The Home I Know: Memory
Chapter 11
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.
PART III: HOLD
“Behind the story I tell is the one I don’t.
Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear.
Behind my carefully buttoned collar is my nakedness, the struggle to find clean clothes,
food, meaning, and money. Behind sex is rage, behind anger is love,
behind this moment is silence, years of silence.”
~ Dorothy Allison
Chapter 11: Memory
“The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social contract are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable. Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried.”
~ Judith Herman, MD1
~ ~ ~
Thanksgiving arrived, so I returned home for the holiday. Per usual, all of my extended family members in the area and any friends without family held hands in a large circle in our front yard between the off-white house and the red brick wall on Bunya St.
“Everyone list three things they’re grateful for!” my father demanded.
One-by-one, we all said our set of affirmations. I named the routine litany: my family, my friends, the ocean; then ate plates full of potatoes and turkey. During the weekend that followed, my father, mother, brothers, and I drove down to Joan and Pop’s house on the golf course. As the day progressed, I felt so left out, so different, so othered from my own family, that I needed to take a break from them. Our values had divided so distinctively that I couldn’t quite find a way to relate to them, or for them to relate to me. Often, I felt both offended and lonely by their conversations and their company.
I walked out and sat on the curb, so I could manage the reactivity of my inner screamer with external silence. Suddenly, Pops came and stood by my side. He had noticed my absence. Then, with far too much effort, he sat his big, brittle bones beside me on the low sidewalk.
“What’s wrong, Annie?” he asked.
“I just can’t relate to our family. I feel so alone. Ever since I got back from El Salvador, I can’t seem to access any joy, pleasure, or gratitude.”
“You know,” he began one of his war stories, “when I flew back to the US after the war ended, I didn’t go home for weeks. I didn’t call my mother. I just rode trains around the country and sat with myself. As an engineer, I never saw direct combat. Instead, the military gave me a community and a sense of meaning that I had never experienced before, and I have yet to experience since.”
“I’m so sorry, grandpa,” I grieved. “Thank you for telling me. It’s helpful to know that you understand.”
While we shared this brief moment of intimacy, a conflict had erupted inside the house. Something had happened between my father and one of his sisters. She ran to the bathroom crying and he followed her. As I was told, she turned around and grabbed my father’s genitals and pinched them hard. In response, he reached for her breasts and twisted the nipples. Now, she was crying in the bathroom, while he was defending his actions.
“Why would you do that?” I asked him.
“She started it,” he replied. “Sometimes that’s just how siblings treat each other.”
While I drove back to Berkeley to return to school, I considered why my father could so easily justify the sexual molestation of family, and blame his sister for all of the wrongdoing. I remembered the few instances where my brothers had tried to touch me inappropriately when we were growing up. Immediately, I had disclosed the moments to my mother and she sat them down and asked them to respect my body. It never happened again.
I settled back into my life away from family. My graduate program offered complimentary spiritual direction to students. So I returned to this practice, which I found so comforting in El Salvador with Father Matthew, to guide me through the intense transformation of my worldview. Instead of sitting in the garden of the Peace House, I walked a few blocks down the street to see Sister Joan in her office. She had the same name as my paternal grandmother, but taught me about a much more gracious God.
Joan began to connect me with a source of divinity face-to-face without a male intermediary, without the Sacraments of the sexist church and the so-far-fixed family dynamic I was slowly separating myself from. Sister Joan was an expert in the practice of Ignatian Contemplation developed by the Jesuit founder, St. Ignatius of Loyola. Joan showed me how to use my practiced imagination to safely connect with this source of love that felt so deeply necessary.
Instead of getting lost in perfection in my head — the Garden of Eden that would never be real — I could redirect the power of my creative mind to focus on the voice of love in my own life. Scripture stories could be used as a composition of place, a starting space. I imagined myself on Noah’s ark.
I felt as if I left my entire world and was now lost in the pain of constant rain with a bunch of strangers. The wake of the waves shook the boat of my body. What would be my olive branch that would tell me land was near? When would the promise of land finally quiet my fears? When would my rainbow arrive? My promise for a better life?
