holidays are hard for me

I have a hard time during the holiday seasons.

My girls don’t. I made sure of that…I’m a great bullshiter. They know, they just let me lie and move on.

Holidays are hard for me.

I have had some rough holiday seasons.

I had to call out some pedophiles one time.

I had to put them on blast.

They in turn…turned a complete community against me successfully.

My holidays sucked for several years…during the trial days… five years of them.

But I couldn’t let my girls be unsafe.

I couldn’t allow them to be around negative, disbelieving, and unsafe people.

So we, my little family and I did holidays on our own.

Me and two little girls enjoyed the holiday season.

When cousins got old enough to drive…as this went on for five years…they would drive over and spend a little time with their cousins on the holidays.

Such sadness.

I merely stated the facts I had been told…and our entire world turned inside out.

People…professional people kept telling me the same thing…”I have never dealt with this before.”

I understand, I really do understand, your need to tell me this…but this did not help me process the fact that I had never been through this before either. And if you ,who is guiding me, has never done this …then how the hell am I supposed to act or react….hmmm.

I’ve journeyed forward for many years trying stubbornly to not look back at separate issues, but today… today I cry.

The first year on my own…all alone for thanksgiving…was something I had never done before either. I had two little ,tiny girls, who were five years old and just wanted to be excited like their classmates about the holidays. But we were separate, segregated, alone. We were victims. We were hard to look at. We had to much pain to look directly at for to long. No one knew what to say. No one knew how to act. We were untouchable. We were dirty…unclean…we were victims.

It just hit me the other day…We were on the outside because our perpetrators were not the regular perps. Our perps were nice church going head of the nursery, great pillars of the community perps…not your ordinary hide in the bushes, drug induced bad decision making perps. These were Christians for Gods sake. How dare I spill dirty laundry in their church. In their community…in their presence.

A wise women told me years later…after the smoke had cleared…after I had picked up the pieces of my broken life…She told me, “You know that an entire community can be groomed.” yes…yes, I know that. First hand I know that.

I shake my head today as I watch people try to decide if a victim is trustworthy or lying…Sometime it makes me scoff, and sometimes…ok ,sometimes I wanna punch them in the face.

A community can be groomed.

What does that mean though?

What is grooming? Grooming is a word people in the field use to describe how a perpetrator gains access to our children. Sadly I could teach a course on this , sadly I could quote statistics to you…but I’m so tired anymore…it no longer feels relevant to me now. As, I know what I know…and it is what it is.

Grooming though goes beyond getting access to your child…it s getting access to a community of children.

During our FIVE year court battle several less privileged victims came to confess their abuse by those same perps…but since we had been so harassed, ridiculed, and subjected to such hate…how would they fair in the coming forward for justice. You pick it up and move…and that is what they did, they merely wanted to stop by on their way out of town and let me know that I was right…that these people had perped on their kid too… hope everything works out for us, but if the community acted so vehemently against me…how would they ever fair against them.

When we told the truth…

We were asked to leave the house we were renting…we had two weeks.

We were asked to not come back to the church.

I was told by my pastor that he had nothing to say to me.

My family was tore apart…no longer a safe place for my girls. The perps were a part of all those things…and they won the battle. We were the poster child to what never to say or do to victims.

So in the short time between my daughter telling me horrendous life altering things that a five year old should never know…I had become homeless, without family support, with out a church, without a pastor, and without the new friends I had acquired through the gospel of Jesus Christ…

I was utterly, and completely ALONE.

I was forced to live in a one room house. We had been kicked to the curb, and since we were homeless my father had to step in…a little. So the very least because I was his daughter, but he didn’t have to do more then just enough…because he was a great and mighty man of God, and he had to show love to the other victims…the perps. ( I have to inject a thought here, when we finally go to trail these perps had successfully turned the entire community against us and the world saw us as the assailants and the poor accused as the vicitms. This thought was so well groomed that on the day of the trail when their legions of support came to support them they walked into the victims room in the courthouse. because the perps were considered the vics. Go ahead and say wow! Cuz it really is amazing)back to where I was forced to live. There were other rooms but we were not allowed to clean it out…as, we were unworthy of the full use of the house. As a parent he had to give us something as we were about to live in my car, but we were not worthy of the whole house…only the living room and bathroom. There was no gas in the house and yep you guessed it…it was November. I cooked on a hotplate in the living room. I bought a little dorm refrigerator. We had one bed that we all three had to sleep on. The expensive electric heaters merely kept us from freezing to death…we could see our breath as we sat huddled together, licking our wounds. We slept with five heavy blankets on us for warmth.

So when you see us today and you think...wow! Those girls are very close…oddly close…yes we are we went through hell together. And I never disbelieved them. I never questioned the validity of their words. I never questioned the emotions they were going through...I just showed them love and understanding. I was Jesus to them in the worst possible moment in their life.

The shack they allowed us to stay in was placed right next to their brand new three bedroom house they had just had built. So I could hear family and friends come to them…to give them support in THEIR time of need. My girls ,like any other five year olds would get excited to see someone they knew…”Mommy, Mommy….this person is at grandmas.” and I would answer, “come inside Fate, they aren’t here to see us…we got a lot of stuff to do here…lets make a collage.” The pastor came to pray with them…not us, my poor parents, their church friends came to help them stand up…and family came…to stand with the parents….not the victims, because somehow my mother had made the entire debauchery about her…so each time I redirected my babies and we sat huddled under piles of blankets and cut out pictures to glue on paper…I made hell fun! Because I am the SHIT mom…and I would and did fight the world to save them.

Holidays are tough for me.

