Truth is Kryptonite
This is a fifteen-page short story that I wrote for a Creative Personal Non-Fiction assignment in the grad school program where I am earning my M.A. in English.
I am sharing it here because I have a message of hope for others who might be walking the same road I traveled, or those who love them. I believe that by pulling back the curtain on what is often shadowed by shame, understanding and healing are possible.
TRIGGER WARNING: If you are dealing with sexual abuse issues, please consider whether my experiences as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse are okay for you to read. There is no explicit content; however, I would be remiss not to issue a warning. As a person who manages Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder through being careful to avoid triggers, I want to encourage all readers to do what they need to do to take good care of themselves.
The first time our superhero savior put stars in my eyes, I was piloting a bumper car and nearly bit through my tongue when another driver blindsided me. I was dazed—frozen in place—and “Superman”—my mother’s new boyfriend, “D”—bounded nimbly across the shiny steel floor, gracefully avoiding zig-zagging bumper cars to reach me. He slid the safety harness off my shoulders, lifted me into his arms, and breathed comfort into my ear.
“D” didn’t need a red cape and blue tights to stand out. He was six feet of chiseled brown flesh in pressed pearl-snap western shirts, jeans so stiff that they could stand independent of an occupant, and high-heeled cowboy boots that made him tower over my tiny mother. He was slender with short brown hair, hazel eyes that turned gray when he watched me, and a smile that was more of a closed-mouth smirk. It betrayed no hint of the mouthful of gold-capped teeth that ranged from shiny bright to dogshit dull. “D” smelled like Aramis cologne and cherry cigarette smoke.
He made an entrance just like Superman, too. That man came out of nowhere and landed smack-dab as the center of attention of the ladies in the beauty shop where Mom’s Thursday night singles’ group met. That evening, I imagine my mother merely expected to maintain her Carol Brady hairdo and catch up on gossip, but instead she was more surprised than her friends that this handsome construction worker from West Texas would choose her—a divorced mother of an eleven-year-old scrawny son, Brett, and me—an eight-year-old scrappy tomboy who defended Brett from bullies, to his abject horror.
Four months after “D” saved me from certain death by bumper car, I became his stepdaughter. Even though I was a tough little kid, I was thrilled to finally have a daddy.
Not long afterward, “D” began watching me. I was playing outside and accidentally hit my friend Thomas in the face with a water hose. “D” rushed out of our house, dragged me inside, and began hitting me below the waist. He threw me into my room.
Shocked, I crawled to my mother’s room, pulled her phone onto the floor, and called my grandmother, the woman who held godlike status in my life. We called her Gaga, and the way I saw it, she was all powerful. She sprayed my grandpa’s mouth with green Chloraseptic spray—she called it “snake spray”—anytime he cursed in front of us. She ran off Nicky, the crazy babysitter who locked Brett and I out of our own house one steamy summer day. We pedaled our bikes to the local Dairy Queen and called Gaga, who barreled over to our house in “Bluebell,” her Buick sedan, and let Nicky have it with both barrels. Some people might call her a bitch. But she was my bitch. Gaga could do anything.
Except save me from “D.”
I sob-whispered into the phone, “H-h-he h-h-hit m-m-me!” Gaga was yelling into her receiver, “What did he do? Tell me, baby. What did he do?”
My mother found me in her bedroom, slammed the receiver onto the cradle, and told me that I was never, never again to tell of anything that happened in our house.
Less than a year later, “D” moved us to an isolated house in the country outside Terrell, Texas. Unlike our old neighborhood, there were no other children to play with. My companions were the chickens, geese, dogs, and rabbits. I was an oddball fourth grader, wearing my mother’s clothes because I’d grown too tall and heavy for my own, and we had no money to buy new ones. “D” forbade Mom from asking Gaga and Grandpa for money to help out. I was the only kid in this rural school who wore cowboy boots—my mother’s—because my feet grew too large for my sneakers—and, paired with polyester pantsuits, I was quite the object of taunts. To this tomboy’s sorrow, and to make it all a hundred times more horrifying, my breasts were bursting onto the scene. But even all of those things could not damage me as much as what began in that house on Route 34 in Terrell, Texas: I became emotionally frozen at the age I was when “D” began sexually abusing me.
The “Scout” side of me died.
Although I obeyed my mother’s admonition not to speak of anything that happened in our house, I did write about it. Words on paper began forming primitive Kryptonite molecules, but I didn’t realize it at the time. I was eight years old the first time I crawled over the toys on my bedroom closet floor, pulled a small diary—the kind with a little lock and key—from among my dolls and books, and wrote the words, “Sssh!!!!!! He likes to squish my boobs! Last night in the green chair…”
I was so shocked, I’d pretended to be asleep, and the next morning, when Mom told me that “D” wanted to talk to me outside, he told me, “Slap my hands.” He’d say those words countless times over the next several years: “Slap my hands, Kiddo.”
In my mind, I can still see the words, “Ssh!!!!! He likes to…” written in my childish script, on the pages. I didn’t know what to do with that information. I felt sick on the inside, and dirty, and confused. My father had never been around for me so it’s not like I had normalcy to compare it to, but I hadn’t seen Mike Brady do this to Marcia, Jan, or Cindy.
I don’t know why I believed that the secret I committed to paper was safe within that cardboard diary. Anyone knows the cover can be torn away, but I hid the diary in the back of my desk drawer and carried it with me when we moved from the house in the country—the one with the green chair in the den where I’d nearly fallen asleep in my stepfather’s lap and he’d felt me up for the first time.
