Nowhere but Up (2 page)

Mom remarried when I was six, and I thought I had found my golden ticket. Bruce Dale was quiet, good-natured, and every bit in love with my mother. They were head over heels for each other, stealing kisses every chance they got. When Mom and Bruce were first together, he and I would watch boxing on TV. I’d climb on his lap, unable to take my eyes off of the sweaty boxers exchanging crushing blows, and proudly tell him, “I’m gonna be a boxer one day!” I loved the thought of Bruce becoming my daddy.

Bruce brought with him two children of his own, Candie, thirteen, and Chuck, eleven. Candie was a sweetheart and I looked up to her. She was a good big sister and always made time for me and made me feel special. My stepbrother had a gentle nature like his father, and he was fun to be around. I loved them both.

The more I got to know Bruce, the more I liked him. Especially because I knew how well he treated my mother. On August 15, 1981, the day of their wedding, I was so excited I could hardly stand it. My mom looked so pretty with her short hair brushed in a soft wave to the side. She wore a turquoise chiffon dress that complemented her eyes and held a small bouquet of beautiful white and pink roses. Bruce stood tall and proud next to her. He looked sharp in his dark brown suit. Even the tufts of hair that normally jutted out from his almost-bald head were neatly combed down. The boys wore light corduroy jackets with their butterfly-collared shirts sticking out like sore thumbs. They looked uncomfortable in their fancy clothes, like they wanted to tear them off and throw on some jeans. Candie and I wore pretty white dresses and matching knee-high socks. I got my hair done and even used hairspray for the first time.

But for me, the wedding was about more than having to look sharp. This was my moment. I would have a new dad. A dad who loved me. A dad who wanted to stay. I thought this was the best thing that could ever happen to me.

Later that evening, I called out for my new dad, who was in the other room. “Daddy,” I said. I’d had such a deep longing to say that word. I wanted it in my vocabulary permanently. I wanted it to stay there so I could rest in the assurance that I had a daddy. That he would love and protect me. That he wasn’t going anywhere.

Daddy.
That was all I had ever wanted.

But at that simple two-syllable word from my lips, my brother Chris exploded.

Chris pulled me close to him so Bruce couldn’t hear what he was about to say. “That is not your dad,” he hissed in my face. “That is your mother’s husband. He is a stranger in this house. Do not call him Daddy. You already have a dad!”

And after that, I never did. I’ve always liked Bruce, but I also looked up to Chris. After all, he was my older brother, so I respected his wishes. But in the process, I missed out on what could have been such a special relationship with my stepdad.

In Chris’s defense, I can understand now where he was coming from then. He was seven years older than me, so he’d had more time with our dad than I had. Naturally, he felt more of an attachment with his father than I did. And having been the only male in our house for a few years, he may have felt threatened by the new male figure in our home. I don’t believe for a second Chris knew how deeply wounding his words were. I’m sure that had he known, he wouldn’t have said them.

On that day, though, I immediately created a distance between my stepdad and me. For the rest of my childhood, he would never take on the role of a father, because I never even gave him a chance. Before Bruce had the opportunity to be a true father figure, I had already shut him down. He never did anything wrong or hurtful, but in my eyes he would always be my mother’s husband. Not my dad. I kept him at a safe distance back then, at arm’s length.

As distant as I was from my mom and Bruce growing up, I was also distant from religion. My siblings and I grew up as nonpracticing Catholics. We never went to mass. Sundays weren’t reserved for church. They were reserved as a day of R and R for my mom and Bruce. They both worked hard at their blue-collar jobs during the week, and come Sunday, it was time for them to unwind. Catch a game on TV. Do some shopping. Visit family. Maybe even go out for a big breakfast.

Around the time my mom remarried, my neighborhood friend, Robbie Wigan, invited me to church one week. My mom and Bruce didn’t mind. It gave me something to do. While my mom shuffled around our modest kitchen half asleep, ripping open a package of filters to start the morning pot of coffee, I was upstairs finding something nice to wear. A pretty dress. Shiny shoes.

After I finished getting ready, I bounced down the stairs, yelled “Bye!” to my parents, and skipped four houses down to Robbie’s house. I piled into the Wigans’ station wagon with my little buddy and his family. I was so excited about going to church. I wasn’t quite sure what I was excited for—I mean, who associates the word
excited
with church?—but it felt like an adventure.

As we made our way to the service, the adults in the front seat chatted away about boring grownup stuff as a tape of easy listening music played. Robbie and I gabbed away about little kid things.

Sunday school was a whirlwind of stories, crayons, crafts, songs, and snacks. I sat next to Robbie, utterly mesmerized. I was entranced by the fun and by the other kids who laughed and drew colorful pictures of Jesus. They all seemed happy to be there. Church wasn’t a drag, a boring chore like washing the dishes or cleaning your room. Church was, well, fun. I liked this kind of fun. This was fun that I wanted. I wondered why my family never went to church.

When class was almost over, the sweet teacher with the big hair asked if I wanted to accept Jesus into my heart. Well, of course! Why wouldn’t I? From what I could tell from the Bible stories and the cool-looking pictures, I liked Jesus. I wanted Him to be my friend. And I was even more tickled to hear that Jesus was waiting to be my friend first. Imagine that! So I accepted Jesus into my heart as a Sunday school teacher nodded approvingly beside a flannel board of colorful felt Bible characters.

I believe God had a hook in my life from that moment on. But even though I opened the door, I was only five years old. A lot of life was waiting to happen. And even though I believe my early exposure to God planted a seed for my future, faith wasn’t going to keep bad things away. It wouldn’t shield me when I was robbed of my innocence. Again and again.

To look at our family, we were normal—whatever “normal” means (it means something different to everyone). My childhood appeared to be rather uneventful. Our small two-story house was nestled in a quiet suburban neighborhood in Stratford, Ontario, Canada. My mom and stepdad worked hard at their blue-collar jobs to provide for our family. Our block was home to kids of all ages, and we played together all the time.

Just about every day someone knocked at my front door to ask if I could come out and play or if they could come in and play with me at my house. Didn’t have to ask me twice. My friends and I rode bikes. We hung out at the jungle gym of the elementary school just down the block. I went over to my friends’ houses and we ate homemade chocolate chip cookies while making Lite-Brite art, playing with fruity-scented Strawberry Shortcake dolls, or trying to figure out the Rubik’s Cube. My friend Robbie and I organized block parades with the kids in the neighborhood. We even put on plays with the other kids when we were older. We’d write our own scripts, sell tickets door-to-door, and perform on a makeshift stage I owned.

I had birthday parties with loads of colorful balloons and presents, and I’d always invite all the kids from the neighborhood. I played with Cabbage Patch Kids and stuffed animals. I had stupid elementary school crushes on boys. When it snowed in the winter (and it snowed a lot), my siblings and I made snowmen and forts. We took family vacations on occasion; we even went to Florida one year. We hosted our extended family for Thanksgiving and stuffed ourselves with delicious food. We decorated the tree for Christmas and battled the malls for presents.

On the outside, our life was normal. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing unusual. Nothing suspect. But underneath all the apparent normalcy, I was enduring many years of sexual abuse.

My earliest sexual memory is of what started out as an innocent game of doctor, minus the stethoscope and medicine bag. As with many of the other incidents, I can recapture only blurry details, as if the incident happened in a fog. But even in light of the fuzzy remembering, the memories are still there.

I remember lying on a table. I was about three years old. Older kids were present, familiar faces. Anxiety filled the air, like a dark secret was about to be exposed. I was playing the role of a patient, expecting the “doctor” to diagnose some scary disease. Someone held a thermometer, I assumed to check how high my pretend fever was.

I wasn’t prepared for what came next. The thermometer was inserted in places in my body where it didn’t belong. I remember feeling gross. It felt wrong. Strangely, though I don’t have any specific memories of incidents prior to this time, I remember feeling like it had happened before. Like I had been touched in a similar way at another time. I don’t know for sure about that. What I do know is that it would not be the last time.

I knew my molester. He was a familiar face in my circle of family, community, and friends. Trust is broken when someone you know, someone you are supposed to feel safe around and with, does things and makes you do things that hurt. That feel wrong. That confuse you. That are perverse.

I was five years old. I was carefully choosing the prettiest crayons to use on the next page of my coloring book when he walked into the room where I played. He wasn’t wearing any clothes. The crayon that was just about to shade a colorless sun a warm yellow slipped through my hands and fell to the floor with an echoing thud. I was confused and scared. I was shocked.

Why is he naked? Why is he showing me his private parts?

I don’t know how I was directed to or what happened after it was over, but I ended up touching him. I didn’t want to; I just followed his lead. I did as I was told. Just like a good little girl.

For the next five years, his inappropriate touching continued. And for the next five years, I kept quiet, confused by the physical attention. I was confused by the way he would caress my skin, the parts of my body that were always covered in public for a reason—they were private.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t my only molester. During the same time period a second molester entered my life. Another person I knew. Another person I trusted.

I remember his hands reaching out to pull down my underwear. My body stiffened. I had no defense. I was helpless.
Again? Oh, God. Why me?

