I must say that life is interesting, I’m not exactly sure what it is meant to be, or what the answer to the greatest question of all time is; but I if I know anything I know that it’s interesting. As I say this, I’m sitting in my room of a two bedroom apartment where I feel I’ve found myself at a fork in the road. The two directions before me, I find myself indifferent towards, but I have to choose where to go, because no one else will make that decision for me, and even if they did I probably wouldn’t follow it.
I’ve spent the past twenty-some years of my life running into walls, weaving webs of lies and yet managing to stay clean and sober through it all. I’ve never done drugs, never smoked and never had a drink of alcohol but I’m still an addict. I’m just a different kind of addict. I’m addicted to lying.
Lies are the things our parents tell us never to do, the very things that can destroy friendships, end marriages and make even the most solid beneficial business deal go sour. Yet lies are also something that we all do at one point in our life and no matter how many times we tell ourselves it’s wrong, we’ll continue to do it because in our minds we’re doing the ‘right thing’ and a lie in the heat of the moment can sometimes seem easier than the truth.
A web of lies is much like a house of cards, it’s built with weak materials, supported by more lies and eventually will end with the same result; at the slightest wind it all comes crashing down. We tell ourselves that the initial lie was a white lie, a lie to protect maybe ourselves or someone we love but in my experience I’ve yet to find a white lie. In fact I’ve come to truly believe there is no such thing. So the question is why don’t I stop? I know it’s wrong, I know that I’m protecting no one and hurting many… The answer unfortunately is simple. I’m addicted to it.
It flows smoothly from my lips, natural like I’m reciting a line from a script or movie. Then as time goes on I expand it, I change it and manipulate it to fit my needs. I avoid questions that might through suspicion on it, and I cover every opportunity made by another to find the truth. Yet the scary factor in it all is I can look you in the eyes and tell you the lie without even flinching and walk away without the slightest amount of guilt.
There’s no Liars Anonymous, or Liars Help lines out there, someone isn’t going to bring me a pamphlet on the seven steps to quitting lying and there’s not a month dedicated to people who want to quit lying because lying is a fact of life. We all do it. We all do it in some way or another and when a lie fails or we’re caught in one, we apologize hoping to move past the issue and often times we lose people we care about. The unfortunate part is despite our loses, our pain and our sacrifices many of us would do it all over again.
The pattern has to start somewhere, and for me it started when I was just a little girl. Now don’t get me wrong every kid that has walked the earth has probably told a lie to their parent to get out of trouble. I mean there is not a ghost stealing cookies from the cookie jar and homework really can’t compare to play time with friends. No my lies were different. They were what I had taught myself at the time was a white lie and what turned out to be the biggest secret I’ve ever kept from my parents, and a secret that if I had told sooner probably wouldn’t have done the damage it’s done to my family, to my family’s friends and most of all to me.
I’ve lost many friends over the years; the moment they get close to me I sabotage the relationship. I end it before they can hurt me. I end it with lies or by pushing so often that they push back. I fear the closeness and love a real friend could give me because my parents had those kind of friends… and those friends well they walked away. I saw them walk away and the ones that did not walk away, the ones that held their arms opened and welcomed us when we needed it most hurt me.
Now before I go on with this let me make it clear that it wasn’t both of them that hurt me. They were a husband and a wife, friends of my parents since before I was even born and I came to know them as Aunt and Uncle. My Aunt is a wonderful woman whom in no way has ever hurt me. She is near and dear to my heart and I’m sorry that this truth about her husband has caused pain but I’m even sorrier that it was kept a secret for so long.
This Uncle of mine however is a different story. For this piece I will refer to him as Uncle, though not of blood relation, I’m not out to destroy him by mentioning his name and creating a club of hatred towards him. I’m not out to disgrace and mark his family publicly, because two wrongs no matter how many ways you spin it will not make a right. This story isn’t about that, it’s about the pain, and the road to recovery. More than anything this story is to, with some hope, help others overcome and to help me find the light at the end of the tunnel, because let’s face it no one really likes the dark; we just like what it lets us hide – Our imperfections.
I was too young at the time to understand what was happening to me, I still don’t understand all the mental reasoning but I’ve been told on numerous occasions that it’s a disease, one that many men suffer from and even some women. However, to any one that has ever stood in my shoes or to those who may stand in them someday, a statistic or a fact that it’s a mental disease doesn’t make it right and by no means will it make the pain go away.
