(The following is the 2nd in a series of posts related to my re-reading of Miss America by Day: Lessons Learned from Ultimate Betrayal and Unconditional Love, by Marilyn Van Derbur.)

Ms. Van Derbur begins her book’s brief Dedication by saying:

Above all else, this book is a love story and is dedicated to my husband of 39 years, Larry Atler.

She then compares her husband’s love to to “champagne being poured into the top glass of a pyramid of glasses on New Year’s Eve,” saying that this love “has spilled over and filled all my empty places.”

The remainder of the book will proceed to make clear how true these words have been at various crucial stages and moments in Ms. Van Derbur’s life.

In addition, Ms. Van Derbur pays tribute to her daughter and also to a Presbyterian minister she knew from an early age and who, as succeeding pages will make clear, played a critical role in her recovery from her sexual abuse by her father.

Reflections on the Dedication:

Who among us—child sexual abuse survivors or not—would not wish to have such a firm and lasting source of support as Ms. Van Derbur has found in her husband of many years—by now, in 2014, of almost half a century? Few, I would wager, indeed. And as the full version of her interview of this year, appearing on her website—missamericabyday.com—makes clear, her feelings of love and gratitude for her husband haven’t changed.

To read and watch such professions of love for and gratitude to one’s spouse of many years in this second decade of the twenty-first century—when the institution of marriage, in its traditional form at least, is, in America and many other countries, so beleaguered—is impressive indeed.

But, whether or not, in one’s own life, one is so fortunate as to have found such a deep and enduring source of support in a single individual as Ms. Van Derbur has found in her husband, it is, I would assert, based on my own experience as a child sexual abuse survivor and all that I have learned of the experiences of other survivors, virtually undeniable that any significant degree of recovery from the adverse effects of such abuse requires, as  a sine qua non, for its success the ample support of empathetic others.

Ms. Van Derbur’s profession of such deep and enduring love for her husband also brings to mind, by way of contrast, the many marriages that, during her and my growing up years, the middle decades of the twentieth century, were maintained—due to factors such as societal attitudes strongly discouraging divorce (especially in locations such as the mid-sized, inland American cities in which Ms. Van Derbur and I grew up), legal hurdles that often existed to dissolving marriages, and the frequent economic dependence of wives upon their husbands—for the sake of appearance only. Shell marriages, in other words, behind which all manner of dysfunction often managed to stay quite well hidden. Considered from this perspective, the greatly increased economic power of women and ease of obtaining a divorce in our present era are to be highly valued as facilitators of a healthy escape from such dysfunction, including the dysfunction of intra-family child sexual abuse.

(The following is the 1st in a series of posts related to my re-reading of Miss America by Day: Lessons Learned from Ultimate Betrayal and Unconditional Love, by Marilyn Van Derbur.)

Imagine that a woman possessing a deep knowledge, insight, and wisdom concerning the milieu in which you were born and raised enters your life to take you, via a sort of virtual time travel, back to that milieu in order to help elucidate some of its profoundest meaning for and influence upon your life. Such was the feeling that ran through me when I first began reading Miss America by Day: Lessons Learned from Ultimate Betrayal and Unconditional Love, by Marilyn Van Derbur, soon after its first printing a decade ago.

How could Ms. Van Derbur’s book have affected me so deeply? Certainly, much of this effect can be attributed to Ms. Van Derbur’s aforementioned knowledge, insight, and wisdom along with related qualities of her character and intellect, and, as well, to Ms. Van Derbur’s skills as a writer, communicating, as she does in this book, in a clear, straightforward style which succeeds in illuminating the kernel of the content without sacrifice of subtlety and nuance.

But these attributes of Ms. Van Derbur and her writing, would, by themselves, fall substantially short of fully explaining the effect that Miss America by Day had upon me on first reading, and still has upon me as I begin my re-reading of it now. The full explanation is to be found, I believe, in a handful of key affinities shared by my and Ms. Van Derbur’s backgrounds:

Affinities of Time and Place:
Although Ms. Van Derbur is eighteen years my senior (having been born in 1937 to my 1955) and grew up in Denver, Colorado to my Athens, Georgia (birth to age three) and Nashville, Tennessee (three to eighteen), our upbringings were both steeped to substantial degrees in archetypal aspects of the mainstream ambiance of post-World War Two America as embodied in various of its medium-sized, inland cities: an ambiance of a resolutely optimistic, forward-looking optimism in which the social unit of the nuclear family (the traditional nuclear family, consisting of a male husband, female wife, both heterosexual, of course, and one or more—preferably more—children, with all children as well resplendently heterosexual) was perceived as constituting the core and bulwark of social respectability and traditional morality.

Affinity of Social Status:
Although, in economic terms, Ms. Van Derbur’s family of origin seems to have been decidedly wealthy, in contrast to my family of origin’s middle to upper-middle (depending on the stages of my father’s career) class status, I and Ms. Van Derbur both were raised in families possessing a high social status—in my case due mainly to my father’s having been a professor at a prestigious, nationally-respected university—Vanderbilt—that represented one of the chief reasons for Nashville’s reputation as being, for the prowess of its post-secondary educational institutions,  “The Athens of the South” (Athens, Greece, as in Classical Greece, that is).

Affinity of Religion:
Ms. Van Derbur and I both grew up in Presbyterