Survivors

Willing the World to Change

On my 73rd birthday both my husband and I were sick with covid, experienced cabin fever to the max, and too long isolated, had to get back out into the world. As soon as we tested negative we ran for it, packed up our travel trailer and headed north. Along the way I read, Julie K. Brown’s book “Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story,” already hyper aware of what happens all the time everywhere to children. To youth. To underage children all alone without family support. The powerless harmed by the powerful, known and unknown. Doubt all around, scorned by people who turn away, procured by a woman who called them throwaway girls. I read the stories and I couldn’t deal.

I couldn’t deal.

But I was not in denial.

As we traveled, I wrote in a tiny notebook, talked with strangers, and listened to the world. Listened hard as if learning to pay attention again after a weird illness and too much isolation and absurdity. As in hard to take seriously. I love to laugh at absurdity. Harmless absurdity. Like that time when I was four years old riding in the back seat of someone’s car with another girl. A girl my age who clutched a toy dog to her chest, a stuffed animal which she refused to share with me, wouldn’t let me hold. I remember feeling annoyed and curious too as we rode together in silence in the cavernous backseat of that car. When the car stopped, we scrambled to get out, and just as we did, the girl with the stuffed dog first and me right behind her, out of nowhere a real dog ran up and snatched the toy dog away from her. Just ran up to her. Zeroed in as if her fear of losing the toy dog had called the real dog towards her. I remember being awestruck. Mesmerized.

A kid who early on knew she was trapped in her family, knew she was in danger, and daily felt as if eternally waiting to be rescued. Then and now I fall asleep worrying and wake up longing for change.

Seems as if I’ve lived my entire life willing the world to change.

In Ventura, California we ate tacos on the pier beside a mother coaxing her young child to finish her meal. Lovingly. Reminding me how much my own once young child loved to eat, and how much I enjoyed nourishing him.

In Brownsville, Oregon the end of the Oregon Trail, we camped on a family farm overlooking a lush valley and walked the dog through an ancient graveyard. I read the tombstones as if they were stories. Subtracting date died from date born for dozens of women who’d left this life before theirs had begun.

Green moss grew on pink granite. Shaded by old Oaks. The earth porous and damp.

In Tacoma, Washington I met a woman my age who was at last learning to sail her own boat. “I don’t know if I didn’t take the tiller or if I wasn’t offered the tiller,” she said to me, referring to her desire to finally learn to sail as a senior woman when she hadn’t as a child or a young woman. “Isn’t that a woman’s eternal question,” I responded. We were standing in her garage with her husband and mine, and in that moment I knew we could be friends. From the look in her eye. A look full of willingness to set off in a new direction, on the road, or across deep waters.

In foster care I went water skiing for the first and last time with a group of girls from church. We took turns. I didn’t know how to get out of taking a turn though I wanted to because I wasn’t a very good swimmer. I watched as one by one each confident girl took the handle, jumped in the water behind the boat and swoosh wow rose like Jesus walking on water. The rope will break the rope will break one girl kept saying. A refrain to my fear. So persistent I decided to do it, take hold of the handle and fly. I hoped I wouldn’t fall and I didn’t. But she did. Wouldn’t you know it the rope did break when the girl who’d yelled out her fears took her turn finally. The rope broke and she sunk right down into the depths.

Her fear realized.

My life is stable now still I often feel down. Trauma is isolating.

For the longest time, my thirties and forties, I lived in the past, not in my body. Now I live in the present, a place other than extreme yet I remain fearful of being tamed, manipulated. I keep my distance even from those I love. A lesson learned from my nomadic childhood, chaos always in the background. I worry all the time feel stupid, ugly. For days I don’t comb my hair. Pull it back it back off my face with a plastic claw. Staying in a dark place avoiding the obligation of joy. You can keep the stuffed dog. The rope won’t break.

For girls who have no one, girls who have never been protected, believing some bad thing might happen seems more believable more possible than good stuff coming your way.

Joy looks like a trap. A way to coax you into the cage.

It used to scare me how much I understood being unloved, more than I understood being a loved person. Maybe because I didn’t want to ever forget what being a helpless girl child felt like. What it meant. What it still means. No one believes you. All these years later, years after the maltreatment, the abuse, long after transitioning out of foster care, somewhere inside I am still a barely put together teenage girl scanning the menu wondering if it’s okay to order what I want.

I want to be heard. I want to be believed. I want to know my rights. Deep down. To know I was and am nobody’s property. No child is property. I want everyone to know that as fact. To admit that and abide by that truth.

No human being is mere property to be used and abused. Every human is an end in and of themselves worthy of support and protection.

At least one in four girls in the United States will experience and survive Childhood Sexual Abuse.

90% of perpetrators are family members or trusted care providers. (1)

I am a survivor. Consequently, I am less who I wanted to become way back when I was a dreaming child and more of who I need to be now to face reality and keep walking forward.

Without bitterness.

To recover I had to think like a poet and a detective.

Poets and detectives can imagine evil.