Trying to understand the disease may help in the process of recovery but it isn’t the recovery. That road is one that’s long and for many who walk it dark. I can say for sure that no child reacts to it the same way and that the path each child travels will be hard. Some come out on the other side and some never make it. We have the choices in front of us and the decisions to make for ourselves and what we sometimes fail to realize that even in our darkest moments someone does love us. Someone out there loves us not for our body but for our spirit and our minds.
We are all born innocent and unaware of what evils can be found in the world. We are born without prior knowledge of mental illnesses and diseases that cause people to do horrible things. These are the things we learn whether we learn them in a classroom or we learn them from experience, we enter the world unaware and without a handbook that directs us where to go. There are no right and wrong answers, there are however many questions.
By now many are probably wondering what I’m blithering on about, and what it is that I can find so horrible that I wouldn’t even bare to mention the name of the man I once called Uncle. This isn’t like a fictional book where I’m too afraid to mention his name. I’m not afraid of him, and I’m not afraid of mentioning his name. Mentioning his name will do no good. It will not erase what he’s done it will not correct it for others out there. This man will have his day to be judged, but that right doesn’t belong to me.
As a child I was sexually molested. I wasn’t, thankfully, raped. This man never took it that far, and I can’t say for sure if I would have let him take it that far. I don’t know what my mind may or may not have done at that time. It isn’t however, the size of the act, it is the act itself. No man, and no woman for that matter, has the right to take away that innocence. It was not his to take from me, and it has taken years for me to even admit it happened.
These people are sick, they are but that doesn’t make it better for me. My Uncle, hurt me, he took away a part of me that wasn’t his to take. I never gave him permission but I never stopped him because at first I didn’t know what he was doing, I didn’t understand. It was a part of my innocence, I didn’t understand that him getting off on reaching into my panties was wrong because I didn’t understand what ‘getting off’ was.
By the time I did understand it was too late, he had managed to hit me in the one place that a lot of little girls are weak to – their daddy.
My Uncle was not the only man to venture below the belt on me as a child, there was another whom I haven’t mentioned because this man was a boy at the time himself. He too was lost and my parents whom sought to protect me from harm caught it and found counselling for me and for him. It was at that time that I had learned what was happening was wrong but on the day the counsellor asked me if anyone else was doing what this boy had done it was too late.
It was the weekend before that session when I was sitting in my Uncle’s car in the parking lot of the arena where my Dad was coaching hockey. It was so long ago that I can’t really remember if my brother was playing or not but I can distinctly remember the tray full of Scottish mints in the beige coloured car and the fresh smell of the car itself. Sometimes when I close my eyes I can see the man sitting beside me, sucking on a mint of his own, his hand reaching over and his eyes trying to find mine as he tells me he needs to talk to me.
He tells me how he knows about me and the boy and how he knows I’m seeing a counsellor about the issue and then he tells me the most important part of all. “It would devastate your father if he knew about us. You can’t tell him, you’ll hurt him.” I remember the glasses half way down his nose, his hand on my lap and me praying he didn’t touch me there and then. Perhaps I was naive enough to believe that since the boy was caught that my Uncle too would stop or perhaps I still hadn’t grasped around the idea of what was happening. I’m not sure at that moment what it was I had thought exactly, but I know that at the next session with the counsellor when asked if anyone else was doing what that boy had done to me, I said no.
In the years that followed that conversation in the car, my Uncle didn’t stop. He would find me alone in the basement and I would pretend I was somewhere else, and pray for it to end soon. I can say I created some of my best stories in these moments because I would pretend I was those characters, I was someone else. Someone stronger than I was. It was in these years that I found my addiction to lying. It must have been a natural talent, though a poor one to have, considering the counsellor, and my parents never suspected a thing. They didn’t know when he took me alone and I never told them.
The act itself didn’t stop until one day where I was in the basement, jumping up and down on this couch with some friends and he had come out for a visit. When he came down to say hello, he hugged me and as he did he touched my chest with a disapproving sigh he whispered to me that I was becoming too developed. Too developed in my chest for his liking and from that moment on breasts were all I wanted. If he didn’t like them, it meant I was safe with them. He wouldn’t touch me, he wouldn’t stick his hands down my pants again and it would be over.
It wasn’t over there though. The act itself may have ended but the nightmare that it was was far from over.
Growing up my family went through some rough periods. My dad worked hard to support us and love us as he always did and my mom raised us well. I mean not myself or my brothers became addicted to drugs or alcohol, we work to make our ends meet and we love each other. I have no doubt that if I picked up the phone in need of help from any member of my family that they would be here in the blink of the eyes.
