Walking on Eggshells: Discovering Strength and Courage Amid Chaos (12 page)

I also send my older daughter, Abbie, to an all-girls private school. As of this writing, Mady is just two and a half and I have a wonderful nanny whom we all have come to love who cares for Mady and Abbie when I have to work. While I’d rather spend all my time with them, I am a single parent and have work commitments
that take up part of my day. I am so grateful, though, to have found this loving, mature woman who values and upholds my standards for my daughters.

I am also totally aware of which songs are on the radio when we are in the car or at home. I fill Abbie’s iPod with Christian music and have taught her that there is a big difference between singing about love and singing about sex. My rule is that if she doesn’t understand the meaning of the lyrics, then she doesn’t need to listen to the song—or sing it. I know every second of every day whom my daughters spend their time with; what they are doing; and what words, music, and other information go into their heads.

Finally, I make sure that I correct any inappropriate tone or words that come out of my daughters’ mouths. Children should respect others, especially adults. I understand a child’s right to be angry or disappointed, but there are appropriate ways to express those feelings without disrespecting others.

You might think that I am an overly strict and rigid parent, and you would be partially right. I am strict, but having lived through what I have, I know firsthand the dangers out there. Plus I think there is a big difference between being a parent and being a friend. My job is to be a parent. I understand that one day my daughters are not going to like the decisions I make for them, such as saying no to dating, but they know I discipline only out of love. I know if you were to meet my girls you would see two well-adjusted, friendly, active, intelligent, funny, and engaging children who are a delight to be around.

Best of all, I have an open relationship with my daughters, meaning they know they can come to me for anything, about anything, and I will explain or help in a manner suitable for their age. Supporting their individual interests, such as singing and swimming, is important to me and I tell them all the time that I love them with all my heart. They know there is nothing they could ever say or do to change that. Ever.

Because of all of that, I find that every day I become a better parent. And because I am a better parent, every day my girls become better daughters. I do realize that in some ways I am reliving the childhood I never had with my kids, and have become not the parent I wish I had, but the parent I desperately needed. I needed a parent with rules and boundaries mixed with love who could show by example a physically and emotionally healthy way to live. Instead, when I was growing up I was left largely unsupervised, which allowed me to follow my older sister far too closely.

At about the time I entered seventh grade my sister Barbara joined us in Alaska. She had most recently been living with Dad and Beth, but it was time for another bounce, and here she was. While I was thrilled to have my older sister around, it quickly became apparent to me that Barbara liked to party as much as our mother did. She was just sixteen, but boys, late nights, drugs, and alcohol were already the norms for her. And they were beginning to be for me, too. I really loved hearing her stories about boys and parties.

My female role models were definitely modeling a path for
me; it just wasn’t a very positive one. I didn’t know that yet and I wanted so much to fit in—wanted so desperately to be seen as a cool person—that I began telling friends I had slept with twelve different boys even though I was still very much a virgin.

Like many twelve-year-old girls I was so boy-crazy I could barely stand it. The difference between other girls and me, however, was that I had witnessed far too much while I was still way too young. While other little girls giggled with embarrassment when they thought of kissing a boy, I can never remember a time when I was that innocent.

Instead, when I was twelve I couldn’t wait to sleep with a boy, and my mother was the unwitting catalyst that made that happen. One day I walked to the bar to ask my mother something and found her wearing a T-shirt that read
SPANK ME
and saw that several men were ogling her. Even though I knew she drank, even though I knew she slept with different men, the scene that day shocked me.

I feel sad now when I think of my mother. She really is a very nice and loving person, but alcohol and drugs change us all. The power that the illness of addiction has over so many people, myself included, is heart-wrenching, especially because it affects every member of the family, every friend, every working relationship the addict has. For many years the thing I was most afraid of was ending up like her, always dependent on a man, living the party life, not loving myself, and needing drugs and alcohol to get through each day.

