Something That Happened

This story was based on my recovered memories of childhood rape. Written in a child's voice, it was originally published in 1991 in Calyx, Art and Literature by Women (13:72-74).

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Two years ago when I was five, my family went camping in the fall. It was really sunny out. Everything smelled like fall and leaves were coming down. I had to go to the toilet. The toilets were kind of far away from our campsite, but I didn't mind. I like to be by myself so I can think about things.

I walked right through every pile of leaves on the path to the toilets.

I thought, “Maybe when leaves turn colors it is because fires come from the sun and light them up. At first the trees don't want to burn and try to stay green, but the fire spreads and soon they're all burning. After a while, there's so much sun-fire in the trees they can't hold it and it falls to the ground. Then everything burns with sun-fire.”

I think maybe fall is my favorite time.

Then I went into the toilets. It was dark inside and it smelled damp and, you know, like toilets smell. Not very good.

I didn't know it, but there was a man in there. He came up behind me and he knocked me down. He was wearing a red, plaid shirt and he was big. Big head, big hands, big everything. Much bigger than me. I think I could have walked between his legs without ducking. I was so scared I didn't make a sound, not a squeak.

He got down on top of me and he held me on the ground.

He said, “Don't make noise or I'll kill you.”

The cement floor was hard behind my head and my back and under my hands. It felt gritty dirty. And cold. And damp. The white toilet bowl hung over my head: hard and cold, with nothing to hold onto, like someone who doesn't care what happens.

The man had black hair and a fat face, and black hairs standing up on the backs of his hands. Thick, black hairs like pins standing up all along the back of his hands, even on his fingers. He was pulling on my clothes and he pulled down my underpants. Then he put his hand down there. His big fingers like dry sandpaper with pins on it were pushing in. It hurt. It really hurt bad and his breath smelled.

Then, I didn't want to see anymore. I didn't want to know anymore. I didn't want to feel anymore.

So I just left.

I floated away. Up, up, up, up, up. I thought, “I will just float all the way away.” But I got stuck at the ceiling. So I had to hang up there by the ceiling and watch.

All I could see was his back. He was heaving around on top of something. I couldn't see what it was because he was so big and it was so small. Small and flat. Small and flat and dead. Just a flat, dead rag-thing that he was pushing at and tearing at.

Only suddenly I was back down there and he said, “I'll choke you if you bite me.”

He put his hands around my neck and he started to choke me. Just to show he meant it, I guess. Then he put his thing in my mouth. I wouldn't have bitten him anyway because only live things can bite. Dead, torn rag-things can't bite. And dead, torn rag-things don't need to scream because they can't feel anything.

When he was all finished, he left. I guess he thought he killed me, but I was just pretending to be dead.

My mom was standing by the picnic table and she was cooking. We have this green, camping stove. She was standing in front of it and when she saw me she said, “Would you like to help me set the table, Honey?”

You know how it is sometimes when everything seems so far away you couldn't touch it even if you stretched and stretched, but at the same time everything is rushing by so close and fast it is like trains booming past your ears? I felt like that.

I thought, “Why is she talking about setting the table when everything is broken all to pieces?” But I guess she didn't know. I didn't say anything about it either.

I was like that doll my sister got in Chinatown. The doll had a box on her tummy. When you pressed it, she would go “Maa, Maa.” Then the box broke and no matter how you pressed, she couldn't make a sound, not even a little squeak.

My mom kept on talking to me. I felt like I couldn't understand what she was saying, but I helped her set the table.

Then I thought, “Maybe I am really dead. Maybe everything is dead.” I decided if I'm really dead than that man was just a dream. It didn't happen for real.

When we got home I found out that there is a giant clam that lives in the toilet. If you don't wash your hands before the toilet finishes flushing, it will come out and grab you and drag you down there. Also, if you don't get dried off before the water is out of the bathtub.

Sometimes I barely make it. I yell, “Time! Time! Time!” and I run out into the living room where I feel safe. Of course, I don't yell it out loud, just in my head, because if anybody knew they'd say, “stop acting like a baby.” Then my chest is all tight and my throat closes up like it is just a tiny thread I can't get any air through, so I lean across the back of the couch and pretend to watch TV.

I hate toilets. Even though I'm way too old to pee in my pants, sometimes I'd rather do that then go into a strange toilet. And sometimes I see this knife or this scissors that is cutting off my fingers. I try and try, but I can't get it to stop. I recite “Mary had a little lamb” and “Peter piper,” but it won't stop. It just won't stop.

I don't want to think about this any more. It makes me want to scream and scream. Only, I can't scream. I can't even talk. No noise can come out, not even a little squeak.

Anyway, I know that I'm not alive for real. I'm not sure about other people. Maybe they aren't alive either. I do o.k., though sometimes it seems silly to go on pretending to be alive. But I'll tell you one thing, I don't like boys. If I was alive, I would want all the boys to be dead.


