To the Partners...

This is the follow-up to Dale's first letter, Dear Younger Ann, written to the girl version of his late wife, to all the survivors out there who have a hard time believing they are truly loved and worthy of love. This blog is written to partners of child sexual abuse survivors.

Supplemental, to the husbands,

(I’m sorry, I can only speak specifically to the husbands whose wife was abused, but I suspect that some of these truths will cross over.)

You guys, I know it’s only natural to want your wife. I know the pain of rejection. I know what it’s like when your wife feels that something natural is dirty but she can’t put it into words. Those feelings are natural, I know, and I have had them all! It stinks! It’s completely natural to want your wife…. The thing is, marriage is not only natural, it’s supernatural! For us though, the one that we love, the one that we would take a bullet for, she is wounded and although our love for her wants her healed more than it wants our glandular urges met… the way that often works itself out in life, is that it ebbs and flows.

Ann was nearing the end of her life and she had been in bed for almost 24 hours, so I got her up and walked backwards, from the bedroom to the living room, holding her up and steady.  So there we were, slowly trudging as I mostly held her frail body up, as we walked. She was getting weak, so I held her close to me. It was getting precarious, and I was forced to hold her up, without hurting her. Picture a bearhug….

Off and on during our marriage, she had begged me to dance with her and I would not…. I’m just not that guy. I had playfully told her once “not even for love! I am NOT a dancer”. But that night I was. I gently held her up and swept her around the room as I hummed “Peaceful Easy Feeling” in her ear. She told me that she didn’t know that I loved her like this, and I said “I didn’t know it either baby” as I started singing, about that time I realized that I was almost to the place in the song that says “I want to sleep with you in the desert night with a billion stars all around” so I started humming again. She realized what I did and she started crying…

She said that she couldn’t even make love to her husband and that she was so sorry for all those times… The man that I wished that I had been all those years answered her “I’m counting it as if you rocked my world every time” … The inspiration came directly from the Bible, in Romans 4, where it talks about how God counted righteousness to those that didn’t do the work. That was one of my better moments as a husband and follower of Christ.

I wish I had an easy answer for you but the truth is, it’s a hard road that you are on and my very best advice is: just look at her, observe the way she moves, think about how she trusts you….

Let yourself fall in love with her a hundred times a day… you married a living feeling human that loves you and chose you. If she had a broken leg, you would want it healed, you would help her get it fixed. This is a lifetime work and, if you keep the right attitude about it, the journey can be just as joyful as the destination.

Dale

Dear Younger Ann,

This month's blog is from "Dale." He wrote this letter to his late wife, as the person she was as a girl. He shared it for the sake of other survivors, of all ages and genders, who have trouble believing they are loved or worthy of love.

Dear Younger Ann,

This is going to be hard for you to believe but PLEASE keep reading! I know your secret, you are safe!

My name is Dale and I am your future husband.... So now I have this idea about writing a letter to you, my deceased wife, to say what I would love to be able to say to child sexual abuse and rape survivors.

There is a lot of time and space between us right now but I want you to know that I’m alive and I will love you like few women have ever been loved! We only had 22 years together and it went by so fast. I know it's a lot to take in... We will meet and fall in love and it's going to be epic!

I can only imagine how unsettling this is going to sound to you, knowing how you felt about things in the time and place that you are reading this, so brace yourself, I know your secret because you told me when we were dating and then, over the years, you told me everything. My love and esteem for you didn't diminish.... it grew….. I wish we had known then what I know now, we could have gotten to the healing part so much quicker than we did…. That’s what this letter is for.

What happened to you is what happened but it's not who you are!

The shame belongs to them baby, not you.

It’s not your fault.

I know it hurts and I know that you keep it hidden. I know you can't tell anyone right now but let the knowledge that someday you will be able to tell your story, be the start of your healing.

I have watched your face while you told close friends what happened to you, your voice before, during and after and I watched their responses to you.... baby it was beautiful! You are so much stronger than you know!

When you told me, we were dating. You said that you had to tell me a secret that you had only ever told two people. You told me that you loved me, but I may not want you. You said that you were trusting me and that if I told anyone, we were through. You made me promise and then you gave me the condensed version of what happened. I remember your eyes when you told me. You were so afraid.

We were married and I don’t regret it. We had a good marriage. People envied us but they didn’t know the whole story. The things that those boys did to you had left wounds and our secret left wounds on the inside. I just wanted to feel close to you and accepted by you, you just wanted to feel loved and pure,

it's okay baby! We just talked and talked until you fell asleep in my arms.... I had never felt closer to you. From that moment things began to change, and they were beautiful changes. You began having more self-confidence and you stopped being so quick to apologize for every little thing... your countenance was changing and our intimacy was growing and growing...

Five years before you died, you were 35 and that's when you told your mom. It was after your first bout with terminal cancer, you told your mom that you intended to just tell everybody and, well, it was healing for you to tell your mom and I'm sure that had you lived longer, you would have told your whole story.

You held onto life so hard.... you lingered for months, and it took so much pain medication to keep you comfortable... I feel like I failed you by not urging you harder to tell the world your story... I feel like you had that unfinished business that you needed to do and that kept you from having the peace to go on to the next world.

Maybe someone will read my letter to you and take that next step for you. I love you baby, thank you for being a good wife and a good friend...

To you the reader, thanks for reading my letter. Please know that you are loved more than you know.

Dale

Read Dale's companion letter here: To the Partners (of child sexual abuse survivors)

A Mother's Lament: Irreparable Damage

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I cannot hate you,

but I hate what you’ve done.

And I don’t know if I’ll ever be able

to forgive you.

Our family is broken now.

And I can’t find the pieces I need

to fix this.

Maybe I can try to glue whatever we had

back together,

but the picture will never look the same.

And I don’t think you understand.

We’re all hurting from a wound

that may never heal.

You cut way too deep and

the pain is way too intense to manage.

You selfishly destroyed your little sister’s peace

and there is no excuse for that,

nor is there an explanation that would make

ANY of this ok.

You helped yourself to something

that was not yours

and you changed the way my baby saw the world

forever.

You detonated a bomb

in her bedroom,

causing the most devastating explosion.

And you burnt our entire home down

in the process.

And I couldn’t have stopped this.

By the time I saw the flames,

it was way too late.

The irreversible damage had been done.

And we can’t rebuild here.

This foundation is no longer safe.

And we’ve all been misplaced,

experiencing our own versions of hell.

Your sister’s nightmares, the worst of all.

And I can’t stop replaying that day.

I can’t stop wondering

how I didn’t know,

how I couldn’t see

what you were capable of…

because I never believed

you’d be capable of any of this.

I carried you,

I birthed you,

I loved you and now

I am forced to mourn the loss of you.

Because I cannot accept

the “new” you.

I refuse.

The person I love would have never done this.

The baby I held in my arms

would have never grown up to be so…

twisted.

And I miss my son.

I really do.

But he died to me on June 17th.

And everyone knows what’s dead is gone

and there’s never any coming back

from that.

Brandy's note: Amber shared this poem in our online SST parent support group. The response from the group was overwhelming; dozens of parents thanked her for putting words to their current or past realities, in full or in part. Our journeys are unique, but we all go through a grieving process. Amber captured common and vital parts of that grief: the loss of the families we dreamed of and thought we had, the torture of watching our children suffer, and the death of the image we held of children we loved and thought we knew. (For those wondering about the significance of the date given, that is the date that Amber discovered her son had assaulted her daughter, 3 years ago. It is almost universal that parents within our group carry instant recall of the date of disclosure and how much time has passed since that moment.)