We moved back to the Dallas suburbs eighteen months later. I am forty-nine years old now, and I cannot pass through Terrell without becoming physically ill. Landmarks from the mid-1970s, when I lived there, are enough to trigger PTSD flashbacks.
When I was in high school, I pulled the diary from its hiding place and burned it in the fireplace when my parents weren’t home. By that time, the abuse had escalated from touching and leering to sneaking into my room at night to try to turn over my tightly-blanket-wrapped body… to rape. I slept in my closet behind my clothes. It was so hot. I was frequently grumpy in the mornings, and “D” would say, “You’re such a bitch in the mornings, no one is ever going to want to marry you.”
Our house was a power keg. The slightest provocation sent “D” into a rage, and I was subject to hours of drunken lectures about what an ungrateful little bitch I was—particularly if I forgot to thank “D” for working that day the moment he came home from work. He played mind games with me, including the threat he’d been making for years: if I told, he’d leave my mom, and I would have to admit to her what “we” had been doing, which added to my feelings of shame. “Scout” was still somewhere inside of me, but I allowed the cloak of shame “D” placed on me to smother my naturally defiant spirit. “Superman” had decomposed into an alcoholic, unpredictable monster whose physically imposing frame looked like a freight train bearing down when he came at me in a rage. Sometimes my rage became too much to bear and I shot my mouth off, even though I knew the consequences would be horrifying.
I became angrier, the longer the abuse went on. I began talking back to a teacher at school because she picked on a girl who never had her homework because her mother was dying of cancer. One day, the teacher exclaimed, “Who are you, Beth? I don’t even know you any more!”
It might have been that very same day—I know it was shortly thereafter—that my volatility broke through the shame-silencing cloak, and it was either kill myself or try to be free. I couldn’t take it anymore. As I came up onto our front porch after school, “D” turned to me and made some comment. The way he looked at me… the self-satisfied smirk he wore…I told him, “Go fuck yourself, you bastard,” then I dashed through our house to the garage, hopped on my bike, and took off for a friend’s house across town. I didn’t think. I pedaled.
Mom tracked me down in no time at all, and a friend delivered me to my front doorstep. I steeled myself for whatever would come, marched into our kitchen where Mom was ironing, pointed at “D”, and told my mother, “Since I was eight years old, he has been molesting me.”
The only hope I had left was that “D” would follow through with his threat and leave, but instead, he hid in his bedroom while Mom played the judge of who was lying. She went back and forth between us while he denied the truth. She would come out of their room and ask me questions like, “Does he pinch your breast when he passes you in the hall?”
“…No.”
“Well, does he call you Honey Britches?”
“No, why, Mom?”
She said softly, “Because he does those things to me.”
Realization coupled with disbelief started at the top of my head and oozed, thick as honey, over my body and puddled on the floor: my mother was seeing me not as her daughter, but as competition for her husband. His mistress.
She returned to the bedroom and shortly thereafter, I heard their door close softly. My mother returned to where I waited between our den and kitchen. I had not moved from the place I stood when I pointed at “D” and forced out the words I thought would save me.
Mom’s voice was empty. “Okay, he says he did it, but he was sick, and he’s not any more. We’re just going to move on now.” She returned to the kitchen, picked up the iron, and resumed ironing “D’s” pearl-snap work shirts.
I was stunned. Absolutely nothing was going to happen because I told. I felt myself breaking apart on the inside. Later, in my novels, I would give these words to a character to describe what it felt like for her when the same thing happened: “Shards of glass. I was shards of glass.”
Their bedroom door opened again, then a familiar sound followed: “D” thundering into the den. He ran straight at me, stopped just short of knocking me down, stuck his finger in my face, and growled, “You are not mine. You were never mine. “Don’t talk to me. “Don’t look at me. You. Do. Not. Exist.”
And, he did not leave.
Ever.
Mom did The Big Nothing. She did not contact the authorities. She did not hold “D” accountable. She never pursued counseling for any of us—after all, he’d changed—and that was that. She even left me alone with “D” for two weeks while she went on a road trip with my aunt. I shoved my furniture against my bedroom door at night and slept in the back of my closet behind my clothes, as I had been doing for years.
When she returned, Mom asked, simply, “Did he bother you?”
My answer in the negative must have solidified her belief that “just moving on” was working.
I endured about six months of her cold angry silence and “D” ignoring my existence before a switch flipped inside of me and I became The Perfect Daughter. I did the housework, laundry, ironing, cooking, worked for the family business, began calling my stepfather “Dad,” and developed an eating disorder that vexes me to this day. I also kept writing, especially poetry. Writing stories was too hard; I did not have the ability to process the clusterfuck of my life, and it was too overwhelming to allow more than a few words onto a page at a time. I could disguise what I was living through if I couched it in poetry. Keeping the secret was paramount. Don’t make things worse than they already are. I had a boyfriend. I was in love with him. We wanted to be married after we graduated high school. Just make it until you’re eighteen. Then you can get out.
I don’t have any of the poetry I wrote. Like the diary, I destroyed any evidence on the chance that my mom might find it and be upset. My whole life was about keeping her from being sad. I hated it when she cried.
Fast-forward to 2004, when I was 38 years old, 100 pounds overweight, on an express train to Crazy Town, and taking four other people—my husband and three daughters—along for the ride. Simply put, I could not cope with the secrets anymore. Committing them to paper hadn’t done jack-shit to deal with the past.
I had a mental breakdown. When I first entered therapy, I told my mom that I was working on losing weight. I told my doctor, “It’s not my parents’ problem. It’s all mine.”
