Survivors' Story

My name is Stephanie. I am 37 years old. I was abused from ten years of age until I was fourteen.

My abuser was a man my mother was having an affair with. He was about a decade younger than her. She not only involved us overtly into her infidelity; she exposed us to a predator that pursued the ewe because of her lambs. He was bi-polar and manic-depressive; he was also addicted to valium. He would lapse into depressive states often after he’d abused me.
He had also given me valium as well to facilitate his acts—especially in the beginning. He was always apologetic; despite his spending much time convincing me before his lapses of conscience that this was most normal and natural.

I was a largely neglected child. My mother is a wholly selfish and willful being. She spent most of our childhood pursuing her own agenda; my father persistently furious at her transgressions, well aware of her affairs, but wholly impotent in his rage. He was physically violent with her and with us. This caustic environment created the perfect opportunity for a child-predator to slip into the fray in the guise of a caring guardian. I was the youngest, the most ignored, and the most naïve. A deer in headlights.

I never told my mother what he did, because I know she would simply call me a liar and refuse to believe it. In her mind, this man was a saint. He was the ‘love of her life’. I feel that her abject denial would be more damaging to me than her so-called ignorance. My mother found his ‘fatherly’
interest in me very convenient for her; it afforded her more freedom and less responsibility. I was left at his home after school more often than not. He picked me up from school sometimes, and drove me around, and I was sent away with him alone on weekends to his house in the countryside. It started with innocent things, like baths together and cuddling. It culminated into events like my waking up in a blind panic because I was being crushed under his weight; he’d fallen asleep on top of me. I suffered continually with urinary tract infections and then began to suffer from depression myself. My already shoddy appearance, personal pride and self-esteem suffered further. I started skipping school—vast amounts of time lost from the classroom. Sometimes I would spend the entire day in the restroom locked in a stall. I began to struggle with my weight, which I still do now. Never once did my mother or my father for that matter, ever stop to wonder what was happening to me. It never set off any alarms in my mother’s head that there was something improper about sending a young girl away with an unrelated, grown man for a weekend. I really think she knows; but with pride like hers she’d probably cut her own head off rather than confess what she’d allowed simply to keep her lover. His flattering attentions to her were apparently worth the price of her daughter’s innocence.

For many years, I have blamed myself for allowing it to happen; to willingly step into his home after school, to care enough to cry whenever he was hospitalized for an overdose of valium. It took me years to understand why I trusted him, why I allowed him to ‘love’ me when nobody else took the time to, to smile at him when he gave me sandwiches and valium-laced hot-cocoa after school (he confessed this tactic to me once just before it all stopped.; it was to help me, he’d told me, to deal with the stress of my parents’ violent marriage). I am at peace with that part now—the part where I forgive myself. He was so doting, so loving, so giving to a child who had no allies, no attention, no friends, no self-esteem. In my situation, I can’t imagine any child would easily see the forest for the trees. We all seek nurturing. It’s our nature. And he offered it; along with less selfless actions to boot.

But the biggest crime is that he deprived me of the chance to confront him or charge him for what he did. When I was fourteen; on a particularly bad day (he had many downs in my presence), he went upstairs after serving me an afternoon tartine, and climbed up to the second floor, took out one of his many vintage firearms, loaded it, put the nozzle in his mouth and blew out the back of his head while I was downstairs. I don’t remember much from that day, except I woke up at home, completely alone, and completely numb.
I remember standing there wooden and indifferent, while my mother drowned in her outpouring of grief, seeking empathy from me for her terrible, terrible loss.

To this day, I have never wept, nor do I feel sorrow for his death. Not a shred. It sounds cruel, I know, it was a life, but at my age now, when my brain forces me to relive again and again moments of his transgressions and humiliations with vivid clarity, I am only filled with anger that he was such a coward—that he scarred my entire life simply to satisfy a sexual need. That much selfishness is hard for me to understand. I think sometimes that it’s why my mother loved him so; because she sensed someone as selfish as she in him. What he did to me continues to affect every aspect of my life; my marriage, my job, my continual battle with depression and weight. A day doesn’t go by where I don’t see mental images of him in one action or other, goading me, whispering to me, raping me, crushing me, touching me. It’s like he never died. He just follows me everywhere.
There’s no escaping him.

I have a very bitter, rage-tinted perception of pedophiles now. I see them at the same level of murderers. I think they should all be lined up on a wall and shot. The waste laid by their passing is long-lasting and terrible. One or two transgressions can equal ruination of a life, of future marriages, of sexual identity, fear of parenthood, of libidos, of normality.
And they so wantonly act without the slightest hesitation; they are so rooted in their selfish desires.

They fool themselves in thinking it’s just play; just love, just affection—that’s what children want.

They selectively dismiss the fact that this is the kind of affection that spurs attempts of suicide to make the memories and humiliation and self blame stop.

Stephanie