The peaceful quiet of an ordinary morning was about to shatter, a dark family secret revealed with one phone call. Will the truth really set you free?  Will the truth add another crushing layer of unexplainable pain and horror to a family saga?  My story is viewed through the lens of an abusive and troubling childhood at the hands of my mother, who was an alcoholic, and a father who took his loneliness out on me.  One phone call to my sister disrupted a reality of childhood events with an unimaginable revelation, bringing the kind of clarity that only muddies the turbid waters and clouds a damaged “knowing”.

The conversation began as they always do when you’re speaking with someone born of the same parents, shares your lineage, but who is as foreign to you as the most distant stranger. Innocuous pleasantries were exchanged when the inevitable topic of our childhood came to the fore. As adults we share no commonality, other than the reminiscences of a childhood suffered together.  I revealed that I had recently sent a difficult email to our brother, asking if he could shed any light, any memory of what went on in our house of horrors as children.  His delayed response led me to conclude that perhaps what I asked of him was too painful to bring to his present consciousness. His eventual response was as startling as a piercing clap of thunder, the percussive boom resonating in my core. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t protect you.”  As I shared his response with my sister she asked, “Do you want to talk about that at all?” “Sure, what do you want to talk about?” I replied not knowing that her next statement would reveal what could possibly be the most difficult and hurtful truth of my life.  “When mom was so sick with lung cancer and I was driving her to the hospital everyday for radiation, you were the topic of conversation a lot. She told me she knew dad was abusing you.” “Whoa, whoa, whoa, what did you just say?”  “I said that mom told me she knew dad was abusing you.” To say I was incredulous would barely define the flood of thoughts and emotions sweeping me over the edge, and plummeting me to a rocky bottom. “Wait, did she say she thought he was doing something or she knew he was abusing me?” “Mom said she knew he was abusing you and that’s why she left their bedroom when you were around two years old.” “Did she ever say why the hell she never stopped it? How could she not stop it if she knew it was going on? How could she not stop it? How? I can’t believe that. How could a mother do that? What was her excuse?”

She was in the throws of alcoholism, and when she was six months pregnant with me, she sat in the backyard of our big old house on Walnut St. and drank a fifth of King Williams Scotch. My sister reiterated my mother’s story that she was alone and trapped, and frightened. Apparently my father threatened to have her committed, and in 1959 she didn’t know she had any options. My sister went on to say that she has vivid memories of my father poisoning her against my mother saying that she was mentally ill. He told me the same thing for years growing up.  He made her out to be the evil lurking in the house.  I spent many hours with my father, and he molded me with his divisive statements, always laying the blame directly at her feet. I knew nothing else but the psychic protection of his unnatural affection, played out with an elaborate system of rewards and our special secret relationship.  He was, in my childlike mind, the lesser evil.

The phone conversation came to an end, and I was left to sit there in a state of knowing disbelief that rendered me numb and eerily calm. Although I have a very mothering instinct, I have never had children.  But as a human being, how could you allow the abuse to happen? Why didn’t mom love me enough to stop it? Why didn’t mom love me enough? Why didn’t mom love me? Why didn’t mom? Why? I wish she were alive today.  I wish I could look them both in the eye and ask why.  My entire life I have been haunted with memories of her, not him. My mother was drunk everyday as my childhood stretched into a long life. My adult nightmares born in an age where sugar plum fairies were replaced with a horrible creature who tormented me with her daily assaults. She was a vicious, ugly drunk, made all the worse by a neurological condition called Alcoholic Neuropathy. Her face would become twisted and contorted, her countenance diabolical and horrific. the result of nerve damage. I was deathly afraid of her. She would stick her finger in my face and with all the viciousness and ill placed hatred she could muster, tell me “you’re the reason my marriage is falling apart.  It’s your fault. You’re the reason this family is falling apart.” I never understood why she blamed me for her failing marriage. My whole life I never understood what was in plain sight, it was my normal. There’s a sad irony to being the object of my father’s loneliness, while simultaneously being blamed by my mother for her failing marriage, as they both played hideous roles in this. The drama played out during my most formative years, the time when one’s lens of the world is being framed, your personhood, your identity. Will the truth really set you free? I can’t answer that yet, but it certainly answers some questions. Memories of him are locked so deeply in me that I disassociate from them. But a protector was born within, creating me and the other me, and a refuge from his storm. I was in his bed from the age of two until I was eleven years old. How can I begin to explain my confusing relationship with him?  One day I just got up and got out, perhaps because I realized I could.

I’ve been hiding in plain sight, living a small life formed in the furnace of fear and a lack of safety from the very ones who should give you your sense of worth and value, or not. The facts of my childhood have displayed themselves and come to fruition through a misdirected life, self-abuse, and pain.  The evidence is there, a trail of knowing, deeply knowing.  The phone call that shattered the morning’s peace, revealed a dark secret that confirms what I have always known. My choice now is to not allow my past to continue to define me. The amazing thing is that inexplicably I feel love for my mom. That’s what forgiveness will do for ya. Somehow I have survived.  Recently I was asked by a friend to explain what I have done to escape my childhood, and make it to safety. I was at a loss to answer her. All I know is that I am here and the healing has taken a lifetime. This is my year of Shalom, wholeness! Just now through my loving community, GRACEPOINTE, I am learning that I am the beloved child of God, and that is the truth that will definitely set you free!