But when “D” began making creepy, inappropriate comments about my body changing as I lost weight and I was beset with PTSD flashbacks and disassociation episodes, my therapist helped me set the first boundary with my perpetrator that I’d ever had in my life. Together, Dr. J. and I wrote a simple request that read like this:
In light of our history of you abusing me, I am requesting that you stop commenting on my body. If you forget and make a comment, I will remind you to be careful. If you continue, I will remove myself from your presence.
My children knew that I was “having a hard time,” but they were self-involved teenagers, as they should be at that age, and they were mostly impatient with my lapses in memory and weepiness. They had no idea that PawPaw was Mama’s rapist and that Grandma knew he’d done that, but hadn’t helped me. My parents and I were maintaining a game of Charades, and the only choice to be acted out was “Nothing Ever Happened.”
We were expected at my mother’s house on Christmas Eve. I was filled with anxiety at the idea of seeing “D” again and I finally got the nerve to send the boundary-setting letter. It was delivered via Fed-Ex on Christmas Eve. As I walked on the treadmill prior to getting ready to go to our family Christmas celebration, I considered letting go of the handrails in hopes that I would be thrown from across the room, break a few bones, and spend the evening in the hospital instead of facing my parents. Instead, I hopped off the treadmill and emailed my therapist. I was in full-on freak-out mode: “Do you have any idea what I’ve done?! I have to go over to their house in two hours! I received delivery notification from Fed-Ex! What have I done? Oh my God!”
His response was simple: “If they treat you badly, leave.”
Their version of “treating badly” was shunning. My mother, aunt, and uncle spoke to my husband and children, but not to me. “D” hid in the bedroom just as he had on that day when I was fourteen. Mom told my kids that PawPaw was sick.
No shit.
We left within a couple of hours. I was numb, white noise filled my head, and I could barely hear my children asking why everyone was acting so weird.
A week later, my daughters and I met my aunt and mother at a barbecue place for lunch. I took Mom outside and tried to explain why I had dared to acknowledge the painful events of my childhood. From a place of deep brokenness, I choked on my words.
Her voice was cold: “Beth, I have no intention of rehashing the past.”
Soon after, my husband, Daniel, tried to explain to her that I had had a mental breakdown and I was in crisis because of what was done to me as a child and teen. She told him, “This entire thing is Beth’s problem.”
Daniel took me out to lunch after a therapy session to tell me of their conversation, and he wept like a broken-hearted child.
The first year I was in therapy, I was suicidal. I processed my pain on paper, mostly in emails to my therapist, Dr. J., but also in poetry and prose. About eighteen months into the recovery journey we were on together, Dr. J. suggested that I try writing a novel. It took four months of stopping and starting and being stuck on the question of “WHY?” Why did this happen to me? Why didn’t my mom act on my outcry when I was fourteen? Why has she turned her back on me now? Why does she refuse to know the truth?
One day, I decided to imagine what would have happened if I had gotten out of my family home as a young teen instead of remaining there until I married at age eighteen. What if I had gone to live with my biological father? I barely knew the guy and still don’t, but what if…he was someone else?
I began crafting the story of a teen girl who is having the experience of recovering from childhood sexual abuse from a perpetrator stepparent and deliberate indifference on the part of the caretaker parent. That’s how the protagonist, Ashley Nicole Asher, came into being, and Courage in Patience, my first book, was written. Even though twenty-odd years had passed since the late Spring day that I pointed at my stepfather and told the truth, the feelings of numbness and disbelief at The Big Nothing that followed were just as raw and overwhelming for me at age forty as they were when I was fourteen. I never made an outcry to a teacher, but the protagonist of The Patience Trilogy, Ashley Nicole Asher, does, because her best friend forces her to do so. The teacher notifies the authorities, and CPS acts on the report. Ashley is placed with her biological father in a tiny East Texas town, and her life begins anew.
Writing the abuse scenes was difficult. I was overcome with nausea at times, but I found that the more I worked at expressing what happened to me as art—those molecules of Kryptonite on paper were beginning to multiply—I was able to step back from it and be an observer. The first time my stepfather molested me became this scene:
Less than a year after they married, he gestured to me to sit on his lap. I did so, enjoying the idea of having a daddy like my friends did. I got so relaxed and content there, I dozed off. He started rubbing my brand-new breasts. I wasn’t actually all the way asleep, but it freaked me out so much that I pretended I was.
The next morning, a Saturday, my mother told me to go outside because Charlie wanted to talk to me. I approached him like I would come up on a King Cobra, full of dread and feeling like a tightly wound spring. His back was to me as he bent under the hood of our car, changing the oil.
"Mom told me to come out here. Said you want to talk to me," I spoke to the sky as I watched a black vulture circle over something dead.
He mumbled something and I said, “Huh?”
He backed out from under the hood and took a deep breath. “Kiddo, slap my hands.” He paused as if waiting for my response.
"What? Why?" I played dumb, hoping that none of what happened in that chair had really happened. I was nine years old, and I already knew what he was doing was wrong.
"Last night … in the green chair …" Now it was his turn to stare somewhere else.
I tilted my head and my voice was so high it didn’t even sound like me. "What chair? When?"
He smiled that closed-mouth smile from his "model" picture. “Never mind, Kiddo. You can go back inside now.”
My heart pounded in my ears as I walked away from him. The morning sun was blinding and felt hot on my hair.
I never even planned to have Courage in Patience published. Once I finished it, though, I realized that I had been helped so much by the experience of writing it that it might give hope to others on the same journey. The only other person who had read it was Dr. J. He told me it was very good, and since he never lied to me, I knew I could believe him. I found an agent within six months, and a publisher soon after.
