Cauldron Anthology Issue 9: They Who Were Spurned cauldron9finalproof | Page 12

down her heart. My own journals from that year—steeped in daily sermons and inundations of male
justification at Bible College—are filled with the same misguided and self-immolating pleadings.
She only mentioned me once in this journal (a child is, by its very nature, intrinsically narcissistic in
relation to its mother). She wrote how hurt she was that I forgot her birthday, didn’t send a card.

Once. I forgot my mother’s birthday once.
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I don’t want to discuss the predatory behavior of the men in my life, in my mother’s life, in
my family, anymore. I’m tired of telling those stories. What I want to discuss is the impact of sexual
assault.

How it makes emotional intimacy unattainable because self-worth becomes a mirage. How
it creates an embedded shame that ensures sex can never, ever be what it might have been. How in
order to reach orgasm, each and every time, I had to climb over a wall of innate resistance, leap over
a moat of fear, because my body betrayed me as a child and responded with physical pleasure to hei-
nous acts. How I never learned to live inside my skin, much less love that skin. How I bought into the
lie for so long, that a woman’s validity exists only in her appeal to and connections with men. How all
these responses oozed into and throttled the way I loved my daughters.

How sexual assault is not just a crime committed. It is consignment to a lifetime of
consequences.
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It takes weeks to work up the fortitude to read my mother’s journal from 1979. I need
something stronger than a cup of coffee in my hand.

This journal is the hardest to read because it documents a Christian marriage conference my
parents attended one weekend. My mother filled the pages with notes from lectures and letters writ-
ten as homework exercises addressed to my father with assorted pet names, like hubbymate, lover-
boy, beloved husband. Hard because of the hindsight I bring to the pages about who my father was,
who he is: a sexual predator. Hard because 1979 is the year my daughter was born, the grandchild
who would become one of his victims.

The grief that suffuses my heart because my mother loved him so much. The outrage that
boils up from my stomach because she loved him in spite of who she knew him to be and that her
love for him hid that knowledge from her family at great peril. But my mother performed a lifetime
of secrets covering for exploitive men, and as a consequence hid her true self from her children. She
didn’t acknowledge her father’s abuse when she was a child until I told her what he did to me.
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Cauldron Anthology