The questions that shamed me for so long
I was talking with a friend one day who knew of my background, so I felt safe. But her question froze me, then filled me with shame.
“Did you move back home after college?”
She meant nothing by it, just an informational question more than anything. But for me, I hated the answer, and myself for it. I couldn’t even look at her.
Before I get into what happened next in my life, there is the obvious…and to me, for so many years, the embarrassing question to address: Why, if I was being abused, did I go back home after graduation?
In one way, anyone could understand initially coming home, if only to regroup and figure out where to go next, now that college was done. But why did I STAY? That is the part I found so hard to accept without shame, for most of my life.
Not a “whole person”
But the truth is, I couldn’t do anything else. I wasn’t ready. And I was doing the absolute best I could at each moment in time. It’s just the way it was.
First, despite my age, I was not an adult. I was not even a “whole person.” He had seen to that. He brainwashed me from the beginning to be compliant and to be what he needed and expected. I had been denied the right to develop into a fully functioning, independent adult. I was always focused on “not hurting the family or him.”
So much I didn’t know
So, I learned how to sustain from one day to the next, versus how to live a life. How to survive one “Dad outburst” to the next. And the reality is that when you’ve grown up in that mindset, you don’t even know there is another way. So, while I knew how to focus on the goal right in front of me — getting through college, obtaining school and car loans, finding a job — I had no idea how to navigate life. And society further interfered because, for financial things like loans, I needed him to be a co-signer. So to be an “adult?” I had no clue what that even meant.
And as to the sexual abuse, frankly, I still didn’t even understand that this was “abuse.” I had no idea I wasn’t alone in this happening to me, or that it had a name — incest. I just considered it all a shameful mess that I wanted to leave in the past, and so I hoped that with college done, he would stop.
My thinking was that, after all, how long could he expect to continue this? I was an adult…at least in age. Certainly, he had to see that. What I didn’t understand then was that I was his addiction, and why would a man with all the power give up his addiction?
Dreams vs financial reality
Instead, I expected that I would move on into greater and greater independence like my peers. Dating. Travel. Maybe marriage and kids sometime down the road. I had gone to school. I followed his command not to grow up to be a stupid woman. I followed my own mantra – don’t grow up to be my mother. I had a profession, a job, a car, and dreams. But my dreams were about to hit a hard reality.
First, there was the reality of my paycheck in 1977. I was going to make $8500 a year. While I thought that was a fortune after being a poor student, the truth is that even for that time period, it was a pitiful sum. After income tax, Social Security, the car loan, taxes, gas, and insurance, student loans, and a hundred other small bites that I had no idea were coming, and some money to my parents for living at home, I was about broke. If I could barely give my parents a small amount of “board money,” how could I afford rent?
Where would I go?
Then, even if I could afford it, where would I go? My hometown was a small community, and apartment complexes were rare. I think there was one in my town at that time — except for something in a 3-family house, which was way more than I needed or could afford.
Also, at that point, most women lived at home until they got married. That was just the norm, between society, the immigrant culture, and the church. About the only exception was if you lived out of town, a rarity, and maybe had roommates. But I had no friends at that point or idea of how to find a roommate…or even the awareness that I COULD do that. I was raised to follow the social norms. And, the truth is, I was emotionally unprepared to move away permanently and start my own life. I might have been an adult if judged by age, but emotionally?
The “pre-adolescent”
As to “maturity,” I was a mixed bag. Certainly, for some things, I was a responsible adult. But in so many ways, I was “pre-adolescent,” to use the description of a counselor years later. I was an emotional child, operating in a grown-up body and world, with limited awareness of how to do “life.” My whole existence up to that point was – survive Dad, get through school, get a job, and the rest would “just happen.”
So, for many reasons, I had to return home…and at least for some time to come, I would remain there. While it was crushing to see my financial reality, it was nowhere near as crushing as the rest of reality that would come crashing in almost immediately…
Soul Mosaic 