I think that when someone dies the first part of the grief process is the hardest because the thing you want the most is to get the beloved back.  The grief and its intenisity signals your proximity to the person you miss.  You hold on to the grief because it is the placeholder for the person and who you were with them.

All this is the same when you are grieving the aftermath of sexual abuse, only there is no funeral, no one has died, what has died is the life you thought you had and the trust you had in the abuser.  The period of time following the revelation of C’s abuse was long and was by far the hardest grief I have ever experienced.  It was so rough it caused physical illness.

Now the stage we are in is different but when grief emerges it is so intense and focued that I am afraid that I am not doing enough to help my children to recover.  We ask why? a million ways, we search for acceptable answers to unaccaptable history.

I say all of this because last night was very hard.  We cried and mourned because we had watched movies from the time the girls were small until after the abuse was discovered and we all knew that these happy-looking scenes were a scrim for a dark mind and terrible predation.  How could he?  We will never have an answer.

And as I stay up very, very late with my two precious daughters I am haunted by all the other little children who have been abused and cry alone.

If you know me at all or if you have read a few of these blog entries, you probably know that I have been on a minor crusade (yes, crusade, all connotations intentional) against the sexual abuse of children and the devastating silence surrounding this abuse.

I want to thank you for helping me to heal, for helping my children to feel that there is a decent community of people in the world who care, for listening.

When experts talk about the grief cycle they talk about the need to talk about the loss.  You.  Whoever you are, have listened and I thank you with all my heart.

Please help to keep all children safe.  I know that sounds like a hyperbolic request.  So just try to keep one child safe at a time.  Everything counts.

Thank you and God bless you

Elea

but as it happened

chaos ensued

you sleep

like a normal person

and I marvel

that words can be a kind

of addiction

calling forth

sleeping beauty

I rake the dark ceiling

hoping for a glimpse

of the God of love

we have a tendency to accumulate

accolades or convictions

these are our badges

the trinkets we wave about

to prove

we are real

when in reality they are

like the trees killed for nothing

mashed into currency, identification, memos

incinerated as our great buildings crash

and fall

so close to Neil deGrasse Tyson

who still cannot hear Jesus

render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar

and what belongs to God

unto God

In the story of the centurion and Jesus in Matthew 8, the centurion says he is not worthy to have Jesus in his home but that he understands that Jesus has sufficient “command” over the situation to heal a dying man from a distance.

In fact neither time nor distance were or are obstacles for Jesus.  He is the commander and lord of them. 

This means that the requests (prayer means to ask something from an authority…) we make are not bound by time and space the way we appear to be.   I say appear because we are 1. eternal beings (whether we like it or not) and 2.  we have access to a powerful friend.

What do you ask a man who can save the world?

What do you ask Him today?

Months before, maybe even as much as a year before we found out that C was a sexual predator we heard a segment on NPR about Kathy Marks’ book about the child sexual abuse on Pitcairn Island. 

Most people know Pitcairn for its role in the mutiny on the Bounty.  Pitcairn packages itself as a remote paradise but it is not.  It is a classic example of what happens when the rule of law is not enforced.  Possibly from the beginning of its troubled history Pitcairn has been the scene of sexual abuse and domestic violence.  Men would routinely rape young children and the islanders turned a blind eye to the abuse.

I have to admit that I did not want to own the book Ms. Marks wrote about this situation.  I hate all of these stories.  But eventually I did buy it and I now recommend it for everyone.  It is well-written and informative.  I want to personally thank Marks for writing it and to tell the victims who spoke out  that they are not alone and that their story helped me to do the right thing for my kids.  I was so outraged by what happened to them that I knew what to do to help my kids.  They did the right thing to speak out.

And the predators who hurt them got a slap on the wrist.

Pitcairn is an example of what happens when you ignore, make excuses for, or protect sexual predators.

If you are a survivor of abuse, please know that you are in my prayers

C would call me up on the phone regularly (pay phone) and badger me to send him his birth certificate and social security card.   Since he has been at the halfway house his goal has been to be independent–he wants his own apartment.  He wants freedom.  Normally diligent employment focused on self-reliance would be very good.  The only problem is that C wants these things for privacy and for his entire life he has only and ever used his privacy to harm people.

Lucy, oh speaker of the truth.  I did not want to rant and wave my cyber fist all over fb but you are right about one thing emphatically–pedophiles are very expressly crafting their message on the success of the homosexual movement.  If you look at the language of pedophile groups (why this is possible in the first place is a rough question mark)  they openly adopted language that echoes pr surrounding expansion of marriage rights.

  I dont have the stomach to discuss pedophile terms or organizations but they are out there and they are aggressively determined to normalize pedophilia.  If we see an expansion of the definition of marriage we will see the next frontier move out quickly in two directions–lowering (considerably) the age of consent and polygamy,

 I sincerely hope that the homosexual community in toto would help fight efforts by pedophiles to co-opt their campaign. i have to say that my friends who are gay have been uniformly kind, generous and supportive while the reactions we have received from the Christian community have been mostly very painful,  I repeat that again, mostly very painful with a minority of kindness and support. 

I hope everyone will read this carefully–I have watched and been grateful for a society that a guards the dignity and personhood, the right of safety and equal rights for people who are GLTB,  I wish my children had that kind of support as sexual assault survivors.  Most abuse victims suffer alone. 

I think it would and should take a combined effort by all of us–gay or straight to help keep children safe and I have been grateful, very grateful for every single person who has offered their kindness or support as we try to survive what C did to all of us.