Easter was no better. By this time I died inside a little each time one of the great and mighty church members came to fellowship (can you see my sneer when I say that?) with my parents…so easter we spent in a hotel hiding eggs inside the hotel lobby…cuz my babies did not understand why their life, their family and their everything had changed. So the very next time you hear that a victim ‘recanted’ don’t get all jumpy with the idea that they had lied the first time…persecution is not a warm ,fuzzy feeling to have and when you’re a five year old you cannot fathom why things are very strange now. Still it would be another 3 years before our lives calmed down enough to even get to that level of process’ that a rape victim goes through. These were the very early days of the telling.

Did I ever tell you that the police department threatened to take my children if I did not produce them to be interviewed? I continued to hold them hostage anyway…I KNOW my fucking rights! I refused to take my tiny, delicate babies to big scary police department to be locked in a room away from me all alone to tell a secret to three… THREE police men...in uniform something that had made her mom so sad that her mom could no longer function as a rational human being.

I knew I looked like a raving lunatic…I resembled a hurt mamma bear striking out at anyone daring to come close…cuz so far no one had been rational to me…so far no one had ever said, Its ok…I’m going to walk with you through this fucking scary process…no one said I know what to do…NO ONE tried to make me feel safe. So I could make my babies feel safe…everyone just kept attacking me, threatening me…

So I called bullshit to their vacant threats…

…and we had no dearing house…we had no child advocacy…we had no real concept of a victim yet in this area… we were the first…

Did you know that for five years…the sound of me throwing up EVERYDAY was the sound that my children woke to? Five years like clockwork. My damn eyes would open again and reality would hit me…it wasn’t a nightmare I was enduring all alone…this was real and I had to deal with it, so every morning that wave of reality washed over me and bile rose until I couldn’t swallow it down and I ran to throw up…each and every morning of our lives for five years. Sickness and sadness were my only feelings for five years. Oh and manufactured laugher…I’m a great bullshiter.

I light another Marlboro and I ponder…what else do I need to cleanse to make this delirium moment pass from me.

Mostly I see fates huge brown eyes…

I see her remarkably great brown eyes watching me.

She wouldn’t tell for three years…she wouldn’t tell until she knew I could handle it…until she knew I wouldn’t disappear into a dot and cease to exist anymore…cuz that, my friends and neighbors is what I wanted to do.

She would just silently tend to us, her twin and I, as we suffered through the worst of it. She brought throw up bowls and wet washcloths to us as I held my limp, life less child after she had gone through yet another round of horrendous panic attacks that threatened to take us all away. The utter, sheer and complete panic on my 6 year olds face as she clawed at her throat because she couldn’t breath…her body suddenly rigid from my mere touch…her eyes would suddenly glaze over and the whimpering began…the whimpering/howl sounded like an injured animal…and she fought like hell to get out of it…valiantly she fought…it always ended in bile emitted from her tiny mouth…like clockwork fate and I had it down…miraculously fate would appear with the bowl….throw up…then the wet wash cloth to lay on her wet head… so no Fate didn’t tell me for a long time.

…we missed a lot of school…

She was so tiny…

Dark circles under her eyes…

I can’t recall now how she looked as she lay in my arms...I really don’t think I could look for to long…I watched Fate…watch us.

Today….today…we are relaxed and comfortable in our own skin…Lyric has so much grace and integrity that I am blown away by her enduring faith on a daily bases. And Fate, well Fate never wavered…even though she was so frightened she had to break 30 seconds into the trial. And she ran wailing into the back room to be calmed by the ADA and the victims asst. she stood boldly and told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth…

….so today in live in awe of the graceful splendor that they wrap themselves in. Today s a brand new day. Today is freedom. Today is peace. Today is laughter.

They saw their perps the other day…

Riding down the street in a car on their way home from church, A church they had chosen on their own…(I still suck at church.) My ladies were riding along and looked over at the persons next to them. It was their perpetrators…

Lyric used words like...mesmerized…transfixed…to describe her moment. She said she didn’t know who they were or why she couldn’t stop staring…she just felt transfixed by their utter sadness…she said they, the people next to her looked so dark black and sad….then she slowly realized who they were…she turned to look at her twin and she was looking too…and she was just as surprised…they both excitedly exclaimed…hey that was them! Did you see how dark and sad they look… Lyric later told me that she had prayed for them cuz they looked so lost and miserable. Yes that’s right…their victim prayed for them…because they looked like they were in pain…

…That’s MY God…My God makes your enemies your footstools! My God calls you out of your death clothes and brings you back to life! My God will give back to you seven fold what the enemy took from me! That’s My God, merciful, giving, enduring, loving, ravenous…yes, that’s my God…He made victims victors!

holidays are hard for me

I have a hard time during the holiday seasons.

My girls don’t. I made sure of that…I’m a great bullshiter. They know, they just let me lie and move on.

Holidays are hard for me.

I have had some rough holiday seasons.

I had to call out some pedophiles one time.

I had to put them on blast.

They in turn…turned a complete community against me successfully.

My holidays sucked for several years…during the trial days… five years of them.

But I couldn’t let my girls be unsafe.

I couldn’t allow them to be around negative, disbelieving, and unsafe people.

So we, my little family and I did holidays on our own.

Me and two little girls enjoyed the holiday season.

When cousins got old enough to drive…as this went on for five years…they would drive over and spend a little time with their cousins on the holidays.

Such sadness.

I merely stated the facts I had been told…and our entire world turned inside out.

People…professional people kept telling me the same thing…”I have never dealt with this before.”

I understand, I really do understand, your need to tell me this…but this did not help me process the fact that I had never been through this before either. And if you ,who is guiding me, has never done this …then how the hell am I supposed to act or react….hmmm.

I’ve journeyed forward for many years trying stubbornly to not look back at separate issues, but today… today I cry.

