Stepping Back from the Ledge, page 3
For years, my stepfather raped me. I never screamed, I never kicked him, never tried to hit him or bite him; I pushed back, but quietly. I weighed one hundred pounds and he was twice my size. “Stay quiet,” he told me, “and your mom won’t be mad at you.” He knew how close I was with my mom, but he also knew how happy she was. He knew how much I loved her, and that I would never do anything to ruin her happiness. I also knew that letting him do this meant I could never get in trouble at home, no matter what I did. He wouldn’t tell if I stayed out past my curfew, wouldn’t tell if I hadn’t taken out the garbage or not done my chores. It was confusing to me because he was so nice to my mom and to me at other times. He was so easygoing and so easy to get along with—people always liked him. He doted on my mom, and although he didn’t see his children that often, he seemed to adore them, too. He was a racist and talked terribly about Mexicans even though my father was Mexican American, and I hated his conservative politics that meant Rush Limbaugh was a frequent family-room guest on the radio, but he was nice to my mom. And my mom seemed at ease, happy. So I learned to use it to my advantage in lithe ways, if that makes sense. I figured if my mom was happy, I could be happy. Yet like many victims of sexual abuse, I took out the pain on myself.
I stopped eating during my senior year of high school, dropping to ninety and then eighty-five pounds. I worked hard to be nearly perfect in school. My high school yearbook shows me in photos for the Academic Decathlon team, the Honor Society, the school newspaper as its editor, student government, the softball team, Girls State, the culture club, and pretty much any other club that gave me a valid reason to leave the house. When the urge to tell my mom felt strong, I cut lines on the outside of my thighs with a Swiss Army knife I received in my Christmas stocking. I wanted to feel something, to create pain and remind myself how bad she would feel. I could help make us both happy.
I was relieved when I started my freshman year of college at a school in Northern California, escaping life at home for a while. When I moved into my dorm, my roommate had already built our beds into a loft style, sitting just two feet from the ceiling. Even though I hated the idea of climbing a ladder every night and sleeping up so high, the truth was, it felt so much more comfortable and safe than at home.
At Christmas break that freshman year, a new friend drove with me back to Arizona. She wanted to spend a week in the warm Phoenix winter before returning to the snowy Midwest. I was grateful to have made a friend at a school where I hadn’t known anyone—and that I could show her my hometown. But I was afraid, too. Where would she sleep? Would my mom’s husband try to rape her, too?
She and I stayed out late each night of our break, and I thought maybe if we didn’t come home until he was asleep we would be fine. But when we got home, he often was still up, sitting on the couch watching TV with the volume way too loud. My friend slept in my bed, and I slept on the floor in a sleeping bag in front of her. He avoided my room that week until she went home, and then the familiar and sick routine returned.
I found safety when I returned to my college and dorm room that January, throwing myself into school, my work-study job, and writing for the university’s newspaper and radio station. I grew nervous when spring break neared and I would have to return home.
After five years of dating or living together, my mom and her boyfriend were married that summer after my freshman year of college in 1989. They held a small ceremony at my aunt’s cabin in the mountains of northern Arizona, about ninety minutes south of the Grand Canyon. My mom wore a peach sundress I bought her with my discount working at The Limited that summer. My sister and I held hands as we watched them recite vows while a very hippie-like spiritual woman from Flagstaff married them. I thought maybe this would be it—they were married and maybe things would change. I felt hopeful for the first time, but when they got back from their honeymoon with friends on a sailboat in the Bahamas, the abuse resumed.
The summer between my sophomore and junior years of college, I became an exchange student in Poland and then traveled through Europe instead of looking for a journalism internship in Phoenix so I could avoid living at home.
Two years later, I graduated from college and moved home for a few months before my job at a newspaper in New Mexico was to start. My mom’s husband offered me a job in his bicycle shop, doing inventory and converting his store from analog to digital. I was wary, but needed the money. He never touched me again. We worked alongside each other in the bike store many days as if it never happened. We talked politics—or argued about politics—discussed what he could surprise my mom with for her birthday, about getting another dog, about everything but what had happened. Neither of us ever said a word about it, not to each other or anyone else. I blocked it from my mind for decades, telling no one.
A few years after graduating from college, I met John in Albuquerque. We both lived there for work, neither of us connected to this city that was great for news, and cheap for two young journalists, but we wanted something more. We moved to Portland, Oregon, got married, and a few years later had our first son, Henry. We moved to my hometown of Phoenix, a bigger market and a better job for John who worked as a TV news producer, and the real reason—I could be closer to my mom again. I hated that in Henry’s first year, my mom had seen him only three times. Now she lived just a few miles away and we had Sunday dinner at my mom and her husband’s home, camped with them in their motor home in northern Arizona, and took care of their yellow Labrador retriever, Bailey, and then later, their next yellow Lab, Moe. I had three more children and life moved along as it does. I pretended the abuse never happened, until one day, I couldn’t.
