For those who doubt a sexual assault can ruin a woman's life, I want to tell you it can upset multiple lives & multiple generations. I grew up with a mother who - after her divorce from my father in her early 30's - never dated again. She seemed sad & alone & bitter - always. (1)
She taught my sister & I to be terrified of men, without ever saying why. She taught my brother to hate himself because she railed against males constantly. We believed this was all because of the divorce & could never quite understand it. (2)
My father had his faults & he never paid his fair share for child support or put in time as a parent. But he wasn't a monster, either. There was no abuse or hate or anything to explain why she gave up on all men as a young woman. (3)
We simply internalized her hatred toward men without grasping what it was about. Only recently did I learn that it wasn't about my father. It was about a fellow air force officer who gave her a ride home from Texas to Maryland for her leave and raped her. (4)
She told no one except her sister. When she returned to base, she felt trapped & terrified & utterly alone. She felt she couldn't report it. She blamed herself. Yet she had to continue working alongside this man who had violated her & thought little of it. (5)
She'd liked being in the Air Force. It was her first taste of adult freedom. But now she hated it & wanted out desperately. Since she couldn't tell anyone, she decided to intentionally become pregnant so she could be discharged. (6)
That led to my birth & also to a sudden marriage to my father, a man she barely knew. What followed - the eventual divorce - hurt them both. And the trauma over her rape, always kept hidden, influenced my siblings & I in ways that changed our own lives. (7)
I was afraid of men & didn't begin dating until grad school. I then married practically the first decent man I found. My brother suffered the worst - he had low self-esteem & has been - I believe - forever scarred by it. How could he like himself when he was what Mom hated? (8)
Our lives weren't "ruined." Even her life wasn't ruined. But it sure as hell impacted ALL of us & changed her in a way that changed how she was as a mother. She loved us & would never have intentionally harmed us, but what that rape did to her scarred her & us.
I can only imagine how lonely it was for her. She spent her life keeping a secret of what had happened to her - feeling ashamed when she had nothing to be ashamed of. That assault stopped her dead in her tracks at a time when she was just learning to fly.
