constant inner battle between sacrificing myself and nurturing myself too. I read and study all the right ways of doing things... just after my baby was born I started studying developmental psychology. I am also following the Jean Liedloff, Continuum Concept ideas and the Dr Sears, attachment style parenting system. It is quite sad, because the most important thing should be just to relax and be, and tune into your inner wisdom, which I also try to do... but with me there is desperation behind it... a need to prove that I'm okay.

Because my spirituality is very important I struggled to remain with my original psychologist and then went to a psycho-spiritual healer and lifeline counselor. She really helped a lot with adjusting to my new life as a parent and the birth etc. I try to read a lot on developmental psychology, child abuse, and various spiritual teachings. But I’ve learnt to not be too caught up in the spiritual stuff, because you can wind up being a bigger victim for it. For instance “respect your elders” is very biblical or part of many teachings but so many “elders” deserve no respect at all. And how can you “forgive” if the abuser just takes that as an opportunity to abuse you more? I spent years trying to be a “good person”, and forgive my father or “let go”, but he just used that to continue abusing me up until the age of 31!

The one thing that I also really struggle with is staying "in body". I often just drift off, and go to that place of "nothingness" that I went to when I was being tortured and abused. So sometimes, although I am totally there for Xavier in a physical sense, mentally and spiritually I am miles away. When I catch myself I obviously bring myself back quickly. The problem is that I think through all the years of trauma I have developed the kind of detachment that Buddhist monks spend whole lifetimes trying to achieve. I fully realize it can be a very good thing in the larger context of the meaning of life, but sometimes it worries me in terms of parenting.

I don't think it is affecting Xavier too much… He is a very happy chappie. We are very bonded and loving with each other, and he gets a lot of touch-although-that brings me to another side effect. I find that I touch him a lot less in public. My mother was very touch phobic and my father was totally touch invasive, and I lived with the whole secretive touch thing. I have an automatic reflex to give him a lot more space in public and I suppose that it ties in with the whole thing that I am scared that people will think that I am an abuser. Don't you think that it is just totally unfair? I've lived through the whole ordeal myself and now I am permanently scared that people will think that I am the perpetrator.

I find that I am also surrounded by people who just don't want to know. They have a "just get on with it" and stop delving in your “stuff” reflex. I know that it is because they are not dealing with their own stuff, and my honesty and openness bugs them. It is so weird being in this healing process, (which is one of the amazing things that children bring us!) and everyone just wants you to shut up and pretend, and wear the mask.

Key Birthing Tips

* Being relaxed and being able to maintain this is pivotal

* Also absolutely essential is the woman must learn to have self-reliance and empowerment, backed by a strong feeling of inner calm.

* Respect the woman’s intuition.

* Respect the wisdom of the woman’s body

* Those present must have a harmonious relationship with the mother. Any disruption of trust or trace of conflict can disrupt the labor badly. Be confident enough and able to have anyone you’re uncomfortable with in any way leave immediately (including your midwife or family or doctor.)

* The birth experiences of those present have a profound impact on the labor. The mother has to process it.

* The more we encourage a woman to find her voice, tell the truth, let go and be all that she is and feels during pregnancy, the less likely pathology will develop in labor.

* Patience in all aspects of labor – especially if the woman birthing is calm about the situation.

* “I had the overwhelming feeling that what we needed to do was nothing.” (Elizabeth van der Ahe, midwife)

*“My real work as a midwife has been to get out of the way and let women do their work.” (June Whitson, CNM)