Forgive But Never Forget

This story is not for the faint of heart. It’s a #MeToo true story. My story. Prudes and spiritual skeptics need read no further.

Eva Maria, two new immigrants’ first child, was born on a small New Jersey farm in the year of the Great Pandemic, 1918. Her first language was Lithuanian. She didn’t learn to speak English till she began to walk the 3-miles to and from the one-room school in the middle of nowhere, with no cars or buses for transportation. Mom stopped going to school at age 15, she told me: “Too embarrassed because we couldn’t afford good shoes.” She started work in a factory and made enough to buy not only shoes, but soon, silk stockings which were the rage then.

She met Linwood (isn’t that a tree?) when she was 21. He, a city-slicker as my farmer Grammom called him, was all thumbs when it came to knowing anything about how things worked, or working with and not against Nature. But they were a good match. Within weeks they’d eloped. Freedom! But not really. They had to live with Eve’s mother-in-law, Dorcas, for whom I would be assigned that peculiar, but notorious namesake as the confirmation name I didn’t want. In the Bible, Dorcas was raised from the dead. In time, I would come to think of myself as being given a second chance at life as well.

In marrying my Protestant Dad, Mom was kicked out of her beloved family religion because he refused to sign papers stating he’d raise “any children of this mixed-marriage as Catholic,” a prerequisite for interfaith marriages at the time. He needn’t have worried because, after Mom took my older sister Evie and me to several other choices of Christian denominations, we two chose our mother’s fancy schmancy church, Saint What’s His Face, filled with funny robed men who merrily tossed around incense-burning chalices on chains mumbling stuff we didn’t know what, making for seriously great drama. And a very good excuse for wearing finer clothes instead of our everyday school and rough playthings.

Upon our inevitable choice after reaching the age of reason, Evie and I sat in the pew at my parent’s re-marriage, sanctified by the Holy Roman Church this time. What a great party, we thought. A special meal at the local shiny diner, with Mom and Dad in their important clothes, and Evie and me in ours. “Getting married is pretty cool,” I thought and wondered if we’d get to see them doing this a lot more, we girls giggling, watching them recite vows we couldn’t hear. I was told by my glowingly beautiful, self-satisfied Mom that we were there, “So you children will know how important it is to honor marriage like this.” Here, in my 34^th year of a we-two-are-One kind of marriage, I remember this daily.

Little did I realize how often I’d muse about the logic of this, based upon my parents’ subsequent weird examples of “how important” marriage is. Not much later, my parents stopped enjoying ice cream after dinner with us kids and began to take off. First, weekends only. Then any week night they could, taking advantage of those 25-cent drinks offered at the V.F.W.. And why not? Dad had served in WWII, and Mom had been her own version of Rosie-the-Riveter, welding in the Camden Shipyards while Dad was aboard his submarine in the Pacific war arena.

Once, he was alone as lookout on the stern of the sub with a pair of binoculars. He shouted gleefully up at the Captain on the ship’s high center console, “Capt’n, look at those dolphins coming fast right towards us!” The Captain quickly raised his spyglass and shouted, “Those are no dolphins, you fool! Those are torpedes! Dive! Dive!” Dad’s spine would be out of whack the rest of his life for the yank it took, rushing for the quickly closing hatch cover just before the emergency dive that saved them all.

During my teens the folks’ drinking got out of hand. My sister and I would rush home from school to find whatever catastrophe awaited us, worsening with each passing year. I grew to hate the smell of alcohol, baloney-ish from skin and mouth the day after, the angry noise, the confusion. Sometimes worse, like blood and shattered glass and strange people in the house, all the result of this new intrusive member of our household: the demon of alcohol.

Bad things happened. Things that would take lifetimes to work out. But still—the marriage persisted. Adulthood smacked me in the face and I was slaughtered by my own repeating of history, my own addictions. Adeptness in abusing myself I’d learned so well from just watching. I think I topped my parents’ reserved attempts at self-annihilation. But at least I managed to keep marriage and innocent kids out of harm’s way during my own drinking. So cruelly do we repeat our known histories, until … we are given good reason not to. For me that meant I was awake enough to realize I’d die of alcoholism if I didn’t ask for help.

By that time, Dad was sober almost a decade himself, and Mom, even more. Still married. Still friends. But maybe not. Maybe just living together as a habit. Dad passed away from cancer the second year of my now decades-long journey of a sober life, what I call “living in the Light.” Mom, Evie and I were sitting together soon after his memorial.

