It isn't the boarded-over windows in the front door, nor the fogged up enclosure in what used to be our open-air side porch, both of which provide a creepy feeling that I suspect is really more about the personal stuff that haunts me.
It's the house where my dad continued his desperate efforts to remake me in his own image, always trying to make me more athletic.
It's the house where he spent countless drunken nights stumbling around and swearing at his personal ghosts, for whom mom and Karen and I were sometimes stand-ins.
It's the house where he and mom fought over his drinking.
It's the house where I once accidentally landed on my sister's head in the swimming pool when I was trying to jump over her and slipped. (Thank God she wasn't hurt.)
It's the house where I overheard him arguing with my grandmom over whether my mom had ever given him "plenty of sex."
It's the house where I first remember being sexually abused by someone: my dad. I've been told that it had happened once before, when I was younger, but I don't remember that.
It's the house where I chose my side, rooting with mom for Notre Dame over dad's Alabama preference in the 1973 Sugar Bowl, even though I didn't know squat.
It's the house where we stayed with my aunt while mom tended to dad in the hospital after his accident in PA.
It's the house where he finally shot himself while the rest of us were off on vacation. Mom told us he died of a "cerebral hemorrhage."
It's the house where my uncle told me, "You're the man of the house, now."
It's the house where mom finally told me, maybe as much as two years later, that he'd killed himself, and how.
It's the house where she also finally told me he wasn't my biological father.
It's the house where mom first introduced us to the man who would become (far and away) my worst sexual abuser and, much later, due to the silence about that into which he manipulated me for so long, my stepfather.
It's the house where my wife and I first made love.
It's just a house. But what a freak show my childhood in it was.
Showing posts with label Sexuality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sexuality. Show all posts
Monday, October 22, 2018
Tuesday, April 03, 2018
Another dream
I'm not sure what to make of them. I certainly know not to conclude that I'm gay.
So far, I am not letting them lead me into fantasy, but trusting in God's revealed plan for my life.
So far, I am not letting them lead me into fantasy, but trusting in God's revealed plan for my life.
Monday, April 02, 2018
Disturbing dream
The dream was graphic. I'm not including the details, but still, you should stop reading if you don't want to know this about me.
In it, I was visiting my uncle, who was still alive. In my dream, he shared the long-term obsession from which I've felt the Lord has been delivering me for the last month or so. In my dream, I shared with him where I think that obsession came from and why it was so hurtful to me.
At first he was patient with me, understanding that I didn't want to give in to this desire. But eventually he tempted me anyway. I resisted by saying that I would feel like a piece of defecatory material if I did. He replied that this was the purpose of it. Then I woke up.
The first thing I realized was that my uncle is still dead. I miss him so much, and he would never have done anything like this to me.
The second thing I remembered was to interpret dreams as if every element represents me in some way. That actually fit, especially the reminder at the end, which is very important for me to remember!
The third thing I remembered was to ask God to help me in my weakness.
(Added: The aftermath of this dream is that this temptation that had been so far removed from my thoughts for the last month has been in the forefront of my mind all day. Failure feels inevitable again.)
In it, I was visiting my uncle, who was still alive. In my dream, he shared the long-term obsession from which I've felt the Lord has been delivering me for the last month or so. In my dream, I shared with him where I think that obsession came from and why it was so hurtful to me.
At first he was patient with me, understanding that I didn't want to give in to this desire. But eventually he tempted me anyway. I resisted by saying that I would feel like a piece of defecatory material if I did. He replied that this was the purpose of it. Then I woke up.
The first thing I realized was that my uncle is still dead. I miss him so much, and he would never have done anything like this to me.
The second thing I remembered was to interpret dreams as if every element represents me in some way. That actually fit, especially the reminder at the end, which is very important for me to remember!
The third thing I remembered was to ask God to help me in my weakness.
(Added: The aftermath of this dream is that this temptation that had been so far removed from my thoughts for the last month has been in the forefront of my mind all day. Failure feels inevitable again.)
Monday, February 05, 2018
Friday, October 14, 2016
A physical/emotional response
I just noticed a strange and revelatory response I had (have, I'm pretty sure; it felt familiar) to a frequent thought. I was setting aside a temptation to engage in an impure thought process that leads me to sin, partly because I just received prayer for this area last night in preparation for this weekend's Unbound seminar. It was the most subtly sublime moment of grace-filled, Spirit-driven self revelation, concerning a physio-emotional response that I have to temptation. As I decided to not engage in this thought process, I felt the muscles at the base of my skull contract, and I noticed that I thought of why I don't want to engage in that thought process right now, as if I was reserving it to return to at a later time.
As I say, this felt familiar, and I considered other recent times that I have felt this physical sensation. It turns out that it has never been so much a rejection as a postponement of my tempting thoughts, and it is a reason I have not been able to persevere in purity in this area. I then considered when else I have felt like this: it also turns out that this response was seared into me when I was being sexually abused. It is directly related to my resignation to my physical inability to ever force my way past my stepfather to escape from the room when I was a teenager. It became part of the inevitability of my submission to him sexually, and subsequently of my submission to sexual impurity in general.
