You Saw Me, You Were There

This will be the first part of a new series - You Saw Me, You Were There - about how God sees you. Even if it takes you years to see proof of it.

Part I - The Thing You Want But Don’t Want to Give

I never liked him. That’s how this one begins. I still don’t but this is a series called You Saw Me – You Were There. And it is in the most vulnerable experiences that I must dive into in order to find the truth of that statement. For if God is only found in the easy small trials, then, well, I “must needs” reassess the awesomeness of this God.

At thirteen, I learned to barricade my door with one of those chair pillows at night, the kind that you put on the floor watching TV at your parent’s feet. I don’t know why I chose that. But the fact that I knew something had to go there tells you that I didn’t feel safe at night.

At this point, if you are like me, you are wondering where my parents were, did I tell them? Etc. Secrets and lies my dear. Secrets and lies. Shame and fear. Shhh…If we don’t do anything, it’s not there.

This story begins somewhere in the middle. During the summer. In the dark of night as I awake at the PRECISE MOMENT that this marauder is attempting to lift my nightgown up and above my pelvis.

With the power of HOLY FIRE I yelled his name, sat straight up, and slammed my fist down on the top of his head like a sledgehammer.

He ran.

Then I ran and locked myself in the bathroom just outside my door.

I was “safe”.

I don’t know how long I stayed in there with all of the lights on, door locked, and my Self as far from the door as possible, when I finally found the courage to exit the safety zone and timidly knock on my mother (grandmother¹) and stepfather’s bedroom door.

Now they would have to deal with it.

Mom had me sleep on the floor at the foot of their bed.

And that was the rest that I heard of it.

I will spare you details. Why? Because aside from the obvious cliché of where the devil is, I am an encourager. I find that when the story becomes so specific that we must describe every dark corner and crevice, it falls on the line of grinding axes. Which is the cry of unforgiveness. But I am getting ahead, way ahead of myself.

Suffice to say, there was bad behavior. Predatory behavior. Behavior that, to this day, is denied.

This was a person related to me by, well, the best descriptor would be “brokenness”. Who, in my opinion, should never have arrived.

Now I also know that when stories are told too vaguely, the reader, watcher, listener. is in danger of a too vivid imagination that, based on her own circumstances and history, could take the story in her mind and heart to places undesired, unwarranted, unnecessary. I find this irresponsible storytelling. For that reason I will tell you that this bad behavior was not – as my teenage self would describe – all the way.

I dealt with this roughly four years later when Mom got a new job as a secretary for a therapist’s office. Suddenly, everyone was in therapy. A decision I think Mom would regret later, when, after destroying a pillow with the wooden baseball bat the therapist had given me, I blurted out in shame and self-defense the truth from my seventeen-year-old mouth amidst spurting horizontal tears a necessary detail: “It was just a touch!”

Well, in fact, it was much beyond “just a touch” but not “all the way”. We’ll wade here together in the middle among the vernacular of the teen lingo. I was already implying my abuse isn’t as bad. I have no right to complain about this. Stopping just short of rounding it all out with a comment about the starving children in China.

In 2010 I wrote a one-woman musical called Whose My Girl where I describe in a song what the therapist said to me after I’d blurted “It was just a touch”.

 Oh, how the enemy is always willing and available to screw up your journey toward healing. “There are others who have it far worse than you.” “Who are you to complain?” “You’re not telling the truth.” “Stop moaning and whining.” “You’re going to ruin the family.” “You’re going to destroy it all.” And the denouement: “It’s all your fault.” Curtain. What an insipid uncreative liar.

Anyway here are the lyrics:

Just a touch is all it takes to make the world go round

Just a touch is all it takes to turn your world around

Just a touch

“It was just a touch”

But just a touch was all it took to turn your life upside down.

I wish I could sing it to you. Just so you’d be appropriately creeped out with the minor key.

All this to convey that there is no such thing as “just a touch”.

So now that I’ve gated the bounds of your imagination, I can continue being vague.

