The Rose Garden, Chapter 12 – The Chasm

Antelope Canyon, AZ, Author King of Hearts, (CC BY-SA 4.0 International)

WARNING:  Graphic Images

“Flee sexual immorality.” (1 Cor. 6: 18).

I found a way at last at age thirteen to end the molestation.  The solution was so obvious that for a long while I would not forgive myself for having failed to see it [1].  I could never again be alone with my father.  No setting was safe.

There was one final level of violation reached before this shift.  My father began to cajole my “permission.”  His face would grow red, his eyes glaze over.  His voice would turn husky.  The words remain seared in my memory.  “Please, honey.  Please, let me.  You’re so sweet.  I can’t help myself.  See how hard you make me.”

I would repeatedly push his hands away, deluded that I might actually be able to deter him.  Finally, my will was broken.  I stopped resisting, even feebly; gave up all hope, and lay there like a rag doll.

It was the request for “permission” that was insidious.  Children do not think logically.  Now, I inferred that I had given consent — against my will.  The shame was excruciating.

I find a section on bees from my father’s notebook particularly striking, in this connection:

“So, when we were kids we used to hang out around the well…It was always wet around [there], and bees loved it.  Barefoot kids, too.

So, the naughty kids, when a bee was sitting in the water or [near it] used to grab the bee by the wings, and hold it.  Naturally, the bee pulled his or her weapon.  Kids held [the bee] on their heels, and let them get stung.

I guess they must have gotten high from the effect.  Naturally, they tried to pull the bee off, but the bee was dead.  Minutes later on the heel was the bee’s needle, turning around like a drill in the foot of the kid [who] quickly pulled the needle out of his heel.

And that was the fun.  The bee was dead, and the kid has his little high fun.  Probably, like they claimed, they eventually got immune to it.”

A predator may grow immune to his victims’ pleas.  A child never develops immunity to the violation to which he or she is subjected.  Each assault leaves a fresh wound.

About this time I began dreaming that a lion had escaped and was roaming our yard.  I had no defense against this lion, and no one to ask for aid.  I would awaken from these dreams in a cold sweat.

Cold Comfort

Since we were Catholic, I had made the sacraments.  Confession, communion.  Attending parochial grammar and high schools as I did meant receiving a religious education.  Unfortunately, the theology conveyed was often riddled with error and harsh in tone.

Though the incest seemed something apart, answers to my deepest questions became increasingly difficult to obtain.  Religion provided cold comfort.

In my teens, my faith expressed itself in involvement with idealistic causes.  These were, however, turbulent years.

Fury

After my grandmother died, my younger sister and I became “latchkey” children.  Not only did we miss Grandma immensely, not only did the house become silent and cavernous in her absence, there was no longer a buffer to our father’s anger.  His fury held sway.

I know now that anger can be a useful tool for separation.  All I knew then was that my father and I argued bitterly.  Whatever the topic — why there were dishes in the sink or whether public assistance was justified — I never seemed to win these arguments.  I came away from them feeling mauled and bloody.

Grandma’s garden withered from neglect and was paved over.  Grandpa moved out.  The cherry tree was cut down.

Self-Absorbed

I taught myself about sex from the encyclopedia, the Bible, and James Bond novels.  That combination filled the gaps the regrettably mature experience imposed by my father had left; placed the assaults by him in some context.

During these years, I became self-absorbed, preferring to spend time by myself.  It is my greatest sin.  I would lock myself in my room, after we came home from school.  My sister, no more than ten at the time, would knock timidly on the door.

“Please, come out, Anna,” she would plead.

“Not now.  I’m really tired.”

“We can play a game.  Please.”

“Maybe later.  Just let me lie down for now.”

“Please, Anna.”

“Maybe in a little while.”

I would experiment with my mother’s lipstick or try on her negligees, while my sister wandered the empty house with nothing but the television for company.

I began reading books on psychology and human behavior, in an effort to better understand myself and make sense of my life.

