This week’s Weekly Geeks theme is books we loved as children… which makes a great follow-up to Why Do We Read? Beastmama made a little meme for it which I’m using here.

1. What is the earliest book you remember loving?

Little House in the Big Woods. And maybe Cassie’s Magic Flower, a book my mother got me from the Lilian Vernon catalog which I still have and which appears to have made no mark on the internet whatsoever… amazingly. Or at least no mark on Google!

Cassie’s Magic Flower… which I don’t guarantee was absolutely for sure called that… was a big picture book about a little girl who lived in “Calico Corner”, where everything was black and white and dreary. And then one day, a star falls to earth and leaves some funny-looking seeds that grow into enormous full-color calico-patterned flowers.

When Cassie takes one, she turns Technicolor and everyone else makes fun of her and is mean to her. Except for a few kind souls who believe in her and her kooky dreams, or who are outcasts themselves. And she gives each of them a flower and soon they are leaving trails of color everywhere and bringing joy to the whole world with their colors. I loved the sense of strangeness of the town, and the magic, and the way it was drawn, and the way everything centered around a little girl with crazy dreams of awesomeness.

I won’t swear that Little House in the Big Woods was the one I first encountered. I went to a Montessori preschool where for a while they were reading to us out of that series every day, and I think it was out of that book. That’s the first one I remember loving, because I had a copy of it (that and Little Town on the Prairie, where they GET KITTENS!!!!1!!1one) and Laura was just about my age in the Big Woods, plus it had great stories within stories from Pa, plus it is the one where Aunt Delia’s buttons look just exactly like big ripe blackberries and I was a sucker for anything that sounded like food. Mmmm… suckers.

2. When you were younger, which book characters did you want to be in your circle of friends?

I didn’t think about it consciously in those terms, but I really wanted to be one of the silver-eyed kids in The Girl With the Silver Eyes, (by Willo Davis Roberts, who also wrote the previously-mentioned Don’t Hurt Laurie!). I identified with feeling like a freak, and being treated like kind of a freak, and I wanted so badly to have Super Sekrit Special Powers ™ to go with it! And I liked books where kids could run away from abuse or do something about it; these kids went behind their parents’ backs to band together and ran away where necessary and totally helped each other have community.

I also really liked the kids in E. Nesbit’s books. They lived in the turn of the last century, and they were all incredibly real and brave and adventurous and clever. She just had a fantastic ear for how kids think and talk and act, and it was a lot of fun to see how much I had in common with children who lived in this completely different world – not only filled with Psammeads and Phoenixes, but also full of social commentary on the class system in Victorian England. Oh, and time travel.

3. What books do you have nostalgia for as an adult?

 All of them?

I went through a serious, many-years-long nostalgia phase. I’m sure many of you can identify with it – that place of not being willing to let go of notebooks, books, scraps of paper, toys, keepsakes, clothes, whatever, from a past phase of life….as if those objects hold the memories of that time and letting go means losing the memories. Or betraying our past selves who loved and used those things. Or betraying the people who gave them to us. Or risking not having enough, like letting go of some appliance or outfit that we never use will result in immediately needing and wanting it desperately and not having our needs met!

There were so many layers to it. The fear of deprivation, because I had deprived myself of so many of my needs in the past. The fear of loss, because I had felt so much loss in the past. The fear of all the emotions, the fear and sadness and rage, that I had felt and hidden from myself in the past, exploding out if I disturbed the objects from that time.

And then, the memories. I realized eventually that a lot of my clutter was my way of archiving my past. Accumulating evidence. I had spent so much of my childhood dissociated, burying memories I couldn’t yet deal with, that I didn’t trust myself to remember anything. I needed proof to look at, whether it was a forgotten poem I’d written in high school or a half-kept journal from third grade. I felt like I needed to have hard copies of everything I might forget.

Of course all of this was subconscious. I didn’t know why I kept so much stuff, or why I worried that I would be sad or need something as soon as I got rid of it. I was so codependent with my stuff. I projected all my fears and sadness onto it, thinking half-seriously (maybe three-quarters seriously) that if I got rid of these things they would feel sad and be betrayed. That it would be mean to a once-enjoyed doll to give it away. It felt like nostalgia for EVERYthing, because I projected everything I had felt or experienced or wanted onto the stuff around me.