Life wasn’t easy for them though, but life really isn’t meant to be easy. It’s meant to be hard with challenges along the way. In the challenges we find who our friends really are. My parents were close with two families I can remember and both these families were there when the times were good but only one of them remained when the times became rocky. Not everyone can deal with stress and pain and when you’re going through it yourself having others looking to you for support isn’t easy and I don’t fault the friends that left for leaving. They made their choices it was theirs to make just as we have our own to make.
The other family didn’t turn away during the difficult times, the Aunt and Uncle I’ve mentioned before welcomed us when we hit our hard times. They provided us with a place to stay and helped my parents get back on their feet, and for that I’m grateful, but a part of me will always wonder whether the Uncle did it with other motives in mind. While I tend not to doubt his love for my father and mother, I wonder if the love for my parents was second to his disease.
These people were friends when we needed friends, and they became close not only to my parents but to my extended family as well. My dad’s brothers and sister became friends with them, invited them to family weddings and events. Yet it’s here that as I grew up I found myself running into the walls with my lies.
It wasn’t that it had become hard to hold onto the original lie; in fact it was even easier than it had ever been. The subject was practically never brought up and any time it was I could usually make it drop just by becoming squeamish about it. It was the house of cards I must have built out of blocks because the wind wasn’t knocking it down. Yet it was the ugliest house I had ever built and each day it remained standing it was taking another piece of me with it.
Boyfriends never got close to me, if they did I panicked and I became detached and instantly everything they didn’t want me to be, just so they didn’t go towards the forbidden area. I became cold and distant but to them I didn’t clam up about what happened to me, I played it like a card to keep them away from me, to turn them off of wanting to be with me. It wasn’t a card to be played though it should never have been used but it was the only way I got around saying no. I couldn’t say no, because some part of me never learned to say no.
Sure No sounded great in context. Pushing them back and saying. “Stop” or “No” would have made worlds of sense and would have made me a stronger person but I wasn’t a stronger person then. I was terrified and so I used the only tactic I knew to get out of sexual contact with boyfriends, I told them about the molestation, I told them I wasn’t ready for intimacy and then I sabotaged the relationship. It was like an art I perfected, and by the time I was over eighteen I was so good at it, that I could cry at the drop of a dime.
People knew, but my parents still didn’t know, there was this gate around me and I thought I was protecting my parents. It was years after, they didn’t need to know. My father and mother didn’t need to know because it was the past and it was over. I wasn’t being molested anymore, and the man had lost three of his fingers in an accident, which by the way was one of the few times I had the hardest time showing sympathy. Try showing your parents your sympathy when all you want to say is ‘serves him right’ with the biggest grin on your face.
At this point I wasn’t innocent anymore I was just stupid. I had forgotten something more important than anything. I was lying and it wasn’t my parents I was lying to anymore it was myself. I couldn’t face myself in the mirror anymore. If I saw the man at weddings I dreaded him even so much as touching me. I saw my dad and mom laughing with him and I wanted to scream what he had done at the top of my lungs for everyone to hear but I didn’t. I kept my mouth shut and I let it tear each part of me away until I was sitting on the floor staring at a broken heart and all the pieces around me.
I wasn’t being strong for them, I wasn’t being strong for me, I was slowly destroying myself and every year I let the lie continue I let myself be taken down.
I was at a fork in the road, I saw two directions before me. The left was the path I had walked countless times and countless times I’d seen this fork and continued down the path I knew. I continued to walk in the pain thinking I was protecting those I loved but this time I looked at the right. The right was to come clean with the truth, and it would start with my parents. It was a long path and it was scary and it was dark and as I stepped towards it I knew it was going to be hard but a part of me felt almost… relieved. I was going to finally stop walking in circles and try walking forward. I made the conscious decision to come clean with the lie I had built over years.
Telling my parents this meant breaking down the house of cards I’d built out of blocks, and for anyone that’s knocked down a block house they know there’s no easy way to do it. You can’t gently remove the pieces and carefully set them down in place, you have to just do it. So I did.
I was sitting in my parents’ living room, it was hard to say and at first I thought I wasn’t going to say it. I wasn’t going to come clean with it because just the initial look on my mother’s face was enough to send my gut spinning but then I found myself thinking. Someone doesn’t wake up one day and say ‘Hey I think I’ll go molest my best friend’s daughter’ it doesn’t work like that. The disease doesn’t work like that. So how many girls before me were there and how many girls after me were there? How many more could there be. Three fingers lost didn’t mean he was done, and the lie I told myself that he was, was just that, another lie.