The interest I developed in anthropology and archaeology during my teens was actually an attempt to decipher human nature and men, in particular.  It was a great comfort to think that the species could not have survived, but for millions upon millions of dedicated fathers over the millennia; that somewhere there had to be good and decent men.

Control Slipping

Meanwhile, my father felt his control over us slipping away.

As a birthday surprise for our mother, my sister and a friend of hers planted rose bushes around the yard.  When our parents arrived home after work to find the rose bushes in place, my father went into a rage.   One by one, he tore them up in the dark.  I will never forget the shock and distress on my sister’s face.

At times, I felt offered up — my father some demonic god; my mother at the altar, holding the knife.  In an effort to lift my spirits, she would tell me how “pretty” he thought I was.

Whether confused, fearful, desperate to please, or deliberately unaware — she served during these years, in effect, as his co-conspirator.   I am certain this was not intentional on her part.

Exposed and Overlooked

In other respects, we were simply overlooked.

Oh, our parents always worked hard.  Aside from a school uniform, however, I owned very little clothing during my teens.  If my mother did not have time to shop, it did not occur to her to give me money for clothing either.

Since I was, by that point, some four inches taller than she was, I could not fit into most of her clothes.  That left me feeling naked and exposed — very nearly as vulnerable as the molestation, itself, had.

I remember one outing we made to an upstate park.  I had nothing to wear but a pair of my mother’s white shorts — too tight for me.  My father remarked that strangers might take me for his girlfriend.  The horror of that thought was nearly overwhelming.

Covert Incest

While the molestation was no longer actively taking place, the relationship with my father continued to involve characteristics of emotional or covert incest.

Covert incest is a dysfunctional family dynamic of silent seduction in which one parent is effectively absent, and the other makes a child the surrogate spouse.

This intrudes on the child’s sense of self, even though sexual intercourse does not take place.  The sense of violation is pervasive, detrimentally impacting later relationships.

My father would often say, “You’ll never marry.”  Each time it felt like a blow.  My father considered it a compliment, a reflection of the fact I would never find anyone good enough for me.

That the episodes were no longer occurring did not end my father’s attentions.  He rarely hugged me without cupping my breasts.  To this day, I cannot observe the most heartwarming scene of a father/daughter embrace without cringing inside.

My father felt entirely comfortable running his hand over my buttocks when I passed by, as if I were his property.  I would go rigid when this took place, shrink into myself, as I had during the molestation.  At the same time, he felt no compunction about telling me how “ugly” I looked wearing jeans.

My father would allow no locks in the house.  It was, after all, his house.  The bedroom doors, even the bathroom doors, could not be locked.

Certain statements in my father’s notebook lead me to ask whether he was not, himself, the victim of covert incest.  He was extremely close to his mother, considered “the man of the family” after his father’s death.  From what I understand, she was unhappy about her son’s marriage since it meant he would emigrate and leave her.

My sister was never present when my father touched me.  However, she did live in the same highly charged and threatening atmosphere I did.

If I had spent more time with her, I could have spared her loneliness.  I could perhaps have lessened her childhood insecurities.  Though she has become a capable adult, that failure on my part is a lasting regret.

Every night I would resolve to start my life afresh the following day; to recreate myself as slimmer, more vivacious, more lovable.  Every new day brought with it new failures.

Aversion

Even when my father was not present, I could not bring myself to sit in the same spot on the couch he frequented.  I could not sit in his chair.  I could not bear to touch the kitchen garbage can which was — or seemed — hideously filthy.  I could not stop eating.

I can use the appropriate anatomic terms for sexual organs because my father did not use them.  The words he invented, to this day I cannot repeat.

I worked a summer with my father in the deli, my first job.  It was not the proximity to my father that terrified me, so much as the public.  I felt continuously inadequate.  What contributed to that, I now realize, were the ambiguities in the job.

