My Own Story

By Barbara Dolan

Last night as I lay sleeping in my bed, I awoke to see a lonely figure of a woman hovering over me. I was not afraid. Often she comes to visit me in the night. Once I sat upright in bed and screamed, "Who are you? Who are you?" As if I didn't know. She is my mother. She tells me stories about my childhood, stories I do not want to hear and often can't remember.

I am a survivor of incest long past. Somehow it is all too easy to forget those things that traumatized the soul. The phantom woman in the night reminds me. Everything I do in life revolves around working out the problems created by that woman in the night who long ago terrorized an innocent child.

How did she terrorize? If it had been done with knives and loaded guns, it would be easier to deal with. No, she took my affection for her and turned it into a sordid relationship involving sex. My first recollections of our interaction, when I was three, involve me sitting happily between her legs in a bathtub, both of us naked. I also remember her standing in front of me rubbing her breasts. At other times, she would fret over whether my bowels were all right. A regular ritual was a cleansing enema of sudsy water made with laundry detergent. I still recall the feel of the tile bathroom floor as I lay there on my left side while she administered the preparation. "Breathe deeply," she said while we waited for her brew to work.

Where was my father while all this was going on? you may ask. He was always away on business. To me he was as much a phantom as the woman who visits me in the night. My mother wept and wailed over his sexual dalliances, but then she turned to me. I became the sexual replacement for my father, who deprived my mother of affection. My mother spent much of my childhood in bed, horribly depressed and trancelike. The only thing about me she was interested in was my bodily functions. Cleaning my genitals became an obsession. I remember lying rag-doll across the bed, my mother carefully removing my clothes. To me it was a loving act.

Although I had sisters, I was isolated and lonely as a child. I wandered through wide expanses of prairies without any supervision. A farm boy took me into a cornfield when I was five and showed me his penis. A teenager molested me when I was eight. At 10, I felt the groping fingers of a man reaching up my leg in the theater where I was watching a movie. By the time I was 18, I was pregnant. In my 23rd year, a psychiatrist was putting his tongue deep into my mouth. My mother opened the door, and everybody else walked through.

I didn't know the difference between consensual sex and rape. I didn't know that when my husband wanted sex, I could say no. I didn't know that when a psychiatrist sticks his finger in your vagina, it isn't therapy. How could I not know these things? you ask.

I didn't know because I was keeping the secret about my mother's violation from myself. To be able to see anybody as abusive, I had to acknowledge that the woman who gave me life also devalued it, demeaned it and nearly destroyed it. It took me 20 years before I could admit to myself that my mother did not love me. To deny what had been done to me, I became a superachiever. To block out the pain, I used alcohol and overeating. When those didn't work, I would drown myself in overworking. None of these prescriptions worked any better than my mother giving me enemas. What worked was giving up my pain-killers and finally giving up my mother. I had to face squarely the abuse that was done to me in the name of kindness and give back the shame I have carried with me all my life.

Recovery is not easy. The messages my mother filled me with had to be replaced with self-esteem. It is a tedious task. For me it involved five weeks of intensive treatment and many hours of outpatient therapy. At times I have felt enraged that I have to endure such pain. Today I feel only sadness -- and hope. Hope for me, for my children, for the many people engaged in this incredible battle. I promised my children years ago that I would break the cycle of incest that has haunted my family, and now that's happening. I only regret that the resources I've tapped weren't there for my mother, who still says that, whatever happened, it was not sexual abuse.