The Home I Know: Apology
Chapter 20
Thank you for your interest in the section of my memoir below. If your email server clips the message, then you can read the full post on Substack. You can also listen to the post by clicking the audio button at the top of this page. When needed, visit the Bibliography and Support Resources. This post mentions incest abuse. If you’re seeking resources, head over to Incest AWARE or Sibling Sexual Trauma.
“What is an apology? It is a humbling. It is an admission of wrongdoings and a surrender. It is an act of intimacy and connection which requires great self-knowledge and insight.
I will most certainly come up short.”1
~ V (formerly Eve Ensler)
~ ~ ~
Ruth’s sister worked as a clinician at a Planned Parenthood. So on the way between her sister’s farm and the apartment awaiting me in Seattle, we stopped by to say hi. I continued to be sexually active and wanted an easier way to stay safe. Birth control pills had impacted my mental health too drastically and the next step was to try an intrauterine device (IUD). I spoke to Ruth all about the reservations whirling through my mind:
What if I get activated during the insertion of it?
What if it’s too painful and I can’t tolerate it?
What if my body reacts negatively to it?
“Well, it can’t hurt to try!” Ruth encouraged me. “Besides, I can sit by your side and hold your hand.”
I entered the sterilized room with the long, pleather-clad chair that leaned back, the paper that scrunched loudly when I sat on it, and the various tools the doctor would use laid out before me. A physician’s assistant knocked then opened the door and immediately handed me what seemed to be a business card. I looked at her confused, while she said:
“Are you safe in your living environment?”
Tears welled up in my eyes, as I gazed at the resource before me that provided examples of what lack of safety at home might be: verbal, physical, sexual, and emotional assaults, as well as gaslighting and grooming. No medical physician had ever approached me with this question. I reflected on how far I had come since my upbringing on Bunya St.
“This card tells a lot of the history of the home I once knew, but yes, the home I know now is safe.” I said.
“I’m sorry to hear of your history and am glad you’re safe now.”
Ruth entered the room, and I smiled as I remembered the generosity of the safe place to land that she and her family provided for me. Ruth’s sister, the clinician, followed quickly behind her and explained to me every step of the procedure. Then I laid down as the thin, white paper crinkled beneath my back. I placed one hand over my eyes, while the other one found warmth in the hands of Ruth. The physician pushed the cold duck lips up inside of me and spread open my vaginal canal. I squeezed Ruth’s hand and winced, as the doctor positioned the IUD into my vaginal canal, through my cervix, and into my uterus. My pelvis felt fuller than usual, my belly nauseous, and my lower abdomen strangely crampy, but much to my surprise, my mind was fine.
With a medical team concerned about my safety—a trusted doctor who I knew would care for my body gently, and Ruth’s support sitting next to me—I felt safe to receive this next form of medicine. And with it, I renounced the church’s archaic prohibition against birth control. With it, I turned away from my family who claimed I couldn’t claim agency over my own body. With it, I stepped forward with one more form of protection into the next chapter of my life.
~ ~ ~
Ruth dropped me off at my new place in Seattle. The apartment sat over a detached double garage next to the landlord’s log cabin on a few acres of land. Although more remote than I liked after my active city life, the trees soothed me, the land held me, and the water awaited me in walking distance. Ruth hugged me goodbye, and I settled into my new home.
Soon after, I walked to the door of my new nanny family and met Kathy, her husband Jim, and Abby and Bradley, their two kids. Their home was decorated simply and warmly with soft neutrals and a big cozy sofa. Abby was the age I was when I began to be abused: two. While Bradley was the age I was when I first had surgery and seizures: six months. The kids and I would spend nearly 30 hours a week together walking to the park to play, snacking, napping, watching TV in between.
Often, Abby sat on the ground and wailed. She threw her feet all around, slamming her bedroom door as hard as she could. My immediate reaction was to walk away. Leave her be. Let her tantrum by herself. Feeling angry, I wanted to scold her for her fit, isolate her until the tantrums stopped, then invite her back in to spend time with Bradley and me when she calmed down. This time though I broke that pattern.
I got down on the ground and just sat there calmly with Bradley in my arms. Abby looked at me so confused. Really, I had no idea what to actually do, except to stay, to be stubbornly and supportively present. She wailed and wailed and wailed and wailed. Then, eventually Abby settled and approached me. She crawled into the other side of my lap and put her thumb in her mouth, while the salt water still dripped from her cheeks.
“I’m ready to play now.”
“Okay.”
Whatever was happening in her body, the cycle had stopped. Spending so much time with these two little ones helped me better understand my own vulnerability as a child: how innocent, how terrified I really was. Big feelings in little children for small things like not getting what they want or being hungry can rattle them, make their hearts race in their chest, cause their bodies to shake and tremble. They are completely dependent on the adults in their company to comfort them back to regulation. Quickly, I came to comprehend how hard a childhood is for those who have chronic illness or are being abused or both, without safe solutions or adults to provide a regulated baseline for them.
