I was reading a blog from a male survivor’s website and he mentioned that change was always terrifying to a victim of child sexual abuse. I let that rattle around in my brain while I thought about my childhood. I had been born in International Falls, MN and between my birth and the age of 15 I had lived in ten different towns in five different states. My father was the Superintendent of a construction company that built electrical power stations and power lines. Whenever a new job came up we followed the work. Usually we didn’t have any warning. I’d come home from school and mom would be packing our few belongings into boxes. “Pack your things. We’re moving”, she’d say. We didn’t get a vote. Everything I owned fit in a pillow sack and all of our family belongings fit in a car carrier. We had a few broken dishes and pots and pans, a few books and other assorted personal belongings. We always moved into a furnished house so in addition to having to adjust to a new town, a new school, new friends and a new house, there’d be new furniture. I wanted so bad to live in a town where I had relatives buried in the nearby cemetery.
The one change we dreaded was the water. The minute the car stopped we’d run for the kitchen to taste the water. Sometimes it was great and we were relieved. Other times we spit it out it was so bad. We became convinced that the bad water was tainted from the septic tanks that pumped out toilet water. We’d rather go thirsty. The first thing I did was head for town. I rarely wore shoes and the bottoms of my feet were so tough I probably could have walked through fire although that was never tested. Until we moved to the Los Angeles area, between my tenth and eleventh year of high school, every town we lived in except for Tucson, AZ was small enough to walk from one end to the other barefoot. Nothing was consistent in my life until I turned 13 and my dad started coming into my bedroom in the middle of the night to rape me. It caused a lot of changes, ones that became consistent. My mother began hating me, telling neighbors that I was no good and unclean. My father quit working for the construction company, went to work for Nebraska Public Power and Light in another city and only came home on the weekends. My mother spent most of her time in bed crying with Marine Corps blankets covering the window as if we had something dirty in the house we didn’t want the neighbors to see. We did.
To those of us who were sexually abused as a child, change was never something we looked forward to. Better the devil we knew than the devil we didn’t. Whoever thought up that little ditty must have been a real coward. I ran away from home when I was 18 and for the next three decades my life was filled with change, some good, some not. I learned to adjust to continual changes but I was never happy about it. I craved stability, I craved wisdom. I wanted someone on a white horse to come charging into my life and save me from myself. I went from husband to husband, always choosing abusers, I tried suicide many times, twice waking up in a psychiatric ward. Between husbands I went from man to man, never any that treated me good. I went through psychiatrists, therapists, self help groups. None helped. No one even asked about my childhood except for a family doctor who kept insisting, despite my denials, that my father had molested me as a child.
By some miracle the four children I had by my first husband turned out to be four of the finest humans I know. How did I, as a single parent, accomplish that? Today I still go through changes on a regular basis, new homes, new states, new books published, new friends and now just one man I want to grow old with. Today I am stable. I am wise. I am the happiest person I know. I did this by going through recovery using REPAIR as a guide. I’ve learned that change can be good if you couple it with wisdom. I’ve written several volumes of poetry since I was thirteen. The following poem contains insight I never knew I had. I’d like to share it with you. Maybe you’ll find bits and pieces of yourself in it.
Change has always loomed, like a demon in my mind,
It pounces sharp on all my plans, the treasure that I find,
I hate it when it comes to me, a smile upon its face,
Disguised in goodness and character, dressed up in pearls and lace,
My life is set in front of me, predictable and fast,
How dare this wayward, orphan child, stray me from my task,
It flounders, wanders, oscillates, with its persistent nagging voice,
Bent upon surprising me, with growth and will and choice,
But I can see through all of it, this aim to tempt my fate,
And call adventure to my door, when I’d really rather wait,
For deep inside my cautious heart, there lurks a frightened child,
Who doesn’t know if she can cope, when change makes her riled,
What if I stumble, lose my way, fall and skin my knee?
What if life, who brings this change, becomes an obstacle to me?
But I must play the advocate, with deep humility,
I must admit that without change, I’m never really free.
