a prayer for peace

I watch only one soap opera - General Hospital - and people scoff.  The lives of the prestigious Quatermaines and the adventurous Spencers doesn't seem realistic to them.  But if anyone who's ever made that statement had met any one member of my family, they would know how realistic it was.  Deep, dark secrets and tragedy exist.  They go on existing from generation to generation.  The sins of the father and all that... well it exists in my family.

I don't talk about it much, but something happened to me when I was just a little girl.  Before I ever dated a man who called me names, a man who threatened to kill me, a man who raped me, I was molested.  Actually, I'm not sure if you can call it that since it only happened one time.  I owe my mother for that I think.  While she didn't know exactly how to handle the situation and definitely could have handled it better, she did the best she could.  She was stronger than her own mother and for that I am grateful.

When my mother was being molested, she went to her mother for help and her mother called her a liar.  Her mother ostracized her.  It has all gotten so bad now that my mother lives on the outskirts of her dark family.  Her name is only whispered when - and if - it's mentioned at all.  And she is not Jeanne, the social worker, the mother, the daughter, the sister... she is Jeanne, the traitor, the liar, the scape goat.  For this, I admire her.

My grandfather was not a nice man.  He was a child predator.  He preyed on the weakness of my grandmother and her children.  My mother, my aunt, and my uncles, God help them, were his victims. My mother will talk of this openly.  Thank God, one of her brothers is starting to admit things as well.  Through this I believe they will both heal.  Through this, their children will be saved.  The curse will be broken.

But what of the other siblings?  What of my mother's sister?  Of her brothers that won't admit the truth?

I prayer for them.  Not because I like them, but because I love them.  Most of them I miss terribly.  I even pray, in the depths of my soul, that the one uncle I have who touched me and forced me to touch him, is saved one day from the torture of his own memories.

Mostly though, I pray for the other children involved.  I have cousins enthralled in all this mess.  Cousins whose parents haven't spoken of anything.  Cousins who are being paraded around an uncle I know to be guilty of at least one crime.

I pray that they will not know the pain I did.  I pray that they will not have to deal with the sins of their fathers.  And if that doesn't work, and the worst happens to them, I pray that one day they can find me.  Or that they can find the aunt I was fortunate enough to speak with before posting this.  I pray that they will find safety somewhere and that they will know they are loved.

And above all else, knowing that this is now the fourth generation of abuse my family has survived, I pray that it is coming to an end.

I pray for peace.