God could meet me there and share some advice. I entered into the stories of Jesus too. The breaking of the bread. The time sitting around bonfires with friends. The walking on the water. The resurrection. I imagined being satiated. Being warmed by endless healing flames. Being accompanied side-by-side along the tops of impossible tides. I would no longer climb the mountain that was my paternal grandfather, nor cling to the whitewash that was my father.
~ ~ ~
Christmas came, so I returned to Bunya St. for the holiday. The warm winter weather in Newport provided the perfect opportunity for my family to visit the beach and take a walk. My mother and I strode across the warm sand holding hands with the salt water lapping against our feet.
“So,” she began. “I’ve started having flashbacks of my childhood.”
“Oh?” I questioned curiously. “Flashbacks of what exactly?”
“That I was sexually abused by my father, Jay.”
“Really?” I replied. “I’m so sorry. Do you want to say more about that?”
“It was so much: oral, rape, sodomy, molestation of my breasts, his hand forcing my hand to his penis.” She recalled these memories with a smile on her face, which perplexed me. “I didn’t know if the memories were true, so I asked a few others in our family, and they said they had also been abused.”
“Do you want to say anything to Grandpa Jay?”
“No, I’m not ready.”
“That’s understandable,” I replied. “Do you think he abused any kids in my generation?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she questioned, in a tone that suggested she couldn’t quite go there.
“Do you think other family members may have abused children? What about dad? He’s always been so obsessed with sex.”
“Well, he was never around,” she said, which I noted wasn’t a no.
I returned to school and researched more about recovered memories of child sexual abuse. From the work of Dr. Jennifer Freyd, a researcher and survivor, I learned that developmental traumas, especially when the perpetrator is a provider, can cause Betrayal Trauma. A child’s brain can’t hold the complex reality that the hand that feeds them is also the one that harms them, so victimized children compartmentalize their experiences. Some survivors glorify the abuse, some minimize it, some normalize it, others internalize it. They may only recall the good memories from childhood, while repressing the instances of incest abuse.2
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5), describes dissociative amnesia as a condition that “causes people to be unable to recall important personal information, usually due to trauma or stress.” The brain buries it, while the body is often the first vessel to speak through illness or by some other means until the memories can be retrieved. Sometimes though, they are not. The average age of disclosure for child sexual abuse survivors is in their fifties.3 My mother had just entered this decade of her life.
My studies began to focus more on the prevalence of sexual violence throughout history. Specifically, my class read Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us, by Rebecca Ann Parker and Rita Nakashima Brock.4 Parker shared about her adult-experience recalling instances of child sexual abuse by a neighbor. In her body too, she felt this deep embodied pressure, pain, and rage that she couldn’t release or escape in healthy ways.
And there was so much more. My professor revealed stories to me about the serial rape of so many girls and women that had often been erased. Like the “The Comfort Women”: 200,000 girls, mostly from Korea and between the ages of 12 and 16, that Japanese soldiers kidnapped during the Second World War and took to “comfort stations,” where they enslaved and raped these children.
But alongside this horrible reincarnation of memory, we also recovered the language survivors adopted to explain their pain, as well as the resiliency they found in solidarity. The Comfort Women adopted the word, han,5 the describe the pain left over from the serial sexual violence of their bodies. Suh Nam-dong, a professor of Minjung theology6 explains han as a “feeling of unresolved resentment against injustices suffered, a sense of helplessness because of the overwhelming odds against one, a feeling of acute pain in one’s guts and bowels, making the whole body writhe and squirm, and an obstinate urge to take revenge and to right the wrong — all these combined.”7
Reading the stories of these survivors’ pasts felt both deeply uncomfortable as well as strangely familiar. My mother’s words made more sense in reflection to these stories. It was as if the wounds of all of their wombs somehow whispered into mine still clinging to the confusion of silence inviting me too to speak. While I lacked a verbal language to express my emotional experience, my inner screamer was learning a verbiage that seemed to be resonating.