But I didn’t realize any of that then. What I saw at the bar that
day just gave me more validation that women need a physical relationship with a man to be happy. While I do not advocate unmarried or unprotected sex now, that’s why I lost my virginity in the front seat of a car after a party when I was twelve to a boy who was five years older than I. The boy was a former boyfriend of Barbara’s, and I remember I was so happy that I finally had sex.

Today even the thought of that night makes me sick. I was far too young to handle the responsibility, and there was nothing loving or sacred about the act. He was a nice boy and a nice friend, but I wasn’t in love with him, or he with me. Everything about it was totally wrong.

★

As you have seen, drugs of one form or another had been a given in my life as long as I could remember, but drug use in our family was going to go to an entirely new level. I had been smoking pot on and off (mostly on) since my days in the closet in Hawai’i when I was eight. Barbara and my mother also smoked, but when Barbara returned to Alaska this last time, my mother began giving her pot.

It says a lot that the use of marijuana was so commonplace in our family that a mother would give it to her daughter. In our own version of sibling rivalry, I thought it unfair that Barbara was given pot and I wasn’t. When I first asked my mother for some marijuana, she said no, but when I asked several more times, she gave in, and that’s how my mother became my supplier. All I can
think now is that when you are around anything long enough, it becomes the norm, and for my mother, using drugs and drinking was just part of everyday life.

About the only really normal thing in my life was that I fell in love with the boy next door, or in this case, the boy across the street. Even better, he was in love with me! James Jenkins was a year older than I. He was the star athlete in our school and he was the epitome of tall, dark, and handsome. Before long I was spending every waking moment with James. Our windows faced each other, and I stapled a sheet across mine so he could slip in unnoticed. All we did was hold each other in my bed. And although that, too, was inappropriate for a child of thirteen, I remember feeling so loved and content and secure. James did not know I smoked pot, even though he must have had some inkling of the dysfunction in my family.

To add to that dysfunction, my mother had a new boyfriend, and at about this time he moved in with us. Jimmy Neeley was a really good guy and was a stabilizing factor in my mother’s life—and in mine. Back in Colorado, Dad and Beth had just had a baby girl, Bonnie Jo, and all sorts of conflicting emotions were running through my head.
I
was Dad’s Baby Lyssa.
I
was his baby girl. The youngest of Dad’s children had always been me, and to have a sibling younger than I was . . . well, that was inconceivable to me.

Jimmy’s presence also helped us financially. Since Mark had left, we had been dirt poor, and having another income in the household lifted us out of the bottom rungs of poverty. In addition, Jimmy
spoiled Nick and me, and I ate up all the attention. I liked him for that, and also because he was someone I felt I could trust. That was important because at some point I realized I was pregnant.

James and my innocent holding of each other had eventually turned into much more. We had tried to be careful, but I was too embarrassed to ask for condoms during my therapy sessions and we had no other access to them. While I knew being pregnant would complicate my life, I had no concept of the seriousness of it all. A month or so earlier Barbara, still just sixteen, had announced that she was pregnant. She had immediately been sent back to Colorado to live with Dad and eventually had an abortion. Two of my friends, including one named Danika, were also in the fifteen-to-sixteen age range, and they, too, were expecting. This, I thought, is what teenage girls do.

Even though I didn’t understand the scope of change a baby would bring into my life, I was afraid to tell anyone about the pregnancy. I knew it had to be done, however, so one night I got drunk and told my mother. If I thought she might be supportive, I thought wrong. Instead, she hit me across the face and called me trash. I’ll never forget how deeply that word stung. My mother then called James’s mom, and more yelling began. Before I knew it Jimmy, my mother, and I were fighting just like Dad and Beth used to fight. Talk about learned behavior!

I was angry with my mother for not supporting me and angry with Jimmy because he took my mother’s side. In my anger, I told Jimmy that my mother was dating someone down at the bar. This
was a fact my mother had been hiding from Jimmy for some time. Jimmy then stormed down to the bar, and I assume another fight took place.

