Abuse, America, and Airing Our Dirty Laundry
I used to cringe when I would see what I referred to as someone “airing their dirty laundry” on social media. So tacky, I thought, using their family drama for attention, or gathering support in a distasteful display of hyperbole that skewers the offending party on the rapier of public opinion.
I see it differently now.
There comes a point when you realize that it no longer matters how you say a thing. It no longer matters how respectably you couch it, or how many eggshells you walk on, each one slicing into your scarred and bleeding feet. You approach a thing softly, in the hopes of not startling it, step by careful step not to snap a twig or crunch a leaf so that they won’t leap away when you begin telling them painful truths.
But some truths are just too painful for others to bear, and so however you choose to express your truth, it will be turned against you as evidence of your untrustworthiness. Those who challenge the status quo are painted as frauds, unstable, attention-seeking.
This is my story: a confession, a cautionary tale, an allegory, and a plea for change.
Recent Events
Like many Americans in the past few years, I’ve held an uneasy truce with family regarding politics. I tried to simply avoid the question, hoping I was wrong about their predilections and sharing post after post on Facebook in the hopes that something I said would sway them. Surely, I thought, surely over four years of watching the corruption in the White House, being disgusted by the chaos and incompetence and grift, they would eventually hold their nose and vote blue, no matter how disgusted they were by the idea.
But then the one-two punch of QAnon and the politicization of COVID19 hit, and I watched in horror as it became clear that conspiracy theories and the lethal tying of nationalism to religion cemented their rejection of any media except those which confirmed their point of view.
I didn’t know what to do; I cried in every phone call to my mother, trying to convince her it was about something else. Sometimes it was; everything is stressful these days. But mostly it was the weight of all my fear trying not to scream at her not to do this, not to help the biggest threat to American democracy in our history secure and extend his power. I swallowed my fear and hurt to hang on to that relationship in a year when we are all so disconnected from each other.
And then my sister posted on her Facebook wall a meme that said something like “At the end of this election season, I’ll still be your friend no matter who you vote for, because I’M AN ADULT.”
And I lost it.
10 Months Ago
You see, ten months ago, before we knew what 2020 had in store for all of us, before COVID hit, my father died.
Don’t go for the sympathy card just yet.
I didn’t go to the funeral.
I have shared with a few close friends some of the worst things that my father did and said to me, but I have never told anyone the full account.
You see, no one really wants to hear the story of a little girl who was abused by her father. The ones who knew her father don’t want to hear a story that conflicts with what they thought they knew about him, and the ones who didn’t know him just want everything to be okay, for you to be past all that, for you to have “survived” and moved on already, let it make you stronger, put it behind you.
Except it’s never really behind you, no matter how hard or fast or far you run. Because the minute you tell anyone what happened, you are defined by that confession. As listeners seek for a way to fit your story in to their schema of the world, there are really only two possible narratives:
You are either a strong survivor, or…
…you are a liar.
I am neither.
I am telling the truth, shrieking it, whispering it, speaking it in measured and neutral tones. I know what happened to me. I know what he did, and I know the structures around me that protected him while he did it.
But I have not survived, because it is not over. He is dead now, but his voice lives in my head and the doubt he sowed in me about my worth and my motives and my intelligence and my work ethic and my inner self is a constant presence that I have spent years of my life and thousands of dollars of therapy, medications, and self-help books trying to eradicate.
His influence lives in the way my family views everything I say with suspicion. And while he certainly spent the decades between my childhood and his death painting me with a broad brush of being the “crazy problem child,” the deeply-held misogynistic stereotypes of our society helped him out every step of the way.
For 16 years, between the time I told him that I wouldn’t be speaking to him again until he went to a therapist (he refused,) and the day he died, our estrangement was nearly a family secret. As far as I could tell, very few people in our small town every knew that he and I were not on speaking terms; occasionally old friends from there would pop into my inbox and ask about him, usually when they’d heard he’d had a stroke or was attending an auction. I just ignored those messages; I didn’t want to deal with the questions. I’m sure they thought I was rude.
And then he died of one of those strokes, at the beginning of 2020, and I didn’t go to the funeral.
I didn’t go, and my sister can’t forgive me for that.