But of course, there were also books that were especially special to me. Still a lot of them, but off the top of my head: those Laura Ingalls Wilder and Elizabeth Enright books of course, the Betsy-Tacy series, a lot of books by Dianna Wynne Jones who is fabulous, the So You Want to be a Wizard series by Diane Duane especially… the All of a Kind Family, the Active-Enzyme Lemon-Freshened Junior High School Witch, Cheaper by the Dozen, The Family At One End Street, ummm…. I might have to come back to this list!

4. What books do you wish to share with the kids in your life?

The Little House series was one of the first, for sure. Re-reading them as an adult kind of blows my mind. There is so much more to them than I could see as a child. Intense political stuff, detailed how-tos for pioneer living….

I read the first several books to my son while I had shared custody of him. We were doing a little project where we’d read books from the 1800s and look at how different people’s experiences were depending on where they lived, what their background was, and when in that century they lived. So for example, we read some of the Little House books and then the first American Girl book with Josephina, and a book called A Boy Becomes A Man at Wounded Knee which takes place in modern times but talks a lot about the history of Wounded Knee. And If Your Name Was Changed at Ellis Island. With that one, we looked at the world map and saw all the different places that people came from, and talked about where our relatives had come from. I wanted to read him The Great Brain at the Academy next, about a scheming young con artist/genius going to a Catholic boarding school in 1800s Mormon Utah, but we didn’t get that far. (That’s another winner of the “if it sounds like food” bonus – my favorite part in the book is where he starts his own candy store, sneaking forbidden chocolate bars into the Academy, carving a key for a hiding place out of freaking SOAP, and making a tidy profit.)

He totally loved “the Laura books”, but I think his other favorite was “Return to Gone-Away,” another Elizabeth Enright book. Of course: who doesn’t love her stuff? I want to share SO MUCH with him. It is hard to have loved so many books and want to pass so many on. Like holding a firehose.

5. More philosophical question— how do you think your childhood reading shaped what you like to read as an adult?

I’ve spent a lot of time as an adult revisiting children’s books that I loved. And I’ve found that I still love new ones too. The Penderwicks, and the Bartimaeus trilogy, and those Hermux Tantamoq books especially come to mind. I tend to like chick lit, funny fiction, speculative fiction, very personal fiction, and adult non-fiction the best – which is to say that I want things that are either relaxing or exciting to read. Or both. I guess that that comes from how I read as a child, too; I like to be able to read as a nice relaxing adventurous trip away from daily life. And now I also get to read stuff that enhances my daily life, books that teach me new interesting things about how to live and about the world around me.

Bonus: speaking of the Lillian Vernon catalog (as we were waaaay back up at the top there) this song from Hedwig and the Angry Inch is now what I think of, and what starts playing in my head, every time that’s mentioned. (The youtube page has the lyrics written out, too.)

At its most basic, economic abuse is any form of abuse involving money. The classic example is in domestic violence situations, where one partner may make a point of controlling the family’s money so that nobody can leave. Besides neglect, economic abuse may be the least visible form of abuse. There are no public service announcements about it. There are no helpful pamphlets detailing signs that economic abuse is taking place. So let’s start out by naming a few here, in the context of an adult relationship.

If one partner is….

• not “allowed” to get a job or go back to school, or not allowed to choose their own job or area of study;
• kept in the dark about how much income their partner has;
• denied access to information like account numbers and payment arrangements;
• given no part in decisions about how the family’s money is spent;
• consistently dependent on their partner for their financial needs;
• loaning their partner money and never seeing it again;
• entirely responsible for their partner’s financial needs;
• unable to get credit because their partner has defaulted on household loans or expenses;
• losing or never seeing income or personal belongings that their partner is stealing from them, whether silently, openly, or through binge-spending;
• disturbed at work by calls or visits against their will from their partner;
• at risk of losing their job because their partner threatens to share inappropriate information or lies about them with their employer;
• required to ask for any money they need;
• required account to their partner for everything they spend even though their partner does not do the same;

…then they are being economically abused.

Like most forms of abuse, economic abuse is often but not always paired with emotional abuse. It is easy to say, “I would never let someone tell me I couldn’t take whatever job I wanted or keep me out of financial decisions!”, but rarely is the setup that blatant. It may even seem kind to begin with. Perhaps you don’t have as much income, and your partner generously handles all the bills. Maybe you naturally defer to them on big purchases because after all, it is their money. Maybe you start out on even footing but slide into this position of unequal power as one partner stays home to take care of children, becomes disabled, goes back to school, or is laid off. Perhaps you are the one who makes more, and extend your hospitality to your partner, covering their rent or their utilities or even food – “just for a while.” Or it may seem minor, even natural, next to the other abuse which has become an intrinsic part of the relationship.