Wow. This is exactly the sort of red flag I should have learned about in one of my rounds of therapy. It's a question I would now ask of anyone who shared that they struggle in a given area: go back to the beginning of the latest incident, and let's go through how your body physically responded before you realized you were responding. Then: when is the earliest time you remember feeling that way?
I'm not going to assume that the battle is over now. But I understand something about it that I never did before, a physical and emotional and thought process that ties in with the spiritual aspect that I've tried to invoke previously. Perhaps, now that I have all four pieces, I can have lasting victory in this area.
As I say, this felt familiar, and I considered other recent times that I have felt this physical sensation. It turns out that it has never been so much a rejection as a postponement of my tempting thoughts, and it is a reason I have not been able to persevere in purity in this area. I then considered when else I have felt like this: it also turns out that this response was seared into me when I was being sexually abused. It is directly related to my resignation to my physical inability to ever force my way past my stepfather to escape from the room when I was a teenager. It became part of the inevitability of my submission to him sexually, and subsequently of my submission to sexual impurity in general.
Wow. This is exactly the sort of red flag I should have learned about in one of my rounds of therapy. It's a question I would now ask of anyone who shared that they struggle in a given area: go back to the beginning of the latest incident, and let's go through how your body physically responded before you realized you were responding. Then: when is the earliest time you remember feeling that way?
I'm not going to assume that the battle is over now. But I understand something about it that I never did before, a physical and emotional and thought process that ties in with the spiritual aspect that I've tried to invoke previously. Perhaps, now that I have all four pieces, I can have lasting victory in this area.
Saturday, February 07, 2015
Staying out of a disagreement, yet expressing my thoughts
50 Shades would seem completely unobjectional in circles in which sexuality and novelty are celebrated as inherently good for their own sake, because pleasure for its own sake is viewed either as a positive or even as a means of personal growth.
But these things are no more true of our sexuality than they are about any other good thing. Every gift from God has a proper place for which is was intended and for which it thrives, and outside of that place becomes like a cancer.
The thing that concerns me is not that society embraces 50 Shades; we should expect nothing else. In fact, I get frustrated with Christians who expect nonbelievers to live by the standards to which God calls us. It isn't that there is anything wrong with pointing out the inherent shortcomings in the secular attitude, but we must do so without a sense of moral superiority, as if we are better than nonbelievers because we have accepted a gift we don't deserve.
So my first concern about 50 Shades is a reflection of a much larger one: that so many within the church think that it's acceptable to remove a beautiful gift of God from its proper place and boundaries and simply revel in it for its own sake. We have grown up immersed in a society that snubs its nose at quaint ideas of propriety and purity, of the preposterous idea that any good thing should be reserved for God and the purposes for which he designed it, let alone that we ourselves might exist only to glorify him so that all might enter into his boundless love. There are many believers who see nothing wrong with the world's point of view, especially versus the perceived alternative of puritanical restriction on something the world sees as too long withheld from us. These believers have accepted the lie that we have further evolved and become more enlightened than our primitive forebears of centuries past. Any time spent reading their profound thoughts ought to disabuse us of the notion that we are superior to them merely by virtue of our technological advances.
But the temptation to consider our sexuality as outside of God's purview, as something that we should decide for ourselves the best use of, is the same as for wealth, possessions, power, happiness, leisure, etc. These are each good in proper context but become harmful when taken out of it, or when taken to extremes or made a goal into themselves. And when the church joins secular society in misusing God's gifts rather than proclaiming the higher truth, we are not doing our job.
All of that, though, does not mean that my concerns about 50 Shades are limited to its effect on church members. Quite the opposite. As someone whose adolescence and subsequent life were marred by the abuse of the concept of mutual consent, I believe that I am well qualified to observe that yes, for some people - perhaps many people, who will certainly almost never realize it at the top - this slope is very slippery. The more we mainstream sexual permissiveness, the more people will get caught up in their weaknesses. Also, the more people will attempt to manipulate others into actions that they would not choose for themselves.
Finally, these books and film themselves bear testimony to the existence of a slippery slope; fifty years ago they would have found only a niche acceptance rather than the widespread acclaim they have today. Simply stated, though, these glorify sexual revelry outside of the marriage covenant by promoting forms of it which are novel and therefore exciting, when that is not God's plan for any of us.
But we know better, right?
But we know better, right?
Thursday, June 12, 2014
More on dreams (moron dreams?)
All you need do is peruse some of my other postings with this label to gain a general sense of what I think dreams are and aren't useful for. But just as sometimes some of our dreams - I am skeptical of the words "all" or even "most" here - can be analyzed to reveal some of our own unconscious feelings about ourselves, sometimes they can also uncover attitudes of which we might otherwise remain unaware.
