Childhood Sexual Trauma Healing, for Auckland: There Was No Grand Gesture

A note before you read: this story talks about childhood sexual abuse and includes strong language. If you need support, help is listed at the bottom of this page.

This one’s a tough write.

Tough because people want to know how I dealt with this and most don’t seem happy with how I did. Tough because I don’t know if it will be helpful. Tough because I think I’ll sound weak when I tell it.

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Maybe tough because I don’t want to have to sit and think about this crap again and it is messy to tell.

It was and still is, a process. Every time I have a challenging day or I’m dealing with the consequences of my broken marriage and life, my immediate response toward Fred and Rosemary is: “I WANT TO FUCKING KILL YOU.”

When asked if I have family back in Australia, I say, “A sister, I am orphaned.” If I talk about my parents I don’t call them my parents. I call them Fred and Rosemary the people who raised me.

When the memories came back, I didn’t confront Fred and Rosemary about them. I was in the U.S., and they were back in Australia. I don’t know why I didn’t.

I suppose I wanted to believe that if I saw and talked to them again that they’d apologize, and we would mend as a family. I know that’s hard for some to understand, but for so many years all I wanted was to be loved and accepted by them. I use to imagine them telling me they were proud of me, like they were my sister.

I was in my mid-40’s and still needing and wanting that affirmation. My inability to confront and break those ties put a further strain on my first marriage. We didn’t have a lot of interaction with them outside of the occasional video call, but the kids still had attachments to them and asked about them.

My reluctance to deal with the situation, I am sure lead to my then-wife losing further respect for me. I was all about men protecting their families, and she probably felt I was leaving a door open to wolves.

One day we got a call from the State Department that my then-wife won the Green Card Lottery. The odds had been so high against us winning it, we were unprepared, and we had to leave within 14 days. Tickets were expensive and hotels and rental cars in Sydney were ridiculously priced.

My then-wife didn’t want me to tell Fred and Rosemary that we were coming. I made all sorts of excuses as to why we had to see them, how they could help us with cars and accommodation, money, etc. but deep down I was probably hoping for that apology.

I didn’t tell Fred and Rosemary when we were coming in. I wanted to get the Green Card done, and I wanted to have a chat with my little sister, Mary. Life had been tough for her too.

She had been in therapy for 20 years. She was beautiful and smart, but filled with self-loathing. I always imagined it was something akin to survivor’s guilt.

From my very first memory of abuse, there was always a choice involved and a decision I had to make, “We can do this to you or Mary. You can come with us, or we will take Mary, you decide.”

I always let them take me. Later in life, I would easily take the blame for any infraction, supposed or real, and suffer the consequences for it. I just wanted to protect my sister.

I never talked about any of this with her until one Sunday afternoon when we got together at a rooftop beer garden overlooking Sydney Harbor.

As we sat and talked, I opened up to her about John-A-Geddon and all I had remembered. I went through story after story. Instead of being shocked, she was amazed.

She said she remembered all that stuff, but thought she had made it up. She had been in therapy because of the fake memories. Then she started to fill in the other half of the story for me.

She told me about other things that had happened that she remembered. That night I cried with relief. I felt like I had received confirmation that I wasn’t crazy or delusional, and I hadn’t made anything up.

The conversation with Mary forced me to realize I needed to confront my parents, but I still lacked the strength. For me it was all in the past; I didn’t want to go over the stuff again. Sadly, I still craved and needed their affection and approval.

Another nail in the marriage coffin. But then, they started after my boy.

It began subtly at a museum one day. My then-wife told me that Rosemary approached her and asked if Noah had a learning disability, then turned around and walked off. About 30 minutes later, she came back and asked her if we had ever tested him for autism and again went away.

She came back a third time and took Noah for a little stroll to look at dinosaurs. We found them hidden in an alcove, and my son was crying. Grandma was in the middle of a rant about how all boys are stupid and useless and good for nothing and not necessary in the world, and Grandma would teach him how to be a good boy and how to make her and all the other women happy.

When confronted, Rosemary very cleverly and convincingly explained how we had misheard the conversation. She was a grandmother and grandmothers would never say something like that about little boys.

She made a point of telling us how she had raised me, and that she was a university scholar and prominent educator who knew how important it was to build young boys’ confidence and that she would never do anything to hurt him. My then-wife took him away, and I stood paralyzed by a new set of memories of having been made to stand in front of my mothers’ friends to justify my very existence.

I talked to my sister about what had happened, and she told me an identical story but with an additional twist. Every time Fred and Rosemary minded her children, she would come home, and her son would be angry and in tears. Rosemary would just brush it off as “little boys get like that.”

Then Mary noticed that when he was home and made a mistake or she corrected him for doing something wrong, he would start to scream things like, “I am useless. I’m rotten. I’m a fucking little retard!”

He was 6. Then there was her daughter. Fred accused her of being a sexual pervert.

He accused her of grinding her vagina up and down his leg using it to masturbate. She was 9. My sister all this time blamed herself.

Maybe she was a bad mother? Maybe this was just a little girl’s sexual inquiry? Maybe it was her marriage?

But now we both were confronted with how Rosemary and Fred were actively grooming our children.

As I write this, I feel like such a wimp. I want to write it differently so you, the perfect stranger I will probably never meet, will think highly of me, but I can’t. There was no grand gesture; no epic standoff.

I wish my narrative was, “I confronted Fred, beat his arse, bitch-slapped Rosemary and dragged them to court,” but it isn’t. Instead, we packed up and moved about two hours outside of Sydney to my wife’s parents’ place to wait for the Embassy’s decision on our Green Cards. I told Fred and Rosemary we had left the country.

I needed to protect my son, but I still couldn’t bring myself to confront them.

As I write this, I realize that this tiny little stance, this BOLD move of slinking away, was the start of my journey out of my past. It was, as I sat on a little chair outside that 200 square foot cabin at night by the beach, when I started to write poetry. It was there that I penned my very first piece, “Rain.”

It was there that I probably started to heal by allowing myself to get healthfully angry as I had time to reflect on what I had learned and what had happened.

You might find my book #dealwithit: Duct Tape for the Soul useful.

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This is for personal reflection, not medical or crisis advice.