The first step in ending abuse is to recognize it, and the effects it has. We will be examining the effects of abuse later on, but there is one which is important here: anger, which can manifest as defensiveness and even denial. If you feel angry and defensive when reading these lists, grumbling to yourself that I don’t know you or your partner, or that there were special circumstances that made everything on that list perfectly reasonable, or that you can’t call this abuse, you may want to be aware that that is not the reaction of someone who has never been abused.

Economic abuse can occur in adult/child relationships as well. Some simple examples of economic child abuse include:

• having to pay for your own food, clothing, housing, medicine, health care, or other basic needs;
• missing school in order to work;
• being required to work either in a family business or to earn outside income for the family;
• being unpaid or underpaid for such work;
• losing money as a result of broken agreements around chores, allowance, and other financial matters;
• being asked to loan money to your parents or other adults;
• never seeing that money again;
• not having your physical needs for food, clothing, housing, medicine, health care, or other basic needs met at all;
• losing money as a result of your parents or other adults stealing it;
• being forced into sex work to earn money for the family.

Many of us will look at that list and protest that sometimes parents simply can’t help not being able to meet their children’s needs. It is certainly true that sometimes parents feel trapped in low-income situations. Sometimes adults make a series of bad decisions, or find themselves thrust into bad situations as a result of natural disasters and other emergencies. Sometimes a government’s way of handling these situations seems to trap the victims or make things worse. However, placing the burden of these situations on children is always abuse and always wrong.

Handling traumatic situations is very much like writing a sonnet. In sonnets and other formally structured poems, the limits that we place on the situation paradoxically give us tremendous freedom. As we accept a few specific rules, we become able to see all the options that we are not restricted from using. At the opposite extreme, when writing free verse, poets often end up using the same few tricks and making the same sets of mistakes over and over; their apparent complete freedom can bewilder them. Having principles of our own choosing guides us toward experimentation, while having no set rules leaves us wandering in confusion and giving ourselves rules that don’t work.

It is the same with trauma. We always have a very large number of options available to us, but all too often we are sure that we are stuck in the situation at hand. We may even put tremendous amounts of energy into finding reasons that no other option will work. However, if we are determined to do anything to prevent our children from being adversely affected, we begin to be able to see that the choices we had rejected before might actually work. When we are willing to put our energy into preventing any harm to them, we start looking more closely at our options, gathering information on resources we never knew existed, pressing points that we had formerly given up on, and trying things we had never before been willing to consider.

If we have children, we must also be willing to put our energy into refusing abuse to ourselves. Abusive acts never happen in a vacuum. If we are abusing ourselves by not making sure our needs are met, whether physically, emotionally, or otherwise, then we are not fully available to support, nurture, and love our children. If we are staying in an abusive relationship at home, work, or elsewhere in our lives, we are not just teaching our children that it is reasonable to expect and accept abuse; we are also exposing them to abusive people and depleting the emotional resources that we have to offer them. In that spirit, let’s take a moment to look at another kind of economic abuse: abuse which occurs at work.

Abuse in the workplace may look like simple emotional abuse, but it carries one of the clearest hallmarks of economic abuse: the abuser has economic power over the victim such that they may seem to be unable to meet their needs if they leave the abusive relationship. Often it does not look so clear. Workplace abuse can come from co-workers at any level, from subordinates to CEOs, and might involve:

• performance pressure, in which the expectations for an employee’s performance rise as far as they can, without recognition or reward, until the employee is punished for not being able to exceed the final set of expectations;
• shaming or punishing employees who make mistakes;
• sexual harassment;
• discrimination on the basis of race, age, gender, sexuality, physical or mental abilities, et cetera;
• refusal to pay for work performed, including overtime;
• threats of violence, whether joking or serious;
• threats of any kind, such as using the threat of layoffs to demand that employees work harder or longer, especially without a commensurate increase in pay;
• pay that is below a living wage for its area;
• pay that is considerably below the standard for the work performed;
• refusal to communicate clearly about expectations;
• denial of benefits for any reason, including forcing employees to work fewer hours than they are able to in order to avoid paying them benefits;
• requiring employees to lie on behalf of the company or their supervisors or other co-workers;
• yelling or insults;
• outsourcing departments.

None of the items on these lists are options. If we are to truly face abuse, we have to accept that as our most basic premise. There is no situation which can justify any of the above acts. As adults, we have a double responsibility: we have to refuse to abuse others, and we have to refuse to condone abuse against ourselves.