After a few appointments with my psychologist that fall of 2011, I told about what I had kept inside for decades. I told her about the abuse as if it were a confession, as if it had been my fault, for all these years. I had lived a lie by not telling my mom or husband or anyone about this, and now I felt relief, like something I had ignored and kept inside for so long finally could be told. Maybe I felt safe now. My mom’s husband had been sick after a stroke and a brain tumor, and he still was drinking, a lot. After his stroke, he had to live in a rehabilitation facility for a while before he was well enough to come home. It felt as if he no longer was a threat, even if maybe he hadn’t been for years.
My mom asked me to bring their dog to visit him one day at the rehab center while she was at work. I knew how stressed she had been, and how busy, and I wanted to be helpful. I didn’t want to go, but did anyway for her. I had seen him so many times over the years, but I hadn’t been alone with him since I was maybe twenty-one. One of the assistants at the rehab center brought his wheelchair out to the grassy courtyard; he was strapped at the waist and chest so he wouldn’t fall out. His arms rested weak at his sides. I walked Moe up to him on her leash.
My mom’s husband looked at me that day and said, “You’re real pretty, like your mom.”
I took a step back.
“Come give me a kiss,” he said, his words slurring.
This time, I didn’t have to, and I’m not sure I had to before, but I had thought I had no choice. People have said that before you die, your life flashes before your eyes. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that in a blink that day I saw everything he had done to me. It was as if I was watching a reel of life with him: I saw myself trying to be still on a super-single water bed, my eyes fixed on the paint-splattered wallpaper. I smelled the Jack Daniel’s that still makes my stomach turn. I heard him say that my mom would never believe me. I saw him in my doorway and felt the resignation of knowing it was time. I saw myself lying on my back pretending to be somewhere else while he pushed inside. I remembered the fear and the determined feeling that I could make it through. I saw my mom becoming so happy—when she learned to water-ski and sail a catamaran with him. I saw her coming home with her first wet suit after learning to scuba dive with him. I saw her smile—not a forced smile, just a relaxed smile. I remembered not wanting to ruin it. I remembered counting backward.
It’s “really pretty,” I thought—he should say “really pretty,” not “real pretty.” The adjective in this sentence should be really, not real. My mind had gone to the familiar, the routine that would calm my brain—not numbers, but grammar rules.
But I wasn’t a teenager this time. I was a mom and I wasn’t afraid. I pulled on the dog’s leash, turned around, and walked to the car, leaving him in the courtyard alone.
The feeling was both startling and scary, knowing that he had the ability to bring all of this back with one small phrase. My psychologist said I had pushed the memory of the sex abuse so far back that I never dealt with what happened to me other than at the emotional level. When other things in my life weren’t going right—when my mom’s husband said he wanted a kiss, for example—it triggered that memory and brought it forward. The fact that I had turned forty and finally felt strong in my life provided a time to tell. She said that holding little traumas inside your head can allow them to attach to each other, creating one big trauma that no longer wants to be contained. At a certain point, you no longer can compartmentalize them. People act out, she said, sometimes in harmful ways: drinking, drugs, reckless sex, eating disorders, cutting, shoplifting. The mind finds ways to placate itself, as mine had over the years.
After a few more appointments, my psychologist suggested I needed to tell my mom about the abuse. First I told John. He agreed that I needed to tell my mom. It was a lie between my mom and me, one that would keep us from being close, no matter how close I thought we were. I was so afraid that telling my mom would upset her, that it would make her feel bad, that it would be something that once I shared, I wouldn’t be able to hide back in my head. I knew my mom’s husband was sick, and that he had been such an alcoholic that maybe she would understand and maybe she would look back and see that there were signs she missed. Maybe she would remember how drunk he was, maybe she had seen this behavior other places.
In the years he was in our lives, did my mom notice that I never wanted to be around him alone, that after I was married he was only invited to our house with her on holidays or on special occasions, that she always came over alone? Did my mom understand when I told her that the kids should never be alone with him? Did she think it was only because of his drinking problem? Why didn’t she ask why? I didn’t think about how maybe she was stretched thin taking care of him, that his drinking and his care had weakened her, that she hadn’t been sleeping well, and that maybe she only knew the good in him, that maybe this would be too much for her.
My mom stopped by my house one evening that fall. She had retired from work and spent most of her time caring for her husband. She still came over to see the kids, but didn’t stay for dinner as often or read to them before bed because she wanted to get home to her husband—she didn’t want to leave him alone for long. That night, she parked her Jeep in front of our house. I was outside watching the kids play soccer in the yard, the grass starting to brown as the cooler Phoenix temperatures set in. As usual, the kids ran up to my mom to hug her, calling out “Grandma, Grandma,” to tell her about something from the day. Lucy tugged on my mom’s cardigan to come inside and read her a book. I was quiet. We stayed outside to enjoy a night finally cool enough for the mosquitoes to be gone, but still warm enough for the kids to wear shorts.
John came home soon and brought the kids inside. I had only recently told him about the abuse and he knew I wanted to talk to my mom. He was upset with her, thinking she didn’t protect me, that she should have seen something, seen the abuse, should have recognized what was happening. It was easier for him to be mad at her than for me to be. He hadn’t known her back then, hadn’t known our life, and only saw what was happening now. It hurt him that I had kept this from him and that now I was falling apart and hurting our family.
