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Myself at 6 years old in Virginia where my mother
spent her childhood.
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I hated my mother from the time I was 8 years old until the day she moved out of our house for good. I couldn't understand what I thought was her need to control me.
What I understand now is that perceived control was actually her idea of protection. In reality, my sister and I were my mother's miracles, the babies she thought she'd never have.
But, to this day, I have trouble equating control with protection. My memories of my mother abruptly went from "I'm mommy's little girl" to "why is she treating me like this?"
Teen-age Riot
My mother grew up never being allowed to date, go to the prom or spend the night at her friends' houses.
Likewise, my mother never let me go to parties, go out with any boy alone, punished me severely if I was five minutes past my midnight curfew and always thought I was lying about where I was going.
I did lie. I had to if I wanted to experience a teen-age existence in even a remotely normal sense. If I hadn't lied, I would've just crawled into a shell of myself. Needless to say, I was grounded a lot.
But it was not so much the tight leash as it was her impression of me. When I hit 14, we went around and around about her insistence that I get on birth control. She said horrible things to me, insinuating that she thought I was sleeping around every chance I got. I had barely kissed one or two boys.
I was hardly developed. Breasts didn't appear until I was 16. By then I was living with my father, who loosened the leash to the point of non-existent discipline.
One particular memory of my mother that sticks out is when three of my friends came to pick me up to go out when I was 15. My mother and I had just had a horrible fight about birth control. As I was walking out the door, she yelled from the front porch, "Darlene, don't forget to keep your legs shut tonight!"
I was still a virgin.
I don't think I have ever forgiven my mother for those and countless other things. But, after writing this article, I've realized what I haven't forgiven her for is her own childhood and the way it's affected her life and mine.
At the time, I didn't understand what was going on in my mother's head. All I knew were bits and pieces of her life. It wasn't until my college years that I found out that the cocktail of pills I set out for her every morning was a mixture of hormone replacement therapy, muscle relaxers and antidepressants.
The Day
My mother sat on her couch, nervously stroking the collar of her button-up light blue blouse in such a habitual motion that you could see she lives her life in a very affected way. She was preparing herself to reflect on the 13 years of her life that she lived in terror and disgust, the years she was sexually abused by her stepfather.
I'll never forget the day I found out my mother had been sexually abused as a child. I was in the kitchen on a school morning, doing what I did every morning -- assembling my mother's concoction of daily pills, making her lunch and setting out her bowl and cereal for breakfast.
She was in a bad mood, which was by no means unusual. Her build-up of rage climaxed that morning by turning to look at me with a crazed look on her face as she yelled, "My virginity was ripped away from me when I was 9 years old by a grown man! I hope that never happens to you!"
I was 8 at the time.
That confession tore away a sliver of my innocence, just as my mother's had been torn away from her. I can't remember what I did to set off that morning's rant, but its result will stay with me forever. What I do remember is a wildly vivid and harsh count-your-blessings tone in her voice that told me no matter how bad I thought my life was it could never compare to the horror she lived with.
My mother's biological father died when she was just 8. This left her 42-year-old mother, who had no job skills, without an income and with three young mouths to feed.
It was the mid-1950s -- before the Women's Movement, even before the push for civil rights. My mother's family lived deep in the Appalachian culture in the mountains of Virginia. To her, it was a "backwards" time and her experience was no more ordinary than it was singular.
A year later, her mother married Leon, who was 17 years her junior. My mother's first impression of him was fear, because he instituted harsh rules and ran the house like a tyrant.
The abuse started on a sunny day shortly after her mother and Leon were married. Her mother called for her and brought her to the bedroom where Leon was lying on the bed. Her mother then said to her, "Leon wants you to lay down with him."
At that moment and at the tender age of 9, my mother knew that something was inherently wrong with the situation. Her own father had never asked her to do anything like that. She began to cry and beg her mother to not make her "lay down with him."
That was the last day of my mother's childhood.
In my mother's words, she was the sacrificial lamb. Her mother had to make up for the fact that Leon, in his prime at 25 years old, married a woman who was 42. Somehow Leon was worth the innocence of her youngest daughter.
In the twisted web of abuse, her mother got jealous of the relationship that had developed between Leon and my mother. Ironically, my mother became Leon's anchor to the family.
Often, my mother was told to go to him. "You can put him in a good mood," she was told.
The Cycle, the Fear, the Plot
So began a tumultuous cycle of sexual and physical abuse. During that time, my mother doesn't remember a day without some kind of abuse.