So this morning's dream featured people I really know, or used to, and a situation which never happened. In real life, our circle of high school friends was more than a little casual when it came to dating one another. The fact that we'd previously dated someone's friend didn't keep us from dating them. My marriage is evidence of this; early in my high school sophomore year I "went with" my wife's best friend for a while. It never became very serious, though, and we "broke up" before very long. Soon my wife and I started going out, and our relationship would be on-again-off-again through high school. My best friend dated the same girl through most of our sophomore and junior years, though. She was a year ahead of us, and they broke up at the end of the year as she prepared to graduate. In the ensuing summer we had a group trip to Fort Miles, DE, which my best friend couldn't attend, though his ex did. My future wife and I were off-again, and I made a play for Sue, which she gently rebuffed with a kind suggestion that she might have been interested were circumstances different.
In my dream, though, I was confessing to my wife in the present that we had in fact been together intimately back then. She asked why, and I explained that the only reason I could give her was the only one a teenaged boy would ever need: she was willing. In my dream, there was a recollection of our intercourse, or at least of the occasion and setting of it.
But the thing that was really revelatory for me in this dream was the underlying attitudes about sexuality which I long-ago internalized. I still carry around so much of society's approach even as I still strive to consciously reject it in favor of what I say that I believe to be a better and healthier way.
Thursday, October 03, 2013
Respect for the whole person
And this letter from a mom to her unborn son is why the argument that we should feel free to enjoy whatever consenting adults choose to do is completely specious. I love how she takes responsibility for her own decisions and doesn't shift blame for the entire industry onto the consumer. Nonetheless, we are called to act with justice, not from a sense of protecting people from themselves but rather out of true respect for them as a person.
It goes hand-in-hand with this letter from a dad to his son.
It goes hand-in-hand with this letter from a dad to his son.
Saturday, July 27, 2013
Called to love tenderly
The last presentation last Saturday, by Roger and Kathy Chmiel and Fr. Dennis Koopman, was hard to hear, especially when Kathy was speaking. Roger and Kathy are an older couple, and Kathy was having issues with getting her microphone positioned properly. Most of what I did hear of what they shared was the obvious stuff.
I don't know why Encountered couples who share about their sexuality manage to miss the emotional mark on it, but it happens almost every time that they come off as being titillated by talking about it. It's as if we can't enjoy our sexuality in proper context. Some of the moments that I have felt closest to God are when I have been closest to my wife. I realize most people will find the idea odd that our sexual intimacy should be a sacred experience. Most people - even most Christians, I suspect - will tend to think that this is one realm in which they don't want to have a sense of God being present. Perhaps it is because of society's insistence on treating sex as something fun but tawdry, and of treating marriage (or less) as a sex license. Yet I think that the union we experience as a married couple, which finds one of its most beautiful and intense expressions in our sexuality, brings us a fuller experience of God than almost anything else we do. Our ecstatic union shared between each other reaches and stretches beyond us, even leading to the incomprehensible wonder of the creation of another life. This certainly doesn't mean that we're doing something wrong if we aren't thinking of God's presence during every act of intimacy we share - or even the majority of them - but I think that this awareness of and closeness to him may also be part of God's intent in giving us this gift. Yet sometimes it feels like couples who are sharing about their sexual intimacy are crowing about their naughtiness rather than celebrating their holiness. It is as if we think more of society's view of our sexuality and only paying lip service to God's plan for it. Still, I am glad when couples share about this aspect of their relationship, if for no other reason than that it fosters an atmosphere in which we can take the tawdry out of it and discuss things like this.
There was a wonderful moment (that I missed the first part of) in another area of this talk that was pretty central to it, a beautiful story about a time that Roger was upset over a project he was working on and Kathy, rather than withdrawing in the face of his anger, simply took his face in her hands and reminded him of how much she loves him. It completely defused his frustration. What a beautiful moment.
There was another phrase they used, though, that I wish Catholics would avoid the secular sense of. They talked about how deciding to love tenderly when the beloved my not be acting in a lovable way "can feel like martyrdom." I think martyrdom is another most misunderstood gift of God. We tend to speak of it as a sacrifice to be avoided. I am convinced that true martyrdom looks and feels like love in action; this is the consistent characteristic of every act of martyrdom that I've ever read about. And this is a great gift which God provides to a privileged few. If it were his plan for me, I pray the Holy Spirit strengthens me for that moment.
Meanwhile, I will settle for dying to myself in the ways to which he calls me each day.