The first year on my own…all alone for thanksgiving…was something I had never done before either. I had two little ,tiny girls, who were five years old and just wanted to be excited like their classmates about the holidays. But we were separate, segregated, alone. We were victims. We were hard to look at. We had to much pain to look directly at for to long. No one knew what to say. No one knew how to act. We were untouchable. We were dirty…unclean…we were victims.

It just hit me the other day…We were on the outside because our perpetrators were not the regular perps. Our perps were nice church going head of the nursery, great pillars of the community perps…not your ordinary hide in the bushes, drug induced bad decision making perps. These were Christians for Gods sake. How dare I spill dirty laundry in their church. In their community…in their presence.

A wise women told me years later…after the smoke had cleared…after I had picked up the pieces of my broken life…She told me, “You know that an entire community can be groomed.” yes…yes, I know that. First hand I know that.

I shake my head today as I watch people try to decide if a victim is trustworthy or lying…Sometime it makes me scoff, and sometimes…ok ,sometimes I wanna punch them in the face.

A community can be groomed.

What does that mean though?

What is grooming? Grooming is a word people in the field use to describe how a perpetrator gains access to our children. Sadly I could teach a course on this , sadly I could quote statistics to you…but I’m so tired anymore…it no longer feels relevant to me now. As, I know what I know…and it is what it is.

Grooming though goes beyond getting access to your child…it s getting access to a community of children.

During our FIVE year court battle several less privileged victims came to confess their abuse by those same perps…but since we had been so harassed, ridiculed, and subjected to such hate…how would they fair in the coming forward for justice. You pick it up and move…and that is what they did, they merely wanted to stop by on their way out of town and let me know that I was right…that these people had perped on their kid too… hope everything works out for us, but if the community acted so vehemently against me…how would they ever fair against them.

When we told the truth…

We were asked to leave the house we were renting…we had two weeks.

We were asked to not come back to the church.

I was told by my pastor that he had nothing to say to me.

My family was tore apart…no longer a safe place for my girls. The perps were a part of all those things…and they won the battle. We were the poster child to what never to say or do to victims.

So in the short time between my daughter telling me horrendous life altering things that a five year old should never know…I had become homeless, without family support, with out a church, without a pastor, and without the new friends I had acquired through the gospel of Jesus Christ…

I was utterly, and completely ALONE.

I was forced to live in a one room house. We had been kicked to the curb, and since we were homeless my father had to step in…a little. So the very least because I was his daughter, but he didn’t have to do more then just enough…because he was a great and mighty man of God, and he had to show love to the other victims…the perps. ( I have to inject a thought here, when we finally go to trail these perps had successfully turned the entire community against us and the world saw us as the assailants and the poor accused as the vicitms. This thought was so well groomed that on the day of the trail when their legions of support came to support them they walked into the victims room in the courthouse. because the perps were considered the vics. Go ahead and say wow! Cuz it really is amazing)back to where I was forced to live. There were other rooms but we were not allowed to clean it out…as, we were unworthy of the full use of the house. As a parent he had to give us something as we were about to live in my car, but we were not worthy of the whole house…only the living room and bathroom. There was no gas in the house and yep you guessed it…it was November. I cooked on a hotplate in the living room. I bought a little dorm refrigerator. We had one bed that we all three had to sleep on. The expensive electric heaters merely kept us from freezing to death…we could see our breath as we sat huddled together, licking our wounds. We slept with five heavy blankets on us for warmth.

So when you see us today and you think...wow! Those girls are very close…oddly close…yes we are we went through hell together. And I never disbelieved them. I never questioned the validity of their words. I never questioned the emotions they were going through...I just showed them love and understanding. I was Jesus to them in the worst possible moment in their life.

The shack they allowed us to stay in was placed right next to their brand new three bedroom house they had just had built. So I could hear family and friends come to them…to give them support in THEIR time of need. My girls ,like any other five year olds would get excited to see someone they knew…”Mommy, Mommy….this person is at grandmas.” and I would answer, “come inside Fate, they aren’t here to see us…we got a lot of stuff to do here…lets make a collage.” The pastor came to pray with them…not us, my poor parents, their church friends came to help them stand up…and family came…to stand with the parents….not the victims, because somehow my mother had made the entire debauchery about her…so each time I redirected my babies and we sat huddled under piles of blankets and cut out pictures to glue on paper…I made hell fun! Because I am the SHIT mom…and I would and did fight the world to save them.

Holidays are tough for me.

Easter was no better. By this time I died inside a little each time one of the great and mighty church members came to fellowship (can you see my sneer when I say that?) with my parents…so easter we spent in a hotel hiding eggs inside the hotel lobby…cuz my babies did not understand why their life, their family and their everything had changed. So the very next time you hear that a victim ‘recanted’ don’t get all jumpy with the idea that they had lied the first time…persecution is not a warm ,fuzzy feeling to have and when you’re a five year old you cannot fathom why things are very strange now. Still it would be another 3 years before our lives calmed down enough to even get to that level of process’ that a rape victim goes through. These were the very early days of the telling.

Did I ever tell you that the police department threatened to take my children if I did not produce them to be interviewed? I continued to hold them hostage anyway…I KNOW my fucking rights! I refused to take my tiny, delicate babies to big scary police department to be locked in a room away from me all alone to tell a secret to three… THREE police men...in uniform something that had made her mom so sad that her mom could no longer function as a rational human being.