© R. Elena Tabachnick 1991

Forgiveness: Can We Will It or Does It Take Grace? I.

In Christian history there is this long tussle between those who insist that we get to God through good works (and a good life) and those who insist God enters us through grace alone – no works of ours having made a bit of difference. That last was one of Luther’s big deals. It seems he felt so crappy about himself that all the good work, good living and consuming prayer he practiced didn’t help. Then one day (or night) -> poof <- God entered him and cleared out all the crud. For the rest of his life, he insisted “by Grace alone…”

Yet for some people good works have, well, worked... despite the insistence of those like Luther who’ve experienced divine relief as a pure gift.

This suggests there is not really an argument to be had here. Both must be true.

As in the story Bo Lozoff tells about Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach (It's a Meaningful Life - It Just Takes Practice).

Once the Rabbi said, “Full experiences of God can never be planned or achieved. They are spontaneous moments of grace, almost accidental.”

Puzzled, Bo Lozoff asked, “Rabbi, if God-realization is just accidental, why do we work so hard doing all these spiritual practices?”

To which Rabbi Carlebach replied, “To be as accident-prone as possible.”

There it is: grace and works. In fact, grace after works or grace with works.

This matches my experience of forgiveness.

It’s that time of year for me. Valentine’s day. The date when my then best friend was overwhelmed by the pain of her childhood abuse. She killed herself, as I described in my last post. So my thoughts naturally turn to my own story of recovery from the wounds of childhood rape

This is also the story of how I inexplicably experienced forgiveness.

In my next post, I will share a published story based on my child’s experience of rape. Then I will describe the aftermath, and how that led to forgiveness.

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Survival - A Valentine's Remembrance

Neither of my friends Ana and Jim,survived in the end, although they both lived a long time trying.

On Valentine’s Day, 1991, Ana put a plastic bag over her head, lay down on her bed, and suffocated. She was 39. In the winter of 1992, Jim put a gun to his temple and blew a hole in his brain. He was 59.

Technically, they aren’t “survivors,” but how long does one have to struggle on to qualify as having survived? Does thirty years count? Forty? Is it only how we die that matters, only at that last moment that any of us can be said to have made it, to have “survived”?

Consumed by overwhelming flashbacks, Ana often lost all sense of her real-time life and the present-day people in it. She wandered into heavy traffic, bought sleeping pills with the idea of overdosing, and was repeatedly hospitalized.

Jim used to drive wildly, fantasizing about having an accident. He smoked, took drugs, and worked in an OSHA-violating machine shop where he was constantly injured.

As a young man, Jim had lost a wife and baby daughter to heavy drinking. He let his anger out by  abusing those he cared for and starting fights until he bottomed out on the street, living only to drink. He later described himself as a hard, nasty man--a racist and a bigot. That is a story we have all heard too many times. What was different about Jim was that after two years on the street, he woke up one day and said, “I have got to change. I have got to find a way to live.”

Jim checked himself into VA detox, then got a job and an apartment. He saved money and saw a therapist. By the time I knew him ten years later, Jim was a model of gentleness and compassion. Absolutely trustworthy, he felt other peoples' pain as deeply as his own. He took in psychotic cats and offered support to injured women without the slightest hint of wanting anything in return.

When Ana’s demons first took her life, she was on the way to success. She had a good marriage, her Ph.D. in a hard, physical science was almost completed, and she had the respect of her peers. Then the long-buried memories of childhood abuse burst out.

Ana was institutionalized for schizophrenia. What else could explain a woman screaming, muttering to herself as she stomped down the street, or breaking into churches? But an amazing psychiatrist asked Ana to describe her hallucinations and realized they were actually flashbacks. The easiest memory came out at that time. It was of her father's one-time sexual attack.

Unfortunately, the first was not the last. Over the years, new triggers brought up new memories, each more awful than the ones that went before, but despite the times her past rose up to drown her, Ana finished her degree. She landed a hot, government, research position in a tight job market where most science Ph.D.s went unemployed or underemployed for years, published often, and traveled the international, academic circuit arguing for her ideas.

Jim worked as a machinist, but he dreamed of being an artist. At the Toledo Museum's art school, he studied drawing, painting and metal sculpture. He exchanged care of the metal shop for studio hours, and when students needed help they came to him first. He was never too busy, and unlike so many art professors, never needed to bolster his ego by putting students down. He was as kind and humble with students as he was with injured women and cats.

Finally, Jim felt secure enough in his new self to take the big risk. He quit his job and spent his life savings to be a full-time artist. Jim had taught himself to blow glass. Because he had no money, he traded his help for glass colors and scrounged color scraps that richer students threw away. With only bits of any one color, his glass pieces were streaked with swirling rainbows.