What she does have are disturbing memories like those of Leon inserting objects into her vagina to stretch it. Those escalated to him climbing into her bed, night after night, forcing her to perform oral sex until she vomited and then forcing himself inside her.
Leon had a strange obsession for her that today she still doesn't understand. His abuse of my mother was both direct and indirect.
He was promiscuous, having one-night stands with hordes of women. During many of these he forced my mother to go with him to pick up women. He then forced her to sit quietly in the front seat while they had intercourse in the back seat.
My mother's nights of agony were rounded out with days of psychological and physical abuse. On more than one occasion, Leon lined her up outside between her two brothers so they could stare down the barrel of a shotgun while he shot at them. The bullets came so close that my mother's hair would move from their velocity.
My mother recounts her past with a disgusted yet pensive look on her face, as if she's just matter-of-factly describing someone else's troubled nostalgia. She's still angry, and you can see it in her green eyes.
Yet those weren't her worst memories. Her absolute worst fear was that this monster of a man would impregnate her -- a fear that fueled her nightly plots of suicide and murder.
But violence, she realized, wasn't the answer. My mother persevered, despite none of her four siblings attempting to help and after repeated failed attempts to get help from a school counselor. And why should she tell her mother? She already knew.
During my mother's high school years, Leon moved the family to northeast Ohio. She can't remember what specifically made her go to her counselor for help. All she remembers is that he wouldn't support her for fear of losing his job because Leon taught in the same school district.
That was the first and only conscious effort on my mother's part to get help. She remembers just one time where she "acted out" as a child, pulling her hair out at the roots while at the grocery store. But it never happened again. She was beaten severely after a store clerk confronted her, Leon and her mother.
The abuse didn't stop until she married my father and she got out.
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My mother at age 8, just before the abuse began
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She met my father during her first day of college at a community college in Loraine County. They dated for three years and then married. When my mother left, Leon constantly called, begging her to return. My father never questioned it.
But he didn't know. He subsequently found out when they were trying to start a family. The doctor didn't think my mother would ever be able to carry a child as a result of how prepubescent intercourse had affected her physically, emotionally and mentally.
Despite her doctor's prognosis, my mother conceived my sister seven years later. I surprised everyone three years after that.
My parents first divorced when I was 13. My mother's mother died shortly after that, bringing back an onslaught of painful memories and issues that had been tucked away behind a thick shroud of obsessive shopping and medication.
My relationship with my mother consisted of a constant exchange of increasingly nasty words peppered with physical confrontations here and there. My father, hoping he was the glue that could fix anything, remarried my mother.
Just one year later, they divorced again and I opted to live with my father. In retrospect, the divorces were neither of my parents' faults -- my mother had issues, my father had issues.
My mother sought professional help after the second divorce. To my knowledge, my father has never exorcised the demons that haunt him from his two tours of duty in Vietnam.
On April 22, my parents would have been married for 33 years. Take note that this article isn't about taking sides or pointing fingers. It's about healing.
At this point in my life, I'm the family's press secretary. I have simultaneous relationships with everyone -- my father, my mother and my sister. I have no axes to grind.
Getting Help
My mother, as a child, teen-ager and woman, really couldn't have gotten help anywhere because there was none available. Awareness to problems that plague women, like sexual abuse and domestic violence, didn't surface until around 1976 -- ironically, the year I was born.
My mother was 30 at that point. Nearly a decade had passed since her abuse stopped.
Kendall Fisher, associate director for the Cincinnati branch of Women Helping Women, said she's not sure if a viable outlet of help existed during the days that my mother was abused.
"It wasn't talked about then," Fisher said. "Very often, in people's minds, it just didn't exist. If you told someone, they either didn't believe you or basically said, 'Just deal with it.' "
Today, survivors of sexual abuse have a much stronger network of support to turn to. Women Helping Women alone provides a 24-hour hotline as well as accompaniment to hospitals, courts, arraignments, grand jury and trials.
Awareness was so late in coming because it arrived on the coattails of the Feminist Movement, Fisher said. Women Helping Women began as a grassroots organization for women to talk about issues affecting them.
Two disturbingly common threads uniting women were sexual abuse and domestic violence. Women Helping Women spearheaded the sexual abuse issue. Originally, Fisher said, it started as a broad-based organization that quickly morphed into a rape crisis center. Now, although focusing mainly on rape crisis, the organization covers a lot of bases.
