A Thanksgiving Time Memory

A Thanksgiving Time Memory (one of the ugly ones)

mentions child sexual abuse

I had decided to write about this specific incident, but am having trouble because when I try to type out a sentence I can’t find the words, I don’t want to share it all in detail, which I don’t have to words for at all, but also I don’t know how to write about it in an abbreviated way either.

I was sexually abused for a long time by a male. He was the man who took me away from the ritual abuse cult I was being abused in. He could do that because he took over the group and was the leader there, for a time, until he disbanded the group. He saved my life, parented me, and loved me, so understandably our thoughts, emotions, beliefs, and memories of him are complex. I knew him for twenty years, until his death. I’m writing about him only as an introduction, for context of why young men were in my life and why that made me more vulnerable to being abused by them.

A few times other men, who worked for him, sexually abused me or tried to sexually abuse me, as well, over the years. When I was eleven, and my primary male abuser was very sick, I was raped a series of times by two men together, in their early twenties. I contracted some kind of reaction on my outer privates that was very obvious and excruciatingly painful.

What made this worst of all, for me, was that I had to tell my mother, who had been my primary female sexual abuser, that I had to go to the doctor and why. My parents never asked me if something had happened to me. They discussed it alone and had decided that my adult sister would go with me to the doctor and stay in the room with me. My sister never asked me if someone had touched me or hurt me.

(Neither did the young doctor, when he showed up. He kept repeating instructions for the proper way to wipe yourself after toileting and insisting that I take very hot baths, as hot as you can stand, every evening, because apparently what obviously looks like a sexually transmitted issue is a refusal to wipe and keep her privates clean. Which incidentally baths can cause infections, so he actually told me all the wrong stuff. He inserted some cream and gave me a prescription for another cream, which worked.)

So here we had been sitting in this cold doctor’s office waiting, after me being told to remove all my clothes and sitting on the table with two thin and tiny paper cover ups, one for above and one for across my thighs. My sister sitting in a straight back chair. We waiting like that for about 45 minutes. It was late November and cold outside and in. I always recall it was November because of our interactions while we waited.

We talked for a while and she was asking about school and how that was. This was the school year where we had moved and there was a  lot of girl bullying. We talked about several things until I started telling her about a music lesson.

I was telling her about a new song that I had learned in school for Thanksgiving. It is called We Gather Together. And to keep my mind occupied and distracted she let me teach her the song. So there we were, for almost an hour, me cold and getting colder by the minute, her ignoring what we were there for and yet there for me, and us singing We Gather Together.