I told my mom that I had something difficult to tell her, but that I needed to do it. She looked worried.
“Are you OK?” she asked.
“I am,” I said. “But I’m worried about you.”
I told her that her husband had raped me when I was a teenager, shortly after we moved in with him during high school.
She didn’t say she didn’t believe me, and she didn’t seem surprised. She didn’t reach over to hug me, didn’t ask how, didn’t say she was sorry. She didn’t cry, didn’t seem angry, had almost no reaction. She left without saying goodbye to the kids, and went home to him.
I struggled to understand her response, or her lack of response, to this betrayal of her daughter, her family, her trust. But I didn’t understand. Had she known that this happened? I couldn’t imagine that she could have known and didn’t stop it. But I couldn’t understand how she could seem so calm after hearing this, how she didn’t look troubled. I didn’t think about how maybe she was depressed and couldn’t react.
I walked inside the house, pretended everything was fine, and sat down to read Lucy a Henry and Mudge book, a gift from my mom, who had left notes in cursive handwriting on the pages about the characters and pictures. I tried to concentrate on the words, on Lucy’s hands holding the book and turning the pages, instead of how my mom hadn’t seemed angry, didn’t seem to feel anything. I was so angry and so sad. I had thought I might feel better somehow letting her know what happened, but instead I felt worse.
I now think neither of us knew how to react. I think both of us were depressed and neither of us were expressing exactly how we felt, and maybe we were feeling so much, we didn’t know how we felt. But I couldn’t see any of this then—I was stuck in simply feeling hurt, and confused.
I read the book to Lucy again. I knew how to handle things that were difficult by putting them in a part of my brain, compartmentalizing. Instead of counting backward this time, I read the book over and over as many times as Lucy asked that night. She climbed into my lap and I held the book as she then read parts of it to me.
That fall and through winter, my mom and I didn’t talk about the abuse. In many ways, we pretended we had never had the conversation. I said nothing to her about it, but everything hurt inside. She said nothing about it to me. We talked, but not about that; we talked about the kids, about my work, about her dog, about the birds that show up in the morning outside her window, about her fall garden that bloomed. John grew angry with my mom for letting this happen and how it was exploding now and ruining what felt like our perfect family. I was clearly depressed, but didn’t realize it at the time.
John had long wanted to move back to the Midwest, closer to Chicago where he grew up, and where his parents lived. We had spent the past nineteen years in the West, living in New Mexico where we met, Oregon, and then the past fourteen years in Phoenix raising our family. I was ready to move up in the editing chain in my company, so it seemed time for a change. Maybe we just needed a break, and maybe moving to a new place would help—I could leave all this in Phoenix.
We had started looking at jobs in other places when an editor role opened in Cincinnati. The company that owned our newspaper in Phoenix also owned a newspaper in Cincinnati, a half-day’s drive to John’s parents’ house. I hoped the company might transfer John and me. I didn’t tell my mom when we flew to Ohio to interview and then to house hunt. It hurt to not talk to her about one of the most important decisions in my life at the time. It hurt to not be able to talk through it with her, to tell her about the cute brick houses that seemed to be everywhere in the Midwest, about the school that the kids could walk to, about how it snowed enough to make the city look dusted in powdered sugar as we explored neighborhoods. It hurt to think I might no longer see her any day I wanted. It hurt to think of driving home from work and not seeing her Jeep in front of my house and knowing that everything inside would be fine. It hurt thinking the kids wouldn’t be able to see her every week, that they wouldn’t know her in the same way. And that she would lose that closeness with them. It hurt thinking that I wouldn’t be able to just call her on my drive to work, like I had done every day since I got a cellphone. Everything about our relationship hurt and I felt as if it was my fault.
In the next few weeks, she stopped by in the afternoon to see the kids. Some days she would still be there when I came home from work. We talked, but it was mostly facts, no feelings. Something big sat between us, and neither of us knew how to move through. The fact that I hadn’t told her long ago created a secret. I didn’t want to make her feel bad and didn’t want her to think I was angry at her, because to me I wasn’t angry—I blamed myself for telling her now. I felt I was selfish to not tell her then when the abuse happened, and selfish to tell her now because I thought I needed to. I wanted to take it all back and hold it again. I had lived with it for that long—why couldn’t I have continued? So we ignored what I had said and the abuse, for two months.
Slowly, her denial and her lack of reaction began to give way, and she started asking me questions. She wanted to know how she hadn’t sensed anything, how the man she knew, the one with a gentle heart who once hired a homeless man to work in his bike shop, who used his van to help people move, who kept our beloved dachshund Daisy until the dog was well into her twenties, could do this. He had taught my mom to ski and sail and scuba dive and to become much more adventurous. How could he be capable of this? And even more, how could she not have suspected it? She was so confused that I had let them both back into my life now after what he did that it made her brain unable to even think this could be possible. She tried to reconcile that these two men were the same person.
I told her I felt like I had to tell her, that part of the secret was in keeping it. If I was never alone with him again, I could pretend it never happened. My mom and I went days without talking, then talked until we both couldn’t breathe from crying.