I did not expect my father to assault me with customers present.  However, that cigarette brands were not stored in any fashion I could grasp, called up the uncertainties I had felt as child when the assaults occurred.

New Experiences

I did try to seek out new experiences.

In high school, I joined the glee club and Christian Action, a club which performed occasional charitable works.  I was on the yearbook staff.  I was a member of Students for Constructive Action, a short-lived group which lobbied for more student involvement in the curriculum.

I memorized the lyrics to every Simon and Garfunkel song, and sang (far to the rear) with an intermural chorus at Carnegie Hall.  Strangely, I was able to stand up before a crowd, though unable to make myself heard at home — no matter how loudly my father and I shouted at each other.

Later, I began weekend employment as a hospital receptionist.  Many a Sunday, my sister had to rush me to work downtown, when I had overslept.  Since driving was faster than commuting by bus and subway, I would shake her awake, if I was late.  However she may have grumbled, she never let me down.

And I attended the school dances.  These were the typical high school affairs — teenage boys on one side of the room, teenage girls on the other.  At one dance, however, something happened.

There was a crowd of students at the coat racks when the dance ended.  In the crush of bodies, I could feel a boy’s erection pressed against me.  Neither of us acknowledged the moment.  Neither of us had room to move away.  Neither of us wanted to move.

To my surprise, I was not frightened at all.  The sensation was so clean.  So different from the episodes with my father.  The boy made no effort to grope me.  Far from sordid, the experience was a gift.  It held out the hope I might one day escape.

Loyalty

I never as a child spoke directly to my mother about the abuse.  Never as a girl said, “Mommy, Daddy touches me.”  Or “Ma, it’s terrible what Daddy’s doing to us all.”  But — having come home from yet another long walk to nowhere — I did confront my mother in the yard, one night.

We talked at length about my father’s anger.  I pleaded for her understanding and intervention.  “Ma, I can’t stay, if things go on this way,” I remember saying.  Her reply knocked the breath out of me.  “Well, maybe it’s better, if you don’t.”

My mother’s loyalty was to her husband.  She chose him over her children.  That explains why as an adult I never talked with her about the molestation.  Yes, I avoided the topic to spare her pain.  But more so to spare myself pain.

I did not trust she would believe me.

Sexuality

Take an axe to a young tree, and it may survive, but it will bear the scars.  An enormous proportion of runaways are the victims of child abuse.  Those prostitutes you see on street corners as you drive by are merely living out the cycle of abuse.

Some children who have been sexually abused will become promiscuous — demonstrating that their bodies have become mere commodities, yet seeking via the self-same acts which victimized them to regain sovereignty over those bodies.  Still in search of love, such children may, as adults, despise the opposite sex.

Others will fear or idealize the opposite sex; choose a partner of the same sex or shun sex entirely, if not desire.

The scars stem from the same source, and are equally devastating.

By a hair’s breadth, I avoided a life on the streets.  I somehow staggered from day to day.

A Sister’s Support

Finally, when I was nineteen, my sister told me she could not live at the house a day longer and stay sane.  Within twenty-four hours I had rented a studio apartment in the basement of a nearby home.  Though she never did come to live with me, she was the impetus to my own freedom.

And though she may at times have feared for her sanity, my sister was the anchor for mine.  Her love was a constant.  I would not be alive today without her.  She may not as a young child have known the full details of the abuse, but she knew what went on in our home.

I look back now on my teens as a chasm I had to cross to reach adulthood.  How I managed to make it across, I cannot entirely say.  Again, I can only credit grace.

I think that for my father his chasm was the Atlantic passage.  It was a crossing he, in some sense, never completed.  He longed for a time and place that were gone.  The hardship and upheaval he underwent in his youth colored his whole outlook on life.

Much as I might scour his notebook, however, nowhere is there remorse for what my father did to us.  He did not see his actions as harmful.

—

[1]  Not all abused children have this option.

Copyright © 2008 – Present Anna Waldherr.  All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60247-890-9

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