How else to maneuver the darkness.

Women who experienced child sexual abuse are at two to 13 times increased risk for experiencing sexual violence in adulthood.

Additionally, people who experienced child sexual abuse are at twice the risk for experiencing non-sexual intimate partner violence. (1)

Lately I’ve been brooding on all the ways in which I accepted so much, too much. Trying to prove myself worthy of kindness and care. My identity formed around a driving principle. Be of use to others. That’s the deal I made with life as a young girl. A child really. Wounded and alone I knew I needed to prove my worth. To my father’s family who accused me of wanting something from them. When I was a child I wanted to be seen and heard. Like any child I wanted to be believed and protected in what I knew to be a dangerous world.

Early on I learned who to sidestep if I could. When to run. Even now I don’t trust anyone who can’t see. Won’t see. Who refuse to believe the vulnerable, the poor, the weak the disenfranchised.

The children.

In the campground store at a KOA in Corvalis, OR I found a travel bracelet made of woven leather and took it up to the woman behind the cash register. Beside her sat a small boy, her son. As she passed my receipt across the counter she told me she was teaching him about feelings. “So many coming in here with changed faces,” she said. “With what’s going on I’m trying to teach him about feelings.” Her son mumbled something I couldn’t make out and smiled. “You’re doing good by him,” I said as I walked out of the shop, thinking of my own son, thinking I wasn’t that kind of mother. I didn’t have the tools yet. The clarity. I was a child mother. And there were consequences.

For far too long I was too needy. Aren’t we all in some fundamental way. Me. We. Us. Runaway girls. Without core confidence yet brutally brave.

Everywhere we went last month I listened and learned. Still not settled not knowing where I really belong this last season of life. Everywhere we go I try to imagine myself living there. It’s become a kind of game I play. In my heart I know I don’t belong anywhere to any single location, or community. In my bones I know that if I belong anywhere it is to the vast country of girls abandoned by those meant to love them.

Survivors.

We met Jenny Moss and her husband Ken at the Red Bluff KOA campground. Her father a congressman from California in the 70’s and 80’s. He was the legislator who during the Johnson administration authored the Freedom Of Information Act.

“It’s saving our bacon,” Jenny told us, and she was right.

From a recent New York Times article: Homeland Security Missions Falter Amid Focus on Deportations. “Homeland security investigators worked approximately 33 percent fewer hours on child exploitation cases from February through April compared to their average in prior years, according to a Times analysis of data obtained through the F.O.I.A. lawsuit.”

How The Times Analyzed D.H.S. Data

Through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, The New York Times obtained Department of Homeland Security statistical reports that indicate the monthly number of hours worked, arrests made, and search warrants executed by Homeland Security Investigations staff working on investigations into child exploitation, immigration, and other crimes.

In The New Republic I read: 17-Year-Old Girl in Gaetz Probe Was Homeless and Trying to Save Up (2)
She was a high school student who wanted to pay for braces.

Most days I awaken bodily aware of all the ways in which the people I depended upon tried to break me as I grew. I still don’t know if they succeeded. There’s a seam in my soul where the once ripped has been stitched back together. Repaired, visible and fragile. I am held together with the duct tape of reinvention.

I RE member myself. As in put my body back together. Acknowledging what it takes to recover.

Multitudes weep and I weep with them.

Forever and always.

It’s been rainy here in San Diego. When we walk the dog I slip on a boiled wool jacket, like the one Peter Rabbit wore as he ran out of a walled garden into safety. Chased as I was as a child, a young girl, a young woman.

“The law considers you a child until you reach the “age of majority.” That is the threshold of adulthood, when you become accountable in the eyes of the law and can vote in local and often national elections. It may also be the age at which you can get married, have a driver’s license, and work, although these vary between countries. In most places, you reach the age of majority when you turn 18, which is what the United Nations committee on the rights of the child recommends.” From Know Your Rights and Claim Them, A Guide for Youth from Amnesty International.

Only one member nation of the United Nation’s 197 member nations hasn’t ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and that nation is the United States.

It’s absurd. Meaning senseless, illogical, but also true. There is no excuse, no excuse for decades of denying what every kid who had to run away from their family of origin knows all too well: most people are more than willing to look the other way from childhood sexual abuse. It’s too incredible, they say. Sordid. Besides, they ask repeatedly, where’s the proof?

Listen and you will hear proof. Listen. And believe them. Listen to them. And Support them. It’s not their job to prove themselves to you. Believe them. Believe the preyed upon. Believe the victims, girls who were purposely chosen because they had no one to protect them.

Horribly they still don’t.

Notes

1. CDC Childhood Abuse and neglect https://www.cdc.gov/child-abuse-neglect/about/about-child-sexual-abuse.html#cdc_behavioral_basics_quick-quick-facts-and-stats

2. The New Republic: https://apple.news/AUxpKgZ8pSX6YmY6y5e-z7A

3. https://victimsofcrime.org/child-sexual-abuse-statistics/