Silenced Each Day
1976 to 1990, Queens, New York
By Eileen McDermott
I’ve heard a lot about sexual abuse lately. Every time I turn on the TV there seems to be another Catholic priest accused of molesting pre-pubescent altar boys, another pretty young teacher caught sleeping with her students, or another aging pop star on trial for inappropriate contact with his young fans.
My own experience with sexual abuse – and the experience of most victims around the world for that matter – is far less sensational, and will never specifically receive air time. The family member who violated me regularly until I was 12 years old escaped punishment thanks to his two constant champions: shame and silence. My grandfather’s wandering hands, hard lap, and dirty jokes have been tattooed in my memory forever, but, like the majority of abuse victims, it was years before I spoke of his crimes out loud.
It usually happened in the kitchen of my grandparents’ home in Queens, six blocks from my own. Wednesdays were half days at my Catholic elementary school, because the public school kids came for religion classes. My parents were both teachers, so my younger sister and I stayed with my grandparents on those afternoons.
My grandfather always had homemade pizza waiting, my favorite, with soda that somehow tasted sweeter at his house, and Neapolitan ice cream, which I would swirl slowly with my spoon until it became ice cream soup. These delicacies delayed things somewhat, but that last slurp of ice cream inevitably came. Soon my sister would be sent to the living room to play. Then my grandmother would wash the dishes and dutifully disappear.
He had various techniques. Sometimes we played hangman, a game I liked in theory. But the answers to his puzzles were always sexual terms. I refused to pronounce them out loud, so I would just keep guessing until I had filled in all the blanks. When a word was finished, he would ask me if I knew what that particular sexual term meant or what it looked like and then laugh heartily, reach out to tickle me and pull me into his lap. I had to stay there for the remainder of the game, while he writhed beneath me, his fingers poking intermittently between my legs.
Sitting there on his lap, I would plan for the next time: I would stick a block inside my underwear, or a knife! As soon as I got home I would write a letter. It would say, “I know what you’re doing and if you don’t stop right now I’m calling the police.” I would leave it in his mailbox for him and he would be terrified. I would have to make the handwriting look grown up or cut the letters out of magazines….
On his lap, I grew bold. I screamed, I punched, I grabbed him by the crotch and threw him clear across the room. From the heights of my mind I was heroic, and I looked down upon the weak little girl sitting in that kitchen with disgust.
He gave me the standard line about keeping it quiet once or twice, but for the most part he knew I would never tell. He had done this before – I later learned that I was not the first generation he had silenced. For a while, it did not consciously occur to me that he could be abusing my sister as well. I had fooled myself into thinking that there was just something about me that elicited his disease. Then, at 16, when I had long become too old for his liking, too capable of fighting back, I read my 9-year-old sister’s diary. That was the day I found rage.
Rage is any victim’s friend – it gets things done. It can empower even a bitter, introverted teenager. I leapt out of the room and threw the diary at my mother: “Look at this, read this!” I demanded, shaking. The words dripped off the page like the tears I was not yet strong enough to cry. Then my mother told me what I had always known in my heart: that he had done it to her also, that she had left home at 18 because of it, and that my father knew everything.
I was not ready to question how they could have let it happen to us. I had my own guilt to wrestle with, and there was so much else to be angry about first.
My grandfather never stood trial, he has never been publicly accused, and there has never been national outrage on our behalf. There was a period following the day I told when my parents cut off all contact with him, but that slowly diminished. Soon he came to my parents’ house again for Christmas and Easter. My mother spoke to him on the phone again, and it was all swept back under the same dirty, threadbare rug where it had festered for so many years before. Ultimately, it became more of a mess than we could bear, so the four of us just walked away from it, in opposite directions.
When I was 23, living on my own and finally beginning to feel strong, I told my mother I would not see my grandfather anymore. If he was invited for Christmas, I would not come home. This caused some commotion initially, but in the end he was no longer welcome. That was the first conscious step I took toward becoming an advocate for the little girl I had once been.
Like most pedophiles, my grandfather is neither a famous nor a controversial figure. He is just an ordinary old man, now in his 80s, living somewhere in New Jersey. You will never see his story recounted on E! or Dateline, but – if you turn off your television for a moment and listen very closely to the stillness in your own neighborhood – you might begin to hear the thousands of ordinary children who are silenced each day in this country by ordinary people, just like him.
Eileen McDermott lives in New York and has been writing professionally since 2001.
Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Thursday, February 22nd, 2007 | Email This PostThis entry was posted on Thursday, February 22nd, 2007 at 12:03 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
7 Responses to “Silenced Each Day”
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February 23rd, 2007 at 8:02 am
Your piece moved me to a hilt but hats off to your unwavering sense of integrity.
February 23rd, 2007 at 7:16 pm
I thought your story was eloquently told, and congratulations to you for standing up for yourself and your little sister.
