With all the talk about Joe Paterno, and all the stories of childhood sexual trauma being shared on this board and others, it seems a good time to tell a different story. I wanted to share a story about what happens when adults do the right thing. Nobody reported my situation to the police but this one football coach, refused to let me drown in a sea of shame. My story took place in a tiny mid western town, where men are macho, football coaches scream, and gossip spreads faster than wildfire. Follow me below the fold for a happy story about what happens when unlikely adults reach out to children drowning in the secrets of childhood sexual trauma! Never doubt the power of reaching out to a child.
It’s the ironies of life that stick with me. The man who saved my life, literally plucked me out of a sea of whirling epithets, was quite the opposite of what my mind might have imagined. I was the new girl in a small town of 500 or so. Having moved from the inner city, it was city mouse meet country cousins. Both the worst and best of my life happened in the very town where lady Gaga, shot her last video. To this day, tiny midwestern towns both draw and repel me. Such a mixture of wild and tame, hostility and generosity, good will and bad.
As the new girl in this tiny town, the outsider, 12 years old, with long blond hair, and a desire to out run the fastest boy, one of my greatest life challenges occurred. It wasn’t a soft spoken female, or a caring social worker type that saved me. It wasn’t the parents of my friends, no they scorned me. It was the football coach. He, with his red faced yelling; his style was anything but gentle as he would throw an eraser if someone was caught sleeping in his class.
My cries for help, went out in journals, where I told my story. There would be sweet notes back from some of the teachers imploring me to keep talking about it. While others ignored me, and still others looked for predatory opportunities. The football coach didn’t play this game. It was as if he swam out to me, in the stormy ocean as I was drowning and handed me the life preserver. He was relentless about calling on me in class. Even as I looked stoned. He made sure to talk to me, every day. He told me over and over again, how smart I was. Told my mom, that I was perhaps the smartest girl in the class. And when I began to slip under, told my parents, and me, in no uncertain terms the importance of the loss of me.
In a town of 500, when the new girl comes to town and is gang raped by a group of older boys, there is no adult that does not know. And it seemed there was no adult who knew what to do, including my parents, years later when they found out. The rumor spreads like wild fire. It surrounds you, and drowns you like an ocean of disapproval. The stares, the whispers, the isolation. “My mom wouldn’t let me invite you, she said we don’t want girls like you at our house”.
But this man, the football coach, history teacher, and perhaps one of the most powerful men in my little town, put his hand out and pulled me up. He said; “No, these words they say, these horrible events are not you”.
Years of therapy, later, I have forgotten the sick ones. But I cannot forget that man, and how he changed the course of my life, simply by taking the time, to treat me as a person of potential and intelligence instead of a sex object, crazy girl, or some other label. He knew what to do, and he did it, and it changed my life. The fact that it was the football coach was all the more important. I knew he heard those stories, I knew he had heard the worst, and yet, he still reached out to me, and treated me like a person of potential. The way he looked at me, was not like a peice of meat, or some weird anomoly. He looked at me, the way a father might look at his daughter. I could feel the caring in his eyes. I could feel that it was not sick, just as I could feel the sickness in the glares behind some of the other eyes.
I remember when it clicked. It was after a parent teacher conference. He told my mom how smart and how concerned he was about me. He went on and on to my parents about my potential, and his concerns about the path I was going down. I kept thinking “How does he know I am drowing?”, “how does he know that I want to die?”.
After that, I became determined to turn the bus that had become my life around. It was my 9th grade year. I quit letting people tease me, stopped laughing at their jokes and insinuations. I stopped acting like a sex object and instead starting acting like a girl who was going somewhere. I was inducted into national honor society the next year, president of my class, then president of the student council. I turned down the cheerleading gig and focused on my leadership skills. I left that small town, having risen from the rubble, with scholarships and accolades in hand. With my gang rape a distant memory.
Today I am a counselor, and hopefully am reliving this gift over and over again, in my work. The way his kindness has multiplied is a miracle of life and astounding to me. His attitude, his kindness, his recognition of me, taught me about my own stereotypes, and was the perfect irony for me to remember about all men. Miracles happen every day, and he was my miracle.