Mara Song's Story
Mara Song's Story
I am a 38 year old single mother with one son. My silence is finaly being broken after 34 years. No one knows my pain or the trama I've been threw except myself and my abusers. I've always believed that no one cared, no one wanted to know what happened to me. So I kept it to my self. I was raped and molested most of my life. I never shared any of my experiences with anyone. I find it easy to tell it to those of you who will be reading this because you do not know me.
My first rape occured when I was 5 years old. by my uncle who at the time was living with my family. My aunt had brought a swimming pool and I wanted to go swimming with the rest of the kids. So I went home to change into my bathing suite. While I was in my room changing my uncle walked in. I didn't notice him at first, but there he was standing in the door in his boxer and a robe. He then grabed me and and yelled at me for being there before he proceeded to raped me. I can't remember exactly what he did, but I do know when It was over I was in a lot of pain.
Once he was finished he told me to get dress and leave. He said if I told anyone he would kill me and He would kill my mother. So I did what he said and never told. I went back to my aunt house and hid in her barn because I could not let anyone see me or see how much pain I was in I thought if I rested the pain would cease.
But he did not stop there he continued to molest me every chance he got. I went threw this for four years with out telling a soul.
I don't consider myself a survivor. I just consider myself blessed, that I've survived this long and that I'm able to function in life. I'm finally making the first step to recovering from this ordeal by sharing my story.
I found out about my dad when I was 12 years old because my mom finally pulled out the court papers and decided not to keep my dad's sexual abuse on us a secret anymore. The reason that she told me then, was because my dad had died. There it was, written proof that something went terribly wrong in our family. But even before that, I knew. I've always felt different, scared at night, even making friends was difficult for me. I found out recently that I started sucking my thumb, right after it happened. At times, I feel like I shouldn't be on this earth. Almost every night I cry, sometimes, I don’t know what for. All these feelings come from when I was younger; I feel that inside. Growing up, my sister looked at me with hatred in her eyes, because I look like him. I guess she figured that every time she looks at me, she sees him and thinks of what he did to her. I'll never know, because we both keep it locked inside, wanting it to go away. She was tested when she was younger and he was taken to court for what he did to her. My mom told me that I was too hyper and wouldn’t sit still to let them examine me. They should have done it anyway. But, deep down inside I know that something happened to me. Even though I can't remember what he did to me, I do remember crying every night and being afraid to fall asleep. Every time my mom got me to sleep, I’d wake up crying shortly after. My mom divorced my dad, when I was a little over a year old, but my grandparents had visitation rights. He was told to stay away from us, by the court. To be “Like two ships passing in the night.” But, my grandparents (his parents) let him come around, so the abuse continued another year or two...until my mom found out again and my grandparents had their visitation rights taken away. So, from the time I was 3 until the time I was 12, I never seen my grandparents or my dad. Even at three years old, you can remember things. I remember running from him, being scared and banging on the door to my room. I didn't get into the room fast enough and my sister shut the door. I keep crying and screaming at her to let me in, but she won't. We were trying to get away from him. Every once in a while, I still flashback to that scene. I fear that room, and every time that I go to my grandmother's house, I can't sleep in it because I feel him there. When I'm alone, I feel him watching me. Growing up, I used to sleep with the light on, and wake up anytime I heard a sound. Often, I cried myself to sleep. When I started developing, I found out that I have this fear of being raped and still do, to this day. When I started having sex with my boyfriend (now my husband) I would sometimes cry after sex and not know what to tell him when he would ask me what’s wrong. It's been a long time since then, about 17 years or so, but the feelings never go away. I recently got married, but the feeling of being alone is still there because my husband works out of town and not even having my baby around is comforting because I have this fear of hurting him like my father hurt me. I’m afraid to show the kind of love to my son that I want to, because I have this fear that I’m doing something wrong. All I need is someone to talk to, someone to understand, and someone to believe in me. Because I was never tested, my mother and sister refuse to believe that anything happened to me. So I don't know where to turn.
It was the summer of 1970 when I was 13 years old. My mother, myself and my four siblings had left my father (whom I loved very much) in Sault Ste. Marie Ontario and moved about 500 miles away to the town of Dundas which is now a suburb of Hamilton. My mother prepared for the move in secret, packing clothes in green garbage bags for a week before we left.
On the morning we left, my father asked each child in turn who he or she wanted to live with. When it was my turn I said I didn't know and he became angry so I said my mother like the others had said. After breakfast, my mother packed the car and that was it. I saw some of my friends on the street but couldn't bear to wave good bye to them as we drove away. None of them knew what was happening.
In Dundas, I started grade 8 in an inner city school where my class mates were a lot tougher than at my old school. They spoke in slang and thought I came from Britain because of my "proper" speech. I had to pass near the pool hall on my way and was scared to death of the biker gangs that hung around there. My grades slid from mostly A's and a couple of B's the first term to C's and D's by the end of the year. The first term my teacher told my mother I was the best math student she ever had.
I had also been on a swim team and a down hill ski team but I did not feel comfortable doing these things anymore. At a regulation size pool in Hamilton, one girl said "I bet you get everything you want" because I was dressed in a nice skirt and a leatherette choker I had made myself. While waiting in the tow line at the Hamilton ski hill a boy asked if he knew me and when I said no he replied "good" or "I hope not" or something like that.
During the summer of '71 I hung around with other kids at the church across the street from the small town house complex where we now lived. I especially liked one boy named Ron who was tall and lanky with brown hair and eyes. Ron lived up the road across from Joe who was a little pudgier than Ron, but lived on a farm and owned mini-bikes. My best memory of that time is of riding mini-bikes in a field with Ron and Joe. Years later, in 2001 I met Joe's father who told me Joe always had a passion for motorcycles and later graduated to ones larger than mini-bikes. Late at night, they could here the distinctive sound of the engine coming up the road as Joe returned home from an evening out.
One night a new boy named Don started hanging around with us in the church yard. He had bushy hair, squinty eyes, and wore a blue checked lumber jacket, jeans and snoot boots which were popular at the time. He was from Copetown which was further away and had to hitch hike to and from his home. He was 16 and I was 14 years old that summer.
Don started playing rough with me but I just kept hitting him back and laughed it off. Ron didn't try to stop it and thought I somehow enjoyed it because I recall him saying "some girlfriend" to no one in particular. Don kept getting rougher and rougher until one night the other kids disappeared leaving me alone to struggle with him. Two boys, Steve and Bill, stayed behind and hid behind a wall to watch. I could see them and heard them giggling throughout my ordeal.
