“Just because you survived doesn’t mean you came out whole.”
Daria Burke – Of My Own Making
“Disaster Date” then the quiet before the storm…
I don’t recall much about the holidays that year. I assume I got together with family, and things went uneventfully.
The only thing I do remember from that period was a date that nearly got both of us frozen to death. We foolishly drove an hour or so away to go to dinner that night when the temperatures were literally 20 degrees below zero. We should have stayed closer to home.
On the way back from the restaurant, we ended up stranded on the side of the road because the hoses in his car burst and the car lost all its antifreeze. He didn’t even realize what was happening or how much danger we were in. With no heat in the car, we couldn’t even talk without shaking, and his stopping and starting the car to let it cool off almost killed the battery. Even as I explained that we needed to find help fast, he kept stubbornly ignoring me and denying there was a problem.
Thankfully, we finally ended up at a local volunteer firehouse. I had told him if he didn’t stop, then to let me out, and I would walk to a stranger’s house for help. My lifelong thanks to the wonderful young fireman who had just returned from a call, allowed us to take refuge there, and brought us hot chocolate to warm us up.
Even then, my date cluelessly tried to put us at risk by wanting to head back out and drive an hour home from there. Realizing he was an idiot, I refused to leave the fire station. While he sat there unable to figure out what else to do, I got a tour of the firehouse as well as a compliment from that young gentleman who said he would have asked me out except that he was already in a relationship. I totally respected that.
My date finally called AAA, who arrived a few hours later and said they couldn’t help us. The serviceman told my date the same thing I did — that we were stranded and he shouldn’t drive his car. So, we ended up staying put at the firehouse all night.
Finally, his father drove down from Torrington and rescued us at 6 a.m. the next morning. At that point, I told my date off, then went home and sat in a hot bath to warm up. Needless to say, that finished it with us.
With the holidays and the “disaster date” behind me, January began with a quiet start. I went to work, came home, and savored quiet nights enjoying the luxury of “Cable TV.” That was something brand new in 1984, especially in our area. All my life, we’d only had 3 channels via an antenna on the house roof. Instead, at my condo, I had CNN, HBO, and almost 100 other channels to choose from. Between that and the peace of living in my own place with just my dog, it was glorious.
January 9, 1984 – The “explosion”
I was home from work that evening and had settled in around 9:00 p.m. to relax with a movie on ABC. It was one of those “made-for-TV movies” called “Something About Amelia.” My life was about to be blown apart.
The movie opened with Ted Danson’s “father character” glaring at his 13-year-old daughter across the yard. In that moment, I SAW that “LOOK” on Danson’s face. And my heart started pounding. It was the same look of anger and jealousy I often saw on my father’s face when he looked at me.
The shot immediately shifted to the daughter — who was scared, uncomfortable, and seemed ready to cry. I viscerally felt her fear, entrapment, and despair.
She had been asked out by a boy. The father didn’t want her to go. She was too young, he said. She was…whatever. He acted more like a jealous lover or husband than a father.
I started shaking. Not just a tightened stomach. My entire body. I recoiled into the blanket on the couch and curled up in a ball. But I kept watching. I couldn’t stop watching.
Things continued to worsen. His secret arguments with her. His stealthy interactions of anger were hidden, so that no one else saw him except his daughter. The stress and fear on her face. Suddenly, I recognized my life on that TV screen. She was living exactly what I had been living with my father. The shock was almost too much, but I kept watching.
The girl started doing poorly in school and became withdrawn. Confronted by her guidance counselor, she broke down and shared that her father was doing sexual things to her.
Now, I will say that while that helped move the plot along, and no doubt could happen, I was amazed that she opened up. Shame, fear, and self-hate, not to mention threats and brainwashing, usually keep victims silenced. Sometimes for a lifetime. At least it did for me. So it might have seemed a bit unusual to me for her to open up so easily. But not so much that I considered it impossible.
Instead, I was riveted, anxious to see the guidance counselor’s reaction. I was amazed to see her immediately understand what the girl was talking about. And she then took action ON THAT GIRL’S BEHALF. She comforted the girl. Reassured her she was not at fault, and was not alone. She was protective and immediately set up a meeting with the mother.
The mother, however, reacted angrily and accused her daughter of lying. The younger sister was angry because this meant she would lose the “special attention” her dad was starting to show her. The counselor got the victim out of the house and to a safe place, then contacted the police. All of this was so incredible to me on so many levels. But especially that the counselor knew about this kind of thing and was actually protecting the girl.
The father, when confronted, denied everything and demanded to see his daughter. However, the police refused.
“Off the rails”
Here is where the movie, great up to this point, started to go off the rails. Yes, the father was arrested…until he wasn’t.