February 24th, 2007 at 11:26 pm
If you listen to psychologist talk shows on the radio, you hear this story again and again. The mother who was abused as a child brings her daughters to the same address to get the same treatment.
How these complex networks of abusers and enablers evolve is a haunting mystery.
Eileen, you did all that was in your power. But the culprits - your grandfather and both of your parents - need to be shunned. I hope you find the strength to stand up to your mother and father for their neglect.
How could they leave you there? If they took the risk, foolhardy as that was, they had to warn you not to sit on Grandpa’s lap. They had to quiz you for signs of anything untoward. They failed you. Teachers are they?
February 26th, 2007 at 1:48 pm
Eileen,there all kinds of abuse both physical and mental.My Grand mothers were good at that and unfortunaly mom mom learned too well the mind games.
I tried to tell her in and unsubtil way that she was playing those same games on her grand daughter about her father as her mom had done to me.I don’t know if it really registered on her that she was doing that but she did see that I had caught her at that game and she never did that again around me.God Bless and Keep you,and to remove the hurt that you suffered.
February 27th, 2007 at 4:02 pm
Thanks to all for your heartfelt comments.
Jay, I\’m not quite sure how to answer you, except that I have forgiven them. I know how deep denial runs and that my mother simply didn\’t have enough strength at the time, because of all she had been through herself, to face the reality that it could happen to my sister and I too, or to estrange herself from her family. I existed on the very same premise for a long time, by simply avoiding the fact that I knew in my heart every time my parents dropped my sister off at my grandparents\’ house while I escaped to a friend\’s to play instead, he was hurting her. I know that they were adults and should have been stronger, but adults who were abused are often just children in disguise, and I\’m sure she downplayed the situation for my father.
Still, I know what you\’re saying, and believe me, it took a very long time to get past the anger - it still creeps up now and then. I put my parents through hell as a teenager and largely ignored them until my mid twenties because I was so angry, but as I get older, I understand more and more how hard it must have been for them - how hard life is in general, never mind the added responsibilities of being a parent and all of the attendant chances to screw that up, especially when you\’re not emotionally whole yourself. They screwed up, no doubt - but losing them would break my heart all over again, and I\’ve had enough broken hearts for one lifetime. I know that I could never make them more sorry about it than they already are, and in the end, the real fault still lies with my grandfather.
As for whether I\’ve forgiven HIM, that\’s much more complicated. I go through periods of guilt for having cut him off - I can\’t help but pity he and my grandmother at times, and my mother as well - they\’re her parents and she must feel horrible sometimes that we never see them for holidays or anything anymore, and that they\’ve been largely ostracized and alone for so long..they\’re so old now. No matter what my parents might have done to me, I\’m not sure I could ever stop loving them, or at least having empathy for them. And who knows what kind of things happened to my grandfather to make him what he is…pedophiles and other criminals cannot simply be dismissed as perverted disgusting wastes of lives - that doesn\’t solve the fundamental problem at all.
Anyway, sorry for the long reply and thanks again.
February 28th, 2007 at 1:53 pm
Eileen,
If I might suggest a way of closing the book in your mind on your grandfather…
To forgive him in his lifetime would be a moral wrong in itself, because he is a random hurter of people and must be ostracized until he dies. Even if it is a disease he needs a quarantine, and that can only be truly accomplished if your resolve is absolutely inviolable. People like that prey on the goodness of the good to hurt them. You have to override the usual ways in which goodness expresses itself - being gentle and pliable and tolerant - with an awareness that being good to the world can only be accomplished by steely hostility.
After he dies, you have the right to forgive your part of the pain he caused, but your power extends only to your piece of the puzzle. You yourself probably do not know the complete list of his victims.
As for the genetics, don’t let that get into your head. We each get to choose good over evil. Whatever was good in him will come down to you; his evil will flee when it sees you have not prepared a place for it in your heart.
I wish you every blessing and success; if you have children or will have, I pray they learn only kindness and peace. The evil will be starved out of your hearth and will have to forage elsewhere for prey.
December 4th, 2008 at 5:18 pm
We struggle in our human forms toward greater consciousness. Your parents were probably doing the best they could. And yet I find it a good thing that that was not good enough for you and you took action. Taking action leaves us feeling lonely sometimes however, and as an outsider to the group. Your parents don’t need to be punished, they already are punished by the burden they carry with them knowing they did not protect their daughters.
I think that abuse experience is what gives us the true awareness that being a part of the fold requires a degree of numbmess, and even though it looks good from the outside, it doesn’t deliver on its promise of security.
Sometimes the only way to honor parents who turned a blind eye to the situation is to not make the same mistakes they did. Good for you for sharing that experience and thanks to you for raising the counsciousness of the readers who happened upon your writing as I did.