My half sister, Irene, was abused/raped by my biological father. I was nine years younger, and she married and left me behind at about 11 to sink or swim on my own in a home so riven with strife it will take at least a book to express it. When she turned 40, she was unable to contain her rage and pain any longer. The accusations came out in the open.
Out of the blue one day, my father called me in California from Florida, looking for sympathy. He told me my sister was asking for money to save her house, and she claimed he owed it to her because of his molestation/rape (there was no money to be had but that is unimportant).
In an instant, I had to process what I knew to be true in my gut and realize that my sister had also been a victim of my father’s incestuous compulsions. In that fraction of a second, I put together what I had not realized till that moment.
When he had called me Irene (my mother’s name), I had thought he can’t tell the difference between his wife and his daughter. That realization came full circle: my mother Irene, my sister Irene and myself were all interchangeable in his head.
In that moment, I realized that my sister was an incest victim just as I had always believed myself to be without concrete evidence. In fact, she was validating my instincts, my beliefs about what I had endured.
In my late twenties, my therapist cued me in to the reality that I had not been allowed to move through the normal stages of childhood maturation because I had been so cloistered. I was a full decade behind in my social/psychological development. At the time of my sister’s revelation, I was developmentally 21 although I was 31.
I told my father that I knew Irene was telling the truth because he had wanted to do the same to me (therapists have repeatedly told me there is no way of knowing if I was abused and repressed it, if it happened at such a young age that I did not understand it or if I merely witnessed something at such a young age that, again, I would not have understood it.)
During this conversation, my father blurted out “I never broke her cherry.”
I have never typed this sentence or even mentioned it in context outside a therapist’s office. A daughter who already felt violated by her biological father every time she was in the same house with him, had to hear and process that line. My mother had to have heard it as she was hovering around the phone, but she blocked it forever.
At some point, my mother grabbed the phone and asked me, (the youngest child, the one who had insisted on escaping and earning not just the first college degree in my family but a Master’s and the only who had already earned tenure as a community college instructor in California (as far away as I could get from my father short of swimming to Hawai’i)), asked me to call my sister and find out the truth. I told my mother the same thing I had told my father, “I believe Irene because I knew he wanted to do the same to me.”
This commenced a 23 month upheaval in my already sick family that reached from New Jersey to Florida to California.
At the end of those 23 months, months in which my sister actually started treating me as her sister for the first time, Irene died in a home fire started by a cigarette in the couch she was probably sleeping on.
But she really died because what was left of her tortured soul gave up when my mother did not leave my father, when my mother was unable to connect with her first born or her second born for that matter.
Not believing women leads to soul death at the very least
I had a real sister for 23 months because she finally accepted that I was not the one who got off unscathed. Ironically, I was the one who soothed her, told her to stop fearing my father, told her to call him and yell at him.
My mother never heard my sentence, “. . .because he wanted to do the same to me.” Not for decades, not even when I screamed and screamed out my anguish. She never really heard my sister either. Decades after my sister’s death, she was still mouthing sentences like “We don’t really know the truth about Irene.” And astoundingly, I didn’t realize she had not heard my cry of pain about my deep fears and shame about the incestuous environment of my childhood.
Late in my mother’s life when she was finally living with me, I realized how completely she had shut down my sister’s story and my own. This is not uncommon. My current therapist was anything but shocked to hear my mother did not believe my sister or me as I explained to her today that I was writing this story. During the last decade of my mother’s life, she told me she could never understand why I was so angry about my father.
I am planning to write my memoirs in the next year or two now that I am finally retired. This story is partially practice for that goal, partially a cautionary tale.
Sexually abusing your child creates more pain than can be repaired in a lifetime, especially if your loved ones reject your story.
I have moved through the rest of my life encountering and/or dodging sexual abuse after sexual abuse just as any other women in our culture.
I was once essentially kidnapped by a man who intended to rape me. He had obviously disabled my brand new car enough for it to stall just off campus in an agricultural area at night. Pushing my car off the road, he told me to leave it unlocked so that it could be towed and offered me a ride into town. During that drive, it became clear what he had in mind. He insisted we turn off the road onto still another agricultural area. I managed to convince him to let me go. I am sure that learning how to deflect my father gave me the courage to signal to him I was going to fight him tooth and nail. He changed his mind. He dropped me off where my boyfriend was waiting for me.The next day, my boyfriend and one of my students went to retrieve my car. There was nothing wrong with my car. It started right away, but they found ejaculate all over the seats, front and back. I will never forget the look on my sweet, young student’s face when he explained how they had cleaned up the car. The professor he admired so much might have been brutally raped or killed the night before.