I don't know why Encountered couples who share about their sexuality manage to miss the emotional mark on it, but it happens almost every time that they come off as being titillated by talking about it. It's as if we can't enjoy our sexuality in proper context. Some of the moments that I have felt closest to God are when I have been closest to my wife. I realize most people will find the idea odd that our sexual intimacy should be a sacred experience. Most people - even most Christians, I suspect - will tend to think that this is one realm in which they don't want to have a sense of God being present. Perhaps it is because of society's insistence on treating sex as something fun but tawdry, and of treating marriage (or less) as a sex license. Yet I think that the union we experience as a married couple, which finds one of its most beautiful and intense expressions in our sexuality, brings us a fuller experience of God than almost anything else we do. Our ecstatic union shared between each other reaches and stretches beyond us, even leading to the incomprehensible wonder of the creation of another life. This certainly doesn't mean that we're doing something wrong if we aren't thinking of God's presence during every act of intimacy we share - or even the majority of them - but I think that this awareness of and closeness to him may also be part of God's intent in giving us this gift. Yet sometimes it feels like couples who are sharing about their sexual intimacy are crowing about their naughtiness rather than celebrating their holiness. It is as if we think more of society's view of our sexuality and only paying lip service to God's plan for it. Still, I am glad when couples share about this aspect of their relationship, if for no other reason than that it fosters an atmosphere in which we can take the tawdry out of it and discuss things like this.
There was a wonderful moment (that I missed the first part of) in another area of this talk that was pretty central to it, a beautiful story about a time that Roger was upset over a project he was working on and Kathy, rather than withdrawing in the face of his anger, simply took his face in her hands and reminded him of how much she loves him. It completely defused his frustration. What a beautiful moment.
There was another phrase they used, though, that I wish Catholics would avoid the secular sense of. They talked about how deciding to love tenderly when the beloved my not be acting in a lovable way "can feel like martyrdom." I think martyrdom is another most misunderstood gift of God. We tend to speak of it as a sacrifice to be avoided. I am convinced that true martyrdom looks and feels like love in action; this is the consistent characteristic of every act of martyrdom that I've ever read about. And this is a great gift which God provides to a privileged few. If it were his plan for me, I pray the Holy Spirit strengthens me for that moment.
Meanwhile, I will settle for dying to myself in the ways to which he calls me each day.
Saturday, November 26, 1977
how i got there, with why you may not want to be my friend
I'm writing this post on 3/23/2015, but back-dating it so that casual visitors do not encounter it.
so i started this post to explain why i commented on someone's FB post, but i have since found fresh condemnation, so it occurs to me that the more important point is: i understand if you just don't want anything more to do with me when you get to the end. i have retitled the post accordingly. but please understand: the reason this post is constructed as it is isn't to excuse away what i did. i am solely responsible for that, and my feelings tend to agree with the people who condemn people like me. my main concern now is simply to love those i have hurt so deeply, and to remember that my feelings aren't the same thing as Truth.
I know they often get a bad rep among the non-riding public, and I know that the population of mostly non-thug bikers everywhere feels compelled to go to war against the stereotypes. But to hear someone say, "Bikers are the nicest people you'll ever know," is a blanket generalization in the other direction that just. completely. gets under my skin. Here's why:
The first biker I ever knew personally was the first guy my widowed mom started dating, about 18 months after my alcoholic dad shot himself to death while the rest of us were out of town on vacation shortly after I'd turned 14. For me, life with my dad had been worse than that last horrid clause, for aside from his general drunken stumblings and ramblings and rants, I couldn't figure out for the life of me how to gain his love, acceptance, and respect. He'd been a high achieving high school athlete, and to describe myself as unathletic, even mildly klutzy, would be kind. I was smart, though, one of the smartest kids in my school, and he was a self-taught electrical engineer, so you'd think that would have resonated with him. But he never managed (if he even tried) to hide his impatience and disappointment when I failed to grasp some "simple" skill that he thought he was patiently and encouragingly teaching me: the baseball that hit me in the lip again this time when I failed to catch it, another missed layup, the fishing line maddeningly entangled in the bush behind me (these specific instances happened between 7- and 10-years-old). He'd been dead for over a year when mom was finally forced to reveal - because she was afraid someone else would let the cat out of the bag - that he was my adoptive father. She'd been a young, single mom when she met him, and he was willing to accept me "as his own" (he thought) and adopt me, and was a good financial provider for us. My sister was his biological daughter, and on the day my mom finally revealed the truth about my paternity, I suddenly understood why Karen had been able to bring a light to his eyes that I had never seen otherwise. My own biological father was not a topic that she was going to discuss; he clearly hadn't wanted to know me or provide for me in any way once he'd returned to his family (where he belonged, I've concluded). That, along with his name, is all I know about him.
She was careful when she met the new guy, going out with him a few times before letting him meet my sister or me, because she wanted to be sure she could trust him and didn't want to introduce a possible series of guys to us. Once she was fairly sure they were going to be seeing each other for a while, she invited him over for dinner so that we could meet him. It wasn't very long after that first meeting that he convinced her to let him offer me an under-the-table job helping out in his after-hours private garage, because a boy my age could learn responsibility through a job and needed to earn some money to call his own. At first I just cleaned up around the shop, and fetched, cleaned and put away tools, thereby learning what they were called and the purpose of each. "A good helper anticipates what the mechanic is going to need and has it ready for him," he insisted, and it was a lesson that has served me well in various contexts throughout my professional career. With gradually decreasing supervision I started being allowed to work on the vehicles, progressing to increasingly complicated work but never reaching the point of anything like tearing down an engine. He didn't get very many of those jobs anyway. There was quite a bit of body work, though, prepping vehicles for repair paint and an occasional overall paint job. Without belaboring this with further details: this job was my main source of income throughout my high school years. Toward the end of the work day - or evening, when things got to the point that mom was hanging out in the house while we worked in the garage - I'd be offered a beer along with whoever else was working.
