Monthly Archives: November 2011

“Thank-you…Doesn’t Seem to Say Enough”

When I posted my last piece about my “secret”…I had no idea the kind of response I would get especially from my Twitter followers. I know how hard it is to go through any amount of time, thinking that people won’t understand…people won’t accept…people will think that I’m damaged goods now…and about a hundred other negative things that we fill our minds with… instead of concentrating on the one most important thing…I’m here…I survived…

There are people who are out there who want to help…One of the things that I’ve discovered is that it is an awful place in existence for someone who has buried it …whose abuser got away with it…those who have gone on year after year not talking about it….not dealing with it…Those are the ones..I try to reach out to…

A child can be healed….with love and therapy…They can be helped to move away from the trauma. They can grow up and lead normal lives. But my fellow victims….the ones who were too afraid to speak out when it happen…the ones who thought they could run far enough away from it…put so many years between the horror and their present world, find out (usually the hard way) that it never leaves you…If you can’t confront the pain…the anguish…the feelings of guilt and revenge…than no amount of time and distance….no walls you build will ever be high enough and the sadness in you for the childhood  that was taken from you, will fester and grow until it consumes you…

It doesn’t have to be that way…There are so many groups and agencies… some people who have been through it and made it….others who are trained to help someone deal with this kind of ultra-personal hell. It doesn’t matter if you think you waited too long….there is no expiration on this kind of suffering.

It was almost 20 years after the fact for me…the 1st person I shared with was a friend and he helped me to realize that I needed to open up to others as well. The more you put it out there…the fog of self-doubt and bitter confusion lifts. It takes awhile and even though I did spend some time with a therapist…my greatest help for me, came when I started helping others. At first it was just helping at shelters and on some phone banks…but the one thing that the effects of child abuse teaches us is that if left buried it can not only make you  miserably unhappy….it could also cause you to abuse someone as well….

I know that last part is very hard to hear but the statistics prove the fact and when I found out that I was going to have a baby….I was terrified that I might one day hurt him…The counselor I met with at a free clinic was so kind and wonderful…She let me know that just by the fact that I had come there and was concerned about what kind of mother I would be that I had taken a first step to prevent it.  

I didn’t require years of therapy but it was awhile before I came to my present understanding about myself and the world I occupy…My best advice to you..I stated in my last writing….Don’t let the bastards win !!!! You are a special individual who went through a most terrible ordeal but you can find a place within you to put it…out of sight and out of reach of your happiness…

Don’t be afraid anymore…come out from the shadows and let others help…There’s no such thing as ” It was a long time ago”. You do deserve to laugh…smile and enjoy life.

Thank-you doesn’t seem like enough to say to you,all…you have helped me to remember all those special people who helped me when I needed it. You’ve reminded me that it never ends…this battle against the evil ones who hurt our children. So many suffer everyday…We must not let them slip away from us…

Seek out any local agencies in your area…if you want to volunteer your time or have come to that moment where you are ready to share your truths with someone. There are non-profits….churches…hospitals that offer help…don’t be afraid..you have already survived  now it’s time to live and be a part. I have been contacted by several awesome online groups that are working to raise awareness and help our children and their families… One such group to follow or join Childhelp… they are striving to make gains in protecting children & families from child abuse: http://bit.ly/cMj5tr

                                         Be safe….Be well, my dear sweet friends.

“It Was My Secret To Tell”

When I started writing again, the first thing I noticed was that I have way too much stuff in my head that I could write about…Such a quandary not knowing what would be of any relevance to any one other than my near and dear ones…Than a follower on Twitter asked me a question which I did try to answer but 140 characters is sometimes torture for a long winded broad like me. A few days later , a similar question was put to me…both based on a tweet that I try to re-tweet at least once a day when I can…

As a victim who survived I urge you to please help #StopChildAbuse ~Report It ! Donate a tweet a day. http://JustCoz.org/helpspreadthis

Maybe it’s because of what’s been in the news lately…maybe it’s just because it is the whole world’s dirty little secret that a lot of the children on this planet live in fear…but I did open the door when I put it out there that I was not only a victim but also one who survived… The question was posed again and I promised to try and answer it.

