Putting Your Heart On The Page

Author's Note: May trigger memories for others of previous childhood abuse.

Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter — What if? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers prompts — The Exercise:

Make a notebook entry on an early childhood event that made you cry or terrified you, or that made you weak with shame or triumpant with revenge. Then write a story about that event. Take us back to those traumatic times, relive them for us through your story in such a way so as to make your experience ours.

The Objective:

To learn to identify events in your life that are still capable of making you laugh and cry. If you can capture these emotions and put them on paper, chances are you will also make readers laugh and cry as well.

I was seven and I may have been younger. That would mean my brother was five. Our parents went for an evening out, and we were left with my dad's relative, who was recently home from the service. My cousin, who was a couple of years older, was staying overnight.

The announcement came that it was bedtime. He told my cousin she would be sleeping on the couch. We found a pillow and blankets for her, then my brother and I went to bed. We were told to sleep on the bunk beds.

My brother quickly made it onto the top bunk. As we lay there, the babysitter came into the room and lay down by me. I objected, but there he was, and the next thing I knew, he was touching me. He was touching me without my permission, and I was objecting, but I couldn't move. I could complain.

I was overwhelmed with fear, not knowing how long or what I would experience with this person, whom I didn't know. We had just met him, that I could remember. We have a large family with many relatives, so I couldn't remember ever meeting him.

My parents didn't go out much. I have no memory of where the baby was or my sister. No memory of them being there. For many years, I didn't remember this happening. And when I did, I couldn't stop crying when I would talk about it.

Then I remembered my brother was on the top bunk, jumping up and down on the bed and yelling, "I'm telling!" And my cousin told me that she would never stay there again. To this day, we never talked about what happened to her or me, and I have seen her over the years.

It may be time to reach out to this cousin, or not. Maybe leave it in the past. Then, when I was an adult and in recovery, I started seeing a therapist. She helped me remember, and then she taught me something she had been teaching other therapists called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR).

That worked for me. I can talk about the experience without crying, and time with this therapist helped me recover from other abuses I had experienced, and she helped me work through them. None of the rest of them with EMDR.

I don't remember if our parents were told, but I don't remember anything more about that experience. Years later, in early recovery, I did ask my mother about that time, and she didn't recall it. She told me that she may not have been able to allow herself to acknowledge what happened, as she had been abused as a child as well.

We were only able to talk openly about this when we were both in recovery. She grew up on the reservation, and we never lived there, except for missing kindergarten to have my tonsils removed. Today, I believe we didn't live there due to her childhood experience.