My doctoral training gave me access to world famous feminist scholars, some of whom were women of color and especially the writings of exceptional women of color. I learned the theory growing out of the feminist women of color who had begun to speak and write in the second half of the twentieth century. I learned the theory derived from these writings by women of color that insists that the oppressed learn a great deal about their oppressors out of their need for survival. How our spidey senses are enhanced, how we become literate storytellers speaking from a different place as the dominant culture cannot represent or accept our voices.
The picture at the top of this story is not just about a stormy sea. It contains a representation of what we think of as a two hundred or more year old sailing vessel. My father was put on one of these ships at the turn of the 20th century and lived as a cabin boy, then fisherman, traveling throughout the Caribbean from port to port, hauling in cod fish and salting it down, bacalao, as it was called in my house, a staple from the Americas to Europe. My father sailed from Cuba to Puerto Rico to Mexico and up and down the east coast of the Americas, he came to maturity on a ship hardly different from Columbus’ trio, the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. My Latinx side was complicated by my father’s evil sickness. As I have never fully healed from incest aggression (Note that we have no noun or verb for this most horrible of patriarchal crimes. There is no equivalent of “rapist” or “rape.”), I also have never fully integrated my Latina side with my Eastern European heritage. The silence about incest ‘abuse’ extends to a lack of language.
Now, I would like to turn to the impetus for writing this story today. The case of Senator Al Franken. I am horrified that Franken’s accusers have been alluded to and believed without the least examination of the stories, or rather simply by an examination in the press, the press that most of us criticize for getting the story wrong most of the time. I am terrified that the Democrats in the Senate have rushed to judgement, have allowed a swift boating of what I believe is our strongest and most courageous progressive voice.
I believe what has just happened will turn the me too movement on its head. If every accuser is to be believed without a solid discourse examining the story/ies, then no accuser is to be believed. The stance should always be we will move forward with belief in the accuser, but the story must be examined, not as a way to disprove but rather as a way to affirm it.
There are ways to go about rolling back patriarchy, but not stopping to discuss and analyze is not the way to move forward. Anyone who believes Franken’s resignation was a victory for women is going to learn to their horror that it was not.
Eight weeks of furious sexual abuse revelations does not lasting social change make. This is a watershed moment, but we are fools if we think we are moving in the right direction by forcing Franken out without a proper hearing or even an extended discussion.
Sexual abuse is itself a minimizing term for a very wide variety of acts, and discussing sexual abuse as if this term can be bandied about casually and nebulously is as damaging as not discussing it at all.
I believe accusers first, but I don’t blindly believe everyone without examining the story/ies.
We can begin with belief and then think about what we are hearing/reading/observing.
Franken was boorish. The picture of him mimicking touching breasts is disgusting and part of our patriarchal culture. But anonymous accusations mean nothing.
This political disaster has the ingredients to flush women’s rights away for another hundred years.
And here is my postscript. My sister’s only child, a daughter, was placed in her father’s grandparents house after Irene’s death. Three thousand miles away from me and a thousand away from my mother, she became a second generation incest victim via her paternal aunt’s husband. The pregnancy made it impossible to hide. She endures an indescribable level of damage from incest victimization and being twice orphaned before she was eighteen. I am her nearest living relative since my mother’s death. Her father’s family has died or disowned her. Since my mother’s death, I am her only backstop. She has idolized Trump for almost two decades. I will never abandon her, but tell me again how it is immoral to want Franken’s case fully aired and debated.
At any point in my family’s story, any one of us could have been pilloried for bad choices, dubious conduct, victimizing ourselves.
Sexual misbehavior, another cop out term, demands careful teasing apart. Rushing to judgement takes us down a road that will only lead to more disasters, and frankly, we can’t afford these disasters.
We will probably never get to examine and evaluate Franken’s case.
Much of the fallout will damage victims for a long, long time.
It is late, very late. All the more reason to walk and talk and act with precision.