Peace from Pain

More than half of my lifetime has been spent dealing with the painful realities of my childhood. At the age of 18, I had my ugly secret reality defined while listening to a radio talk show. I sat alone and mesmerized in the driveway of a good friend, while tears streamed down my cheeks and my "unique" situation was provided with a label: I was a victim of "incest". And I was not alone. The nauseous feeling I carried deep inside had always been right...what my father had done to me was wrong. The sad part was, it took 18 years for someone to define it for me, and it's taken another 30 years to reverse the damage that the act inflicted upon my soul.

In the beginning stages of my gruesome reality, I was stuck in an angry game of handball with the memories. Slamming the visions fiercely away, only to have them rebound off the wall and return to hit me in the face once my hands were down. It was an exhausting game with few points won.

Very few books had been written on the subject at the time, our society still shoved this unspeakable act tightly into the closet. When I went on to college, I came across clinical studies and definitions of perpetrators in classes such as Sociology of Deviant Behavior and Psychology of Sexuality. But the textbooks rarely focused on the victims and the effect it had on their lives. All the words were arranged into juicy explanations of these socially deviant monsters and placed labels of "rapist" or "pedophile" upon them. But I knew that they were missing the point. The majority of those "monsters" were real-live, all-American, God-fearing, tax-paying fathers who flowed with the main stream. Not the salivating, ten-horned, Devil worshippers the books described. Their victims were of their own flesh; the innocent little girls in their pink-frilled Easter dresses out of Norman Rockwell lithographs; the ones who looked up to their daddy's with pure love and trust in their fawn-like eyes. I knew too well, because I had lived it. I had lived it, and I had no idea how to escape it.