The Home I Know: Honesty

Chapter 13

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.

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“It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering.”¹

~ Judith Herman, MD

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Dressed in outlet-version, brand-named attire from head to toe, I strode down the school hallways weekday mornings trying my best to keep up with the style of my cool colleagues while pretending to be put together. But just hours before, night terrors wrestled me during sleep, insomnia shook me awake, and anxiety that my father might come after me haunted the daylight in between. I was telling more trusted people — friends of the past and present — what the men in my family did to me. Their threats to harm me if I ever disclosed arose from the bottom of my repressed memories.

First, Grandpa Jay tried to convince me. “This is what grandfathers do to their granddaughters.” My submission was my survival.

Then, my father threatened me. “If you tell anyone, I’ll throw you out into the streets, or worse I’ll kill mommy.” My silence was my survival.

Then I forgot about the instances of incest all together. My repression was my survival.

Now between my perpetrators and I rested miles of highway and coastline, farms and city skyscrapers, but my family still felt far too close, especially my parents. I saw their faces whenever I looked at myself in the mirror. I heard students call me by their last name, always reminding me I was their only daughter. I cringed knowing how intimately I shared the genealogy, the biology, and the identity of those who harmed me. The boundaries between them and me could not so easily be erected on the outside nor the inside of my body.

One morning, I arrived to campus and parked, then walked through the corridors lined with classroom doors and lockers, passed the small rose garden, and dragged myself into the Campus Ministry office, where my desk awaited me. The colleague I shared the room with sat in her seat and wished me a good morning, while I placed my book bag on the desk, pulled out the chair, and logged into my computer. An unread email bolded the text on the screen: Flowers For You. It read something like:

“Dear Anne, Flowers have been delivered to the administration building. Please, pick them up at your convenience.”

My body squirmed with worry. Who knew I even worked here?

I hurried back to the front of the building where the administrator sat. A beautiful bouquet awaited me with a card in a plastic holder stuck to the soil.

“Congratulations on getting your first job! Love, Mom.”
“I wish my mom would send me flowers,” the administrator said with a jealous tone.
My cheeks heated. “Do you mind if we speak privately for a second?”
“The only private place is the paper closet,” she laughed dismissively.
“Then let’s go to the paper closet,” I replied. She rolled her eyes surprised.

Together, we strode toward the door that opened into a narrow room with small shelves stacked with different types and colors of printing paper.

“I’m in the process of separating myself from my family. If they ever show up here, please send them away. They would never hurt a student or a staff member, but I’m not interested in seeing them.”
“Okay,” she responded with a strange look on her face. Not long after, the principal called me in to discuss the issue further.
“I heard you’re having some challenges with your family,” she started. “Is there anything I should know about?”

Do I or don’t I disclose to this authority figure? I needed support, I hoped I could trust her with my story.

“I recently remembered repressed instances of incest abuse. I haven’t told my family yet, just asked for no contact, but my mother showed up at my graduation uninvited, then sent flowers to the school today. I don’t even know how she knows I work here.”
“We added your name and biography to the Campus Ministry and Religious Studies pages of the website.”
“Oh, that must be it. Well I just don’t want to see them if they come.”
“Understood,” she said. “Do you anticipate this problem will impact your work here?”
“I certainly hope not,” I replied honestly.
“Okay,” I walked back to my office uncomfortably.

Clearly, I needed to set a stronger boundary with my family. It was time to tell my mother what happened to me. So I began writing a letter by hand. If I printed something, my father could just scan the content and change it. The dam of my body now bled water onto the page. I finished my disclosure and signed my name at the bottom, “Annie Marie.” I worried if my dad got his hands on the letter first that it would never be read by my mother, so I mailed my disclosure to the mother of my childhood friend Kaylee so that she could hand it to my mother personally.

Kaylee and I met as children at church. Often after the service, we ran to the donut stand, then, with sprinkled covered faces, we headed over to the bars at the nearby playground. Together, we swung like monkeys. But my favorite memories with Kaylee were our frequent camping trips during the summers to Yosemite National Park.

Although our lives took very different directions as adults, we stayed in touch with occasional checkins. Recently, I had called her to disclose my resurfaced memories. She, like everyone else I had told, didn’t quite know what to do. Neither did I.

“Can you let your mom know that a letter will be coming to her for my mother explaining everything?”
“Of course,” she responded sadly. Soon after, we lost touch.

A few weeks went by, then my mother wrote back. “Anne, I believe that your father raped you, but you should forgive him.”

I didn’t know what to expect in her response, but certainly not this: both an acknowledgement of what happened and the immediate demand to forgive. Quickly, it became so clear to me that for generations weaponized forgiveness had been used to pass the cycle of incest abuse from adult to child or child to child in my family system.

Shouldn’t the pressure be on the perpetrators to atone, not the survivors to forgive?

I sat with the hurt of my mother’s words. Her refusal to act after my disclosure matched her support of past people who had harmed. Back in grade school, there was a girl in one of my classes whose father beat her mother. Whenever conflict arose between the girl and me, her mother called my mother threatening to slit her wrists if I didn’t do something about it. So my mother sat me down:

“Annie, you must solve this issue with your friend or else her mother is going to kill herself! She is being beaten by her husband, you can’t even begin to understand how horrible that is.”

But how? I wondered in the fifth grade. And why can’t her mother get help from someone else, an adult? The police maybe?