I kept struggling but somehow ended up on the ground. Don was on top of me clenching my wrists together and pinning my legs down while he tried to unzip my pants. Once I managed to free one hand but that just meant that he tried harder to pin my arms together. Eventually I felt I couldn't struggle anymore and I gave in, disassociating from the situation as he slid my pants down far enough to enter me. I can still see his bushy hair and squinty eyes as he smiled at having gotten what he wanted. He didn't try to kiss me.
I was a virgin and remember thinking that the first time was suppose to hurt because it broke the hymen but this didn't hurt at all and there was no blood. All I remember after that was running home. I thought it was my fault so I never said anything to anyone. Now I think that laughing was not such a good idea. I was used to smiling through adversity like my parents fighting so it was a typical response for me at the time. My mother does the same thing. It's like keeping a stiff upper lip.
It didn't end there however. My mother was having difficulties coping with going to teachers college and trying to find a job while caring for 5 kids so I didn't want to worry her or get in trouble myself. I didn't want anyone to know about what happened to me so I kept going out at night as if nothing was wrong and other kids thought Don and I were boyfriend and girlfriend.
One night I had my period so instead of having intercourse, Don pulled my hair and forced me to my knees making me perform oral sex on him. I screamed and cried because I was afraid and had never seen a man's genitals before but he said "You have to do it sometime". When I got home there was blood all over my under pants because I hadn't take care of myself and my mother was concerned saying "Oh, Rosabelle".
My girlfriends and I used to exchange clothing and I had borrowed a long cape from Yvonne. Don thought this was great because he could paw me without anyone seeing what he was doing. One night, he wanted to finger me while driving around in a friend's car and told me to spread my legs. I told him I couldn't and my friend Nancy was alarmed because she heard us. Another time he put his coat over my head and pushed my head up and down with his hand, forcing me to perform oral sex on him again, this time in my own basement recreation room with my other friends around and my mother upstairs.
He had sex with me everywhere. In fields, woods and the vacant house next door. He urinated in me. Once he had sex with me in my bedroom while my mother was out and Ron came in briefly to watch. Don tried to instruct me by saying things like "rub my ass" while penetrating me but I wouldn't do it. To the other kids in our group he said "Rosabelle just lies there".
He left huge hickeys all over my neck which I tried to cover with makeup. My father asked me if someone was biting me when he once came to visit. Don also stole money from me to buy drugs, kicked a popsicle from my hand and pushed me down a hill. I tried to be nice to him thinking that maybe if I was nice to him he would be nice to me but it didn't work.
The really weird part is that he wanted to marry me when I turned 16 and gave me a gold ring with two pearls - one black and one white. I don't know where he got it but he probably stole it. He also stole Ponds cold cream and gave it to me as a gift. However, he became really upset when I told him I didn't love him and I had to console him. At least I thought I did.
When I started high school in the fall I thought things would be better because he went to a different high school but that didn't work either. He would be waiting for me as I left home in the morning or at school as I left for the day. He wrote "for a good time call Rosabelle" on bathroom walls and another boy named Jay leered at me saying that he wanted some too, while others made comments about my breasts (e.g. they are small but nice)..
My mother called his mother to try to get him away from me and my girl friends at school were horrified. One named Kathy said she wanted to spit in his face. Eventually, I had enough courage to convince him to stay away from me. I remember walking to school one morning yelling at him "I don't want to see you anymore, don't you understand that??!?!!".
One night after that he came to the door of my home, threatened to commit suicide and showed me the small scratches on his wrist he made with a broken pop bottle. I told him to go ahead and do it, and I slammed to door in his face. I thought it was over but it wasn't.
The boy named Jay, who had curly strawberry blonde hair and a twin sister named Gay, started being friendly with me and hanging around in our group. One day I heard him say to someone "I'm going to ask Don how he did that because I can't even get near her cans".
One activity I did enjoy in Dundas was roller skating at the local arena. Most of the teenagers I knew went roller-skating and it wasn't open in the winter because they made it into an ice rink. It was such a popular activity I saved enough money from my allowance and baby-sitting to buy my own skates.
One evening at the arena I saw Jay and Don talking to each other. Shortly after that, Don came and sat down beside me in the bleachers. Further away I could see Jay looking at us with an angry look. I told Don to get away from me which he did.
Jay walked me home that night and told me he and Don had planned the scenario at the arena because Jay didn't want to see me anymore. We were almost home when suddenly Don appeared and Jay said he had to go because he was afraid of Don. So Jay ran away leaving me with my attacker. Don wanted money and cigarettes from me. I refused to give him anything and he tried to prevent me from passing by holding my arms. Fortunately my mother appeared and started walking toward us so he left, this time for good. She told me later that she didn't know who it was but she could see someone was in trouble.
After that, I began drinking heavily, doing drugs and shop lifting. I stole a bottle of sherry from my mother's cabinet and one day before school my friend Nancy and I drank the whole bottle. I had what I thought was a great time in folk dancing class and then vomited all over my type writer in typing class.
Someone took me to the nurse's office where the nurse asked me what kind of drugs I had taken. I said none because I didn't know alcohol was a drug. As a result I was whisked off to the hospital and given a lumbar puncture (similar to a spinal tap) because the doctors thought I might have meningitis. I stayed in hospital for one week with a massive headache so severe I couldn't sit up.
My mother said the nurses were cruel to me. One came in and raised the bed which made the pain in my head so intense all I could do was weep. The woman in the next bed noticed and called the nurse back to lower it again.
When I returned to school there was a rumour going around that I was pregnant which was completely untrue. I did lose 5 pounds thought which I thought was great.
By the end of that school year I had been absent 52 days either by truancy or suspension and filled in a multitude of trouble reports, usually the bright yellow ones which were for the worst offences. I hid from teachers in the bathroom and once bolted from the school so fast that another student remarked about the speed with which I travelled. One teacher stuck her tongue out at me.
Face it, I was bad. A teacher asked us what we were rebelling against and told me I was the ring leader of the group. Funny thing is, I never realized I was rebelling, what I was in trouble for or that I was any kind of leader but looking back I think it was probably for smoking, swearing. not wearing shoes and being generally angry and uncooperative. I must have looked like a ragamuffin. I also participated in a student walk out which I believe was the first thing I did that attracted attention from the principal.
