The Bravest Boy I've Ever Known

Recently, I shared about one night of shelter that my brother and I experienced, and how I held him and calmed him when he was crying and upset. While on that one particularly bright night, my brother had a weak moment and needed me, the truth is that my little brother was incredibly brave. Throughout his earliest years, he somehow found the strength to be honest. When police officers asked him about abuse that occurred, he was able to answer them truthfully, in great detail and specificity. He spoke the truth in the language of a child, and he did so without evidence of shame. Meanwhile I, the supposedly bright and precocious older sister, was unable to speak the truth. I cried in silence, and then I spent years minimizing what happened to me, living with the shame that it was somehow my fault and that telling the story only made it worse.

I remember one day in particular, grown ups showed up unexpectedly at our front door. I'm not sure who was responsible for us that day, but I know we were home alone. My brother had a sense that the grown ups could help us, that we should open the door and let them in and talk to them. I was silently shaking my head no, and crying in fear. As my little brother stood on his tip toes with his hand straining to reach the door knob, I begged and pleaded with him not to open the door. I was terrified of what might happen if we were found there alone, fearful of the questions we would surely be asked. My brother was willing to face the questions, willing to take the risk. Eventually, the grown ups stopped knocking on the door, and drove away.  We stayed together in the room for a while, shaken and uncertain. The light outside faded, and we cried together, both of us desperately wanting something better, neither of us knowing how to find help without the other. In time, my brother would take the opportunity to tell helpful grown ups what was happening to us. I will never be able to repay him for his courage. 

As we grew, my brother and I stayed close to one another. Our relationship continued to be this intense sort of give and take for several years. I continually acted like a mother hen, and shushed and rocked and calmed and cried with my brother. I told him everything would be ok. I encouraged him not to rock the boat, as that was my preferred method of survival. My brother, on the other hand, was not content to allow circumstances to continue as they were. He struggled to get along within our dysfunctional family dynamic at times, showing the outside world challenging behaviors and honestly answering questions about one parent or the other when asked. The ways we coped with the abuse we suffered were different, but we continued to cope together. He was my Bubba; I was his Sissy.

He was so small, and so brave.

 That little brother of mine grew into a charming young man. He was always trying to help someone in trouble. Often, he would put himself into a compromising situation in an effort to help anyone he perceived to be in need. He was loyal to his family, even to those who hurt him. He waited tables after high school, and was good at it. He never knew a stranger. He was like his dad, able to talk about anything. As time went on, his conversations occasionally took on an unbelievable tone. Like his dad, he started piling extras on top of truth, started to know about things he didn’t really know about, started to cover his reality with a story that sounded just a little bit better.

Somewhere along the line, my brother’s voice changed. There were a few times growing up when he told the truth but no one believed him or took action to protect him. I think that may be where his relationship with the truth started shifting. And when that happened, when the truth went unheard and the lies became more entertaining stories, I wonder if that was the beginning of what allowed him to step so far away from a healthy reality. Soon, he was drifting, keeping most of the very real parts of his life and story hidden in darkness. He remained outgoing and extroverted, he continued to meet and make friends everywhere he went, but he pulled further and further away from those who knew him best. He created the stories around himself that he felt others wanted to hear, and he hid the truest places. I guess he began to behave in adulthood as I had encouraged in childhood: keep quiet and let them believe all is well, because telling the true stories may cause too much pain.

It makes me unbelievably sad to consider that the person whom I regard as one of the most brave truth tellers I have ever known learned far too well how to hide his real self. That young boy, who could answer honestly and without shame, he got lost. The more darkness invaded, the harder it was to fend it off. I understand the feeling of balancing on the edge of a knife, feeling as though you could fall off the world altogether, and holding on by the thinnest wire to the belief that someone cares, someone loves me, I am worthy and enough. We traded places along the way, my Bubba and I. I grew more honest and open about the circumstances of my life and how they affected me, while my brother learned to hide and keep the darkness quiet. We both recognized the reality of what could happen if we stepped out too far in our various balancing acts. I am so crushed that my Bubba lost his hold on that thin wire at some point, he fell off the sharp edge and couldn’t find a place to pull himself back, and the results have been devastating.