I have started and stopped….deleted and re-assessed this piece over 30 times so far. The mere fact that I have had such difficulty putting into print something that I have lived with my entire conscious life fills me with such a sense of uncomfortable confusion as it is a subject I have spoken on….counseled on…for the most part had thought it had become no more than a teaching tool for me now….and yet…over 30 times ?

Granted it was a secret that started when I was only 5 years old …and other than one very sweet and caring family doctor… it stayed buried deep within me until I reached my 26th year of life… it was also something that I had thought I faced and dealt with a long time ago but apparently scars that may appear to be healed… are still a bit sensitive to the touch…

I was born into a somewhat lower middle-class family. We never went without the necessities but my father worked two jobs….sometimes three to provide for us. Our house was small and always filled to over-capacity as my father took in stray or stranded children the way some people take in cats…There was even a while there when I couldn’t tell who was or wasn’t one of my siblings. The school year was like an exercise in military efficiency (my father had been a drill sergeant in the Army)…we all had our schedules and amazingly it left my mother with, in her words, just enough “alone” time to keep the house and everything else in order…I know now though how hard it was on her…at one time she had three of us under five…(funny how it sometimes takes becoming a parent to appreciate one)

It’s my understanding that it was in the summer time…when school was out and there weren’t enough activities to keep us all busy…a choice was made that there would be summer camp when we could afford it or  they would pass us out for visiting trips to relatives… for what was really only a few weeks during those hot months…and that would  help my mother keep her sanity and even allow for some much needed romantic moments for her and my Dad…I know all this now but back then …well, not so much…

My Grandparents lived on a farm and for city kids, it was fun for the first few days after that it would kind of lose it’s charm…and while the older kids could do chores and stuff …my grandmother didn’t seem to have time or patience with 5 year old “too fidgety” me…I remember sitting in a big rocking chair on the porch doing nothing…being asked to be quiet was something I remember hearing a lot as a kid.

An Aunt and Uncle came for a visit and offered to take me off her hands for awhile…It was confusing in my young eyes to keep getting passed off, especially when my Uncle sat me on his lap and whispered in my ear as he wrapped his arms around me…”nobody wants you but me”… I remember it clear because it was his mantra…he repeated over and over to me whenever he could…always softly…always whispering so no one else could hear…He would add things like “I don’t understand why your mommy says you’re a bad little girl. I think you’re a good girl”…”They said we could keep you but if you’re good I’ll let you go home.”

 For the next few weeks I stayed with them…even though they had other children, I ended up being alone with my Uncle a lot….His hands….his fingers….the fowl odor of his breath…burned forever in my mind…not just from that brief two weeks but for the countless weeks and years that occurred after it…I will not describe anymore of the details as they are something that I do not desire to see in print…for four years he had his way with me…each summer visit made longer than the last…telling me how my mother really didn’t like me…how my father was too busy to be bothered with me but that uncle loved me and that as long as I did what he said and was good…he would make sure that my family didn’t give me away…He had good fuel for this as I did have a foster brother and had been told that his other family hadn’t loved him enough and that’s why he was going to live with us. How cunning these kind of perpetrators are…and how once violated… how openly vulnerable an innocent child is…

My time with my family became so unreal to me….I was the “perfect” child….did all my chores…never fussed…teachers actually sent home notes telling my parents I was too quiet but my grades were exceptional….I was most often found in a corner reading a book ( stories that could take me places and let me pretend that all was right with the world).I sometimes felt like I was only watching my family and not really a part any longer.I would cry about only one thing….not wanting to go away when the summer month of July came around but I was soon to realize that I wasn’t safe at home anymore either…

It was as if there was an invisible label on my back saying “Easy Target“…because two years into the summer “visits” with my Uncle…a so-called family friend began spending evenings at our house and offering to tuck us in at bedtime…spending more time with me than any others…he always acted as if I needed to be comforted or loved….as if I wasn’t…I’ll never know if he had somehow talked to my uncle or if people like this have some kind of radar but it sadly became a part of what I expected and my silence was necessary so that I wouldn’t be sent away for being bad.