By Thanksgiving of the next year (grade 10) had been suspended from school seven times and after that I never went back. I had already dropped acid in grade 9 and continued to do whatever kind of drug was available short of anything that needed to be injected. I remember once driving around in a car with several other kids and someone had a big slab of hashish. He broke off a chunk, speared it with a large safety pin, set it on fire and passed it around. There was so much smoke in the car all you had to do was breathe to get stoned.
It was my first time smoking hash and I thought you had to hold it in as long as you could, so I sucked in a stream of smoke from the chunk, held my breath until it came around to me again, breathed out once and repeated the process. I was so stoned I almost passed out and had to be taken home.
I also drank heavily and frequented the taverns even though I was underage. The taverns were real dumps too. One of my friends, Steve, rented a room above one of them one night and we partied there until we heard the man in the next room yelling and pounding on the wall. We fled. Steve rented an apartment in the back of a house after that and we partied there until the landlord kicked us out for running in the hallway. In that apartment, one boy got so drunk he passed out and vomited while lying on his back. Fortunately, Phil was astute enough to know you could die that way and turned him over onto his side.
Of course I can't forget being promiscuous either. One night after drinking at one of the taverns I had sex with some nameless person on the other side of a guard rail by the side of a road and later developed poison ivy all over my rear end and down the back of my legs. It was really bad. Each butt cheek was one big welt and I had apple sized welts down my legs. My mother never said anything other than "Rosabelle, what did you do?" but I used bottles of calamine lotion to ease the itch. I never saw that guy again but I wonder what happened to him??!!?
After awhile I became so depressed I asked by father if I could live with him in Sault St. Marie and my mother agreed. My father eventually won custody of me, no doubt because of my slide from being a solid A-B student to being a juvenile delinquent.
I never mentioned Don again to anyone until 1985 when I completed a Women's Studies questionnaire about rape. A few years later I thought I saw him in the elevator of my mother's condominium building in Hamilton and was so scared I knew I had to do something about it. One of the nurses at my doctor's office wore a button which read "Wife abuse is a crime" so I told her about my ordeal.
She had me keep a journal to write down the details of the events and revisit the location of the first rape. Eventually I reported it to the police and a woman police officer came to my home to take a statement. Her questions allowed me to more fully interpret what happened, for example, that he always came to my home and I never went to his home, and she asked me if I would press charges. I assured her I would.
I gave the names of the two boys who watched and giggled (Steve and Bill) as well as Jay and Dave T., another friend of Don's who saw him push me down a hill. A police officer later called me in Vancouver where I was studying for the 1992-93 year to assure me that Don no longer lived in the Hamilton area, and I regret not having demanded to know where he was. I am hoping it is prison but that remains an unanswered question.
The officer did mention that my witnesses weren't very good and when I mentioned that to my friend Nancy, she asked if I had given her name. I realize now that Don's friends were probably criminal as well and I should have given the names of my friends, like Nancy and Kathy, who were more credible and would have supported my case. I never pursued the case further and hope it is over now.
The first year back at my old school with the friends I had grown up with was better than anything I remembered during the previous 3 years. I was 16 years old and it was 1973.
I was supposed to live with my father but he had accepted a visiting professorship at the University of Wisconsin so I boarded with his friend Anne with whom he was having an affair. She was separated from her husband and had two small children, Ian who was 4 years old and Jenny who was 2.
Living there was OK except that I felt taken advantage of when she went out in the evening leaving me to baby sit. I loved the children but the more I agreed to baby sit, the longer Anne stayed out, without paying me extra of course, until one night she didn't come home until breakfast. The children were also developing emotional problems. Ian was anal retentive and refused to have a bowel movement which meant he usually soiled the bed at night. Jenny refused to go to sleep and would get up repeatedly especially if I had a friend over which was usually Pamela. When Jenny started to call me mummy, Anne smartened up and didn't ask me to baby sit anymore.
The house was a bit chaotic as well. My friend Wendy commented once that there were always dishes on the go, either clean and drying in the dish rack or dirty and waiting to be washed. This of course was very different from Wendy's house where her mother's kitchen, with it's black and white tile floor and round glass table was always spic and span between gourmet meals. Also, I discovered Anne's stash of "bennies" and was using them although I denied it when she asked me about it. Once she gave me a ride to school but afterward told me not to expect it because she didn't want me to take advantage of her. Go figure!
The next year my father returned and we moved into a little attic apartment in an old Swiss style home built into the side of a hill in another area of town. I was thrilled to be there and kept a clean kitchen, trying out my new cooking skills for my dad. He loved my turkey soup. By this time however, he had developed friendships in Wisconsin and regularly went there on weekends. Being a teenager I didn't really mind and had my girlfriends over when he was away. He had bought a new car but hadn't sold the old one yet so there I was with an empty apartment and a car to boot! What could be better? Sometimes he went out during the week also, with Anne or other friends.
On one such night in autumn of 1976, my final high school year, I took advantage of the opportunity to be alone and practice my dancing. I am usually a pretty active person and at that time took karate lessons but also liked to pretend I was a ballerina. It was dark outside and I used the large kitchen windows as mirrors because we didn't have any other than the small one on the medicine cabinet over the bathroom sink. The house was so far up from the street I thought no one could see in or if they could they wouldn't be able to tell what I was doing or what I was wearing, which was nothing at all on that particular night.
I danced for awhile, leaping through the hall way and pirouetting in front of the windows but after a while got tired and decided to turn in. I smoothed Noxema cold cream on my face because "Noxema girls get noticed" according to the TV commercials and left the door unlocked which was my usual practice when my father was out for the evening. It was an inside door at the foot of the stairs and was difficult to find without first closing the outside door at the back of the house.
Some time later I awoke, sensing someone standing in the doorway to my room. I thought it was my father because that was his habit when he returned home from an evening out. This time something was strange because he kept standing there and I opened my eyes to see what was the matter.
Well, it was not my father standing in my room but a stranger instead! Fortunately for me he was looking out into the hall way when I opened my eyes so I closed them again right away, gripped the sheet and blankets around my shoulders and turned over into the corner. My senses were on overdrive as he came into my room and went through each drawer of my dresser and desk. I could hear my heart beating and the blood rushing through my veins, not to mention every little sound the intruder made, and my knuckles were white from clenching the covers so tightly.
Then he left the room and I could hear him rummaging through the cabinet in the bathroom. I thought he was going to get a razor blade so I made a plan. If he came back in the room and touched me I would throw the covers over his head and run past him out of the room, the house and into the street. I might even grab my house coat if I had enough time. I suppose I would have run out into the street naked but I would prefer to have something on so the neighbours wouldn't think I was crazy.
