Chapter Thirty-five: Connecting the Dots
Fitchburg is a city of hills. The path between my home on Weymouth Street and Fitchburg High School was a 10-minute trek up and over a steep hill, then down the cobblestones of Jay Street (which at a 45° angle was the steepest street in North America), onto Pleasant Street and the back entrance of Fitchburg High School.
One sunny day in late April or early May, about a month before I was due to graduate, I was on Pleasant Street, almost directly across from the school’s back entrance. I was just about to cross the street to enter school when I saw the young girl. She was standing about 15 feet away from me, and she had a beautiful face and looked to be 12 or 13 years old, her features suggested a Mediterranean heritage. The nameless girl’s stringy black hair hung in strands down to her shoulders, and she was wearing a plain white, one-piece cotton sundress, which appeared almost translucent in the bright morning sunshine. As the girl stood in her yard, we made eye contact. She held my gaze with a strange, desperate and pleading look. As we stared at each other, she half-smiled at me and lifted the hem of her dress to her chin.
I was stunned to see that she wore no panties beneath her dress as she displayed her naked body to me. A thin patch of pubic hair was just starting to grow. As I watched, she slowly swayed from side to side, all while keeping eye contact with me. I was trying my best to process what I saw – without much luck. People don’t show their nude bodies to strangers for no reason. I wanted to say something to the girl, but no words would come out of my mouth. After many seconds, she turned around and exposed her bare bottom to me for a few moments before turning again to face me. I admit I was curious, but I was also scared. She slowly lowered her dress and motioned me to follow her as she walked up the stairs and into her house.
I knew exactly what her, “come hither” look implied. My level of fear rocketed off the charts. Nothing about what I saw made sense. I could perceive a level of danger I could not define,
The entire incident left me speechless and too freaked out to react. Instead, I bolted for the school’s entrance and barely managed to make it to my seat before class began. I found the entire troubling experience to be more weird than erotic. What would cause a girl, or anyone, to expose their body like that to a complete stranger?
I thought about the incident throughout my Ancient History class. I puzzled over it in Math class. By lunchtime, all I had was a roaring headache and no answers. In the end, I classified the girl as a strange phenomenon of nature, like the brilliant fireball I had once seen in the sky. I pretty much put the incident out of my mind, and it wasn’t until I started to write this book that I remembered the flashing girl.
Something about her strange hopeless and pleading look reminded me of myself. I think she was an abused child. She was desperately trying to connect with someone, anyone else. The memory of the haunting look in her eyes triggered a connection in my head between my sexual abuse experiences and emotional issues, which have plagued me throughout my life.
Childhood’s forge of experience shaped my life one event at a time. Each of my abusers took their turn as the blacksmith. They assaulted my body and mind with their authority; each strike eroded absolute values and formed within me strange new contours of sexual identity.
I resisted, to the best of my ability. I refused to break, and I would not yield. Nevertheless, I did bend and change. I would never be the same again.
Thanks to bullies and babysitters, I was uncomfortable in social settings with my own gender. I had far more female friends than male friends. I was physically attracted to girls but feared sexual intimacy. I compensated for my deficiencies. I could talk to a crowd of a hundred people for hours with complete confidence but had difficulty in five minutes of one-on-one, small talk. Dan Sapir, a friend, and colleague, once accused me of, “having all the social graces of a brick through someone’s living room window.”
Realizing there is a direct connection between present behaviors and past experiences is the first step in an inward journey. It has been a long time coming, but the age of healing has finally arrived.
I had surpassed each memory of abuse and tried to bury them in my mind. However, just because I didn’t remember the violations did not mean the memories were not there. Each exerted gravity waves like an invisible black hole. Each changed the orbit of my days.
My mother emotionally abused me throughout my life. Her molestation of me was an anomaly. Joyce's weapon of choice was psychological warfare. She withheld affection and used every opportunity to diminish, demean, and degrade me. Nothing I did or would ever accomplish would ever be sufficient to win her love, praise or respect. I spent the first fifty years of my life chasing after her approval. I might just as well have been chasing rainbows.
A dear friend who is also, an abuse survivor told me, “Living and surviving inside the situation keeps our entire trauma compartmentalized, and we are often unable, for a good reason, to see the full scope and sequence of our suffering. Connecting the dots is the Great Reveal that allows us to see the vast extent of our circumstances, and when we finally do we say, ‘Oh crap! No wonder I’m like this,’ and then we begin to heal.”