It has only been perhaps twenty-five years since people began talking openly about any kind of abuse and sharing what they did to recover from it. We do not have a very large pool of information from which to draw. But one of the lessons that people have discovered over and over in that time has been that no matter how limited our options seem, no matter how little we know about what else can happen for us, it is not until we refuse to get involved with even potentially harmful acts that the cycle of abuse ends. It is only then that we are truly free to heal; it is only then that we can end abuse completely.

These are my suggestions for talking to children about abuse, based on my personal experiences….

• Don’t ask once and then drop it. This is a very common mistake, particularly if a child says they have never been abused. Why? Well, a “no” answer (or just no answer) can be a great relief even to an adult who has lots of reasons to suspect abuse. And a “no” answer can be inaccurate, especially when coming from a child, because they might not understand the question, especially at a young age; might have repressed the experience; might not feel safe talking about it to anyone, especially if they have been threatened or told no one will believe them; might not know how to talk about what happened; might want to tell but not be ready to deal with those feelings or what they imagine would happen next; might not feel safe talking about it in this particular place or with this particular person…. It often takes time for children to process what has happened, to consider how to talk to you about it, and to decide that it is safe. You can support them in that process by letting them know the conversation is still open.
• Do remember that it is okay to keep asking, or to keep talking about abuse in general. It’s easy to tell ourselves that it is harassment, or that we will end up wrongly “convincing” them that they were abused. We already know, from decades of research, that it’s impossible to convince someone they were abused if they weren’t. We just have to respect their boundaries while still letting them know the conversation isn’t over.
• Do talk to them about abuse in general, about what it includes, why it happens, and what effects it has. Always in an age-appropriate way. You can talk about it meaning something that something does that is Not Okay, and help them brainstorm about what that might be. Abuse isn’t always a huge grotesque, life-changing event; there are many everyday forms. You can talk about bullying as a form of abuse, or things you see on TV, or talk about your or their experiences. Abusive behavior doesn’t make someone An Abuser, and being an abuser doesn’t mean that someone is intentionally cruel or unloving; you can help them grow up to be able to call a spade a spade without collapsing under the fear of what others will think of the term. You can find a lot of information about that stuff on this site, and more is always coming. You can also send in questions about anything you’d like related to abuse, addiction, and/or recovery.
• Don’t threaten or pressure the child to talk about it. No “you need to tell me,” no well-meaning “you have to talk to someone about it,” no “we’ll sit here until you are willing to talk”…. The fact is, they don’t have to talk about it. Many children never do. Some adults never do. You can let them know that you are ready to listen whenever they want to talk, or that you can help them find someone they can trust to talk to. You can let them know that talking about this stuff helps people feel better, and that the more you (or whoever they want to talk to) knows about it, the better you (or whoever) will be able to help.
• Do pay attention to and respect the child’s reactions. Treat them with the respect you would an adult having a sensitive conversation. An adult doesn’t have to tell you what happened to them, or how they feel about it; well, neither does a child. At the same time, if the child seems hesitant but is still showing up for the conversation – as opposed to doing whatever it takes to change the subject or play with something far away from you – you can continue to approach with the same cautious respect that you would show an adult. Pretend you’re asking a work friend about a miscarriage, or a parent about their time at war.
• Don’t recoil from their experiences. Sometimes, it can be terrifying or “gross” to hear about what has happened to abuse survivors. People can find themselves enraged, or incredibly nervous and unwilling to go any further. Or simply unsure of how to go any further with the conversation. It’s okay to sit with the silence. Listen to your heart or your gut for the next right move. You can always be honest and tell them that that sounds terrible, or that you aren’t sure what to say.
• Do share your own experiences in an appropriate way. Or experiences you have heard from others. You don’t have to have felt or experienced the same exact thing; it’s enough just to be able to share whatever situation comes up for you, to let them know that they are not alone and that what they are feeling is totally reasonable and understandable. And that there is life beyond it. Even if the abuse is ongoing, there will be an end to it and there are others who know what they are going through. Plus, sharing your own stories shifts the focus of the conversation off of the child for a while. It gives them space to just listen, and hopefully a cathartic space where they can see their own feelings echoed outside of them.
• Don’t share intimate details of sexual abuse, of course, but it is fine to share the fears that came up for you, what helped you (at the time, or in adulthood), and whether or not you could talk to anyone about it and what that felt like. You can talk about your experiences, or those of people you know, in a child-appropriate way: for example, “You know, my father used to hit me sometimes too,” or “I know this is hard to talk about, because the same thing happened to me when I was a kid – except for me, it was with my grandmother.”
• Do let them know that whatever you suspect is happening to them happens to a lot of kids, and that you know it can be very confusing and scary – that even trying to talk about it can be confusing and scary. You can read or give them books about it; some children will find this validating, others will hate it, and a lot of the time it depends on the book. You can check out books about how to talk to children about abuse, too.
• Don’t buy into their fear or denial. It’s common for children (and adults; anyone really) to freak out and want to take it all back after telling someone about their abuse. Many of us have to battle an intense backlash of fear, shame, and self doubt when we first confront our abuse. We think that we should not have told, that it was not that bad, that our abusers will be sad, that they really didn’t mean to hurt us, that we are going to be in trouble, that we are horrible people who are just blowing things all out of proportion, how could we have said that, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And, on some level, we want to control the abuse, to make it all disappear from history by denying it ever happened after all. Then we won’t have to deal with these emotions and memories anymore, right? (No, they’ll devour us from within instead. Much better!) Don’t make it worse by buying into their fear and letting them pretend they can erase it.