Her complaint is somewhat understandable — she is (on the surface) upset that I didn’t go to support her and my niece and nephew, who saw my father as their Grandpa. Underneath, she is probably also likely upset that my absence raised questions that were uncomfortable and stressful or even embarrassing for her to answer.
The truth is, I would have spared her all that if I could. If I could have gone as an anonymous person, just some random friend who didn’t know my dad, and held her hand, and shuffled nosy visitors away, I would have.
But there is nothing in the world that could have stopped the flood of fury in me if I had been forced to listen while the first words of praise for my father began.
I Was Eleven
When I was eleven years old, my parents divorced, bitterly. Acrimonious divorces were commonplace by the early 1990’s, but theirs was so rancorous that it drove one lawyer out of family practice entirely. My sister and I were shuffled between houses every three or four days. I spent several years living out of a suitcase, though my father raged at me any time I took any present he’d given me to my mother’s house; in his eyes, even the things he gave me to wear belonged to him.
My father, like millions of other men faced with the loss of their romantic partners, found himself with no other emotional outlet. But also like millions of other men, my father felt that he was entitled to that outlet regardless of its appropriateness.
It started with his monologues; like some sort of cartoon villain, Dad used to drone on about how the world had wronged him, starting with how his mother virtually abandoned him to groom his sister, the favorite child, for success, moving on to describe the faithlessness of his first two wives, and eventually to describe, in vivid and imaginative detail, all of my mother’s sins.
I was eleven.
I do not know how much was true, though I suspect very little. He accused her of having an affair, but considering my sister and I would have been in the house during the time he described, and old enough to pay attention to what was going on, (not to mention his habit of concocting lies to slander those who challenged him,) I very much doubt it. I do think that my mother likely leaned on this man, a pastor who initially was welcome to use tools in my father’s shop, for emotional support as she watched my father morph into someone emotionally violent and unrecognizable. But my father was a master at taking a grain of truth and twisting it out of all recognition.
Take, for example, the time he trapped me at the top of the staircase to my bedroom with one of his monologues. I wasn’t allowed to leave while he told me a long, convoluted, demonstrably false story about how my mother had tried to kill him by running him over with a truck, spinning gravel and shouting “Bastard!” out the window. I had never heard this word; I was eleven. So I asked him what it meant. He told me.
At the next court date, he told the judge that he had been forced to define the word for me because I had come to him, asking what it meant because I had overheard my mother using the word. I have lived in shame ever since, knowing that on some level, I wasn’t smart enough to keep my mouth shut and protect my mother from that lie.
I was eleven.
But the monologues didn’t keep to the staircases and times when I was trapped in a vehicle with no way to escape. Eventually, on weekend days when I stayed at Dad’s, early in the morning before I would typically wake, a knock would be heard, and my bedroom door would open, uninvited, and there Dad would be, in nothing but his underwear, always those basic white cotton white briefs and nothing else.
I would scoot as close to the edge of the bed as I could, trying to make myself small and far away. At first, he just laid there, talking to the ceiling about how horrible everyone (including me) always was to him, about how everyone had abandoned him, how no one cared about what he needed. And there were things he needed.
After a few times, of course, it became him spooning me, still in nothing but his underwear, pressing something hard I didn’t understand against my lower back.
I was eleven.
That’s as far as that went, which is confusing, actually. After all, what is that? It’s not rape. It’s not even what most people think of when they think of molestation. It was a 52-year-old man using his 11-year-old daughter for sexual arousal and comfort, though.
When I started locking the door, he dismantled the locking mechanism in it and threatened to remove the doorknob altogether if I tried it again.
To this day, I can’t sleep on the side of the bed closest to the door. Feeling that particular sensation happen while spooning in a romantic relationship causes nightmares and several days of irritability and unrest.
Eventually, in court-mandated family therapy, while no one seemed to understand the sexual aspect of the abuse going on (it was the early 1990’s and my father was a respected white collar member of the community, after all,) he was told to stop monologuing to us and “get a date, get a girlfriend, whatever” by the therapist. Looking back on that phrase — which I know the therapist said — I can’t believe she didn’t know on some level. I do believe she knew, actually. I just don’t think there were any mechanisms in place to protect me at that point. So my dad had to find new ways that he didn’t think I’d be able to report.
