Part 2 of Coming Out: Complete Silence is death and not the Absence of Sound.

Silence is relative. Silence is never the absence of all sound.  Things still cry in the darkness of silence. When we sit on a porch at midnight and comment about the silence, we mean the uninterrupted chirping of crickets and the cacophonous melodies from God's other night creatures.  Silence is not the nonexistence of the sounds of life, but it, as we tend to define it, is relief from ordinary, unpleasant, bothersome, unwelcome, or uncomfortable sounds like the whisking of cars rolling swiftly on paved streets, the crying of babies and incessant whining of children, barking dogs, and uninvited conversation that summons us to think, talk, respond, recall, and imagine.

People from my mother and her mother’s generation believed that to survive many abuses and traumas, they had to silence them or not talk about them.  They believed that if you didn’t talk about certain things, if you insisted upon silence, that those things would be forgotten and exercise no power over us. They believed (and have convinced some of us) that if we don’t talk about things but act as if they never were that in the night, like old dogs, they would sleep.  But silence has a sound of its own.  Self-imposed, forced, delusional, artificial silence cannot mask the sounds of the human heart beat, the consciousness of pain inflicted, the unending DVD that is our mind playing, stopping, and rewinding over and over again the horror flicks of our abuse(s).

In about 1990 when I bought my first new car, a red 1990 Toyota Corolla SR5, I had come home from Maryland to visit with my mother (as I often did). My mother, my younger sister, and I were sitting in the living room watching tv. Coincidentally, a show about sexual abuse came on; it compelled me to speak. I don’t remember if I waited until the show was over or if I blurted out in the middle of the show. But I said “mommy I was molested by papa.” Papa was what we called my grandfather. I remember my mother being stunned into silence. My sister, as I remember, said nothing, as if I had just asked for popcorn or something that was not at her disposal to give. (I asked her if she remembered and she said she did not fully recall. If she was silent, she said, her silence was not the absence of pain for me but an attempt to process what I had said and not knowing what to say.) They kept watching the tv. My mother was visibly shaken. I think she asked me, when?  I told her when I was about twelve (I'll address this in Part 3).  I asked her what was she thinking or feeling.  She said she was deeply hurt that this should happen to me; that her father should hurt me. She rocked back and forth in her wheelchair as she did when her legs ached. But she could not talk about it with me; she did not want to talk about it.  She eventually said that my grandfather was dead now and there is nothing we can do about it; that it would do no good to talk about it.  I insisted that it was important for me to talk about it; I don’t remember where I got that idea, whether I read it or whether I instinctively knew I needed to talk about it to heal and to move forward in a healthy way. I am thankful that my mother believed me, regardless.

I was extremely shy as a little girl; didn’t know why.  I wasn’t always shy.  My mother said the mailman, Mr. Calvin, would come to deliver the mail when I was five. I would grab his rubber thumb, the one he used to sort the mail, and run with it insisting “ain’t you got a dollar” when he had offered a nickel for its return. Somewhere that boisterous, talkative, bold little girl became scared, unsure, and extremely quiet, so much so one could barely hear me when I did muster the courage to speak. My grandmother said I would sit on the steps in her kitchen silently gazing through the banister.  I wonder what I was thinking.  At some point, maybe by the God’s grace, I stashed away the memory of my molestation like winter clothes in a cedar lined chest waiting for the dawning of a new season when it would be safe to unpack my pain and the guilt I felt. Self-denial is often in these cases about misplaced internalized guilt; fear that people will see you for the dirty person that your abuser has made you feel like (and sometimes, tragically, others will blame the victim, the abused, rather than confront the reality of the abuse and identity of the abuser). Abused children often, if not always, feel that somehow they are to blame.  But children are never responsible for the bad things adults do to them. Gone are not the days when a person's "virginity" is taken from him/her and s/he is blamed for "losing" it. Women in India, Afghanistan, and American households, courtrooms, and churches/mosques/temples are punished for being raped.