It wasn’t too many days later when Jimmy moved out. I was sad to see him go because I truly liked him. I was also sad because he had moved a huge entertainment center into my room, and now it was leaving with Jimmy. I didn’t have to worry too long about that, however, because I was sent back to Denver, this time to live with my grandmother.

★

While I initially resisted the move, it turned out that I loved my time with my grandmother. This was my mother’s mother, Grace Katie Worthington. She had raised five children by herself after her husband died and had a no-nonsense way about her. For example, Grandma had a strict five-minute shower rule. There was an actual timer on the shower, and if you weren’t done when the shower turned off, too bad.

Grandma also always had supper ready at five o’clock. If you weren’t there to eat it, you didn’t eat until breakfast the next morning. She was strict, never found the need to swear, and was the most down-to-earth woman that I had ever met. To this day she is one of my main foundations, and I feel so blessed to have her in my life.

In Denver I also was able to reconnect with friends I had made
from previous childhood visits. One friend lived up the block, and I went to several parties at her house. It was summertime, so kids were on break from school, which meant that whatever curfews they normally had were relaxed.

I met a lot of people then, but Steve was one who became special. James and I had broken up after the pregnancy news had gotten out and I desperately craved attention. Steve was always around, and that’s how he became first a friend, and then a boyfriend. Grandma wisely didn’t allow me to have boys in my room, but I lied and told her that Steve was gay. This is yet another thing I am not proud of. My grandma had done nothing but try to keep me on track until the baby was born and I could give him or her up for adoption. That I lied to this kind woman fills me with shame.

Just a few short weeks after I got there, I went to a party at a house that belonged to another friend. I say a party, but it really was a drunken brawl. By the time the friend’s parents came home unexpectedly, Steve and I were out of pot and had decided to get some more. For some reason we left in a car with four friends of his. I say friends, but these guys were members of a serious gang. Steve and I were in the backseat making out when I noticed we had pulled off the interstate into a secluded area near a bike path.

I remember seeing a tunnel of running water next to the bike path, but before I knew it, Steve and I were having sex. After, he handed me a pill and told me to take it. I wasn’t so drunk that I would have taken just anything, and I was very upset and embarrassed that we had had sex in the presence of these other
guys. I said no to the pill and remember telling Steve that I needed to get home, that my grandma would be mad if I was late, but it was to no avail.

The next thing I knew, Steve pulled out a knife and held it to my neck. I was forced to swallow the pill (which I later learned was Ecstasy) before each of the other four guys took their turn with me inside the car. They were very rough and I began to bleed, badly, all over the interior of the car. By this time I was in a very odd state of consciousness and unconsciousness. Maybe it was the drug, or maybe it was my mind mercifully distancing me from this horrible thing that was happening.

All I remember after that is a blur of police officers. That memory, in turn, ran into a memory of my being in the hospital. How I got to the hospital I have no idea. But I did. As I suspected, Grandma had indeed gotten worried, but in a different way than I expected. She had called the police and reported me as a runaway. It may be that a police cruiser found me and took me in. I don’t know for sure.

At the hospital they tested me for semen and drugs, and I was given the full rape workup. I really didn’t want to let anyone near my privates, so the rape workup in itself was quite traumatic. I can also just imagine what I must have looked like. I had lost the baby—I had been fourteen weeks pregnant and I am sure all of the adults around me felt that loss was for the best. While I did feel relief, there was a lot of grief, sadness, and anger, too. That baby was a human life I made with a boy I loved and now he or she
would never be born. The way I was drinking and smoking pot I might have lost the baby eventually anyway, but that’s something I will not know until I meet God.

At some point my grandma came to get me. We later went to Walmart and got a new purse and some clothes, and then headed to the police station to give a statement. I hoped to get validation from the police officers, to get a warrant out for these thugs and get them off the street. If they had raped me, they had done it to others—and would again.