He ended up being the one who helped me get ready for my driver's test, and he eventually overcame my mom's protectiveness to get her to let me learn to ride a motorcycle. I started on a small BMW - maybe 125cc? I'm not even certain whose bike that was; probably one of the young guys who was always hanging around and working out of the shop. I soon found a good deal on a used 360cc Honda, bought with my own money, on which I did my road riding and took my license test. Eventually, an artistic friend would paint The Hermit and the symbols from Led Zeppelin's fourth album on both sides of the gas tank. It was my solo-riding bike, and my senior year of high school I'd pick up my girlfriend before school on decent days and drive her home after. I remember having to double back one morning to pick up someone's books that fell off the rack on the way to school, but can't for the life of me remember if they were hers, mine, or both. (I suppose I could go into the other room and ask her whether she recalls.)
He and I would go out riding together at least a couple times a month. He eventually bought a second Harley, and once I was skilled enough to handle it, he'd let me ride his 1000cc Sportster while he rode the 1200cc SuperGlide sometimes when we rode together. Many other times I just rode along on the back of his. I wasn't of legal drinking age, which in Maryland back then was 18 for beer and wine, but I was close enough that when I dismounted a Harley and went into a bar with a middle-aged chaperone I was invariably served. Since I was usually riding on or near an expensive bike that he owned, he didn't let me overindulge when I was driving.
I can't describe what a gift all of this was for a kid whose dad(s) had never managed to love and accept him for who he was. Perhaps the reader has a sense of how wonderful this confidence and support might have felt, without my trying to further elaborate, since I could never do it justice anyway. I wouldn't have ever called him my hero, and didn't exactly think of him as a father figure - his personality wasn't conducive to that role. But he made a huge difference in my young life, and I learned many valuable skills from him. I'd have done pretty much anything he asked of me.
What a great guy, right? Everybody agreed.
And it was all a setup, as I learned so life-alteringly - no, I'm not engaging in hyperbole - on Thanksgiving weekend of 1977.
By then I was a 17-year-old stepping into adolescent rebellion. I'd begun smoking pot occasionally and in other ways not always acting responsibly or doing what was best for me. I'd always been a bit of a procrastinator, and part of my downfall was being smart enough to get away with that. I was thinking about not going to college right away because I didn't have a clue what I wanted to do - a high school counselor would eventually convince me otherwise. ("You've got to go to college," she insisted, winter of my senior year, so I did.) I don't know how much these issues factored into mom's boyfriend's ability to talk her into letting me go with him to Philadelphia for his annual trip. In hindsight I think she might have wanted me there partly for his protection: I think it had been the previous year that he'd become the first survivor of a series of claw-hammer attackers in Philly, but he'd gotten beaten pretty badly. But this was primarily intended to be a coming-of-age trip for me. Neither mom nor I had any idea of his real intentions.
We indeed started the weekend off in the City of Brotherly Love, but soon encountered a complication he hadn't anticipated: the drinking age in PA was 21, and I was a not-particularly-mature-looking 17. That meant I couldn't get served beer, and that meant that he couldn't enjoy seeing me let loose and enjoy myself more, as he put it. He could have bought some beer and we could have imbibed in the hotel room, but we both understood that drinking wasn't really the point of the weekend. It seemed like a bigger issue to him than it was to me; I was having a fine time hanging out without the alcohol. But he seemed disappointed, and had cleared a new plan with mom, so I agreed to the change in venue for the rest of the weekend. I've written more about that weekend here, so follow that link and then come back here. It's the least disgusting part of the rest of this narrative.
So from Philly we went to New York City, where the drinking age was more friendly to people with our respective intentions. He didn't have any trouble getting us a room at the YMCA subsequently made famous by the Village People, and that is where, on Saturday night when I was accommodatingly buzzed, his objectively undeniable sexual abuse of me began. (To this day I leave the room when the DJ invariably starts playing that song.) I've since learned through my own therapy that everything before that was part of the grooming process, including a fair amount of playful physical contact which had always been an element of being in his presence. And it probably seems strange for someone who isn't so intimately familiar with sexual abuse to consider that he was grooming himself as much as me. He had to think that I was so special to him that he couldn't hold back his desire to share these sexual experiences with me, even though I was underage and he was dating my mom. I can't tell you how many times over the next 18 months he told me how special I was, how he felt differently about me than about other men, even though I was still a boy and (as I later learned) he considered himself bisexual - he described himself that way to my mom well before he married her, and long before I told her what he had done to me. He probably also believed that I owed him some return for all that he had done for me. When we got back on Sunday, mom was convinced that I'd left town a boy and come home a man. It would be nearly twenty years before, in my therapist's office, I'd finally tell her the truth of what happened starting that weekend, and then only because she deserved to know why I had turned myself in for doing something along similar lines that she didn't at all understand. I am so grateful that she believed me immediately.
