Between Here and Gone

I've always wanted for someone to love my broken life; my broken heart and just simply broken me.

I never really got a good start at a joyful life. Before age 6, many horrible things had already filled up my life and my mind, enough to never ever allow me to be who I was put here to be.

It created who I am today and that is a broken person. That is something I've recently had to learn to come to terms with. Tired of trying to hide it I decided to move back to the area that created me and confront the places that would bring back these ordeals that a little girl could not avoid.

I love a song by Mary Chapin Carpenter called Between Here and Gone, she is wondering where we belong..between Here and Gone. Every verse means something to me but I like one where she says,
"Will I have missed my chance to right some ancient wrong".

When I moved back to this area where I attended Arlington Local School from 1st through 6th grade, I thought it would be fun to see old friends and the area. What I started realizing was I still had a lot to work through. I thought I had dealt with everything, I guess you never can forget it all.

Having a conversation one day jokingly with someone, he asked when I had sex the first time, he had shared his first time, why shouldn't I? I wanted to lie to him and say any age but the age it had really happened at or at least the first time I could remember. I told him maybe we'd discuss that some other time trying to put it off as nothing.

What was I supposed to say? By the time I met you at age 6 I had several males who had already raped me? At age 5 I had a man strangle me to what I term "death".

How would he respond to that? Some experts say you shouldn't tell someone you are interested in things like that because they will never look at you the same again. The truth is...they don't look at you the same. Compassion is not usually at the top of the love game believe it or not for something like this. Usually they just "disappear" and are "too busy" to get together anymore.

A few weeks ago I had to go to Ann Arbor, Michigan to the Veterans Hospital.  It was not far from where all this happened in Ypsilanti, Michigan, so I got some guts up (one of my favorite sayings to myself...get some guts up), and started driving towards the city where my little life was to be torn apart. As I turned onto the road called Prospect Drive, all of a sudden I knew I was going to throw up. I thought, "pull over, let it happen".

Letting the feelings roll over me and the tears start flowing I kept going. How could this still have such a hold on me? I spent years of counseling just to get through it and learn to try not let it affect any relationships I had. But all that had disappeared and now it was me and the demon battling it out...this time though...I was not a little girl anymore who couldn't strike it down. Oh no, this time I was a strong, military veteran woman bound and determined to win this war and no one or no thing was going to stop me!

I kept going and ironically enough, once I turned onto that road, with miles left to go, I knew my way without a GPS. How is it possible to remember what roads to turn on when the last time we were there was the day JFK got shot? I must have been age 6 or 7. But I went straight to the street.

Dwight Street. When I turned on it, I could barely stay on it so I drove around the corner and sat in the car trying to catch my breath. Then I decided I was not leaving until I knew I had the right house and area. So I called my brother and older sister, they both thought the number of the house was right. I had normal conversations with them, but they didn't know why I had gone there.

It wasn't our house but was the house down the road a bit where I went to play one day with a new girl in the neighborhood. No one answered the door, so I heard voices in the backyard, I went back to find her teen brother with 3 other boys. 

I don't even remember their names... but I remember their faces. I won't say much more than that, you can assume what happened. I went home to say something to my mom but she was angry and yelling at my brother in the kitchen over something and it was years before I realized she didn't hear what I said. Instead, she just yelled, "whatever happened, you probably deserved it". 

I know from a conversation we had years later, she was thinking I had done something wrong and one of the parents corrected me. (not uncommon for other parents to discipline back then).  It might not sound like a nice thing for a mom to say to a daughter, but that was just my mom when she was angry. 

What I found when I got off the phone with my siblings sitting there looking down the street was how smart a little girl I had become. Being able to separate bad things from the good and fun events in my life. That was to follow me onto Arlington, Ohio and through my life. I learned to separate the bad and not allow it to affect the good.  

I can tell you that I learned to ride a big bike, my sisters bike which I couldn't sit down on because I wasn't tall enough in Ypsi, MI. I went to the park and made potholders and watched bands and danced. I had fun in my kindergarten class and enjoyed playing with the girls in the neighborhood all the while enduring not just that event and the strangling but other men who thought it was their right to use me.

Mostly, I was so glad I went back to Dwight street because as a child, everything looks so LARGE in your eyes. Now, Dwight street was very small in my eyes, crowded little homes and tiny street that I could have walked in less than 3 minutes.

It represented to me that now, I can finally make these horrible events in my life SMALL instead of so largely consuming.

I have a necklace I wear when I need courage to go see something, meet with someone or when I want to say something to someone. It's just a cheap round cylinder that has the word Courage imprinted on it.  I like it because it is in the shape of a  circle, like the Courage can never be broken.

Another verse from Mary Chapin Carpenter's song says
"Up above me, wayward angels, a blur of wings and grace
one for Courage, one for safety, one for ...just in case".

Just when you need it...there it is...COURAGE!