I knew I looked like a raving lunatic…I resembled a hurt mamma bear striking out at anyone daring to come close…cuz so far no one had been rational to me…so far no one had ever said, Its ok…I’m going to walk with you through this fucking scary process…no one said I know what to do…NO ONE tried to make me feel safe. So I could make my babies feel safe…everyone just kept attacking me, threatening me…

So I called bullshit to their vacant threats…

…and we had no dearing house…we had no child advocacy…we had no real concept of a victim yet in this area… we were the first…

Did you know that for five years…the sound of me throwing up EVERYDAY was the sound that my children woke to? Five years like clockwork. My damn eyes would open again and reality would hit me…it wasn’t a nightmare I was enduring all alone…this was real and I had to deal with it, so every morning that wave of reality washed over me and bile rose until I couldn’t swallow it down and I ran to throw up…each and every morning of our lives for five years. Sickness and sadness were my only feelings for five years. Oh and manufactured laugher…I’m a great bullshiter.

I light another Marlboro and I ponder…what else do I need to cleanse to make this delirium moment pass from me.

Mostly I see fates huge brown eyes…

I see her remarkably great brown eyes watching me.

She wouldn’t tell for three years…she wouldn’t tell until she knew I could handle it…until she knew I wouldn’t disappear into a dot and cease to exist anymore…cuz that, my friends and neighbors is what I wanted to do.

She would just silently tend to us, her twin and I, as we suffered through the worst of it. She brought throw up bowls and wet washcloths to us as I held my limp, life less child after she had gone through yet another round of horrendous panic attacks that threatened to take us all away. The utter, sheer and complete panic on my 6 year olds face as she clawed at her throat because she couldn’t breath…her body suddenly rigid from my mere touch…her eyes would suddenly glaze over and the whimpering began…the whimpering/howl sounded like an injured animal…and she fought like hell to get out of it…valiantly she fought…it always ended in bile emitted from her tiny mouth…like clockwork fate and I had it down…miraculously fate would appear with the bowl….throw up…then the wet wash cloth to lay on her wet head… so no Fate didn’t tell me for a long time.

…we missed a lot of school…

She was so tiny…

Dark circles under her eyes…

I can’t recall now how she looked as she lay in my arms...I really don’t think I could look for to long…I watched Fate…watch us.

Today….today…we are relaxed and comfortable in our own skin…Lyric has so much grace and integrity that I am blown away by her enduring faith on a daily bases. And Fate, well Fate never wavered…even though she was so frightened she had to break 30 seconds into the trial. And she ran wailing into the back room to be calmed by the ADA and the victims asst. she stood boldly and told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth…

….so today in live in awe of the graceful splendor that they wrap themselves in. Today s a brand new day. Today is freedom. Today is peace. Today is laughter.

They saw their perps the other day…

Riding down the street in a car on their way home from church, A church they had chosen on their own…(I still suck at church.) My ladies were riding along and looked over at the persons next to them. It was their perpetrators…

Lyric used words like...mesmerized…transfixed…to describe her moment. She said she didn’t know who they were or why she couldn’t stop staring…she just felt transfixed by their utter sadness…she said they, the people next to her looked so dark black and sad….then she slowly realized who they were…she turned to look at her twin and she was looking too…and she was just as surprised…they both excitedly exclaimed…hey that was them! Did you see how dark and sad they look… Lyric later told me that she had prayed for them cuz they looked so lost and miserable. Yes that’s right…their victim prayed for them…because they looked like they were in pain…

…That’s MY God…My God makes your enemies your footstools! My God calls you out of your death clothes and brings you back to life! My God will give back to you seven fold what the enemy took from me! That’s My God, merciful, giving, enduring, loving, ravenous…yes, that’s my God…He made victims victors!

holidays are hard for me

I have a hard time during the holiday seasons.

My girls don’t. I made sure of that…I’m a great bullshiter. They know, they just let me lie and move on.

Holidays are hard for me.

I have had some rough holiday seasons.

I had to call out some pedophiles one time.

I had to put them on blast.

They in turn…turned a complete community against me successfully.

My holidays sucked for several years…during the trial days… five years of them.

But I couldn’t let my girls be unsafe.

I couldn’t allow them to be around negative, disbelieving, and unsafe people.

So we, my little family and I did holidays on our own.

Me and two little girls enjoyed the holiday season.

When cousins got old enough to drive…as this went on for five years…they would drive over and spend a little time with their cousins on the holidays.

Such sadness.

I merely stated the facts I had been told…and our entire world turned inside out.

People…professional people kept telling me the same thing…”I have never dealt with this before.”

I understand, I really do understand, your need to tell me this…but this did not help me process the fact that I had never been through this before either. And if you ,who is guiding me, has never done this …then how the hell am I supposed to act or react….hmmm.

I’ve journeyed forward for many years trying stubbornly to not look back at separate issues, but today… today I cry.

The first year on my own…all alone for thanksgiving…was something I had never done before either. I had two little ,tiny girls, who were five years old and just wanted to be excited like their classmates about the holidays. But we were separate, segregated, alone. We were victims. We were hard to look at. We had to much pain to look directly at for to long. No one knew what to say. No one knew how to act. We were untouchable. We were dirty…unclean…we were victims.

It just hit me the other day…We were on the outside because our perpetrators were not the regular perps. Our perps were nice church going head of the nursery, great pillars of the community perps…not your ordinary hide in the bushes, drug induced bad decision making perps. These were Christians for Gods sake. How dare I spill dirty laundry in their church. In their community…in their presence.

A wise women told me years later…after the smoke had cleared…after I had picked up the pieces of my broken life…She told me, “You know that an entire community can be groomed.” yes…yes, I know that. First hand I know that.

I shake my head today as I watch people try to decide if a victim is trustworthy or lying…Sometime it makes me scoff, and sometimes…ok ,sometimes I wanna punch them in the face.

A community can be groomed.

What does that mean though?