You can let them know why you believe them, what events or effects you have witnessed, or simply that you believe them. Or that this reaction is totally natural. Another good response is to respond as if they were demanding the impossible, as indeed they are: to simply agree that you wish it hadn’t happened too, and that you are sorry it is so scary but that it will get better with time.

This is a very useful response with little kids in general – the “that would be nice” reply, where we validate their fantasies instead of reacting as though they are impossibly demanding. Often, when kids whine about how they wish school would never start, or insist with seemingly insane stubbornness that we are wrong and it never starts up again and they’re not going, or ask for wild things like horses and castles and candy for breakfast, parents react with anger. Anger because they feel bad that they can’t provide that stuff for their child, or because they are projecting onto the kid that their child is going to “act up” and whine and resist them and frustrate them, or because they aren’t sure how to set a boundary in this situation and feel afraid that the kid will be totally out of control.

The easiest fix I have found is to move with what the child is saying instead of fighting against it. I know that school will start, they will go, and a horse is too expensive or candy too unhealthy right now. And really, I know that they know that (assuming that I’ve actually explained why what they want can’t happen). So there’s no need for me to get upset: I can just move on to acknowledging how nice it would be (if only from their perspective) if they didn’t have to go to school, or could have a stack of cookies for breakfast. We can even go into a long exploration together of what that would be like – so what would have been a struggle turns into quality time. And then they feel heard, and they move on to do whatever it is they wanted less or didn’t want at all.

Like many modern families, my son’s has included a lot of family friends, godparents, parents’ partners, and other more ephemeral members. Of course, many of us do not have any legal rights as far as protecting him goes. In theory that’s good; ideally, sane, healthy parents use their rights to filter out people who are not safe for their children to be around. Sadly, in his case it has instead meant that his abusive birth parents slowly cut anyone out of the family who challenged their abusive ways.

There are many, many stories connected with that, and I may tell more of them over time. For the moment, I’d like to share some of the things I’ve been able to do to help him survive a smorgasboard of abuses.

Thing the First: Talking to him about abuse.

Like many people, I used to be afraid to talk to my child about abuse. I associated talking about trauma with the trauma itself: on some level, I feared that it would traumatize him to even hear about the possibility of abuse or to learn that his mother’s yelling, violence, and neglect would be called abusive. As if telling him it was abuse would magically turn it from “maybe okay” in his mind to “horribly painful.” Plus, I knew how important denial was to my survival as a child and I feared what would happen to him if I broke that denial.

But I couldn’t just ignore it and condone it with silence. I knew, too, how harmful it was to survivors to have their abuse go ignored and unchallenged and how hugely that contributes to the trauma. If I continued to stay silent, I would become an accomplice. Sure, there were things I could do, and had been doing, to mitigate the abuse – like arranging to have him more of the time, refusing to drive him to see the nearly-absent parent who had admitted to sexually abusing him and then tried to recant, and teaching him healthy coping skills. But it seemed to me that from a child’s perspective, there was a huge difference between someone subtly trying to intercede to prevent abuse in a way that might not be obvious for years, and someone flat-out saying “What is happening to you is not okay.”