He did come back in my room but didn't touch me. Instead, he came right up to where my head was and I could hear something wet dripping onto my pillow (I found out later it was hair conditioner). If I turned over my face would have been in it. Then he went around to the end of the bed and very slowly started pulling the covers out from under the mattress. Each time he started to pull, I moved as if I was going to wake up and he would stop. Eventually, he stopped all together and went around into the other rooms of the apartment and I could hear him opening cupboards in the kitchen. I heard cars driving by in the street outside and prayed that the next one would be my father's.
It seemed like an eternity but in somewhere between 15 minutes and one hour my father's car finally drove up. I heard him close the car door, walk along the path, open the door down stairs and come inside. When he came to my room to check on me I whispered for him to come closer and told him there was someone in the apartment. He became immediately alert, got out his pen knife which he used to clean his pipe and looked through all the rooms and crawl spaces behind the walls while I put on my house coat. It was hand made by one of my cousins and was too big for me with a button missing so I hugged myself to make sure it wouldn't fall off.
Not finding anything, we thought the intruder must have escaped by climbing out one of the kitchen windows onto the roof below. My father went into the living room and telephoned the police. As he was speaking to an officer I went into the hall way to go to the kitchen to get a cigarette and discovered the man standing in the hall way.
I screamed "Dad, dad, there he is!!!". My father threw the phone down, ran after him and caught him at the bottom of the stair case. That is when I saw that he had been armed with a knife and had dropped it when my father caught him. It had a long thin curved blade and a bone coloured handle. The kind of knife used to filet fish. I can still see an image of it glaring up at me from the varnished wood of the step where it lay, and I went through a period where I would imagine the pain of feeling the blade slide up under my rib cage as it severed my diaphragm.
My father held the man around the torso pinning his arms down until the police arrived which was about 30 seconds later. They hand cuffed him, read him his rights and took him away. I can still hear it. "You have the right to remain silent CLINK. Anything you say CLINK can and will be used against you...".
A detective came, told me I had handled the situation well and we heaved a sigh of relief. My father told me the intruder was not very strong and that I probably could have fought him on if I had to. A photographer came and took pictures of the scene of the crime - my bed, especially the pillow with it's orange and yellow flowered pillowcase smeared with hair conditioner, as well as a five dollar bill, some foreign coins and my cigarettes he had stolen.
Dad tried to hug me but I was so worried about my house coat falling off that I couldn't hug him back. I still had smudges of Noxema on my face and he recoiled at the sight, not knowing what it was.
We later found out the intruder was a juvenile who lived down the street and had also broken into a school and a trailer park. We never heard anything more. My dad put a new lock on the door and told friends it was an isolated incident. I told him I was alright and he didn't have to worry about me so he kept is routine of going away on weekends to Wisconsin. Boy was I wrong!
The next week, an Ojibway woman started pounding on the door asking for beer. Luckily, the new lock was already installed so I locked the door and sat in silence until she went away. It was really kind of sad because I could here her saying "I am a person too".
Shortly afterward I started to go for long walks and my weight started to drop. One night I made some brownies, ate the whole panful and put my fingers down my throat, forcing myself to vomit. That was the beginning of an eight year ordeal with bulimia nervosa. If I wasn't exercising or throwing up I was a zombie, staring off into space. Most of my close friends had gone away to university or college and because I was a year behind them I was left without strong peer support. Once again, I didn't want my mother to know about the intruder because I thought it was my fault for dancing with the curtains open and I thought she would be too upset. I knew I had to go to university myself the next year and didn't have time to break down so I buried it deep inside, continued to lose weight and secretly vomit.
That winter I moved back with my mother, giving my dad the excuse that all my friends were gone and went to night school to complete high school. He didn't really like my excuse but agreed nonetheless. What is a parent to do? If I could go back and do anything differently it would be this because this was the beginning of a rift that grew between us and never healed before his death in 1986. It still makes me cry.
That summer it was off to Banff, Alberta to waitress as many teenagers from Ontario and Quebec did at that time. While there my weight reached it's lowest point at about ninety pounds and I stopped menstruating. One night at a party, I drank so much alcohol that I blacked out and later couldn't remember anything or recognize people I had met. My dad wrote me and told me he was moving to Wisconsin permanently. I felt abandoned but persevered and saved enough money for my first year university.
In the fall of 1977 I moved into a co-ed residence at the university I had chosen to attend. The bulimia continued and soon I had located enough bath rooms in remote locations where I could vomit without anyone noticing. Sometimes I would fast for two or three days before eating and vomiting again, and sometimes I used laxatives for purging in addition to throwing up. At one point I was vomiting up to three times a day.
In the residence, I was one year older than most of the girls on my floor and already had experience being away from home so they considered me relatively wise. One day a girl came into my room, picked up a philosophy paper I had written and saw a grade of 97% so they also thought I was smart. Little did she know that the instructor had mistakenly given everyone in the class one grade higher than they should have received because he was new and used to a different grading system. Nonetheless, I eventually achieved high grades in most of my subjects and graduated with distinction, which is higher than honours. In reality I probably deserved only honours because I plagiarized once, said I handed in a report when I hadn't once, and fudged data in an experiment once. On the other hand I might have done even better if I wasn't bulimic.
In the boys section of the residence there was a boy named John whom I especially liked. He was tall and broad shouldered with black hair and eyes the colour of opals. He also had a great voice and I knew he was the guy for me when he called to me once from across the cafeteria. The sound was deep and booming yet soft and gently directive as it caught my ear. He was a farmer whose father owned a farm machinery business so was doing a two year diploma in agriculture before returning to the farm to take over the business. He also knew his way around because he had started the year before and had a part time job as a disk jockey for the university radio station. We waited until the second semester when he got his own room to start dating.
John also had a friend named Dave who was kind of skinny with bushy hair and was in the same program as John. I didn't mind Dave but wouldn't have given him a second glance if he hadn't been a friend of John's. Dave dated a girl named Karen who lived down the hall from me. She raved and raved about Dave saying what she liked about him was "a mustache and a cute butt".
One Friday evening I was in my room when other students were preparing to go home for the weekend. Someone came by my room and told me Karen and Dave had broken up. Shortly afterward, I heard someone ask Dave why he wasn't going home and I could hear Dave, who was right outside my room, respond that he didn't have to go home.
