The Home I Know: Property
The End: An Epilogue & Chapter 1
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.
For the family who left me,
and the friends who kept me,
especially Carrie, Tiffany, and Robin.
Acknowledgments
The home I know now has been co-created by so many moments with earth, and bodies, and waters, and words. If I could write a litany of love to each and every one of these people or places in the pages that are to come in this book, I would. Instead, this will have to do.
First, I thank my family of origin for giving me life and sustaining it for my first 24 years. I thank the physicians who helped me and the priests who prayed for me, the community of friends who supported me and the mentors who believed in me, while I circled the streets of Newport Beach — especially Amy, Katie, and Alan.
During my undergraduate and graduate education, I thank the anarchists, and the feminists, and the friends who opened up entirely different worlds to me than the one shaped by my upbringing. Thank you for accompanying me through the hidden heaviness of my years before memory, when I managed symptoms without story and rage without realization. Your love prepared me to receive my history — especially Sarah, Mark, and Jane.
So many joined me in the exploratory mystery of decades of grief and growth, despair and design, and acceptance and hope that guided me to the home I know now. From the families who taught me how to raise children safely, to clinicians who held a safe space for me to process my memories, to friends who supported and celebrated me through so many milestones of my laborious journey — especially Meghan, Kelly, and Tiffany.
Thank you to those I owe the success and sustainability of my writing business: Amanda, Mahina, Angelina, Claire, and Lauren. Followed by those who became my constants: Robin, Owen, and H, Rachel, Alicia, and Faith. Thank you for teaching me of home and then letting me go, so I could continue to explore my soul. And to all those who received me in New York City.
To all the survivors before me and the Incest AWARE Alliance: for believing in yourselves first, then believing in all of me. I couldn’t, nor wouldn’t, do this work without you — especially Suzanne, Shirkydra, and Pennie for pushing me out of my hiding place; Maria and Ethan for keeping me out; and Nancy, Kesa, and Donna for reminding me that activism is first and foremost grounded in joy.
Finally, thank you to all those who helped me to complete this book. From late night calls for clarity to walks with worry, the funds to eat and the homes to sleep, the reviewing and the editing of drafts for craft — Brittany, Leslie, Andrea, Joe, Chris, and Emily. Thank you to my friend Sara for finding the narrative that came to be this precise book within so many of my stories. Our shared hours discussing this project have been the most meaningful of my creative life.
Lastly, thank you to the spirits who speak with me and the land under my feet, the trees who consistently inspire me and the moonlight that guides me through the night, the sunshine that welcomes my day and this city for being a little bit of everything with me. Most of all, thank you to the water for setting me free. And to my brain, body, and being for continuing to be, no matter how wobbly. To my child self, Annie, for surviving then healing with such urgency. Then finally to Josephine: for fighting for agency and giving me consent to share our story.
I am made of all of you. This book holds all of us. I love you.
The End
An Epilogue
I open the door of the home I know now and invite my constants in. There are three of them: Ruth, Oliver, and H. Ruth is my best friend, and her husband and toddler accompany her on their first family trip to New York City to be with me in the place I am currently living: the attic of a colorful, hand-painted Victorian row house in the Bronx.
This home rests between two rivers, a botanical garden, and a famous cemetery, just five miles or so from a bay that becomes a sound that stretches into the sea. Many of my neighbors in the community have arrived here after being pushed out of another home due to lack of basic safeties or pulled in by the privileges of this place, or both. I landed here a year or so ago because it was the next safest place for me to be.
Now, I stand with my beloveds at the bottom of the stone steps. Together, we bear the baby and the baggage into the sunroom. We pass through the second door that leads to the base of the wooden staircase and begin climbing. The railing recognizes the oil of my skin then supports Ruth, Oliver, and H. Step by step, we tread to the top floor, where a painted portrait of me — standing gleefully on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River with the skyline of NYC directly behind — hangs from the wall. Just to the right, I push open my front door, which I recently painted light pink, and welcome my constants home.
For the next few days or so, the four of us play. We adults, with stories and food and drinks and coffee, and the toddler, with parks and castles and the fort we call H’s House. A v-shaped cardboard cutout — pulled from the recycling bin — that sits centered in the living room decorated with twinkle lights. H’s favorite toy is trash, so for weeks I’ve been stacking and storing used, clean-as-possible paper, metal, and plastic items into the empty closet adjacent to our play space. Under this DIY creation, H — intentionally or not — shares their concept of home with me using their quickly growing vocabulary.