I think at some point I gave up trying to talk to my mother about how my grandfather molested me. But I would eventually understand her inability to talk to me when I came to recognize how she too was forced to lock away pain.  I saw my mother cry about her silenced pain in her seventies. I would often sit with her and ask her about her life. I was living in Cambridge, MA, and had come home to visit when maybe for the first time as an adult my mother allowed herself to speak about and feel the pain of her own childhood scars. When she was about four or five (maybe as young as three) she and her sister Nellie were fighting over a doll, and my mother fell head first into the fireplace. The plait on the top of her head saved her life. But she carried a painful scar for the rest of her life, one that would take years to heal. Her hair would never grow back on the crown of her head. She could not wear a covering or wig on her head for a long time so that her wound could breathe and heal. Children teased her; they called her a big ball headed baby, she said. Even one of her elementary school teachers indiscreetly laughed at her.  Tears, sixty something year old tears and cries, burst forth from my mother that day.  We cried. I understood then why she required silence from me. Hers was a legacy of bottling up her tears, her pain, some of her stories, and surviving the daily challenges of living.  If she had let me speak maybe her own bottled up pain would have imploded like a ruptured spleen or exploded like a volcano spewing hot flowing lava from an ever seething gaping cavity.

Before I was married, I thought it wise to share my experience of molestation with my then fiancé, just in case it might have an unforeseen impact on our marriage. His immediate response was to pray for/with me.  From my then uncritical religious perspective I thought his was a good spiritual response. But he too could not talk about it with me. Prayer is no substitute for dialogue especially when it comes to exorcising the things that haunt and afflict us.  Unfortunately, my then husband would use my secret against me. It became the only reason I could possibly not be interested in sex whenever he was!

In matters of abuse, silence is never a virtue.  It is not acceptable to turn a deaf ear (or blind eye) to an abusive situation or person whoever or wherever they may be found.  It is neither holy nor charitable to expect the victim to be silent; to act as if the abuse never happened. The breaking of my silence with my mother and my family was the beginning of my journey to healing cut short, interrupted by more silence. I wanted to talk, needed to talk to someone I could trust. Silence is crippling and diminishing.  It diminishes the person and voice of the abused. And if the victimizer is still alive, it paves the way for more victims. According to recent research, as many as one-third of Americans have been abused as children. It is a silent and silenced epidemic.

In Part 3 I will discuss the “age of accountability” and the guilt of abuse: my journey to healing.

My Coming Out, Part I: The Myth: “Good“ Men/Women Do Not Commit Sexual Violence

We often turn a blind eye to the people who are committing sexual violence and the places where it is being done because we believe “good” men/women, the people we know and worship with and who we live next door to, and entrust our children with, [they] don’t do such evil things and certainly not in good places like our churches.  Remember the Sunday School teacher in Tracy, California Melissa Huckabee, a minister’s daughter, who was charged with kidnapping, drugging, sexually assaulting, and killing eight year old Sandra Cantu in 2009. And of course there are the many other church (and nonchurch) scandals~ one of the latest and more well publicized being that surrounding Bishop Eddie Long.  “Good” men and women, Godfearing and other fearing, Christian and of other religions do bad things, including committing sexual assault against children. Human beings are capable of doing good and evil.

April was sexual violence awareness month.  It was going to be my coming out month, publicly. But I got side-tracked by work and life. Now I am back. I was molested at about the age of 7 or 8.  I was molested by a man most people considered to be a “good man.”  He was a well-respected deacon in a Baptist church in Columbus, Ohio. He and his wife sat on the front row every Sunday.  He was my grandfather who died in the late 60’s. His wife was the only grandmother I knew; she was not my mother’s mother.  My mother’s mother died when my mother was a very young child. Her father, my grandfather, did not raise his children; his parents did. My mother’s youngest sister Betty told her siblings that their father had raped her. But nobody believed her.  I remember the talk about it.  And as I heard the talk I knew in my heart she was not lying, but as a child I could not say so.  I could only sympathize with my aunt Betty in silence. I loved my grandfather simply because he was my grandfather and people respected him and my grandmother.  He carried himself with dignity, as much as a young child could know about dignity. He was the only male figure in our lives.  My mother separated from my father when we were very young because he had a drinking problem. My father was a good man, my mother told us, but she would not raise her children in that environment.  But another “good man” was allowed to be present from time to time and he would harm her child.