He succeeded. The extended cut of the 1971 film The Last Picture Show came out that year, and he asked me to watch it with him. I was an avid old movie buff, so I agreed. The original version features a skinny-dipping scene, which he would have known about; the new version included an actual sex scene. They are explicit and extended. I watched the film, deeply uncomfortable and scared. My father watched me, with his hand in his lap.
I was eleven.
Of course, I didn’t stay eleven, and neither did my body. When I was fourteen, I bought my first bikini — it was green and I was so pleased with how my body looked in it, all new curves and adolescent litheness. I wore it for the first time at the lake near my mother’s house, and smiled to myself to see the way my crush got quiet when I took my shirt off and jumped in the water.
I wore it for the second time to sunbathe at the pond at my dad’s house. When I came into the house, his eyes couldn’t leave my chest, even though my new stepmother was watching him. He hugged me, rubbing my back in a way that I have only ever known boyfriends to do, and whispered in my ear about what a woman I was becoming. My stepmother laughed awkwardly.
I never wore that bikini again.
My father loved to kiss me on the ear with little, quiet, lover’s kisses, and then force me to look deeply into his eyes. How do you explain to someone the difference between the kiss a father is supposed to give their child, and the kiss a lover gives? I lack the words to describe it, there is nothing I can say to convince anyone that there is a difference, a difference of intent and style where one says “I cherish you and will keep you safe” and one says “My body wants yours.” But to this day, I can’t stand to be kissed on the ear. More nightmares. More uncontrollable, irrational rage.
The Growing Years
The problem for my father was that I wasn’t compliant. I do not know how far he succeeded with my sister; she has continually been evasive with me on that account. I began to rebel, and with that rebellion my father’s fear of being discovered prevented further progress down a sexual path. Instead, he began a steady campaign of discrediting me.
To anyone who would listen, including my sister and stepmother, he poured poison in their ear, about how I was ungrateful, selfish, and only wanted his money. That the only reason I ever visited him was to get the gifts he dangled in front of me.
He and I fought and fought; he called me a “brat” and a “bitch” when no one else was around to hear it (once time, simply because I asked him a question while he was trying to concentrate on fixing a printer.)
While growing up he constantly castigated my mother for how much time she spent at church (she had risen to choir director right before their divorce,) and rarely joined us, even on Sunday mornings. He hated singing so much that once he threw the hymnal down and stormed out. After she left, he never missed a Sunday, intending that his presence would drive her out. He spread rumors, ensuring that she could never return to the congregation without embarrassment. He sang louder than anyone else and joined the choir after she left. One day he bragged to me that they were talking of making him a deacon; I never knew if it was true or if he just told me so that I would tell my mother and hurt her.
He gave my sister a car when she turned 16. He bought one for me, too, but then said I could only have it if I agreed to live with him full time. I turned him down and he gave the car to my sister, who then had two cars at Dad’s, and one at Mom’s that we had to share (because he wouldn’t let her drive either car to Mom’s house.)
I drove the same ’87 Chevy Celebrity that my mother bought me for seven years until I finally bought my own car with my own money after college.
Eventually, on the day after Christmas in 2003, my first year out of college, as I raced back to my retail job in Bloomington, Indiana, after splitting my 36 hours off between both my parents exactly down the middle — to within 15 minutes either way — I got a voicemail from him, screaming about how I was a “gold digger” because I only went to his house to pick up the presents and run.
I was a gold digger for accepting the only kind of love he knew how to show me.
So I stopped accepting even that.
That was the point I told him that until he agreed to attend at least one single therapy session, I was done communicating with him. By then, I had learned that attempting to connect with him typically triggered suicidal ideations in me.
At the time, I should have seen this as a sign of so many things to come, but my boyfriend at the time raised his eyebrows and hinted that perhaps I was overreacting, that surely the kind of rage and anger I exhibited as I sobbed in our shared bedroom after that conversation was unmerited.
That boyfriend knew about the events in my childhood bedroom.
Why is it that when we talk about child molesters in theory, we discuss elaborate revenge fantasies of prison rape, but when there’s an actual survivor of childhood sexual assault sobbing in front of you, the instinct is to assume that they are somehow not rational, not seeing things clearly, not giving their perpetrator the benefit of the doubt?