The result of turning to hiding the truths and creating this strange alternate version of himself has lead to even more heartache than ever before. This week I learned that my brother now resides in a maximum security prison in the middle of nowhere. This knowledge wrecks me, and a heavy darkness threatens to pull me off my own edge as well. I knew that this day was coming. I saw him in jail, I watched the trial, and I heard them read the conviction. I read the story in the newspaper, saw the words “convicted sex offender” and “pedophile” tied to the one person who knows best the details of the earliest years of my own life. But seeing his name listed as confined in maximum security brings a deeper sense of the reality of what he will face in the next 20 years of his life.

Over the next 20 years, Lord willing, I will watch my children grow. They will go to middle school and endure emotional angst. They will attend high school, learn to drive, take someone to a dance, and hopefully find their niche. They may later go to college or get married. I pray they will find a course in life that fulfills them and brings them happiness. The opportunity to be a part of their lives, to watch these very normal events unfold, this seems to me an inordinate amount of undeserved mercy poured on my life. During that same 20 years, my brother, the one who spoke for me and was my voice when I could not speak, he will be part of a very different reality. He will, perhaps, fend off rapists. He will fight for his life to not be taken. He will undoubtedly consider taking his own life. He may, I hope, find some sort of routine in sameness. He will be confronted with his choices. He will be offered the opportunity for rehabilitation therapy. All the while, he will be only a shadow of himself, of all that he could have become. He will carry within him the ghost of the bravest little boy I have ever known, my Bubba.

I cannot begin to express the depth of emotion and heartache that carrying this knowledge of my brother’s daily existence makes me feel. I know that I feel angry. I am angry at my abusers, his abusers. I am angry at those who didn’t step in sooner to stop the abuse from continuing. I am angry with those who left us alone, abandoning us at various times and leaving us at risk of greater suffering. And I am so angry at my little brother. I am angry over his choices to pull away from the support and the community that knew him, that wanted to help and to calm and to comfort him, that were always trying to extend the wire he needed to keep from falling.

I know that I feel intense grief. I find myself asking a question I asked often throughout my childhood—how could a loving God allow such atrocity to happen? Where was God when my brother was abused and where was He when my brother was abusing others? This question devastates me. I find a sliver of comfort in the belief that God’s grief over all this devastation is perhaps greater than my own.

I know that I feel sorrow, and regret, and the weight of a thousand words I could not find before and struggle intensely to find now. I don’t know if I can ever forgive myself for my past silence. When we were very small, my brother was my voice. His honesty rescued me. His willingness to speak spared me from greater suffering. And now my brother no longer gets to have a voice; his choices have robbed him and he has stolen the truth from himself. But I will remember when he was brave, and find a way to echo his former honesty, and pray and hope that it finds its way to someone who needs a voice.

I wish I could go back in time and illuminate the places of darkness in my brother’s heart. I wish I could have helped him give a voice to the thoughts he had that confused and condemned him, that held him back from sharing his truth with someone who could have helped him along the way, before things progressed this far. I cannot change the ways that darkness affected my brother’s life, and now affects the lives of those he has abused, but I can change the ways it will affect mine. I will keep pushing back the darkness. I will keep sharing this difficult story. The shame and grief of the truth of this life makes me want to stop telling people about it. But I cannot. For the sake of the darkness in my heart, in my brother’s heart, in the hearts of those he hurt, I have to keep telling the story. I have to continue to work to find the words. I have to find the courage to raise my voice. I have to keep turning on the light.

One Night of Shelter

I remember that the house felt warm. It was December, so probably bitterly cold in Missouri. My parents had been separated for nine months, and we didn’t really have anything like a home during that time. When we were with my mother, we had been staying in her friend’s basement.  It was always dark in the basement.  You had to squint in order to see when you came down the stairs. We had also stayed for a short time in the empty house my grandparents had on the market, and it was always cold inside that house. When we were with my dad, circumstances weren’t any better. For a while we lived in a motel room, and I remember shivering while bathing in a plastic basin. When we were with him in a small house, we were often sitting with our feet on the oven door in order to be near a source of heat.