Still not quite sure how two different perverts in two different cities managed to molest the same little girl but they did…The stopping point came when I was nine years old…( I did go through a period where I thought a higher power had intervened in a most strange way)…a cold turned into strep throat and went untreated which led to Rheumatic Fever…I was in a coma for weeks and than stuck in a bed for almost six months…All the attention that I got quickly buried the brainwashing notion that my father and mother didn’t love me or want me around.

The family friend stopped coming around…and my uncle…well…I had to put up with him awhile longer…but his tactics changed as I guess he knew his mantra wouldn’t work on me anymore…He told me that if my father were to find out what had happened between us that my father would kill my uncle and than go to prison for the rest of his life.He told me that my father would never be able to look at me again because I had done such bad things…Oh, how evil is the mind of an adult with such power over a child…I was only 10 at this time and still very much in this man’s control. He no longer even tried to touch me but he had a stare that at holidays and family events  usually sent me looking for a place to hide…I became the quiet non-social one…I became an outsider looking in with my family…but I kept the secret…

There was a part of me that resented my mother for not knowing what had happened to me…Our relationship spent years strained and distant…My father could do no wrong in my eyes…I somehow felt I was protecting him by keeping the secret…I was closer to him than any of the other children…He confided in me…trusted me…there came a time when I knew I had to tell him…but kept putting it off..there would be time later…He died suddenly of a massive heart attack at the young age of 53… a piece of my heart breaks every time I realize that I betrayed him by not believing that he would love me no matter what.

A year later, I got up the courage to tell my mother…the look of pain in her eyes was almost more than I could bear…I had stayed away from family functions for over ten years by then and kept out of the family dramas…My uncle had been caught sexually abusing his own granddaughters and I know she didn’t mean to do it but my mother put a guilt trip on me of epic proportions making me feel that if I had told on him when I was a child… none of the others would of had to suffer…which also brought back memories of the family friend and put the thoughts of what other young lives had been hurt at his hand in my head.

This is where a lot of victims who like me, face a cross road…we can’t go back and change one damn thing about what had happened to us…and speaking up years after the fact bring a lot of mean, hateful things hurling towards us from those who don’t want to believe that anything you say is true…I did speak up…My aunt and her half of the family have pretty much let me know how much they hate me…The ex-family friend…was going through an ugly divorce…all I did was show up in court one day…I sat quietly in the back…He took one look at me and started to cry…in open court he told a judge that he was a bad man and that he no longer would fight for the custody of his kids…( one of which it turned out he was abusing)…

I call myself a survivor because I went on to volunteer at phone banks set up for abused children . I’ve worked with counselors to help victims know that they were not alone … that it was ok to report it….talk about it…hell, scream it from the roof tops if it’s helps…Silently suffering only helps the abusers… I might of had a problem writing about this but once I found it, my voice refused to stay silent. It is what it is and I have tried to use it for the better…

As soon as I knew that they could really understand me…I taught my sons that it was important to always talk to me about what was happening with them in regards to any interaction they might have with other adults. I might have been a bit over-protective of them when they were younger because of my past but I keep reminding them everyday that there isn’t anything they can’t tell me.. I refuse to feel sorry for myself…I refuse to let the past dictate whether I can live, love or laugh…I love life…I love people…I would not be me if I couldn’t keep an open heart and mind…I  have an unquenchable thirst for helping people…To do or be any other way than who you want to be… is to let the bastards continue to molesting your mind and even your very soul…

This was hard to write but I will have to admit that I am glad I did it…I hope that sharing it with you will turn out to be a good thing as well…

Now do me a favor…Give someone you love a hug and let them know you’re there if they need you :)

Need A Job But Don’t Want One Like Mine…Why ?

I am a member of a wonderful site called  “Daily Kos” It’s a place where citizen journalists, some politicians,famous people and us,regular folks come together to share written diaries based on a wide varity of subjects. You get to comment on what you read and get input from others on what you write. It’s very cool and I’ve learned alot there.

Recently, I read one that totally set me off (which is really hard to do as I am a bit of a reasonably rational person)…This person needed money…needed to find a job…

His ID is MinistryofTruth..He is an awesome writer and has been covering the Occupy Wall Street movement with a firey conviction that is powerful and informing but citizen journalism rarely pays…( he has even been on The ED show twice) though I’m sure it wasn’t his intent … his desciption of seemingly lowering his standards to apply at a McDonald’s was more that I could bare…

Technically, I don’t have a job. I am calling myself a freelance writer because that is the only way I can really explain how I have been sustaining myself for the last few months. I don’t get paid to make appearances, I just do it. What would be better for my future, to do what I am doing, or would I be better of going and getting a job at McDonald’s and go away?

