Think Speak Run

My Grandma died in December.

I miss her. She once said something to me when I was pregnant with Ella: “We’ll defend each other to the hilt, darling.” The sad thing is, she never did get to do that as she had intended. Yes, she prayed mightily for me and for all of us, through all the years. But she was not allowed to know what had happened in my childhood, and so she could not defend me.

She read the magazine article I wrote about my journey with Ella, but the family withheld my book from her (which didn’t even mention the CSA). Now that I am not in danger of causing her death by shock, I feel free to write and speak. Ironically, I feel released by the death of one person who loved me very much, and who would have defended me against my brother and my parents if she had known what happened and what they allowed. I bet you my whole family of origin will vehemently deny this if they ever read it, but since I’m not writing it for them, too bad! I am finally allowed to have my own opinion! …Without them all standing over and reaching a consensus (or not) of approval. They didn’t like my book in 2008. One of my cousins defended me while my aunt and other cousin tore at me with questions and a fair degree of venom. I don’t know if they would react the same way now, knowing as they do the fact of CSA and incest in our family. Hard to tell. My aunt said to me a couple of years ago, “Well, it isn’t as if it was an adult with a child.” I can guess what she meant, but cannot find anywhere in me or in the world the idea of child-on-child sexual abuse being somehow more palatable, tolerable or endurable than adult-on-child sexual abuse.

I love my family of origin. I think that’s what makes this all so hard and so difficult to come out of, and so sad. I love the very people I have to let go of for the wellbeing of my children, my husband, myself. I love my family of origin and extended family, but need to be free from the controlling thought patterns under which I grew up, and within which I was conditioned. I don’t need their approval, but still struggle with not seeking it. I don’t need their permission to live and to be me, but still feel like a little girl waiting outside the headmaster’s office for a signature. I am not a little girl anymore, despite my dad’s constant use of ‘Little Girl’ as a name for me, even as a twenty-something woman. He constantly referred to me that way during his speech at our wedding: “This is the girl…” Never once acknowledged me as a woman. Or as Ella’s mother.

So here I am, yet again, validating my own life and experiences through putting them onto the page. I do not need permission. I say this for my own benefit, so too bad if you’re sick of hearing it. I do not need permission, but I do now, by my dear Grandma’s death, feel released to speak. Maybe her spirit is nudging me too; looking on from the ‘great cloud of witnesses’, and saying, “Go on, darling. We’ll defend each other to the hilt.”