Even though I was thrilled to sell my first book, I was so afraid of upsetting my mom and ruining any chance that she might still come around and be willing to know the truth about what her husband had done to me that I asked my publisher to not be completely forthright in my bio. He came up with the story that I knew what it’s like to be an abused child because I’m a teacher and have worked with abused kids in the past. But, honestly: nobody bought that story, because anybody who reads any of the books in The Patience Trilogy can tell that the person who wrote it has lived it.
I heard through the family grapevine that Mom was aware of Courage in Patience and horrified that people might know that she is my mother. The fact that that is the only aspect of the story that bothers her pissed me off, and it was and is a “good” kind of pissed off. It was empowering. I did not write any of my books with a “Fuck You” attitude toward my parents, but I did gain a “This is MY truth, and YOU don’t get to deny it any more” certainty that made the mushy oatmeal in my spine turn to steel.
I thought I was through with putting my pain on paper. I wasn’t. I was still in therapy and trying like hell to accept the way things were (and are) with my mom: we have no relationship, and I couldn’t wrap my mind around the fact that she didn’t love me with the same fierceness I feel for my three daughters. I wrote the second book in The Patience Trilogy: Hope in Patience, and I started to be able to accept the fact that my mother refuses to know the truth.
It was excruciating to write; I wept when I wrote the scene in the hospital room, when Ashley’s mom tries to get her to admit that her stepfather, Charlie, who has just been killed in an accident, was a good man. I no longer allowed my fear to silence the person I had become. I publicly identified myself as a SURVIVOR of childhood sexual abuse on the book jacket of Hope in Patience, as well as everywhere else.
At the end of Hope in Patience, Ashley begins dating a boy she’s had a crush on. I explored what it’s like to be a person trying to move on with her life and experience normalcy in the third book in The Patience Trilogy, Truth in Patience (not yet published). I also gave Ashley the gift of a face-to-face confrontation with her mom about Truth and what it means to her in the life she has carved out for herself. I have not experienced this confrontation with my mother.
“D” died in 2011. He fell off a ladder, severed his brain stem, and was kept on life support for a brief time. Everything I know about this is through extended family members. My brother and I were not mentioned in the obituary.
Although I ended therapy in August, 2010, Dr. J. offered to meet with me so that we could form a plan in the event that my mom contacted me since my stepfather was dead. In our meeting, my beloved therapist—the man who reparented me and helped me grow from an emotional age of eight to at least a young adult—told me that he never thought I would Fed-Ex that initial boundary-setting letter to my stepfather on Christmas Eve, 2004. He said that sending that note was the bravest thing he’d ever seen anyone do.
My mother still refuses to acknowledge or discuss what I have lived through. She has told others that she refuses to “bash” “D”. All I have ever wanted is for her, as my mother, to know what I went through on her watch. She refuses. When Mom turned 70 in 2013, I felt sorry for her because she is alone. I mailed her a birthday card. She returned the favor by mailing me a card on my birthday in March, with a note that she would like a new start. I know from other people that my mother has no intention of discussing anything with me that happened prior to our new start. This is not okay with me. I am no longer the type of person who can play “Let’s Pretend Nothing Happened.” I did that for decades, and it nearly cost me my life.
Sending her the card was a mistake. Her response sent me spiraling into a deep depression that kept me down for months and necessitated an additional antidepressant medication. I hadn’t told my family that I was sending the card, either, and my husband made it clear to me that if I pursued a relationship with my mother, I would be doing so on my own. He will never forget the sound of her voice and the ice in her eyes when she told him that the abuse I suffered was all my problem.
Over the past eleven years, my husband, daughters, and I created a new “normal.” Family gatherings are smaller, but I never feel like crap at the end of the evening like I did when we attended big, loud family functions with my mother, aunt, uncle, and stepdad. I am no longer besieged by overwhelming anxiety and a sense of shame. For years, I awoke every morning feeling as if I had done something so terrible that no one would like me, much less love me, if they knew how awful I was—and I didn’t know what I’d done to feel that way. What was I guilty of that was so horrible that it scared me to know it?
I am a fundamentally different person now. As a result of sharing my story through fiction and as myself, I am a member of the RAINN (Rape, Abuse, Incest National Network) Speaker’s Bureau. I have served as the Keynote speaker at National Crime Victims’ Awareness Week and spoken on the subject of Hope in the Hall of State in Dallas. I know, from letters that I receive from readers, that my work as an author extends hope to others and helps them hang on during the worst parts of recovery.
I thought my stepfather was Superman when he first came into my life. He was the father I’d always wanted, saving me from being smashed into by bumper cars. But he revealed himself to be nothing more than an illusion: a broken person himself, an alcoholic rage-addict, and a perpetrator of evil on an innocent child. He used fear and anger to control every aspect of our lives; he physically, emotionally, and verbally abused my brother, and my mother remains allegiant to him even in death.
For most of my life, I was unaware that I had any power at all. I believed that I was stupid and that no one could ever really love me if they knew the depth of my shame; if they knew the real me.
I was wrong. Facing the truth even when it is scary and living through the process of recovery from childhood sexual abuse is what empowered me to know that I am worthy of love. I am worth fighting for. Life is worth fighting for. Truth is the key to inner peace.
It took six years of intensive therapy, a take-no-prisoners, fiercely loving support team of my husband and therapist, and iron-clad determination to make it through the journey to hell and back. Once my children truly understood what happened, they joined my husband and therapist in becoming a titanium circle of support. My healing was aided immeasurably by writing the story of a fifteen-year-old girl who finds Courage, Hope, and Truth in a tiny Texas town called Patience. I am able now to look back and see that that my juvenile scrawl in a diary—molecules of Kryptonite—synthesized into an unbreakable structure, capable of weakening the bonds of evil and smoothing my scars until they faded into the background of my life.