~ ~ ~
Easter approached quickly. Although my family expected me to return home for the holiday, I wanted to avoid Bunya St. My awareness of the dysfunctional patterns of my family increased, while my ability to normalize them decreased. Besides, the resurrection of Jesus certainly didn’t feel worthy of celebration, as I felt so trapped in a state of suffering constantly. I sought support from Joan.
“You know you don’t have to go home for the holidays, Anne?” She challenged me.
“What? They’re my family. I have to spend the holidays with them.”
“No,” she responded. “You’re an adult and need to do what’s best for you and your health. You’re always more stressed when you spend time with them than when you return. Why don’t you just stay at school?”
I arose on Easter morning curious about how I would feel on my first holiday without family. I chose to spend the day by myself, as I wasn’t ready to be welcomed into someone else’s house. Instead, I got dressed and went for a long walk. Surprisingly, I felt deeply at peace. An entire day without the obligations of family, without the messy expectations of perfection, without the constant anxiety of keeping up, without the secrets. I wasn’t lonely without my family; it was lovely.
A few months passed, so my mother chose to visit me in Berkeley. I wanted to introduce the beauty of the land to her, especially the trees. So my classmates, my mother, and I all went on a hike in Muir Woods. We made our way up the mountain, together observing the Redwoods standing so tall above our heads. I approached one, placed my hands around its trunk, and felt the fullness of its body. Then suddenly, I felt a hand opening the top of my elastic waistband and reaching down my pants. I turned swiftly to see my mother standing behind me.
“Mom, what are you doing?!” I asked, horrified.
“I just wanted to pat your po-po,” she replied. I pulled her aside.
“That’s private. You don’t get to touch me like that. Also, we’re in public with my friends. That’s deeply inappropriate and embarrassing.”
“I created that body,” she teased.
“That doesn’t give you the right to touch my body if I don’t want you to,” I replied.
“Well, touch is important to me,” she defended. “You know I wasn’t touched appropriately as a child.”
At dinner that night, I tried to continue to set boundaries with her, or at least explain the growing differences in my values and that my future may not be as she expected it. But she grew more defensive, switching the subject of conversation to her:
“Do you know how much it hurt me that you didn’t come home for Easter? The only reason I came here is because you don’t want to be with us at home!”
In that moment, I knew the conversation was over. She returned to Newport Beach, while I went back to Berkeley.
Content Invitation: The stories below contain simple descriptions of instances of child sexual abuse. Please, take care of yourself as you need in order to read the rest of this chapter and refer to the support resources post for help. If you would prefer, you can also skip the italicized sections below to pass by this more graphic content.
~ ~ ~
Days later, I laid in bed still processing this interaction with my mother. My head rested on my white pillow sprinkled with small pink flowers and green leaves. Tears fell down my cheeks, as I suddenly started to receive the memories.
I remembered: My six-year-old or so frame laid on a sofa and watched television as Grandpa Jay entered the room. He pulled down his pants to reveal his
erect penis and asked me to open my mouth.
I remembered: My father repeatedly bursting into my childhood bedroom,
ripping off my clothes, penetrating me.
I remembered: My uncle cornering me, molesting me.
All of the sudden so much of my suffering since I left home for college made perfect sense: The smell of beer on breath. The weight of bodies on my body. The stretching, the burning, the horror, the hurt. The monster under the bed was real. The demon in my body was them. My brain spun in my head, I wanted to exit my own skin.
All of the sudden my childhood history returned to me: I spent my first six years tumbling under the weight of men, not water, while also clinging to them to survive. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t find my way up, or my way down, or my way through. There was no way out. It seemed to have started when I was two. Others had abused me too. I had been imprisoned in my own home, exploited and raped by the people who were supposed to support me. The war was behind closed doors, the wounds buried so far beneath the skin, the chaos trapped in my body for only me to see.
