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Turn on your television. I know, most are telling you to turn it off, unless you are watching some news program of which that particular person approves. And maybe on some level they are right, but I am not here to argue the pros and cons of television. Go ahead, turn it on. I’ll wait.

Now, flip channels until you find something about a girl or woman who has been raped. Yeah, yeah, there might be something on one of the afore-mentioned news channels, or Law & Order SVU, or maybe the Lifetime channel. If that isn’t working, look on the movie channels or a music channel.

The chances are you will find something. And, the odds are pretty good that if it is a drama you have found, and the victim is now some distance-in-time past the act itself, she is being portrayed as a whimpering puddle of ‘why me’, or a drug infested prostitute, or a weapon wielding woman out for revenge, or even a plain-Jane who is living her life in nun-like celibacy, desperately trying to regain what was lost.

Television has pigeon-holed rape victims into generally accepted stereotypes. No, virtually EVERYONE has pigeon-holed rape victims. The general public has been given the impression that if a girl is raped, even once, especially as a child, and is not put into therapy immediately, she will grow up to abuse drugs, alcohol or both, be promiscuous (at least) and probably a prostitute, or have "gone-round the bend" in a mental-health sort of way.

There are other options!

Television, and the general public have it wrong.

Maybe they need to believe that someone who lived though such a violent invasion of their body and their being cannot then thrive. Maybe they cannot imagine recovering and coming out stronger.

Maybe they can’t, but I know it is possible. I don’t have to imagine it. I have been through it. I know.

I know and I am pissed.

I am angry that the media and the general public seem to want to pound into survivors heads that they must remain in a victim like state. That the only options are some mythical ‘complete healing’ or abject victim-hood.

I am pissed at the people who believe that if I am not in some militant stance against all who have committed such crimes, that I must not be ‘fully healed’.

I am especially angry that anyone has given victims (can we say Survivors? Yes we can!!) the impression that there is some ‘fully healed’ state that is their duty to reach. Find me one person on the face of this earth who does not have some mental health issue. At least one point in your life, you will. I would argue that it is not one pinpointed time, but that some sort of something is carried by each of us throughout our lives.

First, let’s get this very straight right now, there is no such state as "fully healed". Fully healed in most peoples eyes is where the act no longer matters to the victim, where she (or he, I do not mean to leave males out - but if the legal community can use ‘he’ to mean ‘he, she or they’, then I can use ‘she’ to mean a survivor of rape damn it!) can live her life with no ‘stain’ of the act on her life. You will never reach a point in your life where this thing that happened to you will not matter. It isn’t going to happen. It will stay with her in the same way the joy of winning first place in Drama Club in high school will. Or her first date with the love of her life. But it doesn’t have to be a ‘stain’. I used that word in an effort to convey what some others seem to believe.
As fully healed as anyone can be, in my mind, is the ability to get out of bed every morning and keep plugging away at life, without drugs, without alcohol, without any addiction to anything illegal, and reaching for an actual goal.

Second, her "duty" is resoundingly not to heal to someone else’s satisfaction. Or on that person’s time table. Or to some degree that makes that other person feel comfortable.

Fuck the people with agendas and time tables. Fuck the media. Fuck the general public. And fuck those people who talk down to you when they find out your past, pretending they are ‘being gentle with you’, when in reality they are being condescending. As if you are going to explode into a million tiny pieces if they don’t treat you differently than they would any co-worker or friend.

Well, not literally fuck them, but don’t let them make their agendas and their time tables or their attitudes part of YOUR healing process.

And do not EVER let anyone make you feel wrong for using the tools you have at hand to deal with this. But look, don’t use tools that will harm you further. Be smart about it and know that you not only got through it, survived it, you can now thrive. You don’t have to use drugs or alcohol to forget. You aren’t going to forget. And you don’t have to say yes every time someone wants your body. You also don’t have to be abrasive or eat too little or too much to keep another from wanting you physically. You can just say no.

One of my tools, the biggie really, has been school. Has always been school. School has been my haven, and remains my haven. Well, for the most part, but we’ll get to that some other time.

I could talk about tools all day. But I won’t. Let’s just mention a few here, you should write down the ones you know you use, and add to them as you go along - I am still realizing mine. I have used silence. I also sometimes close off. Push situations away so that I have some distance and can observe rather than fully participate. That was a good one to use during the actual acts.