After that, when my father would send checks in the mail for birthdays, I ripped them up. Eventually he figured it out, and started sending cash. I waffled at first, but finally spent it, thinking about my car payment.
Family Ties
I couldn’t avoid him forever, though, because my sister had chosen to continue her role as dutiful daughter, and in the spring of 2007 she gave birth to my beautiful and brilliant niece. But unfortunately the birth was complicated and scary, and my sister also nearly died of an internal staph infection. This meant that all family members were in and out of the hospital visiting her and the new baby for several days. In addition, in the midst of all of this, the boyfriend mentioned above had chosen to leave me in a rather dramatic and unexpected fashion, so I was still stunned and heartbroken.
Eventually the inevitable happened, and my father cornered me in the parking lot, between a van and a tall truck, where no one could see us or hear our conversation. I forget how the conversation started, but I believe he challenged me about holding fast to my decision not to speak with him; I reiterated that I would not be doing so until he agreed to visit a therapist. He looked at me, while my sister was near death in the building next door, and said the words, “It’s no wonder Travis left you. You’re a controlling whore just like your mother.”
I walked away, got in my car, and drove four hours back to my wrecked apartment in Bloomington to wait for news of whether my sister had recovered or not.
2020
Dad sent me letters in the intervening years after wheedling my new address out of my sister. They were long and rambling accounts of either his past accomplishments (he was a genius after all — really — he did stock car racing and held something like seven patents in electrical engineering and helped design the rings on the Saturn V rockets and his brain never quit planning new inventions,) but they always circled back around to whoever had wronged him most recently, most often my sister’s husband, though sometimes extended family members whose names I barely remembered. (He blamed my brother-in-law for the loss of his eye, which from what I can tell occurred because my father’s bluster and risk-taking behavior led him to ignore basic chainsaw and lumber safety precautions, but logic never swayed him when pointing a finger would do.) I skimmed them, though I did keep the book he sent me about the Apollo missions, with his annotations complete. That’s history, after all.
But I threw away the letters that excoriated me for abandoning him, as well as the ones peppered in between that sweetly offered me dinner or invitations to visit for the holidays. I knew that honeyed trap too well.
But then in January of 2020, I got the call. One of the mini-strokes that had been plaguing him in recent years finally took over, and his rants were over forever.
In a moment, everything had changed, and nothing had changed.
Or rather, I thought everything would change. And in a way, it did, and in a way, the reality I had lived in since I was eleven was only reinforced.
You see, I had kept quiet about my father’s actions for decades, for two reasons. First, the pressure to maintain his reputation was overwhelming. My father was a member of the county school board for eleven years, an active member of the small church I grew up in. He attended local farm auctions where afterwards Facebook acquaintances would message me and ask about his health and to tell me how nice it was to see him. If you go to his obituary page, you will see messages from friends of his proclaiming how kind he was to them and to their children.
None of these people have ever seen even a glimpse of the man I’ve described to you. None of them have ever seen the kind of man who pinned my mother to a chair in the kitchen with the mere force of his personality, dominating her physically without ever touching her, shaking his finger in her face and accusing her of every kind of sin there was (my mother is not perfect, but reading romance novels is hardly the kind of thing that sends you to fiery pits of hell.) None of these people knew the man who drove us to the KY State Fair in August of 1992 and drove so aggressively and angrily that he nearly wrecked another vehicle while he screamed at my mother. He paid to have portraits drawn of my sister and me that day; we look haunted, eyes too big for our faces, no smiles to be seen. When we came out of the fair after a long day, someone had keyed my mother’s brand-new Nissan Pathfinder. His aggression had consequences. But we were the ones who paid for it with another round of rage and vitriol on the 90 minute drive home.
That reminds me of another time when he took a friend of mine and me on a weekend trip to Nashville; upon arriving home, I was supposed to stay with him one more night, but wanted to go home to Mom instead, because I was exhausted and couldn’t bear the idea of being alone with him. He trapped me in my room and took the phone off the hook so that I couldn’t call my mother to come get me. I am forever grateful to my friend’s mother, who when she arrived to pick up her daughter, saw me sobbing at the top of the stairs, stood up to him, and put me in her car.