Then, I saw her. Me, on my knees, my mouth open in a silent scream, hands bound so I couldn’t leave. I was only three. I remembered the wailing woman on the wall in the chapel in El Salvador. The children kidnapped and raped in Korea. The author of the ashes. My inner screamer. My mother. I now knew what I had felt in their company: the solidarity of this very specific source of suffering. A history of serial rape against my body finally telling me its story:
I am a victim of incest.
That word came to me with such ease. “Incest,” as if the use of it were a calling to me. But this new identity, this sudden knowledge, this hidden history, didn’t fit who I understood myself to be. An ontological shift — a change in my being with the forcing of the first penis, the perpetual penetrations and molestations. Transubstantiations that should’ve never happened due to someone else’s sins.
The flowers of my comforter held me now in this temporary garden of my bedroom that offered space for me to finally receive the revelation of this secret solidarity with other serial sexual abuse survivors throughout history. Most of my resurfacing stories were recovered memories: I had forgotten them and then reclaimed them as a part of my history. Some of the stories surfacing had been continuous memories: I always knew that they happened, but had yet to process them. Other instances remained non-narrative memories that still stuck to the bones in my body, but lacked a clear story.
I remembered: The boy on our block stuck his hands down my pants. The friend who threatened to drive home drunk if I didn’t lay in bed with him, then after I fell asleep, lifted my shirt and began playing with my breasts. The time on the train that the passenger standing behind me groped my ass, or the cat calls I received from the streets, or the up-and-down gazes from strange men that made me feel weak.
I remembered: My sweet Pops pulled me into his body, while I danced in an old dress of my grandmother’s that she had worn as a teenager. He aggressively raised the long skirt to rub my legs, then forcefully pushed me away.
I remembered: The youth minister who asked out on a date the day I turned 18. And the dad in my neighborhood who hit on me at my high school graduation party. And the professor in college who was twice my age and chose to romantically pursue me in my early twenties.
In these instances, I had walked away. But I could not run away from home. I could not set boundaries in the place I was raised with no locked doors by the father who groped my mother, and the mother who devoted herself to my father, and the community who celebrated my mother’s commitment to him as a sign of sanctity, and the church that blamed my body for all of it. Now just like Jonah in The Giver, I was given back at least some of my memories and it changed everything.
I knew I needed help, but didn’t know where to go, nor how to get there. I could barely support myself, but couldn’t go home. Immediately, I grabbed my cell phone, scrolled the contacts list until my first therapist’s name, “Barbara,” appeared and clicked “Call.” My back sat up against the hard wall now.
“Barbara, I’m remembering memories of incest abuse. I don’t know what to do. How do I know if they’re true?” I cried.
“Annie,” she began gently. “I’ve been seeing your mother in therapy these last few weeks. It’s clear to me that your family has a lot of secrets. In families with a lot of secrets, sexual abuse is common. I wouldn’t doubt if they’re real. Find your truth, for it will set you free.”
Finally, I reclaimed the silenced parts of me hiding in my own body. My challenging transition away from home to go to college. The nightterrors of being raped. My avoidance of parties. The slow shutdown of my system. The han in my pelvis. The state of my half-life. The need for isolation. My deep sensitivity to sexism. Finally, I had the answer I had been seeking since my body started shaking when I first drove away from the only home I have ever known at 18.
It was my father’s hands, my grandfather’s hands, and my uncle’s hands that caused the disruption in the cycle that was my life. But incest was not an issue that could so easily be untangled as a knot in a necklace. No bath, holy or not, could heal this. No prayer practice. No comfort object. No medication. No gratitude exercises. No wonder nothing had worked for me.
Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence--From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror.
Freyd, Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse.
Ortiz and CHILD USA, “CHILD USA DELAYED DISCLOSURE FACTSHEET: 2024.”
Brock and Parker. Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us.
Paik-Mander, “How the Korean Concept of “Han” Teaches Solidarity.”
Minjung theology was to many South Korean Christians as Liberation Theology was to many Latin Americans Christians.
Paik-Mander, “How the Korean Concept of “Han” Teaches Solidarity.”