What is grooming? Grooming is a word people in the field use to describe how a perpetrator gains access to our children. Sadly I could teach a course on this , sadly I could quote statistics to you…but I’m so tired anymore…it no longer feels relevant to me now. As, I know what I know…and it is what it is.

Grooming though goes beyond getting access to your child…it s getting access to a community of children.

During our FIVE year court battle several less privileged victims came to confess their abuse by those same perps…but since we had been so harassed, ridiculed, and subjected to such hate…how would they fair in the coming forward for justice. You pick it up and move…and that is what they did, they merely wanted to stop by on their way out of town and let me know that I was right…that these people had perped on their kid too… hope everything works out for us, but if the community acted so vehemently against me…how would they ever fair against them.

When we told the truth…

We were asked to leave the house we were renting…we had two weeks.

We were asked to not come back to the church.

I was told by my pastor that he had nothing to say to me.

My family was tore apart…no longer a safe place for my girls. The perps were a part of all those things…and they won the battle. We were the poster child to what never to say or do to victims.

So in the short time between my daughter telling me horrendous life altering things that a five year old should never know…I had become homeless, without family support, with out a church, without a pastor, and without the new friends I had acquired through the gospel of Jesus Christ…

I was utterly, and completely ALONE.

I was forced to live in a one room house. We had been kicked to the curb, and since we were homeless my father had to step in…a little. So the very least because I was his daughter, but he didn’t have to do more then just enough…because he was a great and mighty man of God, and he had to show love to the other victims…the perps. ( I have to inject a thought here, when we finally go to trail these perps had successfully turned the entire community against us and the world saw us as the assailants and the poor accused as the vicitms. This thought was so well groomed that on the day of the trail when their legions of support came to support them they walked into the victims room in the courthouse. because the perps were considered the vics. Go ahead and say wow! Cuz it really is amazing)back to where I was forced to live. There were other rooms but we were not allowed to clean it out…as, we were unworthy of the full use of the house. As a parent he had to give us something as we were about to live in my car, but we were not worthy of the whole house…only the living room and bathroom. There was no gas in the house and yep you guessed it…it was November. I cooked on a hotplate in the living room. I bought a little dorm refrigerator. We had one bed that we all three had to sleep on. The expensive electric heaters merely kept us from freezing to death…we could see our breath as we sat huddled together, licking our wounds. We slept with five heavy blankets on us for warmth.

So when you see us today and you think...wow! Those girls are very close…oddly close…yes we are we went through hell together. And I never disbelieved them. I never questioned the validity of their words. I never questioned the emotions they were going through...I just showed them love and understanding. I was Jesus to them in the worst possible moment in their life.

The shack they allowed us to stay in was placed right next to their brand new three bedroom house they had just had built. So I could hear family and friends come to them…to give them support in THEIR time of need. My girls ,like any other five year olds would get excited to see someone they knew…”Mommy, Mommy….this person is at grandmas.” and I would answer, “come inside Fate, they aren’t here to see us…we got a lot of stuff to do here…lets make a collage.” The pastor came to pray with them…not us, my poor parents, their church friends came to help them stand up…and family came…to stand with the parents….not the victims, because somehow my mother had made the entire debauchery about her…so each time I redirected my babies and we sat huddled under piles of blankets and cut out pictures to glue on paper…I made hell fun! Because I am the SHIT mom…and I would and did fight the world to save them.

Holidays are tough for me.

Easter was no better. By this time I died inside a little each time one of the great and mighty church members came to fellowship (can you see my sneer when I say that?) with my parents…so easter we spent in a hotel hiding eggs inside the hotel lobby…cuz my babies did not understand why their life, their family and their everything had changed. So the very next time you hear that a victim ‘recanted’ don’t get all jumpy with the idea that they had lied the first time…persecution is not a warm ,fuzzy feeling to have and when you’re a five year old you cannot fathom why things are very strange now. Still it would be another 3 years before our lives calmed down enough to even get to that level of process’ that a rape victim goes through. These were the very early days of the telling.

Did I ever tell you that the police department threatened to take my children if I did not produce them to be interviewed? I continued to hold them hostage anyway…I KNOW my fucking rights! I refused to take my tiny, delicate babies to big scary police department to be locked in a room away from me all alone to tell a secret to three… THREE police men...in uniform something that had made her mom so sad that her mom could no longer function as a rational human being.

I knew I looked like a raving lunatic…I resembled a hurt mamma bear striking out at anyone daring to come close…cuz so far no one had been rational to me…so far no one had ever said, Its ok…I’m going to walk with you through this fucking scary process…no one said I know what to do…NO ONE tried to make me feel safe. So I could make my babies feel safe…everyone just kept attacking me, threatening me…

So I called bullshit to their vacant threats…

…and we had no dearing house…we had no child advocacy…we had no real concept of a victim yet in this area… we were the first…

Did you know that for five years…the sound of me throwing up EVERYDAY was the sound that my children woke to? Five years like clockwork. My damn eyes would open again and reality would hit me…it wasn’t a nightmare I was enduring all alone…this was real and I had to deal with it, so every morning that wave of reality washed over me and bile rose until I couldn’t swallow it down and I ran to throw up…each and every morning of our lives for five years. Sickness and sadness were my only feelings for five years. Oh and manufactured laugher…I’m a great bullshiter.

I light another Marlboro and I ponder…what else do I need to cleanse to make this delirium moment pass from me.

Mostly I see fates huge brown eyes…

I see her remarkably great brown eyes watching me.

She wouldn’t tell for three years…she wouldn’t tell until she knew I could handle it…until she knew I wouldn’t disappear into a dot and cease to exist anymore…cuz that, my friends and neighbors is what I wanted to do.

