By: Barbara Clarke
“Maybe you have to know the darkness before you can appreciate the light.” - Madeline L’Engle
I consider myself one of the lucky ones: Not only did I recover a long-buried memory, but I received great help from a therapist to do so. The challenge, however, was that after almost 50 years, believing in myself and the memory felt like the top of a mountain I was ill-prepared to climb.
How could I be sure I wasn’t making up the childhood incident of abuse from my father? What took me so long to tell after being sworn to silence at the age of six? Where was this memory hiding all those years? And why tell it now? All these questions were with me for months of therapy, stretching into more than a year.
In 1998, just as I was seeking help and recalling the one memory I did have, the “false memory syndrome” appeared on the scene. Books and articles were circulating at the very time women were coming forward with stories of trauma and abuse. Going public was encouraged by survivors who were brave enough to lead the way, writing and speaking about what had happened to them. While at the same time, critics of memoirs — and there were many disturbing stories to read — were telling women to keep their “dirty little secrets” to themselves. Suddenly some people were more sympathetic to the accused abuser than they were to their victims.
Of course, much later, the #MeToo Movement heightened awareness, but the same doubts were applied — often depending on who was involved. More than two decades after I shared my story of abuse with someone, what happened to me is still continuing. The questioning of women and some men: Why did they want to tell? Was it out of revenge or seeking justice? Are they looking for sympathy or a day in court of a financial settlement?
My answer is simple: Until what happened to you is given the light of day, the memory is always casting a very dark shadow. And once you’ve told at least one person, you start to reclaim your life. The one you’re willing to do the work to reclaim.
When I sought psychotherapy in 1989 — specifically hypnotherapy — long-held physical sensations of a certain smell and touch by my father were my guide in the beginning. “Trust the authority of your senses,” my therapist said on my first session with her. I was still without specific information, but those few words held me together for the first weeks of the emotional work that lay ahead. Once I recalled the memory — only a single event was all I ever uncovered — the challenges began.
Some sessions that focused on the betrayal of a child by a parent were so heartbreaking that I had to sit in my car and collect myself before I felt safe to drive. The sessions where we talked about my feelings of shame and questioned whether I had brought it on by loving my father were equally awful. Only my therapist’s reminder not to “confuse a little girl’s love for a parent with thinking I seduced him” allowed me to keep going. “This is abuse, without penetration in your case, and the act of a disturbed man who sadly was your father.” Her straight talk, even said in a gentle way, was hard to hear and absorb enough to make her words mine.
I described having “hate rushes” when I thought not about the event but about his skillful way of silencing me at age six; stealing my innocence; making it so difficult to trust men; not able to achieve real intimacy that I had dreamed of with a partner. All of these felt like stepping into quicksand when all I wanted to do was go out for a pleasant walk. Dreams of vulnerability — with an ex-husband, a boss at work, or someone outside my bedroom door — would make a wreck of a night’s peace.
“This is a long process” my therapist reminded me more than once. “Your goal of understanding may take up some part of the rest of your life.” I remember feeling at times that I was living in a high-speed world, where “you have to move on,” was practically a mantra. Not so fast, I learned, and can still have one of those rushes. Now I know to give them space, take a breath, see them for what they are — that there is still recovery to be done.
Eventually I felt a shift after about six months of weekly and then bi-weekly sessions. I can picture the first time we laughed in my therapist’s office, the sunlight streaming in through the window as though the worst was over and a kind of liberation was within my reach.
My father died before I knew for sure exactly what had happened. Now I know that at such a young age and in the era of my childhood, there were no words in my vocabulary for the secret I was told to keep. Because the body knows even when the mind can’t tolerate the information.
I offered him a way to apologize. I honestly didn’t know for what precisely, just that I knew in my heart and gut that he needed to give me at least an “I’m sorry.” Standing at his bedside, he didn’t — or couldn’t — and died shortly after my visit. I was estranged from both of my parents at the time and dreaded dealing with the dilemma of, “Tell my mother or don’t tell her?” as my therapy was drawing to a close.
Other than writing a memoir about my family that included the abuse, I wanted to bring my secret home, where it belonged. If, when I was teenager, my mother had observed my father’s kisses on my cheek that lasted too long or saw me wipe them off with my sleeve, she never said. He was four things in my mind as an adult: creepy (those kisses), a weak man who retreated into a manipulative silence, a man who never admitted to anything and, in a real way, someone who had also betrayed my mother. He broke her heart too.
When I decided that I was strong enough and could survive if my mother didn’t believe me, I spent three days with her. Her response was mixed: She never questioned my story but focused on how awful “it was to be married to that man.” I was grateful to her then and now several years after her death that she believed me. I never pursued whether she had seen something or had a hunch about him. I never brought it up again — only that one afternoon sitting on her deck. She never mentioned it again either. Once felt like enough for both of us for different reasons. But when she went into the house to get us a glass of wine and the sun came out and poured down on me, I felt acknowledged for my bravery.
Needless to say that when I called my therapist to tell her the good news, she was delighted. And when I put the phone down, I was the happiest I’d ever been — except when my two daughters were placed in my arms after giving birth.
About Barbara Clarke
At the age of seven, witnessing a frightening incident between her parents, Barbara spent much of her childhood toggling between the happy family she longed for and the unhappy one she couldn’t repair. Disturbed by the smell of rotting leaves and a feeling about her father, she spent half her life hoping to get to the bottom of why. In the ensuring years, a summer in Africa allowed her to live without labels — wife, mother, daughter, sister — and become the woman she wanted to be — funny, compassionate, complex, and often flawed. The Red Kitchen is the story of many women like Barbara, and her mother, who surrender to society’s expectation to be one thing but yearn to be another. Both women —in very different ways — come of age together, finding the best parts of their mother-daughter relationship and living their best lives. You can find out more about her varied career as a writer, where to buy her book, and read her blog at www.barbaraclarke.net.