“Oh, and you must keep this information a secret,” my mother finished.

I remembered the girl in my grade school class who was raped in the bathroom, and the women who were molested by my mother’s chiropractor.

“Oh, that girl’s just looking for attention!” My mother proclaimed confidently in response to the girl’s disclosure.

Then the woman who raised me took to the stand in the courtroom to testify to the strong character of her chiropractor, defending him instead of the survivors. She received kisses on the lips from her OB/GYN every time she birthed another baby without consent, concern, or complaint.

If my mother chose to do nothing all these years later, I can’t imagine what she would’ve done or not done if I had disclosed as a child.

My brothers’ responses were more typical. Apparently, my father found the same color pen that I used in my hand-written disclosure letter and put quotation marks around the word rape, contributing to the suspicions of my siblings.

One said, “Your story just doesn’t add up.”
Another asked, “Do you mean that dad emotionally raped you?”
The last said, “Why do you always have to be such a victim?”

I refused to engage with my father, but that didn’t keep him from communicating with me. He sent me an email denying everything, arguing that I couldn’t have been as successful as I was if he had abused me. He accused me of committing a grave injustice against the family for separating myself from them without reason. But I knew both to be untrue. The responsibility of injustice rested on his shoulders, while the burden of it crushed mine.

Perfectionism and high-achievement are often overlooked coping mechanisms of those raised in violent homes, so victims receive the support, validation, and attachment they need from extrafamilial community members.² Because society celebrates perfectionistic and high-achieving behaviors, these victims often fall through the cracks of care, lacking the necessary identification, intervention, liberation, and recovery supports.

Without an apology, or accountability, or assurance that the next generation would be safe from the people who harmed me, I continued to distance myself from everybody, while my family’s story came to be that I went “crazy.” I wrote one last time to my mother to tell her of my reasons for separation. She responded:

“You cannot understand the challenge it takes to accept your decision. […] You may have chosen to rob me of the past […] years and the future years of us having a relationship, but you can never take away the 25 years of support, nurturing, care, commitment and loving memories we shared together. Together is the correct word here.

We mutually supported, nurtured, cared and were committed to one another. I was a very good, faithful and committed mother through your illnesses, surgeries, grade school, Girl Scouts, Theatrical Performances, Choirs, High School, Soccer, Softball, Water Polo, College, Relationships, Study Abroad, Depression Diagnosis, and Grad School. […]”

Throughout my childhood, I could never quite name the complexity of my relationship with my mother. Our closeness felt so deeply necessary for both of us. She became my best friend, but the partnership burdened me. The weight of it felt oppressive in ways I could not contain nor explain. Finally I found a phrase that named the harm of this type of relationship between parent and child: covert incest abuse.

A type of adultification. A form of parentification. Emotional incest abuse. An adult in the family or support system depending on a child to meet a family members’ needs for emotional intimacy and security. Often called a "“Surrogate Spouse,” the adult overshares feelings, engages in too much intimate touch even if not in places considered private, infantilizes the child so the adult feels needed. The adult enmeshes their own identity with the child’s, trapping the developing human into a web of emotional and ontological codependency.³ As my own mother described it: mutual support.

Is a relationship between mother and daughter ever supposed to be mutual? How old was I when this mutuality began?

Once the memories returned of my father’s contact sexual abuse, I immediately identified the behavior as harmful. But my mother’s non-contact abuse felt so much more confusing.

After all, what’s wrong with being loved too much?

I tried to reconnect to the parents of a few of my childhood friends, who attempted to support me in the best ways that they knew how. Many supported my choice to separate from my father. Most members of the community had experienced his lack of boundaries, his verbal abuse, his bullying, his hypersexualized behavior. But my distance from my mother caused them to question me:

“How could you separate yourself from a saint?” They asked me. “How could you deny a mother your love when she’s so unconditionally loving?”

They didn’t want the actual answer. I quickly found that if I wanted to continue to be in relationship with them, I had to follow one very important unspoken rule:

“Don’t tell us why you are choosing to estrange yourself from your family.”

That same Catholic congregation who left the food at the doorstep when I seized as a baby responded with silence to my disclosure of incest abuse. Chronic illness was an issue worthy of collective support, but incest felt far too taboo. This time, I was left alone to make meals by myself when my entire system — brain, body, and being — was refusing to function due to this history. My mother’s note continued:

“It is very easy to run away; its hard work to stay and make things work. Our family has worked; and continues to work at loving each other. There is no such thing as a perfect family or perfect love. There are real families and real love. […]

My heart has been deeply hurt by you. I have been humiliated by stories told to neighbors and friends and I have been humbled by the lack of being able to make any progress in restoring our once incredibly loving relationship.

You are loved by me, your mother, more than any one on this earth whether you care to except it or not. I will never stop loving you and living in hope that your heart will be moved in the direction of this truth. I love you.”

Still I couldn’t help but wonder:

What kind of motherly love justified emotional and sexual incest abuse, then passed it on to the next generation of children?

1. Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence--From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror.

2. Michałowska, S., Chęć, M. & Podwalski, P. “The mediating role of maladaptive perfectionism in the relationship between childhood trauma and depression.”

3. Çimşir E, Akdoğan R. “Childhood Emotional Incest Scale (CEIS): Development, validation, cross-validation, and reliability.”