Truth is Kryptonite.
I am sharing it here because I have a message of hope for others who might be walking the same road I traveled, or those who love them. I believe that by pulling back the curtain on what is often shadowed by shame, understanding and healing are possible.
TRIGGER WARNING: If you are dealing with sexual abuse issues, please consider whether my experiences as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse are okay for you to read. There is no explicit content; however, I would be remiss not to issue a warning. As a person who manages Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder through being careful to avoid triggers, I want to encourage all readers to do what they need to do to take good care of themselves.
The first time our superhero savior put stars in my eyes, I was piloting a bumper car and nearly bit through my tongue when another driver blindsided me. I was dazed—frozen in place—and “Superman”—my mother’s new boyfriend, “D”—bounded nimbly across the shiny steel floor, gracefully avoiding zig-zagging bumper cars to reach me. He slid the safety harness off my shoulders, lifted me into his arms, and breathed comfort into my ear.
“D” didn’t need a red cape and blue tights to stand out. He was six feet of chiseled brown flesh in pressed pearl-snap western shirts, jeans so stiff that they could stand independent of an occupant, and high-heeled cowboy boots that made him tower over my tiny mother. He was slender with short brown hair, hazel eyes that turned gray when he watched me, and a smile that was more of a closed-mouth smirk. It betrayed no hint of the mouthful of gold-capped teeth that ranged from shiny bright to dogshit dull. “D” smelled like Aramis cologne and cherry cigarette smoke.
He made an entrance just like Superman, too. That man came out of nowhere and landed smack-dab as the center of attention of the ladies in the beauty shop where Mom’s Thursday night singles’ group met. That evening, I imagine my mother merely expected to maintain her Carol Brady hairdo and catch up on gossip, but instead she was more surprised than her friends that this handsome construction worker from West Texas would choose her—a divorced mother of an eleven-year-old scrawny son, Brett, and me—an eight-year-old scrappy tomboy who defended Brett from bullies, to his abject horror.
Four months after “D” saved me from certain death by bumper car, I became his stepdaughter. Even though I was a tough little kid, I was thrilled to finally have a daddy.
Not long afterward, “D” began watching me. I was playing outside and accidentally hit my friend Thomas in the face with a water hose. “D” rushed out of our house, dragged me inside, and began hitting me below the waist. He threw me into my room.
Shocked, I crawled to my mother’s room, pulled her phone onto the floor, and called my grandmother, the woman who held godlike status in my life. We called her Gaga, and the way I saw it, she was all powerful. She sprayed my grandpa’s mouth with green Chloraseptic spray—she called it “snake spray”—anytime he cursed in front of us. She ran off Nicky, the crazy babysitter who locked Brett and I out of our own house one steamy summer day. We pedaled our bikes to the local Dairy Queen and called Gaga, who barreled over to our house in “Bluebell,” her Buick sedan, and let Nicky have it with both barrels. Some people might call her a bitch. But she was my bitch. Gaga could do anything.
Except save me from “D.”
I sob-whispered into the phone, “H-h-he h-h-hit m-m-me!” Gaga was yelling into her receiver, “What did he do? Tell me, baby. What did he do?”
My mother found me in her bedroom, slammed the receiver onto the cradle, and told me that I was never, never again to tell of anything that happened in our house.
Less than a year later, “D” moved us to an isolated house in the country outside Terrell, Texas. Unlike our old neighborhood, there were no other children to play with. My companions were the chickens, geese, dogs, and rabbits. I was an oddball fourth grader, wearing my mother’s clothes because I’d grown too tall and heavy for my own, and we had no money to buy new ones. “D” forbade Mom from asking Gaga and Grandpa for money to help out. I was the only kid in this rural school who wore cowboy boots—my mother’s—because my feet grew too large for my sneakers—and, paired with polyester pantsuits, I was quite the object of taunts. To this tomboy’s sorrow, and to make it all a hundred times more horrifying, my breasts were bursting onto the scene. But even all of those things could not damage me as much as what began in that house on Route 34 in Terrell, Texas: I became emotionally frozen at the age I was when “D” began sexually abusing me.
The “Scout” side of me died.
Although I obeyed my mother’s admonition not to speak of anything that happened in our house, I did write about it. Words on paper began forming primitive Kryptonite molecules, but I didn’t realize it at the time. I was eight years old the first time I crawled over the toys on my bedroom closet floor, pulled a small diary—the kind with a little lock and key—from among my dolls and books, and wrote the words, “Sssh!!!!!! He likes to squish my boobs! Last night in the green chair…”
I was so shocked, I’d pretended to be asleep, and the next morning, when Mom told me that “D” wanted to talk to me outside, he told me, “Slap my hands.” He’d say those words countless times over the next several years: “Slap my hands, Kiddo.”
In my mind, I can still see the words, “Ssh!!!!! He likes to…” written in my childish script, on the pages. I didn’t know what to do with that information. I felt sick on the inside, and dirty, and confused. My father had never been around for me so it’s not like I had normalcy to compare it to, but I hadn’t seen Mike Brady do this to Marcia, Jan, or Cindy.
I don’t know why I believed that the secret I committed to paper was safe within that cardboard diary. Anyone knows the cover can be torn away, but I hid the diary in the back of my desk drawer and carried it with me when we moved from the house in the country—the one with the green chair in the den where I’d nearly fallen asleep in my stepfather’s lap and he’d felt me up for the first time.
We moved back to the Dallas suburbs eighteen months later. I am forty-nine years old now, and I cannot pass through Terrell without becoming physically ill. Landmarks from the mid-1970s, when I lived there, are enough to trigger PTSD flashbacks.