As an adult, I just wanted to move on from my past so that I could live my best life, but my inner screamer needed the exact opposite: for me to acknowledge the immensity and intensity of her experience. To sit with her and stay. To be present as her brain grew so fast, as her body carried so much, as her being expanded to hold her entire world all at once. But I couldn’t truly witness her; I couldn’t place her in the context of my life; I couldn’t rationalize with her. Her trauma was pre-verbal. There were no words. All I could do was receive her screams. They were loud and distracting and difficult and unbearable. I felt constantly out of control, that my life was at stake, that I was dying, that I was a problem, and that it would never change. Everything felt fixed and fatal all at once. All of the time.
So, just like Abby was teaching me, I began to just sit with this part of myself and listen to her wail. Without trying to fix her, or convince her, or calm her down. I allowed myself to be present with her until she was finally ready to tell me in any way she could what both of us needed to hear: how much it hurt. All of it. That no matter how much I didn’t want to be a victim, I was in fact a victim of so many horrific things. That no matter how hard I tried to fix it, that my experience could never be fixed. Instead, I needed to learn to hold these complex, gridlocked parts of myself with love. I wanted her history erased in me. She wanted for me to integrate our story, to remain in our body. Together, we needed to learn to regulate and play.
“I’m sorry,” I said to her. “For everything.”
Eventually, I moved on from caregiving to serving at restaurants to ease the emotional intensity of my day-to-day life. Before I left, I gifted Abby a map, so she could always follow me wherever I went. And to Bradley, I handed off Bear-Bear, so that he could have a constant of comfort. Besides the long-term hand-me-downs caused by the consequences of incest, I now was free from anything that my family gave me.
~ ~ ~
I noticed that a major airline was establishing a new route from Seattle to London. A round trip flight cost half the price. I bought a ticket and jumped on board. The airplane landed and I rushed to the connecting train station. Curious and cautious, I hopped on a train, trusting that it would lead me exactly where I wanted to go: Hamburg, Germany. I was here to check a box off my bucket list: go to Europe and visit Gertrude, my childhood au pair. My guardian.
After Gertrude left our family, her wild ways continued as she moved to Hawaii to follow a lover and work at a German bakery. Eventually, she returned home to a small farm near Hamburg, got married, and started a family of her very own. Now over 30 years later, she and I held each other once more on the train platform in Hamburg. We both became teary eyed, then walked through the cool air into the city.
Hand-in-hand, we wandered into an old, underground bar. I ordered sparkling water, and Gertrude got a beer. Immediately, she helped me understand more about the child I was. So shy and observant, I barely spoke until I was three and spent most of my time hiding behind my parent’s knees. This way of being still felt so present in my body, as if I were still hiding within me, waiting to be safe, waiting to be seen.
Then, we shared the stories of our lives since we had last seen each other nearly 20 years before. Her life lived alongside her husband and her sons in her farm community in Germany. My liberation journey, health and financial challenges, and commitment to sharing my incest abuse story. I had disclosed this to her a few years before over the phone. In person now, we finally had the intimate opportunity to talk about what happened.
“I’m so sorry that I didn’t protect you, Annie,” she began.
Gertrude apologized for not knowing about the abuse and doing nothing. What my father should have done, what my mother should have done, what my brothers should have done. Here she was, taking responsibility where my own family left a vacancy in my story.
She continued, “I’m so proud of who you’ve become and the life you’ve created for yourself. You should be too.”
“I’m trying,” I said bashfully.
I returned home reflecting on the power of apology that had now been modeled to me. Memories of my own harmful actions flipped through my mind like an old Rolodex. The people I had left behind without explanation, the silent treatment, the build up and burst out of frustration followed by the quick severing of relationships. The depression that overcommitted then under-delivered; the liberation that sought to free me first regardless of who I hurt; the self-centered nature of recovery. The entitlement to being cared for by others without reciprocity; the inability to respect very clearly communicated boundaries. Yes, I was hurt. Yes, I was healing. And yes, I was responsible for my actions along the journey.
So, I scrolled through my contact lists, reached out to many who I had wronged, and asked for consent to communicate an apology. If granted, I expressed the five steps: I recognized that I caused harm, I took responsibility for the way I caused harm, I expressed remorse for the harm I caused, I offered and asked for ideas of restitution, and I committed to not repeat the harm in the future. Instead, I promised to honor my constraints and commit to what I could follow through on, communicate early and often in conflict to invite deeper connection, ask for help from community to manage my disability, and practice a way of being that both honored my needs and the needs of others.
Some forgave me and we rebuilt our relationship. Others accepted my actions as symptoms of liberation from an impossible situation, and still others remained distant or silent. I am still making peace with my decisions, grieving the loves I lost, and creating new and deeper connections built with better tools and intention. And so, my healing continues.
V, The Apology.