Walking on Eggshells: Discovering Strength and Courage Amid Chaos (10 page)

I’m not sure whether my mother bought that story, but she acted as if she did—at least until a pawnshop in Fairbanks called her to let her know that Mark had pawned the car. I didn’t see Mark at all after that, and a few years ago was saddened to hear that he had passed away in a car accident. He may have been irresponsible, but he sure knew how to let a kid have some fun! Since then I have become close with two of his daughters, who both live in Colorado.

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My mother was now a single parent. She had not worked when she was married to Mark, as his little side business had paid the bills. My grandma gave us some money to get us through, but now my mother had to find a way to support us. In a town of five hundred people that’s not easy to do, as there are not a lot of job opportunities. We did have one big industry in Anderson, however, drinking, and my mother quickly found a job as a bartender at the Dew Drop Inn.

The job was perfect for her because, I have said, my mother liked to drink. She was also bubbly and social, and people loved her. But after Mark left, my mother developed a pattern. She got up late in the morning and started drinking coffee. As the day progressed she’d switch to beer and by evening she was knocking back the hard stuff at work.

I did some babysitting by day so I wasn’t home a lot. And because the bar’s policy was “as long as there is a customer the bar is open,” my mother often didn’t get home until the wee hours of the morning. Consequently I never saw her, and that’s when I really started being free.

The physical result was that I started wearing belly shirts (short, cropped T-shirts), piercing various parts of my body, and dying black streaks into my hair. I looked halfway between a Goth and a slut. My mother must have felt the need to have some control over me, so she told me to be sure to be home when the streetlights came on. The problem with that was in that part of Alaska in summer, it was light all the time and the streetlights rarely, if ever, were lit.

I had lived through addiction with my dad. Now I was disappointed to find I was going through it again with my mother, although this time it was different. The main reason was because I still didn’t realize the seriousness of either drugs or alcohol. I didn’t understand why CPS had tried to take us away from Dad because of his use of drugs, but no one cared if my mother drank. Lots of people in my world did drugs and even more drank, so neither was unusual for me although my mother did seem to drink more than her share.

While I was concerned for my mother, I found that I liked the few new kids I had met. While I considered them friends at the time, these really were older kids who just let me hang out with them from time to time. This group of kids held parties every week, and even though our behavior was age-inappropriate, it was one of the few times in my life that I felt I had any companionable friendship.

The first day I was in Anderson I was walking a bike that my mother had found for me. Up the street I met a boy named Bo Bailey. We went over to the park and I told him I wanted to try the slide. “No,” he said, “please don’t go down the slide. I just peed on it.” From then on Bo and I were great friends. We are still friends to this day.

One afternoon after I had been in Anderson for about a month, I went to the home of an older girl whom I’ll call Ericka to get drunk. Yes, the family curse of addiction was starting to affect me, although I did not yet know it. All I knew was that pot and alcohol
were becoming not only my escape, but also something I looked forward to very much.

I wish someone had been there at that time to pull me back, to show me there were other ways to enjoy life. Maybe if Beth had been there to encourage me in pageant competition, or if a mentor had been handy to steer me into sports, I would not have found chemical enhancements so enticing.

Anyway, I’d had too much to drink and felt an overwhelming need to tell someone about Nathan and his molestation of me. So when I was hanging out in Ericka’s bedroom after school, I told her. We had been smoking pot and drinking when the conversation paused, and I took that opportunity to blurt out my secret. She wanted to know who molested me, and in that odd way that is common to many victims, I found I needed to protect my predator. So instead of saying it was Nathan, I told Ericka that my stepfather had done it. Mark was out of the picture anyway, and I didn’t think it would go any further. Boy, was I wrong.

The next day I was really hung over when the police began banging on our door. Unbeknownst to me, Ericka had contacted them. I am sure Ericka thought she was protecting me with her call, but it turned into so much more—and this time it really was my fault. While I had hated the molestation, I still didn’t realize how very wrong Nathan’s behavior had been, so I was shocked that the police were making such a big deal about it.

