Soul Mosaic

So many times my husband would hug me, look at me with love, and tell me how precious I was.

I would recoil. That word…PRECIOUS…I could barely stand to hear it, much less consider it applicable to me.

“Precious” made me ill and afraid.

The emotions with no words, just paint

Right now, as I write this post, I have reached the place of embracing my anger and claiming my agency. It’s taken a lifetime to get here. And it is only recently that I’ve arrived at this place.

What was I like before this? And what finally got me to this point?

For sure, Dad being gone started the process. But Mom’s death was the final catalyst. Something about her being gone…she was the last present-day witness to everything that had gone on in that house. While she was alive, I had to keep that past at bay, stuff down any emotions from back then, so I could focus on the present moment and her care as she grew old and frail.

But once she was gone? At first, I thought there would be peace. And there was…sort of.

But there was also such grief, and a shredded heart. No matter what, she was “mommy,” and those bonds are primal, even as in so many ways, she failed me. I still missed her. To this day, I still have a voicemail from her in my phone, even as I still can’t listen to it. And though it doesn’t even exist anymore, I still have the entry for her phone number. I’m just not yet ready to delete them. Maybe I never will be ready on that count.

And underneath and behind the grief, there was a pit of roiling emotions. A toxic, angry, painful well of “mess” that I couldn’t give words to yet. Just painted images.

The questions I never knew were there before…

Months after she died, after I wrote her the best obituary I could, and delivered the most heartfelt eulogy for her…I knew there was something BIG coming up. Begging to be heard, FINALLY.

It came from a festering, aching place in me that had been there my whole life, waiting. And now it finally spoke, challenging me with a question it had never dared speak before.

All my life, I’d wanted my mother’s unconditional love, and it wasn’t possible. If your own mother can’t love you fully, who can? And what does it say about your worth? What WAS I if my mother didn’t love me….and I didn’t either?

Then there was the wound of unanswered questions…especially the ones I would never have answers to…the ones my mother took to her grave. How to make peace with those?

And there were the ghosts of my past… each one a separate fragment of me, a separate memory, experience, or just a vague sense of fear, haunting me. What did they want from me?

At that time, after her death, I’d been doing therapy on and off for years. I was tired. Could I just say “Enough is enough,” and run from them? Maybe I could ignore them, pretend they weren’t there. If I never turned around to acknowledge them, would they go away?

But that wasn’t possible. For one, I knew that when you run or refuse to turn around, they just swell and grow into some huge overwhelming darkness that eventually swallows you up.

So, no. I knew – true healing required that I stand and face…whatever. There was NO running…and frankly, I was tired of running. And I was tired of carrying all of this. Just…so…tired. It was time to take a stand.

The second thing I knew about trying to run away was that I had come too far in my therapy to do that. I KNEW there were things in me that had been waiting a lifetime. I had no idea what they were exactly, or their magnitude. But they were there. And…they wanted me to LOOK at them.

So, I knew that healing meant “going through.” There was no going around, under, or over. To get to the other side of this…to reach the answers I needed, and the emotional transformation I wanted, there was only “through.”

I had started to dig at this mess even before Mom died. When she refused to respond to my letter to her, my last and total effort to connect honestly with her, it hurt so much. I wasn’t surprised at her response. But still, it hurt.

And then after her death, I faced things I could never have answers to. And faced parts of me I’d never ever released before because there was no time or freedom….no, there was no running.

To have me back…ALL of me back, and put back together, I made a choice to “unravel.” To deliberately…consciously…and carefully pull out all the frayed and dangling threads. Just yank them apart and let things go where they may.

I had a good therapist. I was stronger than in the past. Both my parents were gone. And frankly, I was choking on so much emotion…something had to give.

It’s like when you have a stomach bug and feel like you need to throw up. You can try to ignore it and clamp your mouth shut. But at some point, if you are ever going to get better, you finally have to vomit.

So, time to vomit up whatever it was within me that was sitting in my chest and throat and choking me.

I knew I had severe PTSD. That one had been diagnosed a few years ago. And I had done a lot of work to manage it, with therapy, meds, and a new career.

But this was a whole different “something,” with a level of power that was not going to be ignored.

Not to mention all the usual culprits that I lived with every single day. I was tired of them, too.

All the usual culprits…

All this writing I am doing now was absolutely impossible a few years ago. As many times as I had tried to write about my abuse, I was TERRIFIED to do it. And use my own name? That was IMPOSSIBLE. I was convinced I had no right to do that to my family name. And I was even afraid of being found out if I used a pseudonym.

I lived in hypervigilance, always checking in with my husband or friends to make sure things between us were okay. If they were quiet, I was terrified. Silence was a weapon used so much on me that even normal quiet moments represented possible threats coming at me. So I was ALWAYS reading the room, watching facial expressions, looking for any possible slip-up I might have made that would, I was sure, destroy me or the relationship. Or both.

Emotional flashbacks haunted my days, though at the time I didn’t know that was what was happening. But there would be times I would flip into absolute terror or depression. Wariness, or outright dread. Sometimes I knew why. Other times it was beyond me.