She would just silently tend to us, her twin and I, as we suffered through the worst of it. She brought throw up bowls and wet washcloths to us as I held my limp, life less child after she had gone through yet another round of horrendous panic attacks that threatened to take us all away. The utter, sheer and complete panic on my 6 year olds face as she clawed at her throat because she couldn’t breath…her body suddenly rigid from my mere touch…her eyes would suddenly glaze over and the whimpering began…the whimpering/howl sounded like an injured animal…and she fought like hell to get out of it…valiantly she fought…it always ended in bile emitted from her tiny mouth…like clockwork fate and I had it down…miraculously fate would appear with the bowl….throw up…then the wet wash cloth to lay on her wet head… so no Fate didn’t tell me for a long time.

…we missed a lot of school…

She was so tiny…

Dark circles under her eyes…

I can’t recall now how she looked as she lay in my arms...I really don’t think I could look for to long…I watched Fate…watch us.

Today….today…we are relaxed and comfortable in our own skin…Lyric has so much grace and integrity that I am blown away by her enduring faith on a daily bases. And Fate, well Fate never wavered…even though she was so frightened she had to break 30 seconds into the trial. And she ran wailing into the back room to be calmed by the ADA and the victims asst. she stood boldly and told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth…

….so today in live in awe of the graceful splendor that they wrap themselves in. Today s a brand new day. Today is freedom. Today is peace. Today is laughter.

They saw their perps the other day…

Riding down the street in a car on their way home from church, A church they had chosen on their own…(I still suck at church.) My ladies were riding along and looked over at the persons next to them. It was their perpetrators…

Lyric used words like...mesmerized…transfixed…to describe her moment. She said she didn’t know who they were or why she couldn’t stop staring…she just felt transfixed by their utter sadness…she said they, the people next to her looked so dark black and sad….then she slowly realized who they were…she turned to look at her twin and she was looking too…and she was just as surprised…they both excitedly exclaimed…hey that was them! Did you see how dark and sad they look… Lyric later told me that she had prayed for them cuz they looked so lost and miserable. Yes that’s right…their victim prayed for them…because they looked like they were in pain…

…That’s MY God…My God makes your enemies your footstools! My God calls you out of your death clothes and brings you back to life! My God will give back to you seven fold what the enemy took from me! That’s My God, merciful, giving, enduring, loving, ravenous…yes, that’s my God…He made victims victors!

understanding my musings

Lots of talk this weekend about narcissism.
I think that I have at the very least a glancing romance with the concept, ailment, self preservation.
I meet most interesting people everyday…
You will never know them…I do not write from their position…I write from my perception of…and my parallelism to them….narcissist! It makes my writing safe. I give nothing up of their anonymity. Their confidentiality is well protected.
….cuz all my writing is ultimately about me…and what I may have learned from the most interesting person in front of me!
So with that disclaimer attached...I can begin.
Re-reading my last blog I wonder what I was trying to say…I had started it before and then went back and finished it later. It leaves me wondering if I made my point, if I got to my thesis statement…idk.
What was my point? I think my original thought was the difference between loving God and God loving us…
Me loving God would never have changed the outcome in that little room so long ago. I loved a lot of things …they didn’t matter as I burned my life up.
I think the thought that someone, a deity or something bigger then me….could truly love me. Really love me. I had NEVER felt that before…not really. The extent of love always ended all sweaty and sad because it was not truth. It was a way to release pent up feelings to feel good for a couple of seconds.
Love was a used up word that had no power.
But this love that preacher man spoke about was so abstract yet so visceral that it boggled my inexperienced mind.
Why has always been my ever constant question…I went in search of the reason why This God could love me… why when I was trying so hard to be unlovable.
When I started digging…I found…I found this unqualified love that the world still cannot grasp. I know they don’t know, even though they proclaim THEIR love for God…but how about HIS love for them! I think that is the correct way of thinking…or maybe I’m wrong.
If you walk into a crack house and tell a scared fucked up girl to love God. It falls so very short. How can she love if she has no history of it. But, to tell her of HIS love….that is life altering. No reason for Him to. He doesn’t have to. He chooses to…that is all.