“H, it’s time for a new activity,” I announce.
“In this house?” They question me.
“This house” refers to any place H exists. So far, it has been used to describe their actual home in the Redwood Grove, their uncle’s house down the road, the car that takes them to preschool, my one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx, and now this dilapidated cardboard co-creation that fills up all the free space on my living room floor.
“Yes!” I reply to H, “In this house.” My answer offers them a sense of place.
The sun begins to set behind the high rises and single family homes that can be seen outside my window, so we all prepare for rest. Ruth and Oliver sleep in my bed. H has a pack-n-play that barely fits in the living room closet, while I lay my head on the daybed that’s pushed into an arched nook up against the white windowsill and fall asleep. A few hours in, I can hear H wiggle and wail behind the closet door, so I rise, hobble across the living room half asleep, place my hand on their back and begin to reassure them.
“You’re safe, H.” Slowly, they grow more familiar with sharing a new home with me.
Five days pass far too quickly, so my loved ones pack up to return home. With baby and the baggage, we walk through the pink door, past the portrait, down the three flights of stairs, through the sun room, to the bottom of the stone steps. I embrace Oliver, then bend down to ask H how they want to say goodbye. The tiny human stretches out their arms, wraps them around my neck, and holds me tight. Lastly, Ruth pulls me close, knowing that this is the last time we’ll see each other for the next six months or so. Their taxi drives away in the direction of JFK where they will board a plane to fly to their home in the Redwood Grove. As I wave goodbye, I sigh:
Somehow I feel whole, possibly for the very first time in my life.
I return to my third-story walk-up, then tidy the type of chaos that only a toddler can make by deconstructing the now dilapidated fort designed with colorful pens and plastered with dried playdough, breaking down the pack-n-play, and washing the dishes caked with whatever concoction H made with what was supposed-to-be their breakfast. The hand-me-down armchair and mismatched ottoman that sit in the corner invite me to rest for a bit, until I feel ready to write. And then I do.
This year, I celebrate the 20th anniversary of the day I moved away from the only home I had ever known before I was 18 years old. I am 38 now. Since then I have lived in so many different places that I have lost count. When I first stepped into this one-bedroom apartment in NYC above someone else’s family, I felt the most foreign of feelings: arrival. And with it the time and space to reflect, to breathe, to grieve, to receive.
So I rearrange my body into the new ergonomic chair and wheel it up to the standup desk donated to me by a fellow activist and continue to pen my story, both asking and answering so many questions along the way:
Do I share my birth name? Just the first and middle names, I decide.
Do I reveal my family’s names and make myself vulnerable to defamation? No.
Must I ask for consent to write about those who accompanied me? No, I changed their names too except for a few who asked to be represented by their real first and last names.
Is it safe to speak honestly of how institutions failed me? I will take the risk.
Can I trust my own memory? My memory is so much deeper than just my history.
Must I tell my story chronologically? No, I can craft a narrative of true stories in any order I wish.
Will it help me or hurt me to scale the history of my body to a public that has serially silenced those like me? Likely, both. Ready or not, I am willing.
This story is about me and all those who accompanied me on my liberation journey from the systems that were supposed to support me, especially my family. So naturally, it’s also about us: all of those who have been touched by the issue of incest. At times, this story may be difficult to read; I know because it was difficult to live. My hope is that no matter what brings you to this page or what stage of life you’re currently in, you will take your time being with this story from the conclusion to the beginning while accompanying me in my backwards-way-of-living.
Thank you for reading. In doing so, you are hearing me, but more importantly, you are listening to us. We, the witnesses of the history of incest. So that our children — especially my H — can be safe, can be free, in the first place.
PART 1: HIDE
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
~ Maya Angelou,
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Chapter 1: Property
In the beginning, no boundaries separated the sea and me. I ran in fearlessly to be with the salt water. My feet splashed through the tides, as they raised into waves that I threw my body into until I could float and rest upon the water’s wake. Then one day, a swell picked me up and before I could set my feet into the sand, it slammed me back against itself. Spinning, twisting, drowning, my eyes could not find a direction. Everything looked like whitewash, and blue, and brown stewed together like an ocean soup.