Of the few people who stepped between my father and me, it was only ever women.
The second reason I have never told the full account of my father’s abuse was the fact that I am a woman, and therefore somehow to be distrusted.
I was a little girl, and my parents were divorcing, so somehow I was just attention-seeking and rebellious — not trying desperately to express my fear and anger to the adults around me in the only way I knew how.
I was a teenager, and therefore hormonal and boy crazy — not disrupted by a too-early sexual awakening that manifested in believing that my sexuality and physical body were ways in which I could achieve affection and attention.
I was a college student, and therefore too selfish and busy with her new life to visit home — not a young woman who had finally found escape in a world where she could sleep in the same bed every night and forge a new identity for herself.
I was “crazy,” because I chose to go to therapy — after all, only crazy people do that. (This was later reinforced by my disclosure that I had been diagnosed with autism. With how many incorrect cultural misconceptions about autism, clearly I’m either crazy, weird, or attention-seeking.)
I was a hypochondriac, not suffering from a variety of conditions that we now know are linked to childhood stress and emotional abuse, including migraines.
I wasn’t hurt — I was “bratty.”
I wasn’t traumatized — I was “slutty.”
I wasn’t abused — I was “crazy.”
My father abdicated all responsibility for the way his abuse manifested in my psychology, but what’s worse is that he created a narrative that defined the way my entire family has viewed me. Despite my mother divorcing him, it’s simply too easy to believe the idea that a man like my father, who was a successful pillar of the community, could be the monster I claim he is. It’s just far easier to believe that I’m exaggerating for attention, that I’m being overdramatic, that I’m lying to cover up for my own deficits.
His poison was so convincing that while I can’t prove it, my stepmother told a friend that she burned the only copy of my father’s will to prevent me from inheriting what he had set aside for me. I’m puzzled, because this means that I’ll automatically inherit quite a bit due to KY intestate law — what had he intended to will me that was so enraging to her? Had he intended to use me to hurt someone else? I’ll never know because his lies have smothered any chance I had of ever being viewed as anything but a venomous harpy.
I had hoped that things would get better when my father died, but it turns out that the same people who pressure you not to speak up when they are alive because you’ll hurt his reputation also tell you to stay quiet once he’s dead, because “it’s in the past, he can’t hurt you now, why hurt your family by destroying his reputation?”
It turns out that they just don’t want you to speak up at all. And if you do, no one will believe you because the bars of the cage have been built long before by someone who foresaw how your knowledge could destroy them, and so they began discrediting you step by step. And it was easy, because we don’t believe women anyway.
Elections
Which brings me back to the present. The thing about a family dynamic where you’ve been set up to be viewed as the hyperbolic drama queen is that that perception of you seeps into all aspects of your life, so that when you beg your family, mere days from Election Day, to consider how their choice of candidate will affect your quality of life, it actually ends up working against you.
Because it’s not just my father’s careful campaign of discrediting at work here; if you watch Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, you are watching my father’s methods on a grand scale. Trump has the bluster and rage and entitlement to anything he wants sexually, but both men are masters at pre-empting the narrative by sowing distrust. Both of them make plans to victimize a group, then spread lies and false narratives about how that group is dangerous and can’t be trusted, and only then do they act against that group — once no one will believe the group’s complaints of abuse.
When you complain, when you speak up, when you call out abuse, you are painted as the problem.
Abusers damage you, and then say you can’t be trusted because you are damaged.
A large chunk of American voters has been led to believe that the other side is untrustworthy, because it serves the purposes of the Republican Party in continuing their abuse. They think that by voting in a second Trump term, accounts of that abuse will somehow fade out, as the “truth” comes out. But instead, the abuse will escalate and expand in scale, as unchecked abuse always does. It always starts with the vulnerable. But it reaches everyone eventually. “First they came for…,” after all.
I know that by publishing this, many will resent me. Some will call me liar. Some will defend an abuser’s honor.
Some will tell me, like I was told once about my father’s sexual assault, that “he didn’t know any better.”
But when your house is dusty, you don’t yell at the person who sneezes.
But I am tired of being silenced. I am tired of trying to build my credibility, year after year after year, for it to never matter. I am tired of my life being worth less than a dead child molester’s reputation.
