Nothing New

    Just got back from a therapy session, where I worked on processing the incident where the uncle I alluded to seeing at the funeral last week sexually abused me.

    This was the first person I associated with abusing me in this way when the memories started coming up.  As I mentioned before, I spent a lot of time several years ago working on it and vacillated quite a bit between denial and acceptance.  It felt right to address it again today and I got a lot of clarity, which actually confirmed what I already knew but had been afraid to completely embrace as fact.

I was four years old and he was 17.  He was the family golden child. He raped me, full penetration, during my nap time while my family was staying with my dad's parents after moving back to the states from being on active duty in the Army.  My mom and dad had left me and my brother with my step-grandmother while they went house hunting.  We slept in a room up in the attic.  He told me at some point that he would kill me if I told anyone.

    On either that day or another day I went to tell my step-grandmother that "Sometimes Uncle _____ is bad," and he tried to stop me from going down the stairs, resulting in me falling down a very steep flight of wooden attic stairs.  He ran down after me and I was surprised that he acted so solicitous and concerned about if I was okay or not, because 1) what he had done before hurt and that didn't seem to bother him and 2) since he threatened to kill me, why would he be worried about me hurting myself falling down the stairs.  Obviously he was covering up and was putting on an act in front of his mom; maybe he snapped out of whatever fog he was in and realized that I could have died, that it was almost obviously his fault for struggling with me on the stairs and he didn't want me to say anything about the struggle so he didn't have to explain why that went on.  When I tried to tell her, she became furious with me for not staying upstairs where I belonged.  She was crocheting.

    I have an image of my younger brother standing up in a crib up in the attic during some aspect of all of what went on.  I don't know if I should tell him any of this.

    When my mom and dad got back from house hunting after I got in trouble for coming downstairs, step-grandmother went on a tirade about what an inconvenience it was that they were having her babysit and how we were misbehaving, etc. and they made a quick decision to leave because of how angry and unreasonable she was.  I definitely had the sense that they were frustrated and felt very responsible for the fact that we had to leave. We went and stayed with my maternal grandmother until my parents found a house for us to live in.

    Two years after that this uncle went to Hawaii to do some volunteer church service.  I remember it being a big deal that he was "such a neat guy" to do this and remember all the hooplah with the family greeting him at the airport when he came home. He, of course, was sporting a Hawaiian shirt and leis and was quite the celebrity.  At the party at the house afterward he was playing the piano and I came over and pushed some of the piano keys.  I wanted to see if he remembered me and he gave me a weird look and said, "Who are YOU?" I said my name and he just looked at me like I had lost my mind and he had no idea who I was. So then I felt very stupid and self-conscious.

    I remember that when he became engaged and got married, I couldn't wrap my head around it.  He must have said something when he raped me about this being what mommies and daddies do. Even though I compartmentalized the incident, I retained some sense of it because I remember looking at her and wondering why she wanted to be with someone who was bad.  Then as I watched how he acted and she responded to him, I wondered if she knew how bad he was. She was very pretty and nice.  When I watched them it seemed so weird to me that he acted so "normal" and that everyone thought he was so wonderful.  I really think that that kind of thing plays into keeping victims quiet--if everything seems normal then what happened has to be impossible.

    I bet he never told his fiance that he had already had practice for the honeymoon.  I wonder if she was enough for him or if he needed to bother their daughters, too.  Now that the encounter at the funeral is over, I keep picturing me leaning in when he hugged me to say, "Does your wife know that you practiced on little girls before you got married?"

    I compartmentalized so well that when I was engaged I kept having the thought, "I wonder if I'm a virgin." Then I would wonder why I was thinking something so absurd, because I had saved myself for when I got married. I started remembering on my honeymoon when I realized that "I know this. This isn't new."

    One of the things we addressed quite a bit today was the threat he made to kill me if I told anyone.  When someone says that to a four year old, the child believes them.  As we talked today I told her that the therapist who worked with me on this several years ago was probably ready to rip his hair out because when it came to the question of confrontation or just telling in therapy I kept saying, "I can't.  He'll kill me," even though I didn't have a super clear memory of that.  I felt it with everything in my gut.  It didn't matter how much we went the rounds with him telling me that perps are the most cowardly people in the world, that statute of limitations was up so he was free and clear from being prosecuted so it would be stupid of him to mess that up now, that he lived in another state, and if he did kill me then he was really stupid because there would be a clear trail that the police would figure out, because both my therapist and my husband knew what I've been processing and he would be the #1 suspect.  I could see what he was saying with my head, but that emotional conviction that he would do what he said couldn't be reasoned with.  I think the work we did today will help a lot with that.  Still don't know that I'll ever write a letter of confrontation but maybe now I won't be so scared to say something to family members if I feel it's needed.  I don't expect to be believed but I don't want to be frightened to death about talking, either.