Would all of these students across America be better off protesting astronomical tuition, or going and getting a job at McDonald’s?

How does a job at McDonald’s or Walmart help me pay off my student loans? ~MinistryOfTruth

 My Posted Comment :

I have a son…he has not one but three college degrees and can’t get a job in any of his fields right now. He works two jobs…One in retail and one in fast food…

He IS paying his college expenses….He IS working to help his family make ends meet…He IS still managing to find time to help out in our community….

I have worked in the restaurant industry for over 30 years…these past few have brought me pay cuts and loss in my benefits as well as loss in self-esteem because the Corporate bosses care more about the bottom line that workers and customers anymore….

I also am totally fed up with statements such as…

“They can be successful or flip burgers for a living”

“If they aren’t careful the only job they will find will entail asking “Do you want fries with that? “

“Stay in school or you’ll be selling burgers and fries for the rest of your life”

And there are more…be honest you’ve all heard them….
It doesn’t matter who said them…but it does matter that it is ignorant and hurtful…

We can’t see family this Thanksgiving…We have to work and really can’t afford to go. We will still spend time helping at our community kitchen and have found a Vet through the VFW that needed some help so we got him some turkey fixings this year…

I’m sorry for the rant but it’s just bad timing that I read this right now….

The place where I work has more than 10 job openings going un-filled…why ???

Maybe because it’s a job that everyone puts at the bottom of the list hoping that they will find something better… ~JMoore

The first response I wrote  was a bit heated and the internet gods must of caught me because just as I was about to hit send…I lost my connection…Hmmmm, someone trying to tell me something…I got back online and re-wrote my comment but this one was a bit more calmer…I do have a job while many others don’t… despite it’s flaws…I  like it and do it well…I knew that my comment would be lost though in the hundreds of replies that the diary had received…

I sat there disappointed that my thoughts would be buried… my youngest son noticed my frown and when I told him what was up….He said smiling…”Why don’t you put it on your blog ?”

Damn, who raised him ??? Such a smart young man…Thanks for letting me rant….

If you get a chance you really should check out The Daily Kos @ dailykos.com

Social Networks: Not Just For Fun Anymore

   Couldn’t sleep last Monday night…not an unusual thing for me. I got up to get a drink around 2 am…not wanting to laid back down, just to do more tossing and turning, I decided to sit down at the computer. Opening up my Twitter account, I found it exploding with tweets about the happenings at Occupy Wall Street…booted up a live stream offered and sat there watching the insanity unfold in front of my eyes.

  I turned on the TV…checking all the 24 hour news channels I had….nothing ! Back to the computer…A few journalists that I trust and follow were on…tweeting what info they could. The citizen journalists and bloggers at the park were the biggest source of knowledge as they were there…I sat amazed at how each one kept their composure as the chaos around them grew. I watched until the last stream lost feed…

  My sons were up and heading out for the day…when I told them what had happened they were shocked. Like me, they hadn’t learned about the OWS on the news but on the social networks and blogs that they were a part of. Weeks before a media outlet even bothered to speak of it…and here it was again refusing to go away quietly or at all….lighting up the internet globally…

  The happenings good and bad surrounding the Occupy movement as well as several past incidents involving the World Wide Web , such as Palin’s daughters getting into a Facebook war …Rep. Weiner’s Twitter drama…the new reality that you can be in a chat room and say something that starts a barrage of down right rude and crude things hurled in your direction  as well as some Blog-a-pheres that are so far from being fact oriented that the term “applied fiction” really should be placed somewhere on the pages…they’ve all made me take a step back and realize that the original premise of social networks being a fun, cool way to keep in touch with friends, family and perhaps  meet new fun,cool people has pretty much been dropped by the side of the cyber highway….It’s still has so many good aspects but the negatives are definitly catching up.