There were times, growing up in a sexually abusive home, when I pushed hard enough to get away from a situation, to get some distance, that I went somewhere else mentally and was not present during the act. That was a very useful tool for me at those particular moments, but really doesn’t work so well in your life.

What else? Well I have learned to write a great deal when I need some clarification. When I was going through the process of winding up law school, applying to take the bar exam and things, I kept crying. I could not quite pinpoint why I was crying. Oh part of it was that my mother passed a few years ago and would not be there to see me get my J.D. But she had been gone for several years before I even began law school, so that didn’t seem to be the problem. I wrote. I wrote until I figured out why it was bothering me so. And then I stopped crying.
Writing and tears. They’re both good. So is a really good counselor. The one I see is a licensed clinical social worker.

Crying is good. Like I said, I have the ability to be completely absent in a situation. It isn’t always ‘pleasant’ but I like being present in situations now. And sometimes that means tears. It is so much better than not feeling. I’ll take being present in a situation and crying because of it over being somewhere else mentally any day of the week.

I just have to say one thing about law school. I was forty-four years old when I graduated. Not exactly young. It took me a long, long time to get there. There was no ‘look she’s healed’ movie-inspired happy ending for me at 20 or 22. School is my haven, and believe me I’ve used it. I have spent 20 years going to college and then law school, at night, here and there, sometimes with big breaks between one semester and the next. So the thing I want to say is this . . . the little girl in me, the one who used to hide in her closet and try really, really hard to be invisible, has been dancing with joy since about half-way through the last semester, when she realized she really had made it through the stress-filled years of law school. She is still shaking it.
:-)

Karmic Splash

They were in the car, driving to the shoe store. It was fall in Missouri but extremely fall this day. It was one of those days when you knew the Autumnal Goddess and the Winter God were fighting for control. Rain had set in hours before in a long sweeping line from the Canadian border travelling well south of their Kansas City area home. North of them, the precipitation fell as ice. It wouldn’t be much longer at all before they were chipping and scraping ice from their own cars. Perhaps needing to let the cars warm for 20 minutes or more before ½ inch thick ice could be broken apart and scraped from the cars. Half inch thick ice was bad, but it had been worse. The younger of the two women didn’t drive if it was worse than that though. The older one’s rule of thumb wasn’t the thickness of the ice, but the number of neighbors whose cars had slid into the creek before she started out. More than two in the creek and she was sure not to travel. One or two and she used other factors to help her determine if risking her life was worth the paycheck or whatever she needed to go out for.

The two women were mother and daughter, though most people did not assume that when they saw them together in a store. More often strangers thought they were a lesbian couple, and that the older one liked ‘em young. The two laughed about that when they bothered still to talk about it. It had been a topic of conversation the first couple of times it had happened, out of surprise more than anything else. The woman was more than twenty-four years older than this daughter, and this one was not the oldest of the woman’s children. The mother didn’t fault strangers for picking up on the fact that the two loved each other unquestionably. She was bothered however when waitresses or sales people treated them rudely out of homophobic prejudice. Utterly ridiculous, in her mind, to fault someone for loving another in this world, regardless of sexual orientation. Too many people hated. Love was something to be honored and cultivated, not shunned, ridiculed and punished.

Rhetta gave her daughter a wicked glance. “Do you want to drive?”

“No!” Willow laughed. “You haven’t been in my car since you taught me to drive the manual transmission.”

Rhetta glanced at her daughter with a smirk on her face. “Yes I have. I drove it once. I moved it so I could get my car out of the driveway, and I left food in there for you.” Rhetta smiled bigger, knowing Willow was going to come back with something. Willow was almost twenty, and still nervous about teasing her mother. Still afraid she would step over a line and get into trouble.

“But you haven’t been in my car with me driving and you in the passenger seat since you taught me to drive it.” Willow laughed, knowing she was right, and knowing the reason why.

Rhetta sighed the deep rumbly sigh of one who has at least a partly Irish heritage. “Yes, well, we all know I have control issues Willow. I am not even going to pretend I don’t. And if you are driving I am not in control.” Rhetta glanced at Willow and laughed.