They will pontificate at us from their podiums and the heads of dining room tables about how we are the selfish ones, the lazy ones, the drains on society who do not contribute, who only take, while they steal our safety, our dignity, and even our lives.
I am tired of how the liars paint us as the untrustworthy ones.
Because now I’m not educated anymore — I’m “indoctrinated.”
I’m no longer compassionate and caring — I’m “against freedom.”
I’m no longer offering historical facts about the current administration’s assault on human rights — I’m “hateful.”
Doctors and the CDC are no longer trusted advisors who guide us in making decisions about our health — they are “idiots” because they exhort us to put aside personal comfort in order to save lives.
Protesters are no longer Americans hoping to end racist police practices, but instead violent rioters and looters.
When one man leans on another man’s neck for almost nine minutes while that man begs for his life and calls for his mother, until there is no life left, with no crime committed and no trial, his past history is trotted out to prove that he was a bad guy, that he was a “thug,” so his cries for help go unheeded and die with him.
Professors and teachers are no longer honored public servants tasked with caring for and educating our youth, but liberal indoctrinators and lazy bums who just want to sit at home in their pajamas and so therefore must be forced to teach to video cameras in empty classrooms. Their value is so dismissed that no one bats an eye that their duties now include special trainings on how to sacrifice their own lives to save the lives of students when (not if) the day comes that one of those students decides to kill some of them.
Speaking of guns, those calling for research into our gun violence problem, and for common sense gun laws to protect our children and churches from mass shootings are painted as “loony liberals” who want to “take all your guns” and “hate freedom and America.”
Those who call for the end of private health insurance and the enactment of a single-payer healthcare system like every other developed nation on the planet has successfully implemented are derided as being somehow “delusional” and the very basic math it takes to understand that taxing billionaires and removing the high premiums and deductibles most of us pay would more than make up for a raise in taxes is brushed aside as somehow being too complicated for even those with economics degrees to compute.
No, instead it’s easier just to believe that we’re all deluded liars who are somehow damaged and untrustworthy. If America can convince itself that we are angry and crazy, then it’s just one small step to believing that all we want to do is destroy this country.
All we’ve ever wanted was for America to stop hurting us. To be a part of this family. To be loved and accepted for who we are.
A Plea for Change
The stories we tell ourselves about victims of abuse, whether at the family or systemic level, are insidious and penetrate every level of society. We listen as upstanding members of society who attend church and get elected to positions and go to 9–5 white collar jobs show up at local events, smiling and clasping hands. They shake their heads sadly to hear about the latest local daughter who has “gone off the rails” and raise a polite eyebrow about the Mrs. who got the new car in the divorce and tut-tut about how he was such a nice man, what a shame.
And it travels up the chain, to the upper echelons of politics, where women who seek power are penalized and viewed as contemptible and disgusting, and back down again, to our everyday relationships, where even loving husbands don’t trust their own wives’ feelings.
And the trap is set.
Call me tacky, attention-seeking, overdramatic, tell me I’m “airing my dirty laundry.” Call me a liar or deluded. Call me a mess. I won’t say I no longer care, but that it no longer matters.
Because you’ve called me all of these things the whole time, just under your breath until now.
Those of us who are the victims of abuse, on a personal or systemic level, have borne the burden of trauma for far too long. We wish for that burden to be acknowledged, so that we can set it down. We do not wish for those who have participated in or been bystanders to our abuse to be traumatized, but we do wish for them to look closely at that trauma, to lean in, to learn from it, to whisper to us, “I see it now — I see you now.”
We need America to open its eyes and remember that we are family, too.
It’s not too late to reconsider that intended vote. It’s not too late to pause and consider whether you’re right about who is telling the truth. Is it really the man screaming up at that podium, pointing fingers and blaming everyone else for his failures, threatening those who challenge him, accusing others of crimes he himself commits? Or could it be those who cry out in fear and dismay at his growing power?
This is our chance to begin building a world founded on truth, a world where secrets no longer destroy families or governments, where we can rebuild families destroyed by lies. But it starts with us dragging our own secrets out into the light, where they can no longer hurt us. It starts with listening to the voices of family members who have been silenced and standing between them and those who would hurt them further.
America, your children need you. It’s time to be there for them.