Sunday afternoons were a frequent time. I could have been busy cleaning all day. But if I finally sat down to rest, I would feel this huge wave of fear. Like I was doing something bad. Like I was about to be in trouble. But given how many times my father had ripped my room apart on Sunday afternoons as revenge for my avoiding him and not letting him abuse me, that made sense. It was best to look and act busy whenever Dad was around. It might not stop his rampage, but it was worse if you were just sitting around.

Weekday afternoons, after three, were another time of strong dread and fear. That too made sense because it was what I felt every weekday afternoon growing up, knowing that Dad would be home soon. Who knew what kind of mood he would be in? Or worse.

There was even the time a year or two ago, when I was teaching at a local high school as a guest instructor. It was a class that the teacher and I had created, and we had a great time engaging her students in marine science. But at 2:30 p.m., when that bell went off and the day was over, I was flooded with terror. Again…it was “time to go home from school and then…Dad would be home.”

But there were those moments when waves of vague fears popped up, like something bad was about to happen. There would be no particular memory or trigger I could attach to them. Those were the worst. I felt crazy – just trembling and wondering why these terrors just showed out uninvited, out of the blue.

There were also body memories – aches I could not identify the cause of. And it was over these years that the “Nightmares” began in earnest. Recurring, violent, raw, and primal images and emotions, desperate to be heard. I will write about them later.

And then, in contrast to my fears, was the rage. Bands of molten emotions defying anyone or anything to control or constrain me. White-hot energy that wanted to be free…whole…ME. And that blind rage would shoot out here and there even as I wasn’t clear why or what triggered it.

I would try to deal with the anger effectively, after all, blind rage isn’t useful in bringing out healing. So I would hold it all and watch myself from a distance, as if I was picking at it all with a dissecting probe to see what was in there.

In those moments, I felt like a person studying a ticking time bomb, eager to defuse it, but aware that to just dive in and start ripping wires apart might not be the best course. Somehow, it had to be defused. Somehow, there was something of great value underneath all this, but it required great care to extract it and not just blow up everything. So I would rage inside, but desperately struggle to control it while I figured out what to do with it.

While some of these usual culprits have waxed and waned over time, the anger and impatience to claim my full life persist most strongly. Anyone who has ever stood in front of a mirror, yelling at a particular person who angered them previously, probably knows exactly what I mean.

Mostly, I rage at my family in those conversations. And frankly, I want to be free of that rage. So I am hoping that as I write these next entries, maybe some emotional release will help to transform them.

Why am I so angry at this point in life? There is a list.

• No, I WASN’T stupid that he took such advantage of me
• I’m angry at how I was treated in that system as the problem and blamed for what I didn’t cause. I became the “scapegoat” for his sins, and the “black sheep” who just could never quite get over things. I am a failure in their eyes.
• And if I hear again, “When will you get over it,” or “It wasn’t that bad”….

I am enraged about what was taken from me through 28 years of sexual assaults, emotional, physical, and mental abuse, and the thwarting of all my normal childhood development experiences.

Did anyone ever consider what TWENTY-EIGHT years of abuse EXACTLY means?

Do they have any idea what it is like to be sucked dry to fill Dad’s needs and protect the family?

And most of all, did they ever stop to think what those thousands of sexual assaults felt like?

The writer Celeste Marcus wrote an essay: “After Rape: A Guide for the Tormented. “ Her description of what rape does to you is so powerful, I will let her words speak for themselves:

“Rape is like explosive ammunition. The bullet fragments beneath the skin, wounding all parts of the body. The initial rupture is then succeeded by a thousand subsequent tears which commit compounded, invisible violence over time. The damage spreads far from the site of the wound. The damage cannot be contained. A victim must track its effects. She must understand how she has been shredded within. She must identify and extract each shard, or else the shrapnel will continue to do damage. Feigning health is not an option.”

“Feigning health is not an option”…just like trying to pretend that what happened to you is over with and you are over it, is equally not possible. You are irrevocably changed.

Marcus’s observation about people telling you it wasn’t that bad nails the extra pain heaped on a person:

“People will tell you that what happened to you wasn’t so bad….each time someone makes that merciless observation, another shard sinks deeper….“

Finally, there is the every-day sorrow of being the “outcast.” I SO WANTED to be understood and accepted and…loved. Sometimes I wanted it so badly I wished I COULD agree to be what they wanted me to be, just so I COULD fit in.

But, I cannot. And these days, I WILL NOT. I will NOT betray me, ever again.

So based on all of this, I knew it was time to face those ghosts, dig in, and get that whole ugly cesspool of emotions drained….

It begins.

Note:

I am seeking financial support to complete my memoir, work with an editor, and return home for fact-checking. Your help would mean the world to me as I take this step toward healing and giving voice to my journey.

Please like, comment, and share this post to help spread the word. The link for my fundraiser is on GoFundMe. Thank you for your support.

This entry was posted on April 18, 2026 at 8:00 am and is filed under Memoir - sexual abuse trauma recovery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.