I sat backed up to a darkened corner of the last room in the house and felt a thousand eyes watching my every move. Simple thoughts had ceased to resound authenticity as my manically overdriven mind attacked itself. I had been up for too long. Any guess at how many weeks would sound like pure lunacy. Days had stretched into weeks and weeks had become months, Impossible ,I know but when you live by the little hand held mirror and it’s little white lines become big white lines; time ceases to exist.
Backed into a corner of a darkened room because the tiniest sound surrounded my ears and became a mocking sneer at the paper world around me. I could find no safety, no comfort. My nose bleed freely ,but the real problem was the panic that filled my very essence. To much, to much, to much … I was busy trying to shrink from existence. I was very small by this time. The last time I had eaten was just a memory. Beer had kept my stomach from growling…that and the ever appearing white lines harnessed my appetite. I was a small form in a darkened room, whimpering at the sounds and darkened shadows around me. The very few people who had stayed to watch the total dismantling of my mind stood just far enough away from me to be safe, yet watch out for me.
They had called a preacher, weather to give last rites or to exercise the demons, that they could clearly feel, that were raping my mind, I’m not sure which.
I shuddered again and again. Racks of shudders attacked my body as I tried to curl further into myself.
A man, a stranger walked into that last room and stared down at me. His presence in the room made me feel embarrassment. Shame ran loosely through my thoughts. I was half clothed. Bikini top and cutoffs was all I had wore…for ever. hadn’t changed them since I had quit my job so many weeks ago. I say quit…I had just stopped going. I got lost the last time I had tried to go.
The man bent down to look into my eyes.
He was not made of paper…I could tell. He looked as if he were real. The shouting maniac voices hushed as he peered into my eyes. Even though I wore very little clothing, and felt such shame by that, he looked right into my eyes with such love that tears began to flow freely from my eyes. I wanted to rush into his arms, but my past abuses kept me backing further into the wall behind me. He leaned in, maybe sensing my absolute reluctance. “Jesus loves you Mary.” was all he said. But he spoke those words to me with such authority and conviction, that there was no room for argument. I looked down at the absolute nothing I had become, as shame tried to rape me again. “No,” he said gently as he reached out and lifted my face upwards. “ He loves you just as you are, dirty, and messed up. He came and died for you…YOU Mary! The power behind those words were the only thought that could pervade my delirium., Yet I quickly discarded the thought, anyway. My brain could not wrap around the idea of the child in a manger…The idea of a bruised and bloody man on a cross…the idea that this fictionist character could think anything at all. I had no history of a deity…beyond myself.
Still the thought tickled my mind.
Who was this Jesus.
And why would he care about me …here and now?
What did this preacher man mean?
My heart threatened to explode out of my chest…I had come to the end…
Lucid thinking wasn’t even a consideration.
Fear gripped me. My heart rapped against its enclosure as I tried to breath. The eyes were everywhere. Laughter echoed inside my mind.
I heard my friend tell me that I needed to eat. That I needed to sleep. My body twitched with the enthusiasm. I felt this at the thought of my own bed. I hadn’t been there in so long. I longed to see my apartment…my bed…my cat. The thought of my cat propelled me up. The rush of movement made my heart leap scarily. I steadied myself, and lurched out of the room. I ran to my car digging in my cutoffs for my keys. I got lost a couple of paces from the house and pulled over. I was completely overwhelmed with dread. I had no idea how to get to my house. Suddenly a mans face appeared in my car window, gently he spoke to me. “Follow me Mary.” “Just watch my red lights” It was my friends boyfriends face. He had saved me once before, when I had gotten lost trying to find my sisters house. That had happened several weeks ago. I was still out in the dark abyss trying to find my way back to the reality that I knew existed, but could no longer find.
I followed those lights all the way to my house, some five blocks away. My hands gripped the steering wheel until my knuckles turned white. Nausea was a constant companion.
Laying on my bed…I was so afraid to close my eyes…I was afraid I would just stop being. My body twitched endlessly. Silent laughter echoed inside my mind…slithering voices taunted me, “You will die if you close your eyes.”
I’m not sure how I lived through that. Not sure how long I was outside my mind. I merely know that it happened just like that.
The people that were with me during that time in my life are always so surprised to see me upright and talking. Why did I live? How did I live? What kind of madness did I bring back with me? I can’t answer any questions about my time in my personal circle of hell. I just know that I sit in my living room with my children and I am alive. The weeks after my mental death was no picnic either. I certainly drug something back with me. Or maybe I am just completely mad now and remember things from my fucked up perspective. The question still remains constant…what came first the crazy or the way to cope with the crazy. I don’t know.
What came next was a crazy, crazy scary time. I was breathing yes, but I was by no means alive. That man who told me about that dude Jesus tickled my brain. Fear was my ever present emotion. Fear kept me awake at night…all night. The only reprieve I felt was during the day, that’s when I slept. The raucous sound inside my head drowned out everyone’s voice who tried to speak to me. I found a bible…the hounds of hell mocked me as I ran frantically from one reprieve to another. I opened the book, but it made no sense to me. I may as well been trying to read a foreign language. It was a different language for me. It made no sense. The only part that held my brain in any way was the red part. Little sentences. I still had no idea what it was saying, but I felt less uncovered when I read it. I slept with the book on my chest when I took my nap, always during the day. I had to stay up at night. Slithering, horrid voices mocked me at night, every night. Fantastical things happened at night. I pretended normalcy during the day. I stared at people and watched their reactions so that I knew how to respond. I was afraid , so afraid they would find out that I was lost. Even my footsteps were calculated. I had to focus really hard just to put one foot in front of the other. Sometimes I got tripped up as I tried to walk. The function of it confused me and I would stumble.
Slowly my real friends came around to see if I was back, I had always disappeared for awhile…just not as long as this last time. They tried to talk to me and I just smiled and stared. Gone in my madness I could trust no one. The secrets of hell were being whispered to me as I tried to concentrate on the words my friends spoke that became fat puffy words floating between us. I had swore off drugs, any drugs…and I was drowning in sobriety. Tracing the beginning of my madness is precarious at best.
My friend tried to get me a job. I couldn’t even walk let alone walk with a purpose. Her husband took one look at me and told me to call when I felt better. He saw the madness in my stare, I think. Still they took care of me. They brought me food, and smokes. I must have been a good person before I fell. Everyone wanted to care for me.
My journey to clear thought was long and arduous. I traveled to the recesses of my mind. I had before always been the fun party girl. The one who could drink more then anyone…toot more coke then anyone, stay up longer then anyone. Do the most outrageous things…and laugh as I did them. But now…now…I was altered, different. That part of who I was scared the bejesus outa me…I couldn’t go back to that…so I had to create someone else. Who would that be?
Id like to stop here and tell you that I found Jesus and my life became crystal clear and beautiful. It did not.
I did try to understand.
I could not.
I wish it had been so simple…a few words recited in my presence and BAM! Angels sing and all is well…didn’t happen my friend.
I did try…I really did. I mean if you had the demons following you around you would try the crucifix thing too right? that’s what all the scary movies say. Get a cross and all will be well. That was the extent of my knowledge of God…what the movies said about him. So I slept with the bible on top of me . I wore a cross around my neck. In the middle of my sleep I would wake to my body involuntarily ripping the cross from my body and hurling it across the room. So…what now!? Ya no movie had covered that yet?
Real madness was yet to come…I had invited evil in and evil had come to stay… They fight voraciously for one of their kind. I would cry incessantly, please…I didn’t know…and laughter surrounded my mind…I couldn’t even listen to music any more…I could hear their tittering under the sound…and it sounded like they were plotting something…
You don’t know real crazy until you become very intimate with it…and feel you need to be kind to it…so that it doesn’t take you completely away.
Shiny Christians baffled me.
Smiling faces looked like sharks ready to eat my pretty face.
Their fear of me was apparent, I stupidly thought it was because I was evil…not because I was pretty. My perceptions were still not to be trusted.
I had to many questions for them. I really just wanted to know. I was not mocking…I was merely ignorant of truths they had learned as a child. I had not the same history. I was so thirsty.
So I read…when my brain could hold a thought for more then a second…I read…
I would no longer be…the dumb party girl…the giggling stupid girl…the girl who would only wear the latest fashion…I didn’t want to be pretty. I wanted to think. I could actually feel the lines forming in my brain as I read…as I learned. I read everything from C.S. Lewis to Dante. I tried to read the bible…eventually I grasped the concepts…on my own. As always on my own. I didn’t just read one version…I read everyone’s version and what they thought about it…I trusted no one…no one would EVER tell me anything…I had escaped my ring of hell and on one man would ever take me back.
….. I had escaped the lunatic in the mirror…
The battle remains constant…I am now a warrior…I choose my battles when I must. I see the debauchery around me…I still cant stomach shiny, fake…Jesus loves you thoughts. He does…I know He does…and I reconcile that I will never know why…but He really does. The knowledge I carry inside is deep and penetrating…He didn’t save me, when I asked…I didn’t even know at that time what I wanted saved from…But He did save me. He saved me when I screamed loud enough for Him to stop ignoring me and turned around to look at me laying on the floor. Not all at once. And not the first time I asked.
So when you look at me and think that you know what you see…remember that you do not.
When you stare into the abyss of who you are…the abyss stares back at you…
……answers aren’t so simple when you cannot ask the exact question.