Willow laughed too. “Oooh, I think it is a lot more than a little control issue Mother.”

“Yes. I don’t like your driving.” The two laughed again. Rhetta took off after the light turned green. The water Willow had been trying to drink slopped onto her hoodie.

“Damn. I hate karma.” Willow complained. “Tease your Mom, and what happens?”

“Karmic Splash!” Rhetta said. And they both laughed again.

The Closet

He was back. She held her breath and shut her eyes. He moved the clothing from one side of the closet pole to the other, thinking she was hiding behind them. When he was unsuccessful in finding her that way, he started digging out the shoe boxes, stuffed animals and other toys stacked and stuffed into the end of the closet, opposite of where she was. She was at the end that was more open. He was digging in the end that logically provided more cover.

That was her trick. Her one way of getting away from them. Hide in plain sight. To her left was the large stuffed bear, given to her by her brother now in Viet Nam. On her right were the two grocery bags full of clothing that that would be given to her eldest niece next time that brother and his family came by. The edge of one bag hid the edges of her body on one side, the bear hid the other. She couldn’t hide her face. Some how, when she hid in a way that her entire body was covered, they always found her. It was only when she hid partly and in plain sight that they couldn’t seem to see her. It was hard to find a place to hide her entire body anyway. At seven she was tall, and skinny. But they never really saw her anyway. They only looked at elements of her. Long brown hair. Gangly limbs. A certain height. Since she was sitting and not lying down, like she had when she hid under her bed. So, when they looked for her at a height four or five inches off the ground, they did not see her. When they looked for her at her 4 foot something height, they also did not see her. Sitting, and being something less than 3 feet tall was to her advantage today.

She needed to breathe. She carefully and slowly let air out of her lungs, while trying to keep her chest expanded as much as possible so that movement wouldn’t catch his eye. She slowly and silently breathed in again when she could.

He stepped back. He looked at the closet as a whole, trying to see her. He turned around, looked under the bed again, and in the two bigger drawers in the chest. There was nothing else in the room, and they knew she had run into the room, they’d all seen her run in here.

With his back turned to the closet, she was able to breathe again. She still did it slowly, silently, so he wouldn’t hear it. Was she scared? Yes. She almost always was scared. She didn’t know yet that it wasn’t normal to be scared this much of the time. Scared wasn’t supposed to be the normal state of being.

He left the room then. She relaxed a little. They might stop hunting for her. The last time that happened, she napped in her closet, and woke hours later having never been found. But that time Dad hadn’t been home. Dad hadn’t been the one who wanted her.

He was back soon enough, this time with one of the others in tow. She didn’t like this one. He was mean. Every God given talent he had was used only to hurt others. He had the ability to charm animals. He could put a bee to sleep by petting it. He could charm a scared stray cat into his arms. The bees he would then bury, and when they woke, buried in the dirt, they would fight their way out, ready to sting whatever was closest. The cat, the poor cat, became his toy. He swung it by its tail and let it go only when he knew it would slam onto the concrete of the road. His charm would draw the cat back to him, repeatedly, until it finally crawled off to die.

The second one stood in the room and surveyed it. As he turned toward the closet, the doorless closet, her fear swelled. She held her breath, as she had before, remained motionless, but still he saw her. The charmer was also a natural hunter. He smelled her fear and honed in on it. He grabbed her shoulders and let them slide down her arms into painful grips. He pulled hard, and she began to kick and scream, which never did any good at all, but she refused to go quietly. The first one grabbed her legs, and together they carried her off, out of her bedroom and down the stairs. And, so, to endure another session of fatherly love. Their chore done, they were released to go play outside.

The beginning

I plan to post things here that I have written. Much of it, for better or worse, are things from a truly crappy childhood that I find I need to get off my chest.

Read, don't read, whatever floats your boat. If you have something to say, say it, but I reserve the right to delete any comments I do not like, find questionable, creepy, etc.

For those who may know me, my true identity and not my pen name, I am changing names in the writings to protect . . . well frankly mostly my children and myself, but others as well. So, no, I won't change something to make you more comfortable. If I have written something about our pasts, I have written it from my point of view. If you have something to say from your own point of view, feel free to start your own blog.