We were the fun family. All the kids wanted to play at our house. Working class and artist poor, we always found room for guests. Most weekends, using battered equipment, we hiked, camped, swam, or cross-country skied. We shared library books, made up plays, and sang in choirs and around the campfire. Every evening, we cooked as a team and shared sit-down meals. No matter how young, everyone talked about their day or discussed some current event.
Yet beginning in grade school, my inner refrain was I want to die. It was true I had what others envied, a family where kids were cherished and listened to. Yet beneath that lurked the shadow family I tried to heal on my own.
Until I was twelve, my mother, a journalist, earned most of the income. For my tenth birthday, she gave me a three by five-inch notebook and suggested I write every day. “Dear Diary,” an early entry reads. “I just got the hardest spanking of my life, across the face and across the rear. My face folded up and I couldn’t even walk. I just screamed and cried. I couldn’t stop coughing. Then my dad lied to my mother and said he didn’t slap me.” Two days later: “I am thinking about my baby sister in the hospital in an oxygen tent. Since Mom is gone, I made dinner of ham, corn, beets, salad, and rolls.”
Not long after that, my parents were assigned A.S. Neill’s Summerhill for a night school class at the local community college. One class at a time, they had decided, they would earn teaching degrees. They summonsed the six kids around the backyard picnic table. Dad perched above us, Summerhill in hand. He read a paragraph about why children should never be hit and how any adult who does is some kind of pond scum. My father apologized. He would never do it again. He wept.
I was glad to see him cry.
“So now what?” I asked. We would hold weekly family meetings. “Any of you can propose topics,” he told us. “Everyone has equal voting power. We will figure out solutions as a family.”
“I hate family solutions,” my baby sister complained.
The notes, taken by hand by whoever was that week’s scribe, document how our family worked out chores, curfews, and various misbehavior. Early on, most of that was mine.
My mother never knew her father. Her mother was physically and emotionally abusive and frequently called into family court, where my mother insisted everything was fine. When she was ten, her brother took their new stepfather’s loaded gun and aimed it toward the window. The bullet ricocheted and sliced through my mother’s hand. She almost bled to death, and her brother was sent away. Later, awarded a scholarship for a top pre-med program, she switched to journalism and history. A friend wrote in her yearbook, “You could be president of the United States.”
Instead, three days after they met, she married my artist father and joined the commune where he and his buddies had built a log and stone lodge. The first year of their marriage, my mother, pregnant with the first of six born in ten years, worked side by side with my father to build a separate four hundred square foot cabin. Their goal was to create the perfect family, kids running freely through the forest, diving off cliffs into the bay, and, in winter, cuddled up with books in our wood-heated haven.
Still, the shadows. When I was a teenager, Mother confided that Dad’s verbal abuse was like being “punched in the solar plexus.” But she loved him. She called him Daddy. Trauma therapists suggest that when abuse occurs early on, children’s character structure is still nebulous. They absorb pain without being able to understand it. They assume they have done something wrong. As adults, to feel mastery, they may re-enact the original abuse in relationships and jobs. In America, around one in five children is sexually abused by age eighteen, often by someone they know and trust. If children confide in an adult, which is relatively rare, they are often not believed.
When I was eight, a family friend invited a colleague to my family’s cabin. After dinner, as we often did, everyone gathered around a campfire to sing. It was chilly, and my mother handed out blankets. When the guest fondled me beneath the blanket, I was too frightened and embarrassed to jump up from the circle and leave.
The next morning, I ran through the woods to our friend’s cabin. He’d been around as long as I remembered. He was funny, brilliant, and generous to my often-struggling parents. I loved him. We all did. When I told him what his friend did, he explained that men did those things. “I did that with some little girls once when we were playing hide and seek. It’s not that big a deal.” I shouldn’t tell my parents, he said. They wouldn’t understand.
I invented an identity my family labeled Daredevil and I called Darer’s Club. Not long after the campfire incident, I dared my best friend Dana to jump from a Weeping Willow. Clinging to a branch, Dana made it safely to the ground. I too leapt. The branch broke. The compound fracture of my right wrist and arm led to two weeks in pediatric intensive care, nine months in casts, and weeks of physical therapy. In the hospital and afterwards, I starved myself, suffered chronic nose bleeds, and pulled out clumps of hair.
I also wrote. By sixth and seventh grade, poems and essays alarmed school authorities enough to call my parents. Did they know their daughter spent time alone with an adult in his cabin? That he let her read Nabokov, Miller, and Terry Southern? Did they know she considered herself isolated and alone? That she was angry?
I insisted all was well.
By the time my parents started Family Council, I was stealing booze, running away, skipping school, and passing out at parties. At sixteen, I ingested sufficient alcohol and drugs “to kill three teenage girls her size,” as the physicians later told my parents. I arranged my body on the living room floor for my parents to find.
In the pediatric ICU, I had prided myself on never crying as some of the other children did. My pediatrician ate his lunch by my bedside every day. I felt seen, even loved. After my overdose, my father took me to the beach. “You can end here or begin from here,” he said. “I want you to know I love you.” Still, I was cast as a delinquent who shamed my family, shunned by my friends. By some miracle, I’d scored a dean’s fellowship to a private girl’s school. There, my therapy was the safe container of my plaid uniform and academic rigor. I buried myself in books and work.