When I was in high school, I pulled the diary from its hiding place and burned it in the fireplace when my parents weren’t home. By that time, the abuse had escalated from touching and leering to sneaking into my room at night to try to turn over my tightly-blanket-wrapped body… to rape. I slept in my closet behind my clothes. It was so hot. I was frequently grumpy in the mornings, and “D” would say, “You’re such a bitch in the mornings, no one is ever going to want to marry you.”
Our house was a power keg. The slightest provocation sent “D” into a rage, and I was subject to hours of drunken lectures about what an ungrateful little bitch I was—particularly if I forgot to thank “D” for working that day the moment he came home from work. He played mind games with me, including the threat he’d been making for years: if I told, he’d leave my mom, and I would have to admit to her what “we” had been doing, which added to my feelings of shame. “Scout” was still somewhere inside of me, but I allowed the cloak of shame “D” placed on me to smother my naturally defiant spirit. “Superman” had decomposed into an alcoholic, unpredictable monster whose physically imposing frame looked like a freight train bearing down when he came at me in a rage. Sometimes my rage became too much to bear and I shot my mouth off, even though I knew the consequences would be horrifying.
I became angrier, the longer the abuse went on. I began talking back to a teacher at school because she picked on a girl who never had her homework because her mother was dying of cancer. One day, the teacher exclaimed, “Who are you, Beth? I don’t even know you any more!”
It might have been that very same day—I know it was shortly thereafter—that my volatility broke through the shame-silencing cloak, and it was either kill myself or try to be free. I couldn’t take it anymore. As I came up onto our front porch after school, “D” turned to me and made some comment. The way he looked at me… the self-satisfied smirk he wore…I told him, “Go fuck yourself, you bastard,” then I dashed through our house to the garage, hopped on my bike, and took off for a friend’s house across town. I didn’t think. I pedaled.
Mom tracked me down in no time at all, and a friend delivered me to my front doorstep. I steeled myself for whatever would come, marched into our kitchen where Mom was ironing, pointed at “D”, and told my mother, “Since I was eight years old, he has been molesting me.”
The only hope I had left was that “D” would follow through with his threat and leave, but instead, he hid in his bedroom while Mom played the judge of who was lying. She went back and forth between us while he denied the truth. She would come out of their room and ask me questions like, “Does he pinch your breast when he passes you in the hall?”
“…No.”
“Well, does he call you Honey Britches?”
“No, why, Mom?”
She said softly, “Because he does those things to me.”
Realization coupled with disbelief started at the top of my head and oozed, thick as honey, over my body and puddled on the floor: my mother was seeing me not as her daughter, but as competition for her husband. His mistress.
She returned to the bedroom and shortly thereafter, I heard their door close softly. My mother returned to where I waited between our den and kitchen. I had not moved from the place I stood when I pointed at “D” and forced out the words I thought would save me.
Mom’s voice was empty. “Okay, he says he did it, but he was sick, and he’s not any more. We’re just going to move on now.” She returned to the kitchen, picked up the iron, and resumed ironing “D’s” pearl-snap work shirts.
I was stunned. Absolutely nothing was going to happen because I told. I felt myself breaking apart on the inside. Later, in my novels, I would give these words to a character to describe what it felt like for her when the same thing happened: “Shards of glass. I was shards of glass.”
Their bedroom door opened again, then a familiar sound followed: “D” thundering into the den. He ran straight at me, stopped just short of knocking me down, stuck his finger in my face, and growled, “You are not mine. You were never mine. “Don’t talk to me. “Don’t look at me. You. Do. Not. Exist.”
And, he did not leave.
Ever.
Mom did The Big Nothing. She did not contact the authorities. She did not hold “D” accountable. She never pursued counseling for any of us—after all, he’d changed—and that was that. She even left me alone with “D” for two weeks while she went on a road trip with my aunt. I shoved my furniture against my bedroom door at night and slept in the back of my closet behind my clothes, as I had been doing for years.
When she returned, Mom asked, simply, “Did he bother you?”
My answer in the negative must have solidified her belief that “just moving on” was working.
I endured about six months of her cold angry silence and “D” ignoring my existence before a switch flipped inside of me and I became The Perfect Daughter. I did the housework, laundry, ironing, cooking, worked for the family business, began calling my stepfather “Dad,” and developed an eating disorder that vexes me to this day. I also kept writing, especially poetry. Writing stories was too hard; I did not have the ability to process the clusterfuck of my life, and it was too overwhelming to allow more than a few words onto a page at a time. I could disguise what I was living through if I couched it in poetry. Keeping the secret was paramount. Don’t make things worse than they already are. I had a boyfriend. I was in love with him. We wanted to be married after we graduated high school. Just make it until you’re eighteen. Then you can get out.
I don’t have any of the poetry I wrote. Like the diary, I destroyed any evidence on the chance that my mom might find it and be upset. My whole life was about keeping her from being sad. I hated it when she cried.
Fast-forward to 2004, when I was 38 years old, 100 pounds overweight, on an express train to Crazy Town, and taking four other people—my husband and three daughters—along for the ride. Simply put, I could not cope with the secrets anymore. Committing them to paper hadn’t done jack-shit to deal with the past.
I had a mental breakdown. When I first entered therapy, I told my mom that I was working on losing weight. I told my doctor, “It’s not my parents’ problem. It’s all mine.”
But when “D” began making creepy, inappropriate comments about my body changing as I lost weight and I was beset with PTSD flashbacks and disassociation episodes, my therapist helped me set the first boundary with my perpetrator that I’d ever had in my life. Together, Dr. J. and I wrote a simple request that read like this:
In light of our history of you abusing me, I am requesting that you stop commenting on my body. If you forget and make a comment, I will remind you to be careful. If you continue, I will remove myself from your presence.