There's more I've written about post-New York here, but you probably don't want to read that. There's the link, though, in case you do, and it does reveal more about me (that you probably don't want to know).
I think he was incapable of having a sexual relationship with someone he truly respected and considered an equal. Therefore I believe that I may have had as much sexual contact with him in that 18 months as he had with my mom in their entire life together.
The Jackson 5 sang that "one bad apple don't spoil the whole bunch." (Okay, when you're talking about actual fruit or workplace morale, yes, it does, but in terms of stereotypes:) Of course not! I know that most bikers aren't like my stepfather, and I don't by any means hate or mistrust bikers in general. I don't even hate him, even though sometimes I still work on forgiving him. Neither do I think that most bikers deserve the stereotype that people generally have of them, and don't hold those stereotypes myself. But biking is as amoral as money is: the fact that a person rides says no more about them than the color of their hair does; there are mostly good bikers and a few bad bikers, just like any other group of people you might describe. And even though the good may strongly outnumber the bad, surely the reader can understand why blanket generalizations about the wonderfulness of bikers rub me the wrong way at least as much as negative ones about their moral character bother bikers.
There's more to this area - and more importantly, to me - that the reader should know, and I shouldn't leave it for inference as I have done above. I usually only share it in person, though it isn't really a secret; I've personally told several hundred people in various situations, including the contexts of therapy, family, close friendship, men's fellowship, and testimony in front of a large group. The reader might be surprised that the biggest reason I don't share it more often is not fear of rejection, though it once was. Mostly it's a matter of there almost never being a good time to raise this topic, so I try to wait until it looks like someone is committing to a deep enough level of friendship that to not tell them feels like a betrayal. You can read more about why I draw the line there in this post, but it isn't because I don't want people to know. I wish everyone knew, that I had no doubt that anyone in my life would still choose to be if they knew. I wish I could say that I've remained as accepting of myself as that post might indicate toward the end, but I still hate that I became what I hate, and no matter how many intervening decades pass, I think I will always hate myself at least a little for what I did. I still struggle to receive forgiveness for the abuse I committed as an adult against someone who should have been able to trust me implicitly. (And I've never blamed the abuse I committed on the abuse I received. That also would be wrong.)
The abuse I experienced in my youth has profoundly affected countless other decisions in my life that I must live with, and it is sometimes a challenge to see God at work through them rather than simply lament their effects on my life. But I am convinced that He is continually at work, that He was with me even in the midst of the worst choices that have marked my life - those of others and my own, my immoral decisions as well as my merely broken ones.
One final thought: my stepfather vehemently and convincingly denied ever touching my sister inappropriately, and I tend to believe him, even though part of me would way prefer that he had been more responsible for her drug problem than I think I might have been. I don't think he had the motivation to supply her with drugs that he had for me, but I know he provided stronger substances to others than the pot that he occasionally had for me. He boasted to me about providing drugs to other sex partners. Could he have supplied Karen, too, even if he never did abuse her sexually?
so i started this post to explain why i commented on someone's FB post, but i have since found fresh condemnation, so it occurs to me that the more important point is: i understand if you just don't want anything more to do with me when you get to the end. i have retitled the post accordingly. but please understand: the reason this post is constructed as it is isn't to excuse away what i did. i am solely responsible for that, and my feelings tend to agree with the people who condemn people like me. my main concern now is simply to love those i have hurt so deeply, and to remember that my feelings aren't the same thing as Truth.
I know they often get a bad rep among the non-riding public, and I know that the population of mostly non-thug bikers everywhere feels compelled to go to war against the stereotypes. But to hear someone say, "Bikers are the nicest people you'll ever know," is a blanket generalization in the other direction that just. completely. gets under my skin. Here's why:
The first biker I ever knew personally was the first guy my widowed mom started dating, about 18 months after my alcoholic dad shot himself to death while the rest of us were out of town on vacation shortly after I'd turned 14. For me, life with my dad had been worse than that last horrid clause, for aside from his general drunken stumblings and ramblings and rants, I couldn't figure out for the life of me how to gain his love, acceptance, and respect. He'd been a high achieving high school athlete, and to describe myself as unathletic, even mildly klutzy, would be kind. I was smart, though, one of the smartest kids in my school, and he was a self-taught electrical engineer, so you'd think that would have resonated with him. But he never managed (if he even tried) to hide his impatience and disappointment when I failed to grasp some "simple" skill that he thought he was patiently and encouragingly teaching me: the baseball that hit me in the lip again this time when I failed to catch it, another missed layup, the fishing line maddeningly entangled in the bush behind me (these specific instances happened between 7- and 10-years-old). He'd been dead for over a year when mom was finally forced to reveal - because she was afraid someone else would let the cat out of the bag - that he was my adoptive father. She'd been a young, single mom when she met him, and he was willing to accept me "as his own" (he thought) and adopt me, and was a good financial provider for us. My sister was his biological daughter, and on the day my mom finally revealed the truth about my paternity, I suddenly understood why Karen had been able to bring a light to his eyes that I had never seen otherwise. My own biological father was not a topic that she was going to discuss; he clearly hadn't wanted to know me or provide for me in any way once he'd returned to his family (where he belonged, I've concluded). That, along with his name, is all I know about him.
