Susan Smiles

PenPals

Hi. How to start? (I’ve just got to get past this first line!) There, I’ve done it!

My story begins when I was a small child. By the age of 4, I knew to listen for my father’s footsteps coming towards my room to tuck me into bed at night. I learned young how to cope with ‘Daddy’s game’. Many a night I spent having a tea party in my mind while we played his game.

I don’t know what to say. My father abused me for most of childhood. He made me feel special and dirty and terrified all at the same time. Sometimes I secretly yearned for his attention. Always my skin crawled as he touched me and my mind and my emotions ‘left’ as I touched him.

As I write this, I’m stepping so far away from it that once again it seems like it happened to another person and not to me. I became so adept at distancing myself from his abuse as a child that as an adult it’s difficult to stay present long enough to talk about what he did. I feel as if it happened to someone else and my mind took a video of it for me to take out and look at it from a safer distance.

My father first raped me when I was 8 years old. The abuse ended when I was 13. No one in my family believes that my father could do such a horrendous thing. After all, he’s always been ‘so disgusted’ by child molesters. And he’s always so insistent that his girls be modest in his presence. How could such a man ever, ever molest one of his own children?

And the fact that I repressed the memories of my abuse for years only adds to my family’s disbelief. They don’t want to accept the awful truth about the man they love. They would rather believe that somehow, Linda’s psychological and emotional problems come form some other unknown and less threatening reason. I’m the ‘sick’ one in the family who needs to be treated with kid gloves lest I slip off the edge of sanity never to return again.

It’s so ironic that they all feel that they need to be careful of me and protect me as an adult. For so many years, when I really needed protection, no one was there to help me. I had to learn to help myself. I learned how to protect myself as a child and in the process I became stronger than anyone realizes. I survived.

Today I still struggle with self-esteem issues, depression, anxiety, and an inability to maintain close relationships. I say I ‘struggle’. I am not defeated. I grow slowly and heal one step at a time. Life is good some days and not so good others. What’s important to me is that I continue growing and that I remember to be good to me.

We all need that self care. That positive self love. The child in each of us was devastated and we, as adults are the only ones that can bring our inner selves out of the shadows and into the light. One, gentle, self-caring step at a time.

Linda J