My mother was sickly as a child and as an adult.  As a child, doctors told her she would not live past the age of twenty-seven; but she was 80 when she died. When my mother was in the hospital, my grandmother and grandfather would sometimes babysit for us. When they couldn’t, Ms. Martha would (she was mean to me and often ridiculed me for being lighter than my siblings; another something I had no control over). My mother had to trust somebody with her children while she was in the hospital. People were always trying to get her to put us in a home for orphaned children. She assumed these church-going folks, her father and his wife and Ms. Martha, were good folks and they would not harm her children.  “Good folks” are capable of harming children, of violating them sexually and non-sexually. When God established sacrifices for sins, according to the Bible, they included offerings for sins and God did not exempt the priests. God knew even the priests would sin.  So do not turn a blind eye or ear to what may be going on around you or to a child’s cry for help because you believe that the “good” men and women you know are not capable of doing such horrible things. Even Jesus once refused to claim inherent goodness for himself as a human being proclaiming that “None but God is good” (Luke 18:19).  I’m not advocating that we trust no one or that we cast suspicion on everyone.  I am suggesting that we listen to our children; that we maintain healthy boundaries; that we do all in our power to know to whom we are entrusting our children; that we remember that “good” people do fall, sin, and violate children; that we reserve blind faith for God

In Part 2 of my coming out I will talk about the silence; it is not a virtue in this case.

SOMETHING ELSE MY MOMMA TAUGHT ME

People who knew my mother and had been in her apartment would say that her floors were so clean that you could eat off of them. We lived in the projects where the floors were mostly concrete (sometimes covered with cheap tiles). Before my mother was confined to a wheelchair (the second time; the first time she had polio and learned to walk again), she would rise early at 6 am before her children woke and clean her apartment. When Momma could no longer walk (her muscles constricted; no definitive diagnosis), she taught us to clean the house. More was at stake than “spic and span” floors. Some people thought, and suggested, that she should place her children in Franklin Village —an institution for children with no parents or whose parents were unable to care for them. My mother refused to abandon her children to the county. She insisted she could care for her own children, even from a wheelchair—a confinement she resisted until she could no longer do so. Mommy first scooted around on a regular stool or chair (until it broke), graduated to a chair with small wheels, and finally, against her will, to a full blown wheel chair.

So my mother taught us to sweep and mop floors along with other household chores. Mommy did these things herself until depending on us became her last resort.  She told me the hardest thing for her was to learn to depend on other “folks” (in this case us children were the “folks”).  My mother was a perfectionist (of course, this wasn’t how I would have then described her insistence that we do things right).  Mommy wanted us to sweep and mop the floors like she would if she were doing it.  Too often we “swept just the middle of the floor” or “swiped the mop around the floor” neglecting to “get the corners.”   “The floor is square,” she would remind us, and not round.  “The corners are a part of the floor,” she fussed with frustration. 

You can’t treat a square like it is a circle.  The corners of a square matter. It is important to respect the image of a thing and not to treat it like it is something other than what it is. This works with people too. People are different; their differences should be respected even while we treat them impartially or with equality. Before my mother’s activities became somewhat restricted by the wheelchair attached to her hips (didn’t slow her down too much), she worked as a nurse’s assistant (she had two years of nursing school having dropped out when she could no longer afford the tuition).  My mother meticulously took care of the older people who lived in (and sometimes were abandoned to) nursing homes; she took care of them “like they were her own parents.”  And some were quite wealthy and tried to reward my mother, but she refused most of their gifts, if not all. Details matter especially when caring for people.

Mommy believed in giving people the same care she would want for herself or her parents regardless of race, ethnicity or gender. Somehow some of us think just because people are in need, they should accept whatever we give them.  I remember Barbara Bush’s comment about the victims of Hurricane Katrina who were crammed into the Superdome under inhumane conditions. Former first lady Mrs. Bush said, "They're underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them." As the gap between the rich and poor widens, it becomes more and more necessary for us to help our fellow human beings and to assist one another in the same manner that we would want to be helped. During this recession, some people who never thought their homes would be foreclosed and they’d be facing homelessness may after such experiences have a different view of the poor. And others in the same predicament may still think they are inherently different than most of the poor. Poverty and bad character or decisions are no more intrinsically related than are wealth and integrity and wise choices.  Wealthy persons are capable of making the same good or bad choices as the poor; they just do so with more money.

So my mother was teaching us equality of care. And even though my mother concerned herself with details, she never lost sight of the broader picture—keeping her children together with her in a clean, healthy environment and not giving anyone an excuse to take them from her.  I learned to pay attention to the details from my mother; I’m still trying to master the big picture thing.