When I started High School, I was very shy. However, that is not how it came across to my new classmates. In our Home Economics Class one day, the teacher asked us to get a clean sheet of paper and write our names at the top. She told us these were going to be Personality Sheets. We passed our paper and, as it went around, each girl wrote something about the person whose name was at the top of the paper.The result was to give us insight into the kind of personality we had. When I got my paper back, I was hurt and my shyness became even greater.
There were four kind remarks about me--by the four girls I'd known for eight years. The other remarks were cruel. Some of them were:
"Thinks she's better than other people" (there were several of these)
"Won't talk with anyone"
"Unfriendly:
"Stuck-up"
The truth was, I had nothing to say that they would have wanted to hear. They dated, I didn't; they talked about their name-brand clothes, I wore the clothes my mother made, sometimes from feed sacks; they talked about what they were going to do when they got home, I went home and worked in the fields while keeping an eye out for my abuser. And, then, there was the constant worry that I would have a seizure and my classmates would witness it and see where I had lost control of my bladder while having it. So, they were right when they wrote that I wouldn't talk. I had learned to guard my tongue carefully, lest I unintentionally let someone find out what I considered my two dirty secrets--the abuse and the seizures.
When I started my Junior year of High School, I had come out of much of that shyness and began making friends in my new school, especially boy friends. I dated for over a year the boy whose coke I doctored. (I wrote about this incident in my last post.) When I broke up with him, I began dating a boy that my teachers and other wise adults tried to warn me was not someone I needed to date. Their advice had the opposite effect on me than what they had hoped. The more they talked with me the more I defended him. And, the more I defended him, the more I was blinded to personality traits that should have been a red flag.
My sister was also dating a boy. I can't remember how the idea of the two of us having a double wedding arose. I just remember that I didn't feel ready for marriage and wasn't sure I even loved the boy I was dating. But, for some reason, I couldn't voice my opinion. As would happen many times in the years to come, I allowed things to be decided for me and felt as if I were just standing on the sidelines and watching everything--even myself. I did make one attempt to tell my boyfriend that I didn't want to get married. He told me he would commit suicide if I didn't marry him. I didn't want to carry the guilt of causing some one's death, so I never mentioned it again. Looking back, I realize his threat was not out of love but the need to control. I also know that he would not have taken his life.
What I didn't understand until many years later was that the sexual abuse had robbed me of my voice. In other words, I didn't feel I had the right to say "No" or to effectively express my opinions and desires, especially if my opinion differed from the people I was around.
So, on February 14, 1958, our dad walked my sister and me down the aisle in a double-wedding ceremony. My new husband and I were both seventeen. I finished High School that year but he dropped out of school.
Even tho I had been an unwilling bride, I found I enjoyed being married and having my own home. We were living in a house supplied by the farmer for whom my husband worked for five dollars a day. I didn't get to wear my rose-colored glasses for long. The reality of living as an adult brought with it truth and responsibilities for which I was unprepared. But life has a way of maturing us when we have no choice but to accept them.
I had always hated the word divorce and vowed that it would never happen to me. But, In less than three years we moved at least a dozen times. I had four pregnancies, two heartbreaking miscarriages, and two beautiful daughters, and I was facing charges for writing a cold check for overdue car payments. We had put the money from our taxes in the bank to save for the hospital bill when our second daughter arrived. When I wrote the check, I was unaware that my husband had spent it. I went to my dad and got the money to cover the check. But, by now I was seeing a future for my children and myself that I didn't want. We had lived with relatives, others had put food on our table, and my husband was reluctant to work. With a one-month old baby and an eighteen-month old toddler, I returned to my parents home penniless.
Mom and Dad offered to pay for me to start to college part-time to pursue my dream of becoming a teacher. Mom cared for my two children while I attended night classes. After two years, Mr. Knight, my High School Principal, called and offered me a job as secretary of Calhoun School. I worked there until I had enough hours to teach on an emergency certificate. The pay was far less than what the other teachers made ($3000 a year), but it enabled me to rent a house in Beech Grove for the girls and myself.
We were probably happier in that little house than we'd ever been before. But, after nine years of being single, I was lonely and wanted a husband to make our home complete. One day I told the girls I was going to marry the man I'd been dating for a few months. They begged me not to. I knelt and gathered them in my arms and said, "Girls, Mama would never do anything to hurt you. Please trust me." With the loving trust that only a child can have, they said, "OK, Mama."
That scene has played itself over in my mind many times, and each time it brings tears to my eyes. For, their intuition had been right and I had been wrong. And, for the next three years we would all suffer for my mistake.
I remarried on November 15, 1969. It was soon apparent that my husband couldn't, nor did he have the desire, to be a father figure to my two daughters. In fact, he was unhappy being married and went into a deep depression. When he learned I was pregnant, he felt even more trapped. Though he loved our daughter who was born September 17, 1970, he became increasingly unhappy. My two older daughters changed from outgoing and happy children to withdrawn and obviously unhappy girls. Our marriage went downhill and I felt as if I were a total failure in life. Gradually my own life became so miserable that I no longer wanted to live.
I used to blame what I did next on the unhappiness of my marriage. Now, I know that the unrelenting pain from the shame that I had carried since the age of thirteen was slowly but surely becoming too much to bear. I didn't have the emotional stability to face what was obviously coming--a second divorce. I went to our bathroom, got a bottle of phenobarbital that I took to control seizures, and swallowed all them. Then I lay down on the bed beside my husband and waited for them to put me out of my pain.
As the pills began to take effect, I felt the tug of our two-year old daughter climbing up in the bed. Crawling on top of me she said, "Mama? Mama?" The realization of what I was about to do to my children brought me to my senses long enough to tell my husband what I had done and ask him to get me to the hospital where I remained unconscious for four days.
I don't like to tell that part of this story, for I am ashamed of it. But, I have promised to be honest both with the wonderful ending and the sometimes shameful journey to get there.
After I had been giving my testimony for a couple of years, I sat writing it one night in preparation for the following day. When I got to the part where I had attempted suicide, God revealed to me that trying to take the life He had given me had hurt Him more than anything I had ever done or anything that had ever been done to me. It was a painful revelation but one that He knew I must have if I am to be a truthful witness to who He is.
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