My children knew that I was “having a hard time,” but they were self-involved teenagers, as they should be at that age, and they were mostly impatient with my lapses in memory and weepiness. They had no idea that PawPaw was Mama’s rapist and that Grandma knew he’d done that, but hadn’t helped me. My parents and I were maintaining a game of Charades, and the only choice to be acted out was “Nothing Ever Happened.”
We were expected at my mother’s house on Christmas Eve. I was filled with anxiety at the idea of seeing “D” again and I finally got the nerve to send the boundary-setting letter. It was delivered via Fed-Ex on Christmas Eve. As I walked on the treadmill prior to getting ready to go to our family Christmas celebration, I considered letting go of the handrails in hopes that I would be thrown from across the room, break a few bones, and spend the evening in the hospital instead of facing my parents. Instead, I hopped off the treadmill and emailed my therapist. I was in full-on freak-out mode: “Do you have any idea what I’ve done?! I have to go over to their house in two hours! I received delivery notification from Fed-Ex! What have I done? Oh my God!”
His response was simple: “If they treat you badly, leave.”
Their version of “treating badly” was shunning. My mother, aunt, and uncle spoke to my husband and children, but not to me. “D” hid in the bedroom just as he had on that day when I was fourteen. Mom told my kids that PawPaw was sick.
No shit.
We left within a couple of hours. I was numb, white noise filled my head, and I could barely hear my children asking why everyone was acting so weird.
A week later, my daughters and I met my aunt and mother at a barbecue place for lunch. I took Mom outside and tried to explain why I had dared to acknowledge the painful events of my childhood. From a place of deep brokenness, I choked on my words.
Her voice was cold: “Beth, I have no intention of rehashing the past.”
Soon after, my husband, Daniel, tried to explain to her that I had had a mental breakdown and I was in crisis because of what was done to me as a child and teen. She told him, “This entire thing is Beth’s problem.”
Daniel took me out to lunch after a therapy session to tell me of their conversation, and he wept like a broken-hearted child.
The first year I was in therapy, I was suicidal. I processed my pain on paper, mostly in emails to my therapist, Dr. J., but also in poetry and prose. About eighteen months into the recovery journey we were on together, Dr. J. suggested that I try writing a novel. It took four months of stopping and starting and being stuck on the question of “WHY?” Why did this happen to me? Why didn’t my mom act on my outcry when I was fourteen? Why has she turned her back on me now? Why does she refuse to know the truth?
One day, I decided to imagine what would have happened if I had gotten out of my family home as a young teen instead of remaining there until I married at age eighteen. What if I had gone to live with my biological father? I barely knew the guy and still don’t, but what if…he was someone else?
I began crafting the story of a teen girl who is having the experience of recovering from childhood sexual abuse from a perpetrator stepparent and deliberate indifference on the part of the caretaker parent. That’s how the protagonist, Ashley Nicole Asher, came into being, and Courage in Patience, my first book, was written. Even though twenty-odd years had passed since the late Spring day that I pointed at my stepfather and told the truth, the feelings of numbness and disbelief at The Big Nothing that followed were just as raw and overwhelming for me at age forty as they were when I was fourteen. I never made an outcry to a teacher, but the protagonist of The Patience Trilogy, Ashley Nicole Asher, does, because her best friend forces her to do so. The teacher notifies the authorities, and CPS acts on the report. Ashley is placed with her biological father in a tiny East Texas town, and her life begins anew.
Writing the abuse scenes was difficult. I was overcome with nausea at times, but I found that the more I worked at expressing what happened to me as art—those molecules of Kryptonite on paper were beginning to multiply—I was able to step back from it and be an observer. The first time my stepfather molested me became this scene:
Less than a year after they married, he gestured to me to sit on his lap. I did so, enjoying the idea of having a daddy like my friends did. I got so relaxed and content there, I dozed off. He started rubbing my brand-new breasts. I wasn’t actually all the way asleep, but it freaked me out so much that I pretended I was.
The next morning, a Saturday, my mother told me to go outside because Charlie wanted to talk to me. I approached him like I would come up on a King Cobra, full of dread and feeling like a tightly wound spring. His back was to me as he bent under the hood of our car, changing the oil.
"Mom told me to come out here. Said you want to talk to me," I spoke to the sky as I watched a black vulture circle over something dead.
He mumbled something and I said, “Huh?”
He backed out from under the hood and took a deep breath. “Kiddo, slap my hands.” He paused as if waiting for my response.
"What? Why?" I played dumb, hoping that none of what happened in that chair had really happened. I was nine years old, and I already knew what he was doing was wrong.
"Last night … in the green chair …" Now it was his turn to stare somewhere else.
I tilted my head and my voice was so high it didn’t even sound like me. "What chair? When?"
He smiled that closed-mouth smile from his "model" picture. “Never mind, Kiddo. You can go back inside now.”
My heart pounded in my ears as I walked away from him. The morning sun was blinding and felt hot on my hair.
I never even planned to have Courage in Patience published. Once I finished it, though, I realized that I had been helped so much by the experience of writing it that it might give hope to others on the same journey. The only other person who had read it was Dr. J. He told me it was very good, and since he never lied to me, I knew I could believe him. I found an agent within six months, and a publisher soon after.