Jim had picked himself up from the gutter and changed his life--something few can do. He grew into the fully feeling, creative person he was born to be. But his demons--born in childhood beatings and a mother's insistent, sexual abuse--never slept. Like Holland with its dikes against the sea, his life needed to be constantly defended against their attacks.

After a year, his money was gone. Jim had gotten paid work on some local civic sculptures--welding parts or fixing patinas--but didn't make much. He had to return to the machine shop. It was the beginning of the end.

Jim abandoned therapy, hid from friends, and sank beneath the numbing waters of drugs and drinking. Then one dark dull winter night, he shot himself . He was so isolated by that time that his body lay for five days in his apartment before anyone noticed.

What is it that lets one person out of thousands find the will to change? What greater achievement could there be than to rise up out of your inner hell and the literal gutter, give up the numbing blanket of drugs, and grow into yourself despite the hurt that consciousness brings? What could be more admirable, whatever the final outcome?

At times Ana faced her past. She let herself remember pain that had been so intense her soul vacated her little girl's body tied to a bedpost, floating up to watch from far away. She let herself feel the betrayal inherent in parents' and grandparents’ abuse, a betrayal that hurt worse than the most terrible physical pain.

At other times Ana refused to deal with her past, angrily shoving those memories away. She WOULD NOT let them devour her creative energy or her ability to love. Yet this was a failing proposition. Left to act out of her unhealed trauma, there were days when she could not enter a room of men, although she worked in a science where almost everyone was a man.

Ana's rigidly rational male-scientist co-workers had nothing but contempt for extended medical leaves and intermittent phobic outbreaks. Of course, they never knew what the problem was. It was enough that she lacked their prized, competitive edge. Besides, her lack was their gain. In the spirit of laissez-fare, zero-sum, scientific competition, others gleefully built their reputations by trashing hers.

Still, between one psychotic break and another were long stretches of calm. Then Ana read widely, cultivated interesting friendships, and spent weekends leading school children through science adventures. She explored Zen, took snapshots of everyone and everything, and loved to walk in a local beaver marsh.

The last calm before her death had lasted several years. Her husband began to hope that, maybe, the worse was over. It wasn’t. When her past re-asserted itself, it demanded her whole attention. She was mentally lost for weeks.

Ana came to herself in a psych ward. There she finally faced the truth: no mental walls are thick enough to block the past. She would not be free until she faced it, all of it. Only if she worked through her childhood trauma could she truly heal.

For many years, Ana had found ways to live injured while healing only lesser hurts. Finally, she committed to the last dangerous trial. It might take years, even decades, and there were no guarantees.

Severe childhood abuse is like a terrible burn covering most of the body. The injury hurts in a way that cannot be imagined by those who haven't experienced it. The cure hurts just as much and goes on longer. Sometimes, burn survivors beg to be allowed to die instead. At every step of healing, abuse survivors risk being swallowed by their desire to escape through death.

What greater courage could there be than to choose to put oneself through the torture of healing? To keep going when it would be so much easier to hide, and when it is only your own stubborn will that keeps bringing the pain down on you? Only the very brave and very desperate agree to such a cure.

My own experience of being raped as a child was like being burned on no more than my hands and feet. That was bad enough. I teetered on the edge of suicide for years as I uncovered and healed my past. I'm lucky. I survived long enough to discover how great life can be.

Ana started that journey. She didn’t make it out the other side.

At her funeral, her husband said, "In her life, Ana had to climb a high range of mountains. She'd made it through the foothills. She'd climbed the lower slopes. Along the way she found people who could help. Others had gone before and pointed out trails. Then she reached the last assent before the top, but it was the steepest--a sheer cliff. Again there were people to help. Others were in front and to either side offering their hands, ready to guide her to the next toehold. She started up. But a fog came down and engulfed her. She couldn't see the other people and forgot they were there. Alone in the fog on that cliff, she lost her hold, slipped and fell."

Strangely, at her funeral one of Ana's hatefully competitive scientific colleagues wept and begged for forgiveness. He hadn't realized how much she was suffering.

In the end, both Ana and Jim killed themselves. But is that failure? After all, they survived for years-- more than survived. They lived and loved and gave and created, despite the terrible gaping wounds they carried. After years of struggle, they lost their grip. Do they not still deserve the admiration of those who admire survival? Can they not still claim the highest badge of courage?

When we heal ourselves, we heal the universe--whether we manage a little or a lot. Our motivation may seem selfish, but our work serves everyone.

Ana and Jim, my loves, thank you for the great gifts you gave us.

You both deserve the richest and warmest of Valentine's hearts.