Through tears and sobs I said it, I just said it. I told them the boy wasn’t the only one and it took pressure for me to say “Uncle” was the other. I’m not sure what hurt me the most, the look on my mother and father’s face or the fact I knew I had waited this long and that my waiting this long had made it that much worse. The devastation and pain filled their eyes and I couldn’t stop crying, I couldn’t stop the tears that fell down my face.
That house had come crashing down and despite the pain I felt almost relieved. I had this weight that had left my shoulders. It wasn’t baring down on me anymore, it wasn’t my skeleton in the closet anymore and for just a moment sitting in that living room I saw this light. The glimpse of what the end of the road would be. It was beautiful, and it was real.
I can’t say that I’ve found the end of the road, and as I write this I’m once again at a fork in the road, no it’s not the same fork. I haven’t looped around and found myself facing the same paths. Instead I’ve found myself confronting another issue that since my journey to the right began has been pushed to the side and ignored for fear that at the end of it I’ll just be standing there, nothing but the skeleton of a girl who once wore a mask of happiness and cheer.
This fork is different in that this fork means finding myself. I still lie, and I’m as good at it now as I was then, but now I catch myself and I scold myself for doing it but I fear coming clean with the lies. I fear telling the truth and losing what people I have left. I still sabotage relationships, friendships, and push away anyone that dares get close enough to me.
A part of me asked once, why did I even come clean with the truth? Why, when all it’s left me with is a broken house of cards and scattered pieces of myself all over the floor? The answer is simple. That house was only going to get bigger and the pieces of myself were only going to become smaller. I can lie to myself all I want, and tell myself that the secret should have remained as one, that I could have worn the mask to the grave as many woman before me did but then I would be denying myself the end of the road, the peace and I’m sure wonderful feeling of happiness that lies at the end of it.
The road to recovery begins with a single step and that step is acceptance. I however misinterpreted the acceptance. I accepted the pieces as who I was. This broken woman that someone would have to learn to love as is. That’s not what acceptance is. It’s not what it was meant to be.
Acceptance, is accepting that yes, I was sexually molested as a child. I’m one of many woman and men out there who have had their innocence taken away from them by someone they thought loved them. That is what I needed to accept. I forgot the next step, so I’ve been standing on this road staring at the paths in front of me and forgetting the most important fact. I’m the most important person to me. I need to make the next step and DEMAND that my life move forward. Demand that I find my happiness and demand that I change the pieces of me and make me whole again.
I know this road is long and I know it’s hard but I also know I can do it because I want to. That’s the key there, I have to want it, and finally in my life I do want it. I don’t want to be the doormat that people walk on because they know they can. I don’t want to accept that I’m broken, because I’m worth more than that.
My mom has tried countless times to get me to write the story of my uncle to tell others that it’s ok to come out with the truth. To let them know they deserve better. In hopes that it might help parents know what to look for, to help them protect their kids. I don’t have the solution to that. I don’t have the happy answer that is going to make everything better, I do have the truth and it’s time I started using it.
We are worth more than any price on this earth. Each person out there deserves a life filled with love, friends and wonderful experiences. There is no such thing as a white lie and you don’t protect people when you tell them lies because eventually the truth does come out. Be honest to those around you and most of all be honest to yourself.
There are no tell-a-tale signs that will tell you your child is being molested or that a child is being molested. Skilled counsellors couldn’t tell that another man was doing it to me. It’s not easy to admit that something has happened, because we feel ashamed and dirty but we are NOT dirty. We haven’t been soiled and our bodies are not the property of anyone but ourselves.
BE HONEST. It’s going to hurt, and it’s going to be hard, but I can say for sure, that there is light at the end of the tunnel and while I haven’t gotten there myself just yet I’ve seen a glimpse of it and that glimpse has told me it’s worth the journey. I’m going to make it there, because I want it and because most of all I deserve it. No matter how rocky this road gets I know someone out there does love me and that I more than anything do love myself.
For the parents out there who like mine have a son or a daughter that has been molested or even raped by someone close to the family, understand something. It’s not your fault either. You do everything you can to protect your children, you love them and teach them to be the best they can be. Kids have a funny way of thinking it’s their job to do the same for their parents, to protect them and they will do anything to do just that.
I know that the decision I made was wrong and faced with it today I wouldn’t have made the same choice I did but I know that I would do anything to make sure no one ever hurt my parents because I love them as much as they love me. It’s what families do… they love, unconditionally.
Sheyna Plamondon