The next thing I new Dave pushed his way into my room and I expressed sympathy about him and Karen. Suddenly, he was on top of me on the bed with his hands up my shirt. He tried to put them down my pants but I stopped him. A few minutes later my room mate Lois came in and Dave left. I didn't see him for the rest of the weekend.
When Karen came back after the weekend, she was furious and burst past my room, slamming the door to the lounge open on her way to Dave's room. When John came back Dave yelled down the hall to him "she doesn't have much but what she's got is pretty good" (referring to me) and John's response to me was "why did you do that?". All I could think of saying was "Karen and Dave broke up" and the situation was more or less forgotten except for once when Dave tried to play footsie with me under the table at dinner.
John and Dave remained friends, and Dave and Karen got married the following year. John and I start dating, attended Dave and Karen's wedding, and remained together for nearly three years. The bulimia continued and I could hide it because I mostly saw John only on weekends when he came to visit or I went out to his farm. He was very romantic and I have fond memories of being at the Forks of the Credit River in autumn and making love in a field among other things.
In the spring of 1980 I was near graduation because I had gone to school all year round and realized that we had different goals. I wanted to go on to graduate school and he wanted someone to return to the farm with him to help in his business. We had also fought about religion so we said good bye.
Several years later in about 1985 when I lived in another co-ed residence, this time in graduate school, I began to have dreams about him and couldn't figure out why. I mentioned the dreams to friends who advised me to phone him so eventually I did, although it wasn't until 1989 while working at a computer rental company in Toronto.
By this time the eating disorder had stopped and I had gone through some major tough times. I defended my Ph. D. thesis in 1988 and received a grade of D - major revisions and another defence required. My committee gave me two years to make the necessary corrections and I had to leave the university to get a job to support myself. The job I had lined up with the Department of National Defence fell through because I didn't graduate so my cousin arranged a job for me at the computer rental company in Toronto where he was Chief Financial Officer.
I helped the owner get a multi-million dollar bank loan which caused jealousy among the other staff members who tried and did trip me up by getting me to buy unnecessary expensive items like an oak desk, run up an expense account and ruin a hard disk. I was so stupid not to see what was happening but to ease my discomfort I decided to phone John.
I knew where John's farm was and that he probably wouldn't have gone anywhere and I was right. His mother answered the phone and shrieked when I said who I was. I don't really know how John felt but he kept saying "nine years later!" when I spoke to him. He wasn't adverse to my phone call however, and we met for drinks in a pub on St. Clair Avenue near where I was working.
I was thrilled to see him and wanted to go to a nice place for dinner but he preferred casual so we went to a familiar roadhouse. I noticed empathically that his large working hands had become covered in scars from nicks and scratches he received while repairing farm equipment and I asked him if he was married or engaged. He said no and later tried to play footsie with me under the table just as Dave had done many years before. Something just didn't seem right so when he dropped me off at my sister's house where I was living I just said good bye without giving him a kiss or hug, or shaking his hand. He gave me his business card which I still have today.
Some time later, I called him again and when I asked him if he wanted to get together he said "I don't know" and told me he was married. Afterward, I commented to a friend that he must have known that when we had dinner.
I successfully defended my thesis in the spring of 1991 and accepted a teaching position in Nova Scotia for that autumn. I purchased a used car and before making the trek out east dropped into to give John and his wife a wedding gift. By this time they had twins. During my visit he mentioned the incident with Dave and I felt immediately anxious. After that I sent them Christmas cards occasionally and they sent me a picture of their family which had grown to three girls by 1995.
I kept having dreams about him and noticed that sometimes he would be coming out to me as if getting closer as the years went by. At Christmas 2002 while writing a greeting to them I became very anxious. I sent them the card and shortly afterward had dreams so intense they were almost real. John was big as life, in my face. At about the same I had another dream about a haunted house in shades of gray. I was frightened but continued as I walked through the wrought iron gate into the yard. Something was happening and I decided I should write him and tell him of my eating disorder.
One day I stumbled upon the web page that John's wife had designed and noticed that he had taken over the family business in 1988. They also posted their wedding anniversary as April. I hunted around for the picture they sent me and determined that the twins were born in 1990.
Things were starting to add up. His father probably gave him the business as a wedding gift in 1988 but when I had dinner with him in 1989 he said he wasn't married or engaged. He lied to me.
With this knowledge I kept thinking and eventually came to the conclusion that the only explanation for what happened with Dave was that John and Dave had made a bet about me. Assuming they made a bet answered several questions. It answered why Dave had come to my room in the first place which he never did before, why he left so abruptly when my room mate came in, why John never expressed concern for me or asked me what happened afterwards, why he was never angry with Dave and why they are still friends.
I had read previously that bulimia nervosa is associated with post traumatic stress disorder and did some internet research, concluding that my dreams of John were flashbacks triggered by living in a co-ed residence and the Christmas greeting describing some activities of common interest. As I began to reinterpret what had happened in 1977 as Dave attacking me, I wrote John and his wife a serious of three letters: the first to John, the second to both of them and the third to his wife only. This was my way of letting go but the fact that I am having difficulty finishing this paragraph tells me I am not over it yet.
When I visited them in 1991, his wife said that as she was dusting a book one day and my picture fell out of it. John had kept it all those years. Does this mean he still loves me or is it something else? During the time we were dating from 1977-1980, one of John's friends had an issue of Playboy, the centerfold of which someone told me I resembled, and I could see his eye lids flutter as John smiled and hugged me while I sat on his lap.
Shortly before we stopped seeing each other I pulled the scab from a pimple on my cheek and it left a small scar like a chicken pock mark. John was horrified by this change in my appearance and I saw him looking for the scar during our 1991 visit. I have since seen many people with similar or worse scars and I am thinking now that I was just a visual image to him from which could not tolerate any deviation.
In the spring of 1980, after John and I said good bye I started seeing someone named Jim who was in my program and was going on to graduate school. He also ate mounds of food and I credit him with saving my life because I had to eat being around him all the time. My mother had given me a scale so I could keep my weight above one hundred pounds and my weight did begin to return to normal, although the bulimia continued.
I had first met Jim in one of my classes when I turned around and told him to be quiet because he was making too much noise. He was also a bouncer in one of the university pubs and one day I saw him carrying several cases of beer. The incredible V-shape of his back straining under the weight of the cases impressed me so much I did a double take.
Later, a mutual friend told me he asked her if I was invited to a party on campus and from that I knew we would be together. He, like John, had a soothing golden voice. When he called me on the telephone I knew everything was alright in the world.