Even though I was thrilled to sell my first book, I was so afraid of upsetting my mom and ruining any chance that she might still come around and be willing to know the truth about what her husband had done to me that I asked my publisher to not be completely forthright in my bio. He came up with the story that I knew what it’s like to be an abused child because I’m a teacher and have worked with abused kids in the past. But, honestly: nobody bought that story, because anybody who reads any of the books in The Patience Trilogy can tell that the person who wrote it has lived it.
I heard through the family grapevine that Mom was aware of Courage in Patience and horrified that people might know that she is my mother. The fact that that is the only aspect of the story that bothers her pissed me off, and it was and is a “good” kind of pissed off. It was empowering. I did not write any of my books with a “Fuck You” attitude toward my parents, but I did gain a “This is MY truth, and YOU don’t get to deny it any more” certainty that made the mushy oatmeal in my spine turn to steel.
I thought I was through with putting my pain on paper. I wasn’t. I was still in therapy and trying like hell to accept the way things were (and are) with my mom: we have no relationship, and I couldn’t wrap my mind around the fact that she didn’t love me with the same fierceness I feel for my three daughters. I wrote the second book in The Patience Trilogy: Hope in Patience, and I started to be able to accept the fact that my mother refuses to know the truth.
It was excruciating to write; I wept when I wrote the scene in the hospital room, when Ashley’s mom tries to get her to admit that her stepfather, Charlie, who has just been killed in an accident, was a good man. I no longer allowed my fear to silence the person I had become. I publicly identified myself as a SURVIVOR of childhood sexual abuse on the book jacket of Hope in Patience, as well as everywhere else.
At the end of Hope in Patience, Ashley begins dating a boy she’s had a crush on. I explored what it’s like to be a person trying to move on with her life and experience normalcy in the third book in The Patience Trilogy, Truth in Patience (not yet published). I also gave Ashley the gift of a face-to-face confrontation with her mom about Truth and what it means to her in the life she has carved out for herself. I have not experienced this confrontation with my mother.
“D” died in 2011. He fell off a ladder, severed his brain stem, and was kept on life support for a brief time. Everything I know about this is through extended family members. My brother and I were not mentioned in the obituary.
Although I ended therapy in August, 2010, Dr. J. offered to meet with me so that we could form a plan in the event that my mom contacted me since my stepfather was dead. In our meeting, my beloved therapist—the man who reparented me and helped me grow from an emotional age of eight to at least a young adult—told me that he never thought I would Fed-Ex that initial boundary-setting letter to my stepfather on Christmas Eve, 2004. He said that sending that note was the bravest thing he’d ever seen anyone do.
My mother still refuses to acknowledge or discuss what I have lived through. She has told others that she refuses to “bash” “D”. All I have ever wanted is for her, as my mother, to know what I went through on her watch. She refuses. When Mom turned 70 in 2013, I felt sorry for her because she is alone. I mailed her a birthday card. She returned the favor by mailing me a card on my birthday in March, with a note that she would like a new start. I know from other people that my mother has no intention of discussing anything with me that happened prior to our new start. This is not okay with me. I am no longer the type of person who can play “Let’s Pretend Nothing Happened.” I did that for decades, and it nearly cost me my life.
Sending her the card was a mistake. Her response sent me spiraling into a deep depression that kept me down for months and necessitated an additional antidepressant medication. I hadn’t told my family that I was sending the card, either, and my husband made it clear to me that if I pursued a relationship with my mother, I would be doing so on my own. He will never forget the sound of her voice and the ice in her eyes when she told him that the abuse I suffered was all my problem.
Over the past eleven years, my husband, daughters, and I created a new “normal.” Family gatherings are smaller, but I never feel like crap at the end of the evening like I did when we attended big, loud family functions with my mother, aunt, uncle, and stepdad. I am no longer besieged by overwhelming anxiety and a sense of shame. For years, I awoke every morning feeling as if I had done something so terrible that no one would like me, much less love me, if they knew how awful I was—and I didn’t know what I’d done to feel that way. What was I guilty of that was so horrible that it scared me to know it?
I am a fundamentally different person now. As a result of sharing my story through fiction and as myself, I am a member of the RAINN (Rape, Abuse, Incest National Network) Speaker’s Bureau. I have served as the Keynote speaker at National Crime Victims’ Awareness Week and spoken on the subject of Hope in the Hall of State in Dallas. I know, from letters that I receive from readers, that my work as an author extends hope to others and helps them hang on during the worst parts of recovery.
I thought my stepfather was Superman when he first came into my life. He was the father I’d always wanted, saving me from being smashed into by bumper cars. But he revealed himself to be nothing more than an illusion: a broken person himself, an alcoholic rage-addict, and a perpetrator of evil on an innocent child. He used fear and anger to control every aspect of our lives; he physically, emotionally, and verbally abused my brother, and my mother remains allegiant to him even in death.
For most of my life, I was unaware that I had any power at all. I believed that I was stupid and that no one could ever really love me if they knew the depth of my shame; if they knew the real me.
I was wrong. Facing the truth even when it is scary and living through the process of recovery from childhood sexual abuse is what empowered me to know that I am worthy of love. I am worth fighting for. Life is worth fighting for. Truth is the key to inner peace.
It took six years of intensive therapy, a take-no-prisoners, fiercely loving support team of my husband and therapist, and iron-clad determination to make it through the journey to hell and back. Once my children truly understood what happened, they joined my husband and therapist in becoming a titanium circle of support. My healing was aided immeasurably by writing the story of a fifteen-year-old girl who finds Courage, Hope, and Truth in a tiny Texas town called Patience. I am able now to look back and see that that my juvenile scrawl in a diary—molecules of Kryptonite—synthesized into an unbreakable structure, capable of weakening the bonds of evil and smoothing my scars until they faded into the background of my life.
Truth is Kryptonite.
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