My husband and I recently journeyed back to a small farming community in northeast Nebraska (pop 380) to attend my class reunion. Boone County is one of the loveliest spots in our nation. Its pastoral scenes include rolling hills, in the summer covered with young plants of corn waving in a slight breeze, large stands of cottonwood trees, sentry giants guarding the land and winding country roads passing over rickety old bridges with wooden planks that clatter as you drive across.
When I was twelve my family moved there, this time my father insisting to my mother that we would never move again. He was the superintendent of a construction gang that built electrical substations and we had spent the last several years going from town to town following the work. To prove that he meant it he bought our first home, a scarlet house on the edge of town with 3 bedrooms, one in the attic, a large kitchen and a living room with a wood stove needed for those cold winter Nebraska days. My mother had an exceptional green thumb and the quarter acre our house stood on had a large willow tree, a row of black walnut trees, a lilac bush outside my bedroom window, a vegetable garden and a flower garden with a trellis filled with roses leading into it. A bed of iris lined the outside of the house and a circled tulip bed had a bird bath sitting on top of a trellised stand.
I fell in love with Petersburg with a passion that has only grown in the many years since we lived there. In a setting as tranquil and lovely as this, my life should have been every child’s dream. In the summer I was always barefoot as I worked in the vegetable garden, read Nancy Drew books under the willow or raced out to Rae Creek, one quarter mile out of town where I climbed oak trees and sat on silent limbs watching the creek meander by, writing poetry and feeling Rae Creek fill all of my senses. The sounds of scampering squirrels, the fragrance of summer flowers, stroking the bark of the trees all placed a complete joy in my heart and in my life. In the autumn it was Trick or Treat, raking leaves into piles which we set on fire and roasted hot dogs and marshmallows and preparing for winter as we harvested the fruits of our vegetable garden and canned enough to last the winter. The winter was a magical time for me. I skated many times down the Beaver River listening to the ice crack as it settled under my feet, watched deer and squirrels and rabbits as they raced along the shores. We watched Jack Frost paint pictures on the windows, drank hot chocolate as we stood in front of the wood stove getting dressed for school. My brother and I often crossed frozen pastures deep with snow as we carried our 22 rifles looking for rabbits that we knew we would never actually kill. It was the hunt and the biting cold, the trouncing through the snow that was our goal.
The end of my 8th grade all of my joy came crashing around me in one horrifying night, the night my father entered my bedroom and raped me where I slept with a rosary under my pillow. It set off five years of both physical and sexual abuse and ended with me throwing my few belongings into a pillow case and running away from home after a beating from my father that almost killed me. During the next 28 years I went from one abusive relationship to another, twice winding up in a psychiatric ward after failed suicide attempts. A the age of 45 I entered recovery and with the aid of a program I later developed and sold as a book called REPAIR Your Life, I emerged from a five year nightmare where I was married to my third abuser, still suicidal, filled with despair and living part time in a women’s shelter to a place where I was the happiest person I know. My motto after I ended my recovery, got my husband out of my home, got a restraining order and a divorce was: “If I’d known life was going to turn out this good I would have started it sooner.”
Returning to Petersburg is like returning to the scene of the crime. But I’m fortunate. I’ve returned many times and each time my heart and mind think only of the good I gathered to me from living there and never once opens that room in my mind that contains all the horror. I don’t need to. It has a strong lock and key for I did a great job of REPAIRing myself.
It can be done! No matter how deep the tragedy, no matter how painful the abuse, like a wound that needs lancing and the infection drained, leaving only a faint scar, you can turn your life around and you too can become the happiest person you know.