She was careful when she met the new guy, going out with him a few times before letting him meet my sister or me, because she wanted to be sure she could trust him and didn't want to introduce a possible series of guys to us. Once she was fairly sure they were going to be seeing each other for a while, she invited him over for dinner so that we could meet him. It wasn't very long after that first meeting that he convinced her to let him offer me an under-the-table job helping out in his after-hours private garage, because a boy my age could learn responsibility through a job and needed to earn some money to call his own. At first I just cleaned up around the shop, and fetched, cleaned and put away tools, thereby learning what they were called and the purpose of each. "A good helper anticipates what the mechanic is going to need and has it ready for him," he insisted, and it was a lesson that has served me well in various contexts throughout my professional career. With gradually decreasing supervision I started being allowed to work on the vehicles, progressing to increasingly complicated work but never reaching the point of anything like tearing down an engine. He didn't get very many of those jobs anyway. There was quite a bit of body work, though, prepping vehicles for repair paint and an occasional overall paint job. Without belaboring this with further details: this job was my main source of income throughout my high school years. Toward the end of the work day - or evening, when things got to the point that mom was hanging out in the house while we worked in the garage - I'd be offered a beer along with whoever else was working.
He ended up being the one who helped me get ready for my driver's test, and he eventually overcame my mom's protectiveness to get her to let me learn to ride a motorcycle. I started on a small BMW - maybe 125cc? I'm not even certain whose bike that was; probably one of the young guys who was always hanging around and working out of the shop. I soon found a good deal on a used 360cc Honda, bought with my own money, on which I did my road riding and took my license test. Eventually, an artistic friend would paint The Hermit and the symbols from Led Zeppelin's fourth album on both sides of the gas tank. It was my solo-riding bike, and my senior year of high school I'd pick up my girlfriend before school on decent days and drive her home after. I remember having to double back one morning to pick up someone's books that fell off the rack on the way to school, but can't for the life of me remember if they were hers, mine, or both. (I suppose I could go into the other room and ask her whether she recalls.)
He and I would go out riding together at least a couple times a month. He eventually bought a second Harley, and once I was skilled enough to handle it, he'd let me ride his 1000cc Sportster while he rode the 1200cc SuperGlide sometimes when we rode together. Many other times I just rode along on the back of his. I wasn't of legal drinking age, which in Maryland back then was 18 for beer and wine, but I was close enough that when I dismounted a Harley and went into a bar with a middle-aged chaperone I was invariably served. Since I was usually riding on or near an expensive bike that he owned, he didn't let me overindulge when I was driving.
I can't describe what a gift all of this was for a kid whose dad(s) had never managed to love and accept him for who he was. Perhaps the reader has a sense of how wonderful this confidence and support might have felt, without my trying to further elaborate, since I could never do it justice anyway. I wouldn't have ever called him my hero, and didn't exactly think of him as a father figure - his personality wasn't conducive to that role. But he made a huge difference in my young life, and I learned many valuable skills from him. I'd have done pretty much anything he asked of me.
What a great guy, right? Everybody agreed.
And it was all a setup, as I learned so life-alteringly - no, I'm not engaging in hyperbole - on Thanksgiving weekend of 1977.
By then I was a 17-year-old stepping into adolescent rebellion. I'd begun smoking pot occasionally and in other ways not always acting responsibly or doing what was best for me. I'd always been a bit of a procrastinator, and part of my downfall was being smart enough to get away with that. I was thinking about not going to college right away because I didn't have a clue what I wanted to do - a high school counselor would eventually convince me otherwise. ("You've got to go to college," she insisted, winter of my senior year, so I did.) I don't know how much these issues factored into mom's boyfriend's ability to talk her into letting me go with him to Philadelphia for his annual trip. In hindsight I think she might have wanted me there partly for his protection: I think it had been the previous year that he'd become the first survivor of a series of claw-hammer attackers in Philly, but he'd gotten beaten pretty badly. But this was primarily intended to be a coming-of-age trip for me. Neither mom nor I had any idea of his real intentions.
