I had a break through yesterday, thanks to my blogging about it so openly. So I'm going to continue doing so. Before I do, I want to say just a few things.
Firstly, to those of you out there who may be feeling like you wish you knew what to say to me but don't and might be feeling guilty about reading in silence- I know exactly how you feel and I am releasing you from your guilt. Be free of that. You are fine just reading along.
Secondly, to those who do know what to say and wish to say it, thank you so much for your courage and sympathy. However, because I don't want to risk the possibility to having to process the wrong feedback on top of what I'm already having to process, I won't be checking my e-mail inbox or even facebook until I feel ready to, which could take weeks. So please don't worry if you don't hear back from me, your words are just waiting for the right time to be heard.
To those of you still in the church I grew up in, you are my dear friends and I want you to know that I don't think anything less of you because you are lead to worship and follow after God in that church. We all have our path. I also don't think that my experience of the church is in anyway the definitive experience, in fact even I received many good things from the church as well as the hurtful things. In fact, for as long as I've been blogging I have been deliberately holding back from blogging about the church for fear of alienating or offending my readers who still attend it. I'm giving myself the freedom to express what I need to now.
Lastly, those of you that are happy and fulfilled and have good things in your life, like children or pregnancies, please don't not in the slightest even feel tempted to feel guilty for being happy and for sharing that happiness.
After I blogged, I realized that whenever I thought of the future and having children, I was assuming that the sexual abuse was, by then, in some way, negated, finished. Like by the time I reached that point in my life the abuse would be all over by then, in some far distant path.
But now I'm realizing that there is no past so distant and no stretch of time so wide as to free me from the abuse. That abuse is always going to be the terms and conditions of every single experience I live through.
Like those car commercials where you see the giant writing which accompanies the shouting:
"SEVENTY PERCENT OFF!!!!!! ZERO DOWN!!!!!!"
And then a whole screen full of tiny writing goes scrolling quickly by which undermines everything.
I can, and will, continue to not define my life by the abuse. But initially, everything is. I'm always going to have to move away from the original, abusive definition of myself until the day I die.
So, in a way this is good because I don't have to feel like a failure for having to wrestle with it again and again and again. It's because the messages from the abuse as written right into my DNA, as it were. I'm always going to be thrown back to it.
In another way, it's sickening and makes me feel furiously angry that my abuser should have so much power over the rest of my future. It makes me want to cut his balls off with garden sheers and stuff them in his mouth. But he's dead, so that's not really an option.
That's why I'm so depressed when thinking about the future. Or partly why. There's no real escape from this. I guess I assumed that there would be. I must have been operating on the assumption that at one point in my life I would be completely free and now, I have to give that up, because it's not true. It's not real.
That's what's contributing to my idea that the future might hold nothing but further, pointless suffering. Pointless, I guess, because it's never really done with. I just have to reprocess it in a new way, in a new context. Which, I have to be honest, undermines my vision of God's redemption. It must mean that there is no true redemption possible in this life. It must be waiting in the next one.
That's it. I have no further insight into that aspect of my life right now. I just have to go on living in the uncomfortable, depressing question until I get more of the answer.
However, I did think of something else yesterday. I was thinking about the generations of my family that were caught up in sexual abuse, like a family curse. Three generations, at least, on my mother's side, two on my fathers.
My maternal grandparents had very little help or resource in their life, so could not truly help or protect their children. Consequently, my mother had little resource in her own life. In fact, her memories of abuse were repressed until she was forty years old, which was mostly too late to protect the next generation.
However, because she had the incredible courage and fortitude to pursue healing for over a decade, she blazed a path ahead that I was able to follow, in my late twenties. Because of her courage, I didn't have to wait until I was forty to begin to heal and I had a partner and support in the healing process.
So you can see that with each generation, the abuse has less and less hold. And, let's say I don't get pregnant and Keith and I pursue the fost/adopt route. It's almost a given that without a permanent home, those children would experience abuse. So by snatching them out, by God marking them as my own children, I would be literally stopping abuse from ever happening at all.
So, if that is true, then in three generations we would go from complete silence and suffering under the abuse to completely negating it. I would be reversing their fate before the terrible things even had a chance to happen. Which would be something profound, I think.
But I don't put too much weight in this, because if I do, I may set myself up for feeling guilty for having a biological child, which would be ridiculous. A person could get tied up in knots thinking through all the options, and I steadfastly refuse as much as possible. At the right time, the right children will be given into my care, whether through conception or adoption.
I don't know how much more I'll be blogging for the next two weeks, not that I've been prolific lately, of course. Today I'm going to pick up my brother Tim at the airport. I would be totally stoked about this if I wasn't so nervous about the drive to the airport. But I'll be fine. And then, after about a week, we'll all be driving up to New Hampshire together. I plan to deeply enjoy every minute, if it's at all a choice.