Other times we were in a quiet room. Though we were behind closed doors, at times we were only a few feet away from adults. Adults who could have been watching TV. Or eating. Or talking on the phone. Or cleaning up. Or reading the paper. Adults doing normal, everyday things. I could hear doors open and slam shut. I could hear footsteps. I could hear talking. I sometimes heard people nearby, people I hoped would rescue me or would care enough to even notice something bad was happening close by. But no one did.

The abandonment that overwhelmed my heart as a little girl who watched her daddy walk away was quickly morphing into something bigger than me. I couldn’t see it at the time, but hindsight, as we know, is always 20/20. As I look back, I can see a child who felt sad. Unwanted. Unloved. Unlovable. Those feelings grew like a fungus and made me hungry for attention.

I knew the sexual touch was wrong, but in a warped way I didn’t mind so much. Don’t misunderstand me—I didn’t
like
what was happening. But I wanted so desperately to find and grab hold of a sense of being loved and wanted. No matter what it looked like, no matter where it came from.

I was sexually violated so many times that as the years went by it began to feel normal. It’s a strange marriage—knowing something is wrong yet at the same time finding it familiar and commonplace. By the time I was in my mid teens, I was sick of asking the same questions over and over again:
What’s wrong with me? What am I doing to attract sexual attention? Why am I such a magnet for abuse?

Maybe it was that obvious. Maybe, just maybe, I thought, I was made for sex. Maybe I was just a dirty girl. At one point I even toyed around with the idea of becoming a prostitute or a stripper. It seemed to fit the mold my life was creating for me.

You can’t help thinking these crazy things when sexual abuse rears its ugly head time and time again. It’s like a Whac-A-Mole game. No matter how hard you hit it to keep it down, the mole keeps popping up. My life was littered with perversions from so many different kinds of abusers—young and old, male and female, familiar faces and those I barely knew.

When I think about some of the events today, it’s like an explosion goes off and I see one moment frozen in time. One scene. One foggy face. I know what’s happening, but I don’t see intricate detail. I’ve learned that’s normal. Like most victims of sexual abuse, I had to forget some parts of the events in order to survive. It’s a defense mechanism. My mind wouldn’t allow me to remember the play-by-play because I couldn’t handle it. Most people can’t.

But some things are impossible to forget.

Sometimes when I close my eyes, I can see a girl from school. She is trying to teach me about pleasure. A pleasure that doesn’t come from dolls and roller skates and hugs from Grandma. A pleasure I don’t understand. She is showing me things about my body beyond my level of maturity. I can barely master writing a full sentence, but I know how to make myself feel good.

I close my eyes and I can see a neighborhood girl coming over to play. We had a gigantic plastic car in our backyard, probably belonging to Chris or Chuck. We’re making up stories about going on a long drive into the sunset with our Prince Charming. Then the mood shifts, and she is taking our little kid fun to an adult level. A level that makes me feel uncomfortable and dirty.

After she finishes, I feel guilty. I think about church. About how I asked Jesus to come into my heart. I am ashamed. What have I done? God must be disappointed. Maybe He even hates me. The worry is crushing. I tell this girl, “I don’t want to do this. God can see us. He knows what we’re doing. And it’s wrong.”

My protests fall on deaf ears. She rolls her eyes and reassures me. “Pattie, God’s too busy to be bothered by us.” I don’t know why her reply makes sense to me, but it does. It’s a convenient justification to excuse what was being done to me. And it seems about right. I do what many of us do—I compare my heavenly Father to my earthly father. If my dad doesn’t care about me, why should God? If my daddy is too busy for me, why should God be interested in my life or what I am doing?

And then there was a babysitter when I was ten. He was only a few years older than me. As we sat in front of the TV watching ALF, the furry little alien guy who had a knack for annoying the heck out of Willie Tanner, the babysitter asked if I could model for him. My eyes lit up. Model? Of course! I was a theatrical nut, born to sing, dance, and act. Walking down a pretend runway and wearing pretend designer duds sounded like fun.

But he wasn’t interested in the funky outfits I would choose. Or my dramatic catwalk. Or the bright red, supermodel-worthy lipstick I would put on. It was my body he wanted to look at.

The first time I took off to the bedroom to change out of my clothes, he stopped me. With a wide grin he said, “Don’t change in there. Bring your clothes out in the living room.” He pointed directly to the empty space in front of him. “Change right here.”

He immediately saw the confused look on my face and dove into some serious persuading. He managed to convince me I would be safe with him, that because he was trusted enough to watch me, he could be trusted to see me take my clothes off. “No big deal,” he assured me.

On one hand, I felt disturbed. On the other hand, I was so used to being objectified that I didn’t give it much thought. Being naked and being touched in private places was my normal, so the babysitter’s request was familiar territory to me.