It was determined that he could go back home, and the family should just have therapy. And especially the mother. Because, of course, the cause of this kind of act by the father was the *wife’s* fault. She wasn’t giving him enough sex and attention!
He never served jail time; in fact, he was never charged. The police officer told him that if he did this to a child outside of the family, he would have been in handcuffs. But the movie implied that because it was just his own daughter, they viewed it differently, and that therapy would make it all okay. The movie ended with the family in the therapist’s office and the girl forgiving her father because of the fond memories she had of him when she was little.
Where the movie started on a groundbreaking and brave note, it devolved into a totally abhorrent and incorrect ending. No question. There was the misguided blaming of the wife. And the movie therapist saying that everyone had incestuous thoughts, but if the husband had felt loved enough by the wife, this wouldn’t have happened. This alone was wrong on so many counts, and there were several other things so far out in left field. I should have been enraged by those statements, but I was so totally blown away just by the fact that they were talking about my life that those nuances were lost on me then.
Looking back from now, I have read scathing reviews that tore the ending of that movie apart, and rightly so. They had portrayed the father almost as a victim at one point and blamed his choices on his wife. Then they went further to indicate it was just fine to put him back in the house, as if some therapy sessions were going to cure this and keep both daughters safe. Add in the mother blaming her daughter, and demanding to know why SHE, the pre-teen, didn’t stop the father, and yes, the errors are simply galling.
The New York Times published an article about the movie at the same time it was aired. It discussed how the producers tried to handle the topic carefully to avoid triggering viewers. They didn’t show any scenes of the father entering the girl’s bedroom or of them in bed, and even had counselors on standby after the airing of the movie in case viewers were upset and needed help. All of those things were fine. But they went off the rails in so many other ways, including that the father should have been charged and prosecuted, not made blameless and a victim.
Eternal gratitude
Despite all of the clueless and wrong conclusions, I am going to say this one thing about the movie: From where I was at that night, I will be eternally grateful to ABC television, Ted Danson, Glenn Close, and Roxana Zal for just making a movie about incest. And for even just saying the word out loud. For me, it did what it needed, which was to literally blow my reality wide open with a new awareness of what my life had really been.
It changed my life that night because it shattered me and got me into therapy, fast. I might never have found out…ever…or at least not for many more years, what had been done to me. I might never have gotten into therapy. I might never have recovered. For sure, my life would have taken a whole different road, and not a good one. So I will always be grateful. That movie was a turning point in my life. It saved me.
I will also give credit to the fact that, for 1984, that movie was revolutionary simply because they risked making a movie about incest and airing it on a major TV network. At that time, no one ever spoke of it. There was no social media, no online anything to search or share, no teaching kids about sexual abuse. It was essentially an unknown topic for most people.
And I suspect it was unknown for most victims in the sense that many, like me, may have thought they were the only ones it happened to. And while I can’t answer for anyone else, that kind of reality left me feeling ashamed, guilty, like a freak, and an aberration of nature. So, by simply putting the topic out in the public media for the first time, it opened my eyes to a whole new reality and made a whole different future possible for me. But that would be down the road. There was, first, the immediate fallout to deal with.
The “free-fall” into the abyss…
For the first time in 28 years, I heard that I WAS NOT ALONE. That everything happening to that girl on TV, and more, was what happened to me. That WAS my life in that movie…on that TV screen. Those behaviors portrayed by Ted Danson were exactly the things my father had done to me. And most totally revolutionary to me was that there was AN ACTUAL NAME for what had been done to me — incest.
However, it’s also true that in that moment not only was my emotional stability shattered, but so was my whole world…and everything I believed. The ground under my feet absolutely disappeared, and I started a deep free-fall into an abyss.
I was literally shaking as I sat there on the couch, freezing cold in spite of my blanket, because of all the anxiety and terror raging through me. Everything I had thought about my life, my family, love, truth — ALL OF IT was WRONG. A LIE. And it left me in the place of: “What the hell do I do now?!”
An approaching avalanche
Until that night, I assumed that getting out of my house was enough. That being free of living with my parents, I could just move on and live a normal life. The truth is, I could not live in gaslighting, brainwashing, abuse, and incest from birth through 28 years old, and come out psychically whole and ready for healthy relationships. There were going to be some major challenges to confront.
Sensing that I was rapidly unraveling emotionally, I had the presence of mind to call a friend who I knew was in marital therapy with her husband. While everything in my brainwashing said, “Don’t be dramatic, therapists are just for others,” I recognized there was an avalanche of emotions coming, and that I wouldn’t be able to handle this alone.
The next morning, I called the office and took the doctor’s first available appointment. I wasn’t sure how long I could hold things together, and there was no time to waste.
Soul Mosaic 