I found that at first, especially when he was younger, he was afraid to talk about what had happened. He was afraid to admit that, for example, he was afraid of his mother’s anger and afraid that she would hurt him, even when he had brought it up before. Paying attention to his art helped; he would sometimes draw very telling pictures, such as one that he said was a monster: his mommy, angry, with long sharp claws. That also gave me a conversational opening, and some idea of what was going on inside his head and what he was experiencing away from me.

Sometimes we would ask him questions about how his teachers and other family members handled discipline, or if they ever hit him or yelled at him – each time asking about them one after the other by name. It helped a lot not just to give him a big vague group question like “does anyone ever yell at you,” which is too wide a net to throw a three-year-old. What helped me, too, was that he had been to a preschool where the teachers did yell at the children and slap their hands and arms, so when I felt afraid that he would think I was obsessed (and really, I didn’t bring this up that often) I at least knew that we both knew there were grounds for asking these questions. Of course, in reality, we both knew that anyway. It also helped to use the same one-by-one question format to ask about things like how different teachers and family members put him in time out – which was how we discovered that his preschool teacher had grabbed him by the ear to drag him back into time out one day, which was the last time he went to that school. So these are great things to ask kids about even if you don’t think they are being abused by another family member at all….

Sometimes he would talk about being afraid of his mommy, or we would ask if she ever hit him, and he would say yes and then take it back. Or take back having ever said he was afraid of her. It helped to remind him of things he’d said in the past; like when he tried to take back calling her a monster, and claim that the picture wasn’t of her but really was just of a monster, I could casually agree that I remembered him calling her a monster before, and move on. It helped to gently let him know that I believed what he said about the violence and fear he experienced, and that I had witnessed it myself more than once – without pushing him or trying to argue with him.

As he got older and I learned more about abuse and recovery, I started talking to him directly about abuse. The way I chose to explain it was that abuse was something that someone did to you that was Not Okay. I suggested that this might include things like hitting and yelling and asked if he could think of any examples. To my surprise, he immediately jumped in to bring up his mother spanking him.

Personally, I do think that spanking is always child abuse and always harmful – and whether or not it’s harmful, it’s also really pointless. It doesn’t teach children WHY they shouldn’t do something, even running into traffic (an example that is often given by those who sit on the fence about spanking) – it just teaches them that you do not want them to do it and they will get spanked if they do it. Which then means that once they are too old or too big to spank, they are left without any idea of why they should make the choices you were trying to teach them.

But in his case, spanking was a particularly obvious problem. It was a fairly clear-cut case of covert sexual abuse, because his mother had already made it clear in front of him, on many occasions, that she thought of spanking as a sexual act. She often talked loudly to friends and acquaintances about the latest sex party she had gone to, in front of her small child, in that common grownup fallacy that if a child isn’t looking directly at them they’re not listening. Or possibly that he wouldn’t understand anything he was hearing. I call it the “little pitchers don’t have ears” theory. So not long after, when she tried spanking him as a form of punishment, he was considerably more upset than even your average kid would have been – and, of course, too young to articulate why it was not okay with him.

I am very proud of him for being able to articulate, later on, that that had not been okay with him and that it was a kind of abuse. And I think that it is evidence that this way of talking to children works. I had asked him in the past about her spanking; talked to him about it at length on another occasion when he said she had taught him how to spank her friends (which she, a longterm BDSM safety advocate, confirmed was her response when he went around her party spanking them too high up on their spines….), and told him more than once, especially when he was terrified of getting in trouble for one thing or another, that I did not think that her spanking him had been okay and that I would never spank him. At one point, he was even brave enough to ask me and another one of his parental figures to talk to his mom for him and tell her that he did not want her to spank him or yell at him anymore. (I think that the spanking thing took, or perhaps that she had already abandoned it; the yelling part did not.)

And over several years of this tentative conversation, he became able to bring it up himself and vehemently, firmly say that it had not been okay with him. The miracle of this, to me, is that not only was he able to bring it up – this child who was terrified to talk about even thinking his mommy was scary, and who had never been willing to tell anyone that I know of about the overt sexual abuse he experienced – but that he became able to talk about it without any shame whatsoever. I think most if not all survivors reading this will know the kind of guilt and shame we take on: the fear of ever talking about what happened to us, of admitting that it was not okay with us, the secret deep-seated belief that we did something to deserve it or could and should have done something to stop it even if consciously we know that’s not true. It gives me a lot of hope to know that in at least one area, consistent support from at least one adult in his life let him let go of that shame within just a few years. And I think that is the area in which I was able to give him the most consistent support.

Next time: suggested dos and don’ts!