My lungs filled with water. I choked as I tumbled through the breaking wave, trying desperately to find my feet so I could catch my breath. Finally, the water shallowed as it reached the shoreline. I balanced on the sand then bent over with my hands on my knees, coughed out the fluid from my lungs, left the ocean behind me, and wept. I stayed away from the sea, as soon as I learned it could hurt me.
But being raised so close to the ocean, many parents sent their children to Junior Lifeguards to learn basic safety skills. One summer, my brothers and I joined other kids between ages nine and fifteen. We ran in the sand, studied the hand books, then inevitably swam in the ocean. To fulfill one of the final tests of the summer season, the lifeguards gathered us kids onto the wooden planks of the pier and asked us to jump off. I watched as my peers leapt fearlessly from the wooden railing into the crashers.
My body trembled as it approached that former love whose strength I had not known until it took my breath away in a way I had never wanted. My hands white knuckled the wooden railing, as I listened attentively to the seasoned lifeguard before me.
“As soon as you jump, press your legs and arms together as tightly as you can like a torpedo. When you land, swim to the surface to take a breath and catch a glimpse of the swell. If it’s safe, then head in diagonally against the current. If you’re in the middle of a wave break, then swim to the bottom of the sea and cling to the sand until the water calms again. Repeat this process over and over. Once the set has finally settled, continue swimming to shore.”
I pulled my scrawny body over the wooden railing, my hands shaking, my heart pounding in my chest. Then as soon as the instructor said go, I released my grip from the guardrails, jumped off the pier, shaped my body into a torpedo, and splashed into the waves. My eyes opened to see the whitewash made from my own weight mixed with salt water.
Quickly, I swam to the surface to take a breath and gazed at the swells to see where they were in that set. A large white cap raised above my head, so I swam deep beneath the sea and clung to the sand underneath me. My body felt the peace of this uninterrupted space beneath the wake, as my eyes caught a glimpse of the beautiful white and blue ribbons of water that danced just above my head. As long as I could see the currents, observe the shape of the waves, and ensure I had the strength to dive and stay near the sand while the water found its peace again, I could swim.
~ ~ ~
I left home for the first time years ago, and then again just yesterday, and I will once more tomorrow. For the first 18 years of my life, I resided in my parents’ property on a hill that plateaued a number of times up the steep side like large steps. On each flattened length of land, a street stretched with residences that sat one right next to the left. Signs marked the different names of each lane, all inspired by plants and animals. My home sat right in the middle of Bunya Street: a tree.
The house that raised me was painted off-white, with red brick high walls encircling it, and an open space into a garden that led to the green front door. It opened to the first floor, with a long dining table to the right and an entrance to the kitchen, a living room with a baby grand piano and an attached office to the front. On one wall, hung a huge painted portrait of my family: my father, my mother, my three brothers, and me. The other walls were adorned with iconography like Jesus hanging from the cross, the Virgin Mary, and so many saints.
The stairs stretched just to the left of the entrance, with three bedrooms on the second floor. The primary room for my parents rested to the right with an attached bath. Two smaller bedrooms for me, and eventually my three brothers, huddled to the left. As we grew older, construction teams blasted the walls downstairs between the office and the guest room to create two separate bedrooms, so that each of us siblings could have our own spaces. My room stayed at the top of the stairs to the left, just across the hall from where my parents slept. For most of my life, it also served as the guest bedroom. So when anyone else arrived, I was kicked out to sleep on the downstairs couch.
To impress our guests, my father filled my room with fancy furniture: a queen bed with four tall posts stained in dark, shining wood, as well as a dresser in the same tone with a number of drawers, brass handles, and a large mirror. My parents painted the walls a sage green and eventually purchased a floral comforter. The entire room looked like its very own secret garden. The floor was carpeted, while the closet cut through the entire wall to the left. The wall to the right held three windows and a large white sill too high to sit on, but deep enough to decorate.
On it, my parents placed a holy card of Jesus and his Sacred Heart, a small white statue of his mother Mary, and a painted glass sculpture of a white, blonde guardian angel protecting a young girl and boy as they walked across a bridge over perilous waters. A furry, cream-colored stuffy named “Bear-Bear” — who had been gifted to me at birth — always hid somewhere in between the rarely made bedsheets.