We indeed started the weekend off in the City of Brotherly Love, but soon encountered a complication he hadn't anticipated: the drinking age in PA was 21, and I was a not-particularly-mature-looking 17. That meant I couldn't get served beer, and that meant that he couldn't enjoy seeing me let loose and enjoy myself more, as he put it. He could have bought some beer and we could have imbibed in the hotel room, but we both understood that drinking wasn't really the point of the weekend. It seemed like a bigger issue to him than it was to me; I was having a fine time hanging out without the alcohol. But he seemed disappointed, and had cleared a new plan with mom, so I agreed to the change in venue for the rest of the weekend. I've written more about that weekend here, so follow that link and then come back here. It's the least disgusting part of the rest of this narrative.
So from Philly we went to New York City, where the drinking age was more friendly to people with our respective intentions. He didn't have any trouble getting us a room at the YMCA subsequently made famous by the Village People, and that is where, on Saturday night when I was accommodatingly buzzed, his objectively undeniable sexual abuse of me began. (To this day I leave the room when the DJ invariably starts playing that song.) I've since learned through my own therapy that everything before that was part of the grooming process, including a fair amount of playful physical contact which had always been an element of being in his presence. And it probably seems strange for someone who isn't so intimately familiar with sexual abuse to consider that he was grooming himself as much as me. He had to think that I was so special to him that he couldn't hold back his desire to share these sexual experiences with me, even though I was underage and he was dating my mom. I can't tell you how many times over the next 18 months he told me how special I was, how he felt differently about me than about other men, even though I was still a boy and (as I later learned) he considered himself bisexual - he described himself that way to my mom well before he married her, and long before I told her what he had done to me. He probably also believed that I owed him some return for all that he had done for me. When we got back on Sunday, mom was convinced that I'd left town a boy and come home a man. It would be nearly twenty years before, in my therapist's office, I'd finally tell her the truth of what happened starting that weekend, and then only because she deserved to know why I had turned myself in for doing something along similar lines that she didn't at all understand. I am so grateful that she believed me immediately.
There's more I've written about post-New York here, but you probably don't want to read that. There's the link, though, in case you do, and it does reveal more about me (that you probably don't want to know).
I think he was incapable of having a sexual relationship with someone he truly respected and considered an equal. Therefore I believe that I may have had as much sexual contact with him in that 18 months as he had with my mom in their entire life together.
The Jackson 5 sang that "one bad apple don't spoil the whole bunch." (Okay, when you're talking about actual fruit or workplace morale, yes, it does, but in terms of stereotypes:) Of course not! I know that most bikers aren't like my stepfather, and I don't by any means hate or mistrust bikers in general. I don't even hate him, even though sometimes I still work on forgiving him. Neither do I think that most bikers deserve the stereotype that people generally have of them, and don't hold those stereotypes myself. But biking is as amoral as money is: the fact that a person rides says no more about them than the color of their hair does; there are mostly good bikers and a few bad bikers, just like any other group of people you might describe. And even though the good may strongly outnumber the bad, surely the reader can understand why blanket generalizations about the wonderfulness of bikers rub me the wrong way at least as much as negative ones about their moral character bother bikers.
There's more to this area - and more importantly, to me - that the reader should know, and I shouldn't leave it for inference as I have done above. I usually only share it in person, though it isn't really a secret; I've personally told several hundred people in various situations, including the contexts of therapy, family, close friendship, men's fellowship, and testimony in front of a large group. The reader might be surprised that the biggest reason I don't share it more often is not fear of rejection, though it once was. Mostly it's a matter of there almost never being a good time to raise this topic, so I try to wait until it looks like someone is committing to a deep enough level of friendship that to not tell them feels like a betrayal. You can read more about why I draw the line there in this post, but it isn't because I don't want people to know. I wish everyone knew, that I had no doubt that anyone in my life would still choose to be if they knew. I wish I could say that I've remained as accepting of myself as that post might indicate toward the end, but I still hate that I became what I hate, and no matter how many intervening decades pass, I think I will always hate myself at least a little for what I did. I still struggle to receive forgiveness for the abuse I committed as an adult against someone who should have been able to trust me implicitly. (And I've never blamed the abuse I committed on the abuse I received. That also would be wrong.)
The abuse I experienced in my youth has profoundly affected countless other decisions in my life that I must live with, and it is sometimes a challenge to see God at work through them rather than simply lament their effects on my life. But I am convinced that He is continually at work, that He was with me even in the midst of the worst choices that have marked my life - those of others and my own, my immoral decisions as well as my merely broken ones.
One final thought: my stepfather vehemently and convincingly denied ever touching my sister inappropriately, and I tend to believe him, even though part of me would way prefer that he had been more responsible for her drug problem than I think I might have been. I don't think he had the motivation to supply her with drugs that he had for me, but I know he provided stronger substances to others than the pot that he occasionally had for me. He boasted to me about providing drugs to other sex partners. Could he have supplied Karen, too, even if he never did abuse her sexually?
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