Assembling My Peace

I won’t be going to my Nana’s memorial luncheon. I refuse to be in a room with my sex predator cousin. Bringing my children into the same space isn’t and  never will be an option. He went away for fifteen years for CSAM, and he had a juvenile record involving rape and other sexual abuse of, I believe, three known victims. Known being the key word. We all know there is the possibility that there are more, those who haven’t come forward or can’t. So, as per usual, I’m the problem for taking issue with his existence. My children will NEVER have to ask me why I knowingly put them in the same room as a sex predator. Never. Is it true that there are many that go under the radar of the law. Absolutely. You need not preach to this choir.

Neither of my childhood abusers were ever reported. One stayed a mystery until last year, when my mother finally asked me at 43-years-old, and I answered. After my main predator was found out, no one even sat me down to talk about it. So, I wasn’t surprised it took 30+ years for someone to ask about the other. No one ever asked for details, and I didn’t offer any. We just didn’t really talk about it again. I was content to spare them. I didn’t want anyone’s pity; I didn’t want my parents to feel the weight of their choices.That would’ve been too much to live with on top of everything else. So I moved through my childhood and then took myself to my first therapist at nineteen. I did decades of work. Hard, excruciating work that continues and likely will for the rest of my life.

Fast forward to thirty, when I was shamed for refusing to speak to my cousin. People questioned why I wouldn’t correspond with him in prison. It’s true we were close once. It’s also true that in my mid-twenties my aunt allowed my niece and nephews to sleep over at her house, without ever disclosing that her son already had a lengthy juvenile record. No one knew. This obnoxious unwillingness to respect my decision went on even after, for the first time, I disclosed to my aunt some of what had happened to me. I shared more truth than I’d ever revealed. In that moment, I felt understood—but within a week, I realized that painful moment of vulnerability meant absolutely nothing.

Now I’m being told it’s “my loss” for refusing to attend the memorial luncheon for Nana. But is it? I don’t feel, even for a second, that this is my loss. Standing up against the disgusting idea that this predator should just be allowed to walk among us because “he has done his time”—that’s the furthest thing from a loss. I don’t know his victims, but my refusal is for them. And it’s for the little me who wasn’t protected, the little me who wasn’t saved by any adult. I was ultimately saved by another child, my sister, and even she doesn’t know just how much. I’ve spent over 15 years wondering if my aunt ever lies in bed at night with a shattered heart for that little girl or for those little boys. Does she ever wonder how they’re coping? Does she wonder if the children in those videos were saved? Does she lose even a moment of sleep wondering if they survived the abuse her son found pleasure in watching? It doesn’t seem so, because she thinks he got “way more than should have been necessary.” 

It’s only the victims who deserved a life sentence, I guess. 

So no, friends, it’s not my loss. I’ll pay tribute to the grandmother, who favored a sex predator over all her other grandkids, in my own way. I’m going to start by contributing to and then hosting a fundraiser for RAINN. Please consider donating.