I should have guessed what I was in for, however, because when I arrived at his residence room the night of our first date I found him snorting cocaine with a beautiful young woman who wanted to join the CIA. I turned around and went home, refusing to see him. Undeterred, he asked me again and we were together for the better part of 4 years almost all of which was under the influence of one drug or another.
I have no idea where he got the drugs but he used to get me to keep them in my cigarette package. Once a professor asked me for a smoke and not thinking I handed him the container for him to select from. When he opened it and discovered a couple of marijuana joints both he and Jim looked surprised. Jim probably would have let me take the rap for it if that had been a police officer.
Nonetheless, I followed Jim to graduate school and was able to hide my disorder from him mainly because of his alcohol and drug use. He wouldn't have noticed anything unusual about me because he was too busy with his own addictions. One summer we baby-sat a german shepherd for a professor who went away on sabbatical and he noticed when the dog became ill. The dog actually was seriously ill with leukemia and died under our care but it stuck with me that Jim noticed nothing unusual about me. Of course, I never noticed about the dog either.
By 1983, I couldn't bear the drug infused lifestyle anymore. Jim was 5 foot 10 inches tall and had mushroomed from about 185 pounds when I met him to 250 pounds. He was extremely unkempt, washing his hair only once a week and brushing his teeth even less often. Once I purchased a $250 sweater on sale for $55 and he became upset because I wasn't spending my money on drugs as he was. There were also other friends living with us in the townhouse his father had rented for him and I had thought it would be just the two of us. One day he announced to me and his friends that he wanted to start selling cocaine. I put my foot down and told him I wouldn't stick around if he did that.
Shortly afterward, I rented my own apartment and bought my first pair of jogging shoes, hoping to return to my previously active way of living. I started by first walking around the block a couple times a week and gradually increasing my distance and speed. After a couple of years I was fit enough to compete in a 10 kilometer race and finished about 700th out of 1400 participants. "Right in the middle of the pack" as my father said.
Jim and I kept dating and I returned once to his townhouse to discover that my replacement was a cocaine addict (they called him Cocaine Mike) who he spent most of his time sitting on the couch snorting the white powder. The kitchen was literally piled high with dirty dishes and pizza cartons, and the place had become so filthy I couldn't spend more than a few minutes in the squalor.
By this time the bulimia was also starting to become obvious. I had a gaping wound on the knuckle of my index finger and bruises on the back of my hand from sticking my fingers down my throat. Jim didn't notice but his friend Jamie asked me what the marks were and I knew I had to get help. I approached one of the campus doctors saying "I have a problem with eating" and she referred me to a counselor with whom I had four sessions.
The counselor asked me to think of the events that surrounded the onset of the bulimia and when I figured out it started shortly after the incident with the intruder at my father's apartment, the bulimia stopped. I ate arrow root cookies and drank milk shakes made with orange juice and raw eggs for about a week and then was back on to solid food. Cheese on toast was my first meal.
I gathered my courage and one day while eating Sunday brunch at one of our favourite spots finally told Jim I had a problem. His response was "So?".
That was it for me. I could tell from his reaction that I wasn't going to be getting any help from him so I told him I needed more space. I really meant more space to heal but he took it more seriously than I intended and started dating a new graduate student named Roxanne. A mutual friend Betsy told me his comment was that "he wanted to get laid" so he fasted for about 3 months straight, consuming nothing but black coffee, and dropped about 70 pounds until he was sure he had her. After that he started eating again and ballooned back to his 250 pound unkempt state.
This was very difficult for me because most of the people I knew were his friends and I began to feel uncomfortable around them. I couldn't have a conversation with one of them without Jim's name coming up or go to a party without drugs being prevalent. I wasn't about to spend my own money on drugs and thought it wasn't appropriate for me to use other people to get stoned. I continued to smoke pot for awhile, even grew my own plants in my bedroom closet but gradually stopped that too. I gave the grow lights to my mother who used them over the kitchen sink to help her cuttings grow and they lasted for many years. The last one gave out this month, February of 2003.
Betsy tried to be friendly and even helped me out once when Jim and I were going through the break up. The three of us were at my apartment and Jim asked me for a drink. Instead of letting me get up and get it for him which I usually did, Betsy pushed his glass away and told him to get it himself. He was stunned. Another friend Adele, helped me redecorate and we moved Jim's couch into an alcove off the hallway. Later, when Jim came to pick it up he was stunned once again that I had already moved it and was now using my own couch, which he had helped me purchase at a garage sale, as the central living room piece.
After that I became what men call a "Bitch". I had absolutely nothing good to say about Jim, and his friend Jamie said I was making him out to be a monster. I blamed him for most of my problems. The rest I blamed on my supervisor who was known as a tough guy. One woman professor wanted me to date another graduate student named Glenn and I refused. I couldn't bear thinking about dating anyone.
I took a Women's Studies course, had my consciousness raised and for the first time was able to write about my rape in a questionnaire. I was MAD!!! I stomped around the hallways and was unreachable even to my women friends who eventually stopped talking to me.
Looking back now I could have stayed around to help Jim overcome his addictions as well but somehow I don't think that would have worked. It was too much of a lifestyle for him and his friends. His parents were the same way and his brother, who was a clean cut policeman, had given Jim a T-shirt which read "Reality is for people who can't handle drugs".
In spite of his addictions Jim was a star graduate student and shmoozer, becoming chairman of a psychology department in another university shortly after he graduated during a time when jobs were becoming scarce. A few years later I met a student from this other university and noticed that even the student had picked up a few of Jim's mannerisms. The way he wiped the hair from his eyes and shook his wrist to adjust his watch were distinctly Jim in nature.
And it wasn't because Jim was a better student than the rest of us either. After he left, I had a job as a teaching assistant (TA) for a professor who used Jim's Ph. D. thesis as a teaching tool. One of the other TA's said she had told her class that when they got to the discussion section of the paper, they would find it followed smoothly from the results section. Well, guess what? It didn't. It was completely unreadable and that is when I realized that his ability to get drugs was in large part responsible for his success.
Several years later I had a teaching position at a private college in Toronto and noticed one of the students, Anastasios, displaying this same charm. When he spoke everyone in the class listened. After my contract expired I went on a date with him and discovered that he was also a drug dealer, purchasing crack cocaine from somewhere in a housing project while I unknowingly waited for him in my car.