But that night in December, when we stayed with an emergency placement foster family, I remember that the house felt warm. It was brightly lit and cozy. Lamps glowed all over the room and overhead lights flooded the space with blindingly golden light. Maybe that was one reason why my little brother kept crying. Maybe he wasn’t used to the brightness and warmth we felt there. I remember the woman asking me if I knew anything that would help him feel better. He was screaming and crying so hard, his little face all scrunched up, bright red and streaked with tears.

 I asked if they had any books. Josh liked it when I read to him. They handed me a Little Golden Book, The Monster at the End of this Book, Starring Lovable, Furry Old Grover. To this day, it is one of my favorite children’s books. That’s how it is—memory is what ties a book like that to your heart.

So there we sat, in the bright, warm living room on a big, cozy armchair. I was a skinny little girl, barely-five-years-old, with long stringy dishwater blond hair.  He was still a baby to me, just three-years-old and crying for someone and someplace he knew. The grownups helped me as I struggled to somehow pull his body, flailing in a desperate tantrum, onto my lap and I began to read. Josh quieted down, his arms and legs relaxing, his weight settling into me, sniffling and shaking a little as his sobbing ceased.  He began to listen to my voice as I went through the pages, trying to do a Muppet voice for Grover. When we got to the parts where Grover would frantically shout, “No! Stop turning pages!” he would even giggle a little bit.

I’m not sure how many times I read that book that night. I know I didn’t want to stop turning the pages. Everything about that moment felt safe. I cannot see the faces of the adults in that home, or remember anything about their appearance.  I remember them only as shadows, illuminated by the brightness all around us.  I remember the kindness in their voices, the softness of their hands as they guided and directed us, offering all of the comforts of their home.  I remember their concern and desire to calm my brother, rather than ignoring his fears.

I wonder if that family ever thinks of me the way I think of them. Am I a shadow on their memory as well?  Most likely, I was one of many children who received a night of shelter in their home.  I was only another poor child whose circumstances led to the need for an emergency place to stay, a haven and a retreat from the world around them. That day, someone had reported an incident of sexual abuse. I had been taken to the hospital and poked, prodded, questioned and examined. I wore a paper gown and sat on a cold, vinyl hospital examining table, shivering and nodding my head when I was asked shameful, personal questions.  But that night, I was sheltered in a home so well-lit it was able to keep out the darkness.  I was given a retreat from a world with poverty and low-lighting and cold that was hiding darker secrets of touching and shaming and violence.

I don’t know if that family ever thinks of me, but I will always remember them.  I am so grateful for their willingness to open their home to two dirty, terrified children, reeling from the effects of divorce, poverty, sexual abuse and fear. That one night gave me a glimpse into what was possible. Those shadowy figures of compassion and sacrifice gave me hope that I could be in a home like that again. That night was a shield and defense of my belief that life could be different, that it was possible for family and home to be a sanctuary and a place of peace, rather than a continually tense place of fear.

April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month. While I wish my abuse could have been prevented, I believe that the moments of shelter I experienced throughout my childhood are what have allowed me to break free from the cycle of abuse in my own life. Connections with community, people who cared enough to get involved, family who persistently let me know they would be available to me when I needed them, faith communities who showed me the heart of a loving God—these things provided the backbone for me to be able to change my future.

I understand that the problem of child abuse can feel so overwhelming, and the solutions must be multifaceted. There are broad, nationwide issues of poverty, mental healthcare, family support structure, reporting and placement that must be addressed. Yet a simple act that anyone can take is to become more involved with the children and families in their community. Knowing your neighbors, becoming involved in your child’s school, participating in local groups that provide family support—these are simple steps that anyone can take to help provide a network of shelter for children at risk. Because of multiple occasions where individuals, families or groups cared enough to be involved throughout my life, I remain in a place of shelter now.

Don’t see child abuse as the kind of issue that is personal, family-related, or none of your business. Protecting children should be all of our business. We can all be a place of shelter for another child by taking an interest in their life and showing that we care. Find a way to be a place of shelter for a child.  I know that they will be forever impacted by the feeling that someone cared enough to notice them.

For more information on National Child Abuse Prevention month and ways you can get involved, please visit www.childwelfare.gov.