  Recently I read a wonderful piece by Sree Sreenivasan , a Columbia Journalism professor and a contributing editor for DNAinfo.com. It was about his experience with the infamous James O’Keefe. Mr. Sreenivasan was drawn in to this right wing nuts web through no actions of his own. How he handled himself and his insights were very awesome. I encourage you to follow the link and read it.  http://bit.ly/sj6SiF

  One of his points hit home with me…It was #3 in the list of 5 things he had learned…

ANYONE IN THE MEDIA CAN BE A TARGET THESE DAYS.

People like O’Keefe have it in for professional journalists. Combine that with the fact that everyone has a camera phone these days, we all need to be hyper-aware that what we are saying might be recorded, or tweeted or Facebooked. I am not saying we should be scared to have our own opinions and thoughts, but the possibility that we are being taped is all too real. Here’s what O’Keefe’s site says about its mission: “Project Veritas is committed to training and deploying undercover citizen journalists to expose fraud, corruption and abuse within all organization.”

  There is something hypnotic about sitting in your own personal space tapping out on the keyboard…comments, suggestions and opinions whether based on facts or just subjective bullsh*t formed by the floating fictional slime hovering in cyber space….something surreal about reading other people’s comments, suggestions and opinions then feeling a powerful urge to respond to them…either to agree, disagree or feel that you are the only one in all of the internet who can stand in judgment and set them straight…People you don’t know….will probably never meet…who have no real cause & effect on your life and yet you find yourself at 4 am …tweeting in all large caps how wrong they are on any given subject. I watch such scenarios unfold all the time…and yes I have even been drawn into a few…

  Though I just started this blog…I have been dancing around some the social networks for awhile now. Not as long as others so maybe my missteps were newbie related but I have made them…but my worst was in another direction…Getting caught up with following celebrities…politicians and just plain famous people online  leads one into a whole field of improprieties especially when they are nice enough to share some of themselves with us “common” folks…

  When did it become alright to say things to anyone online that you wouldn’t be caught dead saying to them in-person ? I’d like to think that it’s still alright to flirt but even that can become too extreme if you cross that line of good taste…now it’s even scarier because things you tweet and post can get people in trouble and as we all know….fired!

  I follow a wonderful man on Twitter, who I think more than indulged me my delusions until I did cross a line and even though I did apologize…it didn’t seem like enough when I realized how badly I had behaved. I  learned a most valuable lesson the hard way…They can tweet us…they can leave a nice comment…or a correction of facts but no where does that give us the right to treat them with any less dignity than we would want to be treated…

  My biggest pet pevee of all though, are those hundreds of face-less…name-less…mindless trolls that follow one of these famous people just to berate and insult them…If you don’t like or agree with someone online….famous or not…Don’t follow them !!! Don’t leave crap on their facebook wall !! Don’t go off on nasty ill-tempered rants on news blogs about a famous person that has nothing to do with the content of the article !

  We want civility in our government…in our schools…in our churchs…temples… and mosques…Isn’t it time to want it on our social networks as well ? Just something I thought worthy of making a note of.

A Mother’s Thanks for Mr. Olbermann & His Thurber Readings

While alot of the lame-stream media put off even acknowledging OWS and still are practically ignoring or distorting the Occupy movements one of the journalist who isn’t is Keith Olbermann.I wanted to take a moment and share another part of this good man that has touched my family greatly.  

It should to be said…There have only been a handful of men that I have greatly admired and respected in my life…My Father being always #1. He’s been gone over 28 years now but I still kind of talk to him and quite often can hear his voice in my head.(Not to be confused with those who hear bad voices in their head that tell them to run for President.)

It’s not that I’m a hard-to-please-male-bashing-woman….LOL, I love men…(though I did date a girl in college for awhile. I’m remembering that she was an extremely hot brunette …and being the open-minded free-thinker my father raised me to be…well, let’s just say it was an interesting summer.) Whoa, cool flash back moments…where was I ??

Oh, yeah…men I admire….Tim Russert was my man of choice for explaining to my common sense mind what the whacked-out power-hungry people were doing….Always understood him….Always trusted him….If memory serves me, (and I am finding that the older one gets the more one looks back) it is because of the wonderful Mr. Russert, that I first became aware of Mr. Keith Olbermann…

Mr. Olbermann with his handsome face, strong jaw, warm smile…Oh what the hell, you’ve heard all that fan BS before…probably tired of it or find it disingenuous…let’s just say that it was his gorgeous hypnotic eyes that caught my attention at first and I was hooked. Not in a scary show up at your door naked way…( damn, sorry….more flash backs…) but in a true sense of belief and respect that he was what he presented himself to be and than some.