When he finally returned to the car he was anxious and wanted me to "drive, drive!!" so I drove hurriedly until we were out of the immediate area. Then he asked me what kind of soft drink I liked and stopped at a variety store to get some. After sharing a few sips, he poured out the rest of it, dented and punctured some holes in the side of the can and showed me several pea shaped crystals which he proceeded to place in the indentation and light on fire. He wanted to add tobacco but I had quit smoking and didn't want any, so we smoked the crystals by themselves. I told him I didn't feel anything and he said that was because it "straightens you out".
He never actually told me it was crack cocaine but I can't think of what else it could have been. I also think he thought I was going to become addicted because when I dropped him off at his home and said I would see him again a month or so later he replied "Oh, before that".
I didn't see him again until several years later when he telephoned to ask if I would participate in a class action law suit against the school where we had met. At first I agreed but later became confused by my feelings for him and declined to continue.
Now I know that when I see someone who is really popular and can't figure out why, it is probably because he is a dealer.
Shortly after I left Jim my scholarship money ran out and I was forced to move into a co-ed graduate residence where I lived until 1989. Life there was not bad, even POSH according to one visitor. They had maid service so I didn't have to vacuum or launder my own sheets. There was a small sink and cupboards in each room so I could prepare small meals like coffee and toast in my room without having to go to one of the shared kitchens.
In the summer of 1985, my first semester there, I received harassing phone calls. Most of the time the caller simply hung up but whoever it was called me every hour on the hour all evening until about 3:00 a.m. day after day.
I couldn't unplug the phone because it was an old system and the phones didn't have jacks. I left the phone off the hook but I could hear the dial tone. I put the phone in a drawer but he kept calling. Hour after hour and night after night. Sometimes the calls wouldn't start until after 1:00 a.m. and I thought he must have been at a bar. I became suspicious of one male resident named Neil and would run to the TV lounge after receiving a call to see if he was present or not. He was present so I didn't see how it could be him unless he ran faster than I did. Cell phones weren't invented yet.
Also at that time I was conducting an experiment that required me to be in the lab every night at 9:00 pm for six weeks. On the last night of the experiment the phone call changed. This time when I picked it up there was an eerie silence on the other end instead of the usual hang up. I shuddered and put the receiver down. A little while later I left the residence to walk to my lab across the street. In the lobby of the residence there was a young man looking at the names on the buzzer system. He had dark hair and a burgundy shirt or jacket. I didn't pay much attention and left the building.
He followed me. I could hear him jump off the top of front steps and land with a thud. I turned around and looked but kept on walking. He followed me. I crossed the street. He followed me. Finally I turned around and looked at him again.
He had one hand on his penis and the other arm out as if to grab me. I grimaced and he said "just stand here a minute". I ran around him on to the street and back to the residence. I phoned security and two officers came to take a statement. I couldn't think of the word masturbate so I said he was "jerking off" and one of the officers turned beet red in the face. They left after asking a few questions.
I had my phone number changed to an unlisted one and didn't leave my for several days. At night I urinated in my sink instead of leaving my room to use the bathroom down the hall. Eventually I calmed down but it wasn't until after throngs of students returned in September. I have come to know that August is not a good time to be on campus because it is nearly deserted making it more likely for a woman to run into any number of weirdos or sexual deviants.
Several other girls on campus had been similarly approached and a couple years later I saw him entering the psychology building where my office was. By the time I walked over to the security office someone had already called to report a man in a women's washroom. I saw him one more time hanging around outside another women's washroom and told everyone nearby about him. Most people laughed at me. He was eventually apprehended but it took several years.
Once I had calmed down from being accosted outside the residence, I became so shy that it took me a year to figure out a short cut through a boys wing to get from the TV lounge to a nearby kitchen. Most people figured that out in the first week.
My supervisor, Doug, hired an assistant to help me encode the massive amount of data I had collected and when I made my first presentation of the results, screamed at me that it was useless. Having been through so much emotionally I refused to listen to him. Doug was a local communist and known as a tough guy. At this time he was also in the middle of a court case in which he was defending himself against a liable charge. I went to one session of his case and thought he looked like a pompous idiot. The phrase "he who defends himself has a fool for a client" seemed to fit him well. He later lost is court case and had to leave the province.
My father, whom I hadn't seen in several years, died suddenly of heart failure in February of 1986 and I felt totally abandoned. Three major male figures had left me and I became severely depressed, contemplating suicide often.
I considered two different methods. I worked in a mouse laboratory so I could easily inject myself with a toxic fluid like formalin, or I would wrap my head in cotton batting so there wouldn't be too much blood and shoot myself in the forehead. I live in Canada where guns are not easily purchased so I never put my plan into action. Besides, I liked the house keepers and didn't want to put them through discovering my body. I also thought of my mother and couldn't bear hurting her. So, for one year I did nothing but run, swim, cycle and generally work out at the gym. I couldn't do anything else and received a small inheritance from my father's estate so was able to continue even though my funding had run out.
The residence was originally designed for women only and was named after the wife of the first university president. However, there weren't enough female graduate students to occupy all the rooms and eventually the building was open to men as well. Being Canadian I was a minority because most people came from other parts of the world: Thailand, Vietnam, Egypt, Australia, England, Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Iran and Mexico to name a few. It was a perfect place for promiscuity which I tried desperately to avoid.
Then one semester a teacher named Carol, returning to school to complete a master's degree, moved in and I was drawn into a relationship with an Iranian named Ramin whom I had been resisting for some time. He had a reputation that preceded him a mile long and was a known womanizer. One night some other girls and I tried to console Roberta, one of his conquests, and she kept saying that it was me he really wanted. In spite of my protests that she was softening me to him she continued to espouse his virtues.
Carol had become close to me so I confided in her that I really had a crush on a Swedish student named Michael. He was polite, well mannered and wore a cravat around his neck. Well, instead of doing what most people would do (i.e. keep it to herself or try to help) she went after him, cooing over him and flaunting it in my face.
One night at a party Michael kissed me and I tried to coax him back to my room with no luck. A resident told me later that Michael and a Chinese boy fought over me and the Chinese boy cut his hand on some broken glass. He later tumbled down the stairs spraying blood spots on the walls as he went.
That gave Ramin an opening to use the strategy of being a shoulder to cry on and of course I fell for it. We never really dated however because he would ask other girls out to movies and such but then come to me for sex when he felt like it. He wanted me to be queen of his harem. I became so distraught lost control and tore the posters from Ramin's door, wrote "Ramin is a pig" on it and the chalk board in the lobby, and had a fight with one of his girl friends, Elizabeth, pulling her hair until she backed into her room and dumping cigarette butts in front of her closed door. She filed a complaint but fortunately for me the coordinator supported me, telling officials that I was normally a very quiet person.