When I was 12 years old or so, I considered running away from home. I sprinted to my bedroom, burst through the door without a lock, threw open my closet doors, grabbed a duffle bag and stuffed it with shirts and shoes, shorts and swimsuits. Before the bag filled to the brim, or any practical ideas of where I might run to shaped in my little head, I heard a voice speak within. It gently said:
It’s going to be okay, Annie.
Immediately, my pounding heart settled and my rage relaxed. I unpacked the swimsuits and shorts, shoes and shirts from the duffle bag, threw myself under the floral comforter of my four post bed, and wept. All I wanted was to grow up and fast.
Finally, the day came. At 18 I moved away from the only home I had ever known to attend college in LA. I packed up everything that I had planned to take with me into my pine green Hyundai Santa Fe, the one that my father bought me for my sixteenth birthday. Printed papers sat on the dashboard to remind me of the directions to Marina Del Rey on the 405 freeway that stretched along the Pacific Ocean. Slowly, I watched the property of my upbringing disappear in the rearview mirror and said goodbye to the constancy of my childhood streets in Newport Beach.
I arrived at Loyola Marymount University: the school of my dreams that sat on a bluff with a view that stretched between the Hollywood sign in the hills to the sea. My life for the next four years would be lived on this campus between the olympic-sized outdoor swimming pool for water polo practice, the cafeteria for meals, the classrooms to learn, and my second home that I was yet to know: a dorm room. It was a tiny space with one closet, two twin beds and desks, a narrow back half wall with large windows, and a shared bathroom with another dorm.
My new roommate and I — her on the swim team and me on the water polo team — unpacked our suits, goggles, sunscreen, and caps: her stuff to the right and mine to the left, with an invisible line that separated the two sides of the room nearly half the size of my childhood bedroom back on Bunya St. After our clothes hung neatly in the closet, our toiletries stacked high in the bathroom cabinets, and our comforters spread neatly across the twin extra long beds, it was time to say goodbye.
We hugged, then left to go on our prospective Pawprints Trips: a weekend away offered to incoming freshmen whose parents could pay so that some students could get to know each other before the first day of school. I strapped my backpack — stuffed with everything I might need for the next three days in the mountains — around my shoulders and hips then walked to the center of campus. A large white van pulled up with the group of other students who I was to spend the weekend with. We threw our bags in the back and our bodies in the seats then began to chat.
After a few hours of circling through switchbacks, we arrived to the trailhead on the mountainside. Then my new friends and fellow first years and I carried our sacks and climbed. I hiked between Nate and Lily. While my feet traversed below me, kicking up the dirt that found its way beneath my nails, within my hair, and onto my freckled skin, my mind wrestled with one recurring question.
Where would I sleep?
Finally, tired and hungry, we arrived at the campsite. The group of us pulled out the few tents we were all to share together, and decided on roommate arrangements. Nate, Lily, and I set up our awkward fabric-and-pole-pulled-together home, grounded it into the mountain, then unrolled our sleeping bags. I froze. Nate stretched his sack against the back wall and Lily quickly followed, laying hers right next to his. My body relaxed, as I placed my mummy sack between Lily’s and the tent door. I felt relieved that my body would rest between a woman and the wall with the exit, so I could escape just in case.
One by one, we each crawled into the small space privately to change into our pajamas, then back out again. After rinsing our faces with water, brushing our teeth, and relieving ourselves behind trees, we each crawled into the tent: Nate first, then Lily. Restless, I crouched down, slipped my body between the tent’s crescent opening, then quickly squeezed into my night sack.
The next day, we shared meals and stories around the campfire. The intimacy between our group had grown so much that we began to share our deepest anxieties about the upcoming year.
“I’m afraid to be raped,” I said, while my new friends nodded their heads in understanding.
The night returned, so we repeated the ritual of rest and my body slept more soundly as trust grew between Nate, Lily, and me. The following morning, we cleaned the campsite as if we had never arrived. Then together, we hiked back down the mountainside, boarded back into the white van, and began the drive to the university awaiting us on that bluff overlooking the sea. By the time we arrived, I called Nate, “Brother,” and Lily, “Sister,” and for the first time felt the experience of friends quickly becoming my new family. My roommate and I met once more in our dorm, where we shared tales of her time with the water and mine with the mountain. Then for the rest of the weekend, I slowly settled into my new home away from the only one I had ever known.
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Beautifully written, Jo! So happy you are publishing this here.
Thank you, Jo! It's a true privilege to learn something about your beginnings.