Being a single mom, I have always tried to put good male role models in front of my sons. What they listen to and watch is just as important to me. I am very proud of both of them with the progress they are making to find themselves and the paths that they are meant to be on.. Every now and than I get a glimpse into their ways of thinking that tells me that I might just be doing a good job as a mom… which brings me to the reason behind this long winded compliment to Mr. Olbermann.

From the first time he explained why he wanted to read Thurber to us…

“My father was in the hospital and every night when I visited him, I read aloud to him. James Thurber. And one night he said, ‘You really should do that on your show,’ and I said, ‘Dad, it’s a television newscast. I’d love to, but how could it possibly fit?’ And he said, ‘How often have I ever suggested anything for your shows?’ And I remembered that he never had. But I also reminded him that there were things like copyrights and bills, to which he said, ‘Try it. You never know.’ ~ Keith Olbermann

 

 And from the posting of his Thurber readings on online to be enjoyed more than once…Mr. Olbermann captured my 15 year old son’s heart and imagination. One night my son came into my room and asked if he could read something to me. I thought maybe it was a school paper or maybe something he had found on the net…

He sat down and started to open a small book…I asked him what it was…He showed me the cover “Rex Stout’s Black Orchids” A Nero Wolf classic…than I asked him why he wanted to read it to me…he smiled saying that he liked the idea of us having something special to share…that he liked watching Mr. Olbermann read Thurber and he liked the way I smiled watching Thurber being read….

My son and I, both loved mysteries…until just a couple years ago I use to read out loud to him two times a week ..now according to him, it was his turn….I secretly wished I could of video tape him doing this as I was so totally amazed by someone who up to this point had been shy and reserved in his manner and speech.

He worked so hard at not letting the old English of Stout’s style throw him…animating his words with occasional hand gestures to fit the prose….looking up from time to time to make sure he still had my attention. (Which he totally did ) His voice cracking now and then in that adolescent it’s-getting-deeper-but-not-yet way …

Bless the wonderful late actor, Maury Chaykin…we had watched the DVDs of the Nero Wolf series and here my son was, normally very soft spoken, boldly speaking Wolf’s words with such a passion…. gulping hard when he took a drink of water…but keeping a tone of excitement in his voice for over an hour …teasing me with the last few pages…asking me who I thought did it….chuckling at me when I gave my answer…not giving me even the slightest hint until the final paragraphs when the murderer was revealed.

He had to of already read this once before… maybe even practiced reading it out loud because he delivery towards the end was so melodramatic and thought out. I was in such wonder and awe of him….

He is starting that time of his life that will be full of chaos and confusion. As much as I want to wrap my arms around him and protect him from everything… I know he has to make his own choices….learn from his own missteps. He loves his games, books and friends…leaving less time for me, which I sadly understand…but as he kissed me good-night that evening…he smiled and asked if we could make time next week for him to read me another…I could feel the tears swelling up in my eyes as I looked up at my handsome young son and told him yes…

I wanted to make note of this because I’ve read online some who criticize Mr. Olbermann for taking the time to still share Thurber with us when he can and because I wanted to remind people that our children don’t just learn from us….they learn from all the things and people we put in their world…

 I am grateful that Mr. Olbermann was and continues to be a positive influence on both my sons especially after his Special Comment this last August. My oldest has become a part of community groups trying to help efforts to change this broke system of ours as well as getting out the messages of such great causes like NAFC…National Association of Free Clinics-  http://www.freeclinics.us

My youngest spent his summer volunteering so he could, in his words “step up” and be part rather than sit silently on the sidelines. He still does read out loud to me though I have to wait awhile sometimes for him to “fit” me in… He brought home his first report card from high school this month…all A’s & one B+…from a kid who barely opened his mouth and had been struggling to keep a C average…

Do I believe that a television journalist helped my son find a better way to enjoy his path in life ??

I truly do and what’s more if you asked my son he would agree as well.