In college, though, dormitory life provided no such safety. Because my adolescent overdose ended all normal high school socializing, I remained utterly naïve. Almost immediately, in broad daylight at what I thought was a work-study job, I was assaulted. As I had beside the campfire at ten, I went numb. I confided in peers, who told me such things happen. It’s no big deal. The assailant remained a shape inside me, a secret. I felt I’d been trained as a child to be prey.
Once again, I sought to heal myself. I filled two spiral notebooks with reasons I should die. And why the assault was my fault. I dropped my formal classes to pursue independent studies of Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath. I figured if I was going to be a target, being with one partner would protect me from all others, and I moved off-campus to live with a classmate who seemed kind enough. I volunteered at a crisis line, counseled rape survivors, and taught inner-city kids. I fostered a sexually trafficked child the same age I was when I overdosed. “The worst case of child sexual abuse the state has ever seen,” the social worker told me. “Wolves would have treated her better.” I was her only hope, he said.
How flattering. How seductive. And I believed that about myself. On the outside, I was the professional. Inside, a terrified child.
Abused children yearn for their parents to intuit what happened. Early trauma can cause a psychic fusion with the abuser. At barely thirty, I checked myself into a women’s rehab. The counselors insisted I confront my parents. They seemed to imply that if I failed, I would have to remain in rehab for the rest of my life.
I met my parents at a café and recited the words I’d rehearsed with the counselors. “Did you know your friends molested me?”
“No,” my father said. He raised his hand to summon the waiter. “More bacon,” he said. My mother cried. “I should have known. I was molested as a child,” she said. “I just told Daddy last night.”
I ended up comforting her.
My counselors insisted I relinquish my fantasy parents. “You might feel you’re risking your life by telling,” they said. “That by sharing family secrets, you’re a traitor.” When someone shares her experience, the perpetrator is on some level present.
Telling caused me to feel unraveled.
Yet slowly I learned to recognize patterns that hadn’t made any sense: My strange relationships with food, pain, heat, and cold. How I’d always wished to be invisible. How I’d leave a relationship or job, become injured or ill, sabotage my own success. How I felt comfortable with chaos and endangered sitting still, so that meditation or yoga caused me to weep. How I felt too much or felt nothing at all.
No wonder, however briefly, alcohol had worked for me. I just wanted to shut off my mind. I just wanted to erase my body.
I returned to professional rescue as a teacher and counselor. For a while, that worked, or at least I thought it did. My family unraveled like beads off a necklace with a broken clasp. Each night, I’d fall into an exhausted sleep, and then jerk awake again, my mind racing. It didn’t seem a good idea to face my pain. I wanted the past never to have happened.
“The trauma isn’t going to vanish, you know,” a veteran told me. “No matter how many times we work it through, outside events can reawaken it.”
My country elected a predator who bragged about doing what he wanted with women. Our borders slammed shut, children separated from family and confined in cages. A virus exploded, first appearing in a nursing home not far from where I live. On a three by five card on the refrigerator, I wrote “one week.” Then “two weeks.” And finally, “forever.” There was no end in sight. As in a game of musical chairs, each of us landed wherever we were.
As a survivor, I sew myself together with narration. With story. As we have for years, each morning over espresso, even when we don’t want to, my husband and I practice sharing from the heart. We call it “talk back” but no one talks back. Alternating who goes first, stream of consciousness style, we each talk about whatever’s on our mind. That’s it. We don’t argue or respond, then or later.
The idea is to create a sacred space of sharing and listening. It’s like the Family Council with which my overwhelmed parents tried to heal our fractured family. As individuals, as families, as nations, and as a global community, we need to listen. We need to share and keep sharing. “I believe you” is a magic phrase. Knowing we’re not alone, that others have survived, can shift our life trajectory. My student who grew up in foster care suffering horrific trauma wrote her research paper on resilience. “I’m the tree that bends,” she told me.
We need to shift the trajectory of a global culture that enables those in power to assault and silence dissenters and survivors. We need safe spaces. If someone says you must be angry when all you feel is numb, find someone else. If someone says what happened to you is no big deal, or you shouldn’t talk about those kinds of things, or it’s your fault, or it didn’t happen, find someone else.
I dream I am to meet my family for a trip. But when I show up at the meeting place, a grocery store, no one will look at or talk to me. Mother talks about my brother and his scores on some test. She points out how well he’s done, even when he has not done well. They all leave together in the family van. I hurry to the freeway where I know they’ll have to pass, and I fall asleep. I awaken to a policewoman asking my name.
“I’m waiting for my family,” I tell her.
In some ways, I’m still waiting.
Kirie Pedersen’s writing appears in Rumpus, Hunger Mountain, Emrys Journal, Superstition Review, Still Point Arts Journal, Lunch Ticket, Juked, Eclectica, Quiddity, Cleaver, PANK, Catching Days, and elsewhere, and includes nominations for Pushcarts, Best American Essays, and other awards. “Getting a Life-Coming of Age with Killers,” published in Under the Sun, was selected as Notable for Best American Essays 2018, guest edited by Hilton Als. Additional writing can be found at www.kiriepedersen.com