At first the officers were rude to my mother because they thought she had allowed the abuse to happen there in Anderson.
“Lyssa Rae,” she yelled to me in my room, “you tell them Mark did not do this. You tell them the truth, that it wasn’t your stepdad but your real dad.”

I was sitting on my bed and I have to admit that I was so terrified I couldn’t speak. One reason for my fright was that I wasn’t sure what was going on; I thought I had done something wrong. I had told a friend something important about me and now the police had barged into our home. I knew I had to go out into the living room and tell the police something—anything—so I did.

“This house is completely safe,” I told the officers. “It happened in Hawai’i.”

The adults then made the assumption that the molesting had been done by my dad, and to my eternal shame I did nothing to contradict that. If I have one huge regret in life, this is it. I am still not sure why I did not step up and explain about Nathan. The only thing I can think of was that between his “friendship” and his molestation, everything was very confusing. Maybe I so desperately didn’t want anything more to do with Nathan that I subconsciously allowed people to believe it was the first man who came to mind, and that was Dad.

Not too long after we had moved back to Colorado, Nathan called me. He started right in with, “How is my Big Baby Lyssa?” and I felt so revolted that I hung up the phone. Just thinking about him made me nauseous, and still does even today. The devastating consequences of my words, or lack of them, began to play out right away. If I had known then the heartbreak it all would bring I
would have shouted Nathan’s name from the treetops. But I didn’t. I didn’t understand the seriousness of it. All I wanted was for the police to go away.

My mother immediately filed legal paperwork to keep me in Alaska. I am not sure if my mother really believed me, or if this was another way for her to get a dig in at my dad. Dad had always been good about not saying negative things about my mother, but she did not always reciprocate, especially when she had been drinking. I tend to think that any mother, drunk or sober, would want to believe her daughter about allegations like this.

Dad also used to tell me (and my mother) how much like her I was. I am sure that my mother thought that Dad had some sick sexual fantasy going on with me, when that was the furthest thing from the truth. Dad was never improper toward me, and his physical actions toward me have never been anything other than what was suitable for father and daughter. In short, I think my mother had such strong negative feelings about my dad that she was willing to believe anything I said, or didn’t say. I am sure my dad was shocked when he heard what transpired, and I am so deeply sorry that I caused him and the rest of my family pain.

I am also very ashamed to admit that while I hated the molestation as much as I could possibly hate anything, I found that I was beginning to enjoy playing the role of victim. I took pleasure from the attention the situation brought me, and for a little girl who had been through all I had, the attention was a welcome thing.

I was also glad that I was staying in Alaska. It was quieter there,
and I had friends. Plus, in Alaska I didn’t have to move all the time. Beth was also not constantly on me about my hair being messy or my room not being clean. I know Beth was trying to provide some structure in my life, and while I can look back with gratitude for her efforts now, when I was twelve her expectations just grated on me. There were no expectations—and there was no structure—at my mother’s. What twelve-year-old doesn’t like that?

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The months wore on, and in the fall I started school in Anderson. We lived at 345 D Street, which was a little over a mile from the school. Mom didn’t have a car then, so every day Barbara and I walked to and from school. It wasn’t bad in the fall and spring, but in the winter our damp hair from our morning showers had frozen solid by the time we got to class.

The school itself was nice. All grades K to 12 went there, but there were only four classes: kindergarten to third grade, fourth grade through sixth, seventh and eighth, and ninth to twelfth.

Our principal was also the sports coach, science teacher, and math teacher. The gym had a rock climbing wall, and every student was assigned one of the orange lockers in the center of the building.

Our little family lived in a double-wide trailer, and our mother always made sure we had a good breakfast before we left for school. You might think that with her excessive drinking she would be
somewhat disorganized at home, but that was not the case. She always kept a spotlessly clean and cozy house.