Fortunately, this person only appeared in the household for a few weeks a year. Unfortunately, I learned to live in fear and as I grew older and my body began to sprout curves. Terror. Especially at night.

At this point I’d like to remind you that I will not leave you here. So if you can, stick with me, the light will shine again.

So we left off at the foot of Mom’s bed. I know something must have been done behind the scenes because it never happened again. But nothing would ever have been done without the above said therapist.

Approximately thirty-five years later and days after Mom’s death, a letter emerged. This letter had been read by every family member but me. This was not an oversight. They didn’t want me to read it. But because this is a story that must fall into line with the topic of being seen by God, I found it. For those who seek the light, the darkness will be lit up - even like a blow torch to a damp basement of nesting roaches.

I read the letter written by the terrorizer. A letter of argument, defense, and accusation. The letter that spoke of how his therapist agreed with his story that I was a liar and a fabricator and that nothing ever happened. None of it. Culminating in a sign-off wishing that my mother was “rotting in hell.”

I read the letter, perfectly timed mere days after my mother passing of a sharp six-month degenerative decline from Alzheimer’s. A letter calling me a liar just after watching one of my most monumental humans take her last breath surrounded by all the other central humans in my life, and I wondered numbly if this side-B therapist knew about the closet.

I told you the story started in the middle. That was the easy part. The beginning resides in a closet where I am barely four, not knowing how I got there, with a teenager doing things to me that he shouldn’t have. And though I protested he persisted.

Somewhere downline, a few years later, I was in taken into another closet. But my brother saved me in time and, furious, he stormed into my mother’s room.

I never heard a further thing about any of it.

So. When I slammed my thirteen-year-old sledgehammer fist down upon the head of this serpent of treachery, I, myself, proclaimed to the adults what had happened. Now something would be done.

A sleeping bag at the foot of a bed.

Did this unknown therapist know of these devilish details?

(Just a side note, I’m writing this just as the Johnny Depp trial just ended with him as victor. I agreed with the verdict.)

But this was B.S.

How do you handle that kind of false witness against yourself – especially your age-four-to-thirteen-to-seventeen-and-beyond Self? Your whole blossoming young womanhood?

Well, I’ll tell you.

First you go to a psychic who tells you that time will help and that it’s like something in a box that you put in top shelf in a closet. (Those closets). The box gets smaller and smaller year after year until it’s dusty and you barely remember it’s there.

Hmm. For a non-believer at the time, I did hold on to that. It did help me along. God uses everything and anyone.

My writing helped. Actually it probably saved me the most. The more I dealt with it the more I was able to be open about it. A sign that shame was leaving the building.

But my writing acted as light. In one of my very first blogs I told the story. In true predator fashion, this rogue found the blog and commented a page’s worth of accusation. And truth be told, it scared me. Because I realized the lion was prowling the internet and had to have gone to the trouble of searching me out. Creepsville. It was my first lesson in the power of writing. I wish I’d been stronger, but I deleted the whole thing - the blog. I was still being tested by it all. I had not fully healed.

Darkness hates the light. The liar hates the truth.

But then only a very few years ago I was called into a wholly new realm of healing during one particular Lenten Season. You see, when you pray, you will hear from the Spirit. And when you pray for healing, you will be asked to heal. I don’t mean heal yourself. God does that. But to be a willing participant. Even as I write this, I realize the depth of it. We are always asking to be healed. “Dear God, heal me!” And God says, in great take up your mat and walk fashion, “Do you want to be healed?” And we say, “Uhhhh yes… yes, that’s why I asked! Doooo it!”

And He says, “Yes. But you must participate in the journey to healing.”

I was asked to participate in the healing of this – by allowing God to heal it. Just sit with that for a second. Sometimes when we say yes to the healing we must let go of… what? What is it for you?

Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!

And here’s the key to the mystery of healing. The very thing we all want yet are hard pressed when called to give it ourselves.

You cannot heal without forgiveness….

To be continued…

1. My grandmother raised me and I called her Mom.