Nonetheless, Ramin had opened the flood gates and after that I had one night stands with several other men from Thailand, Napal, Mexico, Canada and India. It was hard to keep them at bay. One man from Mexico tried to force me to kiss him at a student pub and other people watched as I pried his arm away from around my head. The next day he called to apologize and I never heard from him again except for once when he telephoned to tell me he had moved to Ottawa.
During this time I used part of the inheritance money from my father's death to take a modelling course for self improvement, and started to lose weight again. An older student named Nancy commented on how thin I was getting so I set out immediately to make a double layer cake and ate the whole thing in two days. The bulimia did not return and I gained weight.
I told her that sometimes I would have sex with a man once because then I knew why I was saying no ( i. e. I was stronger in saying no). Someone must have overheard me say that because another man from India manhandled me while asking me why I wouldn't just try it once with him. Later I discovered him and Ramin trying to arrange a scenario with me and another woman. Shortly afterward, I moved out of the residence, back to my mother's house in Hamilton until I graduated in 1991.
By 1994 I had graduated with a Ph. D. taught for one year in Nova Scotia, did one year postdoctoral work in British Columbia and taught briefly in Toronto. I was exhausted and decided to remain with my mother in Hamilton. According to her recollection I came home and announced that I was never moving again. This gave me an opportunity to become reacquainted with old friends.
One night I attended the party at the home of Karen, a friend from around the time of my first rape. One person at the party was Kim, a boy I had casual sex with during my promiscuous years and who once offered to walk me home. When we got about half way there he said that was as far as he was going, turned around and went his own way. As I continued walking alone two boys passed me and one said to the other "if that was my girlfriend I would have walked her all the way home".
That certainly made me wonder about Kim although I continued to see him periodically over the years and at some point told him about Don raping me years earlier. He had confided in me about observing a gang rape which he was reluctant to participate in. I knew the victim and the other participants which made me wonder a whole lot about the friends I had made in Dundas.
Anyway, at the party in 1994 we both drank quite a bit and walked to his mother's house afterward which was several miles away. It was somewhere between 2:00 and 4:00 am when we arrived.
His room was in the basement and he invited me to stay over so I agreed. I hadn't had sex for at least two years so I didn't think anything of it. We were preparing for bed and I wanted to go to the bathroom to remove the tampon I was wearing. Instead of allowing me to go remove it and freshen up he pushed me back on the bed and started having sex even though I said no. He tried to kiss me but I pursed my lips. That didn't seem to bother him so he entered me anyway, talking about fried eggs as humped. I was disgusted.
When I awoke later that morning the sheets were literally drenched in his sweat. I sounded alarmed but he simply tried to tell me it was my sweat from being so "hot" and excited during sex which of course was completely untrue. We got up, dressed and went upstairs where his sister was eating breakfast. He didn't offer me anything to eat and left it up to his sister to ask me if I wanted to have a shower. I declined even though it would have been a good idea, and accompanied Kim to Toronto in his truck because he had something to pick up there.
One the way I made him buy me coffee and a biscuit at Tim Hortons and tried to explain to him what had happened. He didn't understand at all. The fact that I still had the tampon wedged somewhere in my vagina went right over his head. When I got home later that day it took me the better part of two hours to remove it.
A few weeks later I was visiting Karen when he called to speak to her. She asked if I wanted to speak with him so I did and he asked me if I wanted to "go for a walk or something" with him. I told him I wouldn't go that far and was so disgusted with what had happened became celibate for the next eight years.
During that time my sister passed away from bone cancer after suffering for four years and I contemplated suicide again. I thought of going outside on the coldest night of the year without a jacket and simply lying down in a field. On a few occasions I took sleeping pills a dozen at a time but found that I would get up and walk around in the middle of the night, looking at myself in the mirror trying to see what death looked like. I felt terrible the next day and my stomach hurt so I stopped that. Most recently, I thought of jumping off a nearby bridge that passes over a busy highway but the thought of such a violent death scared me.
Now when I am out walking for exercise at night and pass a man I think to myself "are you the one that will kill me?" and hope that it will happen quickly like having my throat slit. Or I boost my confidence by imagining that I actually fight him off and maybe kill him instead.
I couldn't bring myself to have a real relationship so I had one in my head with a handsome man I spoke with once or twice at a local gym. When I learned that he married someone else I was so upset I put a personal ad on the internet and had a brief affair with a married man. The sex was great for awhile but I didn't like the secrecy or the strip joint he took me to once. I also thought he was seeing other women (besides me and his wife) so I ended it after 4 months.
I didn't speak to Kim again until January 30, 2002 when we both arrived at another one of Karen's parties, this one she called a pre New Years Eve party. I decided not to drink anything alcoholic because it took all the diplomacy I could muster just to attend and have to see Kim again. He knows now (at least he better) that he is never getting near me again, and he'll be lucky if I attend his funeral.
Also at this party was Ron, the boy I liked way back in 1971 when I was first raped by Don. I didn't recognize him because he was now a 48 year old man and I hadn't seen him in over 30 years. He kept talking to me, showed me a picture of his daughter and offered to get me a drink. I told him which bottle I had brought and he went to fill up my glass. When he returned he said that he noticed my wine was sparkling and that I would have to drink the whole bottle or else it would go bad.
I laughed because I had told Karen that no one would notice I was drinking non-alcoholic wine and could tell he was trying to get me drunk. Later on in the evening he walked by and said "Oh I know you like my butt. I'm single now". I absolutely guffawed at the idea that he would think I was still interested in him. To myself I said "you left me alone with a rapist, didn't even try to defend me, and now you think I am going to go out with you?" Not a chance!!!.
When he left the party he leaned over to me and said "I am sorry but I really don't remember". An unlikely story. He remembered enough to try to get me drunk before anyone reminded me of who he was.
I am feeling much stronger now at being able to turn each situation around and come through with my self esteem intact. I see now that men conspire amongst themselves in order to get what they want from unsuspecting women. I hope they will learn to stop each other.
In spite of my new found strength I doubt that I will ever be able to have a loving relationship with any man. How could I and why would I want to? I will be 46 years old in April of 2003 and hope only for an income that will enable me to live comfortably throughout old age. At times I think menopause will be a blessing.
The other day I saw some graffiti which read "For a good time call Deanne" and gave her phone number. One day I will find it again, and write beneath it "The man who wrote this raped Deanne."
Copyright © 2002
