All week, all month, or more? I’ve been being stripped of all my
support systems and feeling more and more out there ‘alone’ though I am very
aware that Christ is with me and the Spirit residing within. It has been
a difficult time because my dad’s passing seemes to have started a cascade of
events that has led me to this seemingly complete ‘aloneness’. (other
than my friend Tracy)
My dad (my adoptive step dad) was always on my side. He was
my go to man when I needed someone to lean on. The thing is, that he was
also one of the people that abused me as a young girl. That’s probably a
difficult thing to reconcile for a lot of people, not that it is general
knowledge. But for my part, because of Christ Jesus my heart has the
ability to love and forgive and lay aside what would have been a festering
wound the rest of my whole life if I had not. He was human and made
mistakes but he became a brother in the Lord and he made every effort to live
accordingly especially these past years when they lived out here in this
area. That whole situation was one reason that I had made a conscious
decision to life far away from my family though when they were young.
My mother, the victim of her own father’s sexual abuse has never been
a nurturing mother to me. She was and still is incapable of giving or
receiving love. She does not know how and refuses to discuss it other
than the one time, when she came home from the hospital that day and stood in
my house looking around. She said “Jeanne, I don’t know you” and that I
think was one of the first and only honest things that I have ever heard from
her. She is so damaged that she is not willing to be real with
anyone. I have known about this for years and have given her great latitude
because of it in terms of my expectations for our relationship. So when
you ask about her, I have a difficult time trying to say in normal conversation
that she is fine, for who and where she is. Her dad abused her from
infancy up into her teens. I am actually amazed that she is at all
sane. He was also my abuser but fortunately I had a lot less frequent
exposure to him because usually we only visited there on our summer
vacation. And he died when I was about 9 or 10.
My older brother I have suspected of also being one of his victims
because of his twisted sexually predatory behavior. I got the brunt of
that perversion from my brother also as a young girl and I was not the only one because now he is a convicted
felon. He is on wife # 6 or 7 - I have lost count. I have forgiven him,
but have realized even more so lately that to be near him is detrimental to my
wellbeing since he sees no fault in himself and sees no reason to ask for or
seek forgiveness, or to change.
For some reason my younger brother seems to have been spared from
any of this sexually perverted family history. At least in the sense that
he does not exhibit any signs of having been molested and he has had a stable
married relationship for about 25 years or more.
You may be wondering why I am airing my families dirty laundry to
you. My answer is that it is because I wanted to explain (not excuse) my
actions when I was young. I was very angry and rebellious and hurt and
yet trying to establish my own independence which was poorly demonstrated in my
lack of sexual discretion. I was so very angry because of the hurt I had
suffered from the men in my life that I lashed out at all men, by promiscuous
sexual activity which was damaging to myself but also to those that I was
with. It is a cop out for me to simply blame it on the times and place
that I lived in, or on my family or history. I had a choice and I made a
poor one. It did not occur to me until today that anyone back then might
have actually cared about me. It did not occur to me that I might have
hurt anyone. I was so wrapped up in myself that I never stopped to think
about anyone else but me. I hated myself, did not believe that I was
worthy of being cared about and thought that all I was good for was being used
that way.
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