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Women's Voices III: Rabi’a al Basri

One of the greatest Sufi mystics was Rabi’a al-'Adawiyya who lived in Basra, Iraq in the second half of the 8th century AD. She left no written works. Most of the information about her comes from Farid ud-Din 'Attar who described her as “on fire with love and longing” and “an unquestioned authority to her contemporaries.”

The story goes that she was sold into slavery to a hard master. Instead of sleeping, she prayed, often also fasting. Once when she was praying her master saw her enveloped in a divine light. So he set her free. Rabi’a then became a desert ascetic.

Rabi’a never studied under any human teacher or spiritual master, instead going straight to God. However, she became a great teacher, herself. She had many disciples, and there are numerous stories of her conversations with contemporary Islamic sages, often showing off her deeper understanding of divine truth.

Rabi’a was a God-lover, spending hours in direct communion with her Beloved. Of formal worship - even in the House of God in Mecca - she said, “It is the Lord of the house Whom I need; what have I to do with the house?”

One of the first Sufis to teach that love alone is the guide for the mystic path, Rabi’a also taught that strong emotions like fear and hope are veils that hide God from our sight. In this quest, logic and reason are powerless as only the eye of the heart can apprehend God’s mysteries.

As an ascetic, she usually prayed all night, sleeping a bit just before dawn. She also lived in celibacy and poverty - owning only a reed mat, screen, pottery jug, and a bed of felt that doubled as prayer rug. When a wealthy merchant tried to give her some gold, she wouldn’t take it, saying God “does not refuse to sustain one who speaks unworthily of Him, how then should He refuse to sustain one whose soul is overflowing with love for Him?”

Some of Rabi’a ‘s poems:

Prayer should bring us to an altar where no walls or names exist.
Is there not a region of love where the sovereignty is illumined nothing,
where ecstasy gets poured into itself and becomes lost,
where the wing is fully alive but has no mind or body?

In my soul there is a temple, a shrine, a mosque, a church
that dissolve, that dissolve in God.

(Daniel Ladinsky, tr.)

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Ironic, but one of the most intimate acts of our body is death.
So beautiful appeared my death – knowing who then I would kiss,
I died a thousand times before I died.

“Die before you die,” said the Prophet Muhammad.
Have wings that feared ever touched the Sun?
I was born when all I once feared
I could love.

(Daniel Ladinsky, tr.)

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In love, nothing exists between breast and Breast.
Speech is born out of longing,
True description from the real taste.
The one who tastes, knows;
The one who explains, lies.
How can you describe the true form of Something
In whose presence you are blotted out?
And in whose being you still exist?
And who lives as a sign for your journey?

(Charles Upton, tr.)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

"Everyone prays to You from fear of the Fire;
And if You do not put them in the Fire,
This is their reward.
Or they pray to You for the Garden,
Full of fruits and flowers.
And that is their prize.
But I do not pray to You like this,
For I am not afraid of the Fire,
And I do not ask You for the Garden.
But all I want is the Essence of Your Love,
And to return to be One with You,
And to become Your Face."

For more on Rabi'a al Basri see the Sidi Muhammad Press, MYTH*ING LINKS, Poet Seers

Creeping Hermit Desire

Wow, it was almost two months ago when I last posted.

A few days after that post, I began three weeks of house sitting in a place without Internet access. I could get on at a nearby library, yet somehow just didn’t take advantage, instead falling easily into web-withdrawal. But the house sit ended in early January .

Well, this isn’t the first time I’ve chosen disconnection.

In the monastery, I loved the strictures that limited social interaction and entertainment activity. "Cave time." That’s what the formation mistress called the separation provided by a monastic novitiate. She was referring to the story that Benedict shook off his urban social life by living in a cave.

But our monastic life was hardly isolated. We almost always had guests, and chatted through two meals with them. During work periods, we had unlimited Internet access on private computers. Although many monasteries carefully regulate computer use, our old sisters seemed to have no clue that computers can provide a social life. Still, I policed my own computer activity.

So what provided the overwhelming sense of separation from the standard, worldly, social whirl? Limited phone calls, rare personal visits, staying on the grounds except for group excursions on approved errands – no more than once a week. Somehow these opened up a huge physical and psychic space. I worried about stopping close communication with friends and family. But it was the effect on the others that was worrisome. For me, the one on the journey, the excitement of taking off swamped any feelings of loss - for a good long while, at least.

And I miss that emptiness. I still, sorely miss it.

I have friends who have taken hermit vows while staying in the world - with a job, an apartment, and all the rest. They create their own cave effect. But I don’t have a hermit’s call. It’s in the rubbing of close relationships that my spirit shines.

So maybe that’s why I’ve returned to a bad, old habit: going in waves of regular communication and then withdrawal. Every so often, life provides a trigger and I light out for the psychic hills…

But shoot, I used to disappear into the literal hills. Hmmmm... that sounds pretty enticing right about now...