It was as if she were just awakening from a dream. Mom sat in a daze, wondering if the dream was actually over. Wondering if it were a good, or a bad one. She couldn’t quite figure it out. You could tell because her eyes were so unfocused. She looked confusedly from my sister’s face … to mine … and back to Evie’s.

“Didn’t something happen … between you,” she looked now at me, “and your father? When you were real young?”

The air spun. The nanoseconds gulped. No one spoke.

Finally, I said, looking right into Mom’s green eyes:

“Yes, Mom. Something terrible happened. Don’t you remember?”

Slowly she shook her head.

Oh man, I thought. This is repression. There are just some things that are too traumatic, too awful, too cruel … too much to handle for the human mind to accept. Things like car crashes, war atrocities. Children witnessing atrocities. Or a child being victim to an atrocity by a parent not in their right head because of mind-altering substances.

“Yes, Dad shattered me. My life, he destroyed. My body,” I whispered, “he violated. When I was ten,” I told my still-as-stone Mom. “He did the unthinkable. You don’t remember? Me showing you the …” my voice trailed off, not wanting to hurt my grieving mother anymore. Yet this was the time to be honest. If not now, when? It never occurred to me she wouldn’t remember.

She acted as if she’d never heard my child-self tell her. And right then, I was as shocked as she. We’d never talked about it again. It’s not exactly everyday dinner table conversation.

I wasn’t a bit angry though. I pitied her. That she was just now awakening to the horror I’d never repressed and was healing from, since my own awakening in sobriety. I knew she’d been a good and loyal wife. I knew she was a good mother, the best she could be. But now she had to speak, painfully, achingly slow, as a good person.

“I couldn’t handle it, honey. I tried to. I remember running away (she’d left us for a few days, to stay in a motel in another town, to figure out“ what to do”). But I couldn’t figure out how to live without your father’s help. His income. Him being a man, the head of the family. He promised me it would never happen again. I believed him.”

Mom told us right then that as long as he drank, Dad couldn’t and didn’t stop sexually abusing others. Abusing himself. And God knows what he did that she never knew about. [note to ML Editor: the following excerpt can be omitted if need be] {She told us how Dad had fondled a toddler at a local bar while the girl’s parents were drinking merrily at the other end, seeing and sensing nothing. How can drunks do this? When the other drunken father realized what had happened, he rushed to my parents’ house, where my father already had run home, to cry and beg on his knees for my mother to forgive and help him not be taken away to prison. When the drunken father banged on the door, my mother did beg. And the drunken father, I don’t know how he could, he walked away without pressing charges on my father for his insane, contemptible act.}

How many others had he abused? Only the anonymous Catholic priest will ever know, he whom my agnostic father ironically sought out to share his 5^th Step with, his “confession” when he finally got sober. But my father never forgave himself. I’m sure that’s why he got cancer and died from it. He never stopped asking for my forgiveness either. A million times was not enough for him to ask, and a million times I patiently, lovingly said, “I forgive you, Dad.”

The cycle of abuse stops only when secrets are told aloud. Exposure. #MeToo ad infinitum. Bringing evil doings into the Light. No repressing. No forgetting. To better understand how weakness strikes every human heart. Jung was right. Without acknowledging our shadow, we never get to claim the majesty of the Light. Through cracks in the darkness of our own shadow, the Light finally penetrates our heart. Only then can we begin to heal.

Dad’s weakness might never have occurred had he himself not been abused as a child. By his father’s friend, a leader of the community, a do-gooder who did nothing but badness to Dad from ages 7 to 14. That Dad was able to grow into the dedicated providing husband, father and eventual soul-searching man that he was, working out his own demons when that of alcohol’s wasn’t being unleashed, unmooring his morality—was, and IS his testament to believing good perseveres over evil. He finally asked for help and made the choice to live without deviant sex, without alcohol, with the help of AA recovery. And finally, I got to re-know my dear Dad, the one who sang and played the sax in a jazz band, and laughed uproariously, who could be trusted with anything. The Dad I had had before he danced with the demon and fell into the ravine of Darkness.

Mom’s story was longer and less fettered by self-reflection, self-torment. The shame and guilt that was unleashed, at last, when denial was pushed aside from the release of repression, helped her come into her own. After three years mourning Dad, at age seventy-two she went back to where she left off at high school, passed the required exams and entered college. Before she died at ninety-seven, she ardently wrote and published many nonfiction books.

Sharing all her stories but this one.