today...

Rewinding myself…
Leaving my disarray behind me I journey forward to find a new color for my kaleidoscope of thoughts.
Unpacking my old feelings to see what will fit with my new thoughts.
Evacuating simple for more complex.
I take my backward glances to the imminent.
Like the Cheshire cat…I disappear…again. But just like Alice, if you are constant I will reappear again.
My focus changes like the wind, as it gently guides me forward.
Losing pieces of me used to be so painful…I gently remove the deep fingers of fear.
Cascading into oblivion I seek his essence in others.
Heroes come and heroes go…
My roots stay with me to expel inside my now.
He has become my constant… he journeys through without to much commitment, without any consequence. Is that what I needed all along?

this is today...

Adam, Where are you?
As I reread the pages of my past I wonder how we ever got to be where we are today… on or own.
God said to Adam, Where are you?
I try to answer the question for ourselves…”where are we?”
We are smack dab in the middle of today.
Not yesterday and not tomorrow.
Today.
Today we are healthy…more healthy then we have any right to be.
Today we choose to do the right thing.
Today we strive to be better then before.
Today we have a deep understanding of who we are and who we were called to be.
Today we are not angry that life has crapped on us. Today we use that said crap and turned it into real beauty and share it with the world around us.
Today we make no excuses.
Today we do not whine about fairness, and justification.
Today we march forward and ignore the pleas of the lazy, those that refuse to wear or seek the truth inside pain.
Today we dance.
Today we see the world in a way that we pray you never have to see from our perspective.
Today we love abundantly and exclusively those that have been betrayed by their circumstances.
Today we love.
Today we choose to laugh at the terror that tries to replace refuge.
Today we silently smile at those that wonder why we continue to go our own way.
Today we are disciples.
Today we have utter knowledge of truths we would never have chosen for ourselves…but desire to live it anyway…in spite of them.
Today we do not naively see the world through religiosity or uninformed listening to random truths.
We seek the answers for ourselves from authentic study and seeking of the reasons given to us from He who knows all the circumstances.
It has been quite a journey. We began our authentic study four years ago…it began in a quiet park doing specific studies, and trying to fit the truths into our personal existence. T hat has grown into a personal study of all truths from beginning to end.
From “Adam where are you?” to a deeper search for truths as they chose to slay us in the middle of our search.
I have read where we have come from…
Utter despair…true anguish…to silently picking up our cross and bearing the burden of unknowing judgments. We have come to a time of…such a time as this.
People that I know and trust have come to me and said, “I hope my child is like yours one day.” I keep hearing that, and I know that it is not lip service. I know because I want to be like them myself. I know they have been through fire and been through rain. And what they see is the end result of ugliness that has no boundaries. They became disciples of a God that is the only thing that can make sense to them in a world that continues to confuse them. Keeping it real in a façade of religiosity. We are shunned by the righteous, ignored by the good, and judged by the sanctimonious.
Meanwhile, The real deal hurting clamor to find the truth we easily share. The broken and bruised seek to touch the realness of who we are. They, the broken, instinctively know what they cannot know…but they do anyway. The hurting seek the absolute truth we can give…love. To authentically give yourself until you have nothing of yourself to give…begins the beautiful tapestry of giving them Jesus. The real deal Jesus…not the super shiny I love you , you love me kind of religious smiling to your face and ripping out your soul kind of beginner Christian.
I am no longer angry. I know that they just do not know.
I am so glad the religious Christians shunned us…we would never be where we could do the most good. We seek the truly troubled, and offer hope. We live inside authentic belief, despite unspeakable horrors…we could never have be both, church Christians and authentic disciples.