The school did not provide lunch, so Barbara and I trekked back to the house, where our mother often made chili cheese hot dogs for us. I loved those so much! Sometimes she’d go to work early and we’d have French fries at the Dew Drop Inn for lunch. If we were lucky, we’d catch a ride from another parent back to school.

I always try to look at every situation from the perspective of other people, and I can see how my mother must have been very stressed during this time of her life. Other than for Nick, she had not been a full-time mother since I was very small, and now she had four children to take care of. In addition, she had an older son from a previous marriage, Jason, who was grown and out on his own.

With the stress of being a single mother of five and having been abandoned by her husband, I think that as much as my mother wanted all of us to live with her, she wasn’t prepared for the day-to-day reality of it. Plus she always seemed to be the kind of person who had a hard time fitting in. Now she was a single mom with a ton of kids in a town of mostly married people. It is easy to see why the Dew Drop Inn, and all that lifestyle entailed, became her sanctuary.

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Even though I tried not to think about it, with every day that passed a custody decision loomed closer. Right after this all began
I started having nightmares about my dad raping me. In my horrible dream we were back in the Motel 6. Before long I was too frightened to even try to sleep.

My mother sent me to a therapist and I was prescribed Trazodone, a tetracyclic used to treat depression and anxiety. This was the first of many drugs I would be prescribed. Eventually they would lead to a pill addiction, but for now my zombielike state made the adults in my life feel like they were doing something positive.

When I told Ericka my secret it never occurred to me that I would have to go to court. And I didn’t have the slightest thought that I would have to take the witness stand or that I would have to swear under oath that what I said was true. The hearing was also my big chance to set the record straight. All I had to do was tell everyone that I committed a lie of omission, that it wasn’t Dad. Instead, it was someone else. Unfortunately, I didn’t do that.

I have had many years to think about my words and actions. I was a messed-up kid for sure. I was doing drugs, was overly sexual, and was considered troubled by every definition of the word. At this time I really didn’t care about a thing in this world. I think now that the molestation, the fighting in my dad’s home, and the continual moving from place to place had just worn me out. I didn’t want to go back to that.

Fortunately, my mother did not want to press criminal charges against Dad. All she wanted was full custody of me. On the appointed day my mother and I appeared in an Alaskan courtroom. Dad was on a speakerphone, and I remember how angry and
confused he sounded. I wanted to cry, but my drugged-up state didn’t allow an emotion like that to come through.

Over and over Dad said as patiently as he could that he did not molest me and that he had no clue as to why I would say he did. As the trial had gotten closer, Barbara and Tucker had bounced back to Dad, and I felt so sad when they testified against me and for Dad. It had all gotten so terribly out of hand. All I could think was that I just had to get through this day and that no one (other than my dad) would ever know I was living a lie.

My mother was awarded custody, and on our way home from the trial she bought me a milkshake and said, “Thank goodness it’s all over and no one was hurt.” But that wasn’t true. My entire family was hurt by my lack of words, my inability to stand up and tell what really happened.

I have since learned that my actions were typical of a victim of sexual abuse. The desire to protect the molester and the inability to act on your own behalf are integral parts of the deep psychological harm caused by molestation. What I did was a form of unconscious survival. I didn’t want to hurt Nathan. I also didn’t want to go back to the chaos and constant moving that was life with Dad, so I did nothing and allowed the adults in my life to assume something that was not true.

As you can imagine, my actions caused problems for my family that still exist today. For this I am truly sorry. Picture me on my knees begging for forgiveness with tears in my eyes and you’ll get an accurate picture of my sorrow and shame. Whenever my
brothers, sisters, and I disagree on something they never hesitate in anger to remind me of what I did. I don’t need to be reminded. I live with it every day of my life. But I also take time to remind myself of all the circumstances in my life at the time. If others had been in my shoes, they, too, may have let events unfold around them, as I did. Or maybe not. I believe that God is the only judge, and I have made peace with Him on this.