"Our services are all about giving power back to the survivors of sexual abuse," she said.
Like domestic violence, sexual abuse revolves around one main theme -- control and power. Sexual abuse isn't about attraction, sexual urges or even pedophilia when it happens to children, Fisher said. It's about completely dominating someone.
"The biggest challenge that we face is fighting the stereotypes," she said.
Those stereotypes hold women accountable for what has happened to them, she said.
In 1999, the city of Cincinnati reported 879 sexual offenses, Fisher said. In that same year, Women Helping Women provided 2,000 sexual assault victims with support contacts.
Fisher said it's hard to identify trends in the area of sexual abuse because it's one of the most underreported crimes in the country. Trends do show, however, that more people are asking for help.
I Will Survive
For most of my life, I lived as if nothing had really affected me. I never thought my experiences were bad, just normal relative to anyone else's life. Even when my parents got divorced, I think my mindset was that at least now the silence within the home wouldn't be due to spite.
Yet, until just very recently, I've held my mother in contempt. Although I always knew she'd been abused, I didn't realize that it really was the key to my mother's identity.
Today, my mother is a survivor. She's lived on her own for 10 years. She can control who comes and goes in her house. She found therapy through her work with mentally and physically challenged adults.
But we're still coming to grips that what happened to her wasn't her fault and that there's nothing wrong with her.
What's hardest for me is to take a step back and remind myself to think before I get agitated with her for certain habits she has. (For example, she keeps her house locked like Fort Knox; she checks under the beds and in the closets when she gets home; and she pays $40 a month for the past 10 years for a storage unit that holds nothing but throwbacks to our life in the 1980s.)
All of this aside, the effect of the abuse remains. After sitting down to hear her tell her story to me word for word and having the freedom to ask her anything, it amazes me to see not only how it's affected every aspect of her life but also how she's realized that effect.
The shopping sprees and the seemingly insurmountable debt were all a reaction to living a pauper's existences under Leon's dictatorship. She had nothing materially or psychologically. She never lived in a place her family could call home. She had one dress that she had to wear to school every day. She was being abused on all fronts, and she was extremely poor.
But along with my mother's reconciliation with her issues, I've gotten the chance to come to terms with some of my own.
Perhaps now when I go to my mother's, I won't question why she has so much furniture in such a small space. I won't get annoyed when she asks me to make sure I call her when I get home. And I'll just let it slide that she's always locking my doors and windows when she comes to visit.
I won't question her.
I'm starting to understand that even though my mother knows that she'll never need that box of belts circa 1980 or that room divider or those gargantuan end tables that collect dust under her basement steps, we both know she can't let them go because they represent what she's tried to hide.
They represent her achievement of breaking the cycle of abuse. They are independence.
When I go to my mother's house now, it's with an air of acceptance and pride. I now see her as a survivor, as a strong woman, as my mother whom I dearly love and appreciate.
I probably always have.
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Christmas Day, 1983, still getting rocked to sleep
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I also see that it's by no coincidence that I'm headstrong and independent. I am the way I am because I am my mother's child. ©
Getting Help
AVOISE/PACT
4760 Madison Road, CIncinnati, 45227
Centers for children and adolescents who have been or are being sexually abused; individual, family and group treatment.
PACT provides treatment for the whole family.
24-hour hotline: 221-CARE
During business hours, call the director, Beth Boyd, directly at 321-8286
Department of Human Services, Children's Services Department
222 E. Central Pkwy., Downtown
Investigates sexual abuse allegations for Hamilton County.
24-hour hotline: 241-KIDS
Women Helping Women, Inc.
216 E. Ninth St., Third floor, Downtown
Rape crisis and prevention center that provides hospital accompaniment for rape victims, court advocacy, short-term crisis intervention, support groups, child sexual abuse awareness and date rape/dating violence prevention programs, professional training and community education, deaf and hard of hearing outreach programs and law enforcement advocacy for sexual assault and domestic violence victims.
Toll-free hotline: 1-888-872-9259
24-hour hotline: 872-9259
TDD-TTY: 977-5545
Women's Crisis Center of Northern Kentucky
835 Madison Ave., Covington
Programs for survivors of rape and sexual abuse; survivors of partner abuse; women's, children's and men's shelters; public education programs; referrals; and volunteer opportunities.
24-hour hotline: 491-3335, 1-800-928-3335
TDD: 606-665-2657
