I was a doctor’s wife. I had a beautiful life, for all intents and purposes. While he wasn’t a demonstrative man, I felt I was coping as best I could with his inability to meet my emotional needs. He was a good provider and a good dad. I could overlook the rest. There came a point when I started unraveling a bit. The clouds of depression circled around but never lit very long in those days. That is, until I went in for a physical. My doctor asked how I was doing and I told him I was a bit blue of late. I would often walk into the baby’s room, pick her up and rock her…and cry. “Hmmmmm… Inappropriate crying.” he wrote in my chart. He gave me a prescription for Zoloft and the race to self destruction began. How could I tell him why I was crying? How could I do that in the short time he had allotted for this visit? It was so much deeper than any pill could ever reach.

As I write this, I’m watching the gymnasts facing their abusive doctor in court. What a different world it is for sexual abuse victims now. My first abuser was a senior in high school. I was eight or nine. I was playing with a friend when the big boy lured us into a garage to “look at toys”. When he had his hand in my pants, he was whispering things in my ear I didn’t understand. Mom said don’t talk to strangers. But “Butterball” lived in the neighborhood. We knew him. I stood stock still in the belief he would leave. When he was done with me, he went for my friend. In that moment, my maternal instincts kicked in and I grabbed her hand and ran down the hill to her house. I pounded on the door and her mother came to answer. I was frantic and told her what had happened. She opened the screen door and I thought…”Oh, thank God! She’s going to save us!” Mrs. G grabbed her daughter and drew her in the house. As I started to go in, she placed her hand on my chest, pushed me out the door, and said, “Don’t you EVER say anything like that EVER again to ANYBODY!” Then she slammed the door in my face.

I went to my house and sat on the lawn trying to figure out what had happened. When I was really little, my babysitter’s teenage daughter had sex with her boyfriend in her room all the time. She caught me watching once and beat the tar out of me and told me I was bad. And here, a mother I knew and trusted told me I was bad and I had a pretty good idea it had something to do with that physical act I had no name for. I made a concrete decision right there. I would take Mrs. G’s advice. I would not tell my mom. I mean, what if I told her and SHE put me out on the street like my friend’s mom??? I would die!

I never told, nor did I tell about the time it happened with my best friend’s dad when I was twelve or thirteen. You know…when you are convinced you are bad from your earliest memories, that kind of damage runs deeply and permanently in your DNA.

I didn’t tell until I was watching my girls on the living room floor, playing. Daughter #1 was sixteen. Daughter #2 was one. I don’t know if it was the way the sun came in through the window or the way my daughter tucked her hair behind her ear or maybe it was the sound of their sweet innocent voices but suddenly those memories came rushing back with such force it nearly knocked me to my knees. The shadow of depression that was floating just out of my reach crashed on me with the force of a tsunami. That is when I started rocking my baby in the night…weeping. “Inappropriate crying”? I think not. I was trying to figure out how I was going to protect this precious child from the horrors that await little girls in the great big world. I was weeping for that little girl in me who was abused then turned away by someone who could have helped her..SHOULD have helped her. I was trying to figure out just one thing in my 38-year-old mind…”Who can I tell? And, what the hell does it matter now?” Just, please God…keep them safe.

The fact that I’m sitting here alive and well, and that my children are beautiful and safely grown is testimony to a mother’s strength and courage. The road was long and filled with unexploded ordinance, but we made it through. I told my mom everything when I was about forty. I was hyper vigilant with my girls but they were never abused under my watch. Now, I tell and tell and tell in an effort to teach prevention and give permission to tell your own stories. Because, #timesup. No more secrets. No more lies. No more hiding in the dark.

Yes…I’m proud of these young gymnasts. And, everyone else in the #metoo movement. I wish there had been this same moral outrage when these athletes came forward. It would have helped them so much because, just as it’s difficult to walk the path of grief alone, so too is the walk of abuse. It is the original “walk of shame”…only we did nothing wrong. It was not our fault.

While I never wish pain on people as a rule, I felt a certain vindication when I watched that doctor with his face in his hands as he is forced to sit there while victim after victim sit before him and tell their stories. To see him take off his glasses and wipe the tears away and hang his head in shame gave me great satisfaction. My abuse occurred in a time when such things weren’t talked about. Therefore, my abusers went on and lived their lives unscathed. I don’t know if they ever felt bad. Did they ever have remorse? Did they ever think of me? Did they ever want to ask for my forgiveness but didn’t know where to find me? Or better yet, did they ask God to forgive them? Did they find salvation? Will we meet somewhere and have the opportunity to talk? One is dead. Too late. I’m not sure about the other one. He’d be about 74 years old now. I’ve forgiven them both long ago. But I do often wonder…what if? What if I could sit (or could have sat) in front of my abusers and tell them what their actions did to me. How it affected my family, my relationships, my children. How it affected my views of the world and my sense of personal safely and my relationship to sexuality. How their few moments stolen from me left a deep chasm in my psyche that I urgently tried to fill with drugs and alcohol, sex and shopping. How the memories I had so carefully packed deeply away in a place that could never be opened came crashing out on a sunny Saturday morning…ripping my neat and tidy little suburban doctor’s wife life into shreds.

Inappropriate crying?!?! You got a couple of hours to listen to WHY I was holding my baby and crying?!?! You tell me, doc. Because at that point, I had no words to describe what had happened, no one to listen…to really hear…and only tears to shed. Your answer? Drugs. Drugs, drugs, and more drugs.

“Shhhhh…here. Take this. Let us help.”

I was very nearly “doctored to death”.

Yes, today I am proud of these beautiful young women doing a job no one in their right mind wants to do. We should be living in a world where we don’t ever NEED to have these conversations. As Oprah said…there is a change coming.

Accountability.

A new dawn is rising.

Time’s up. ❤️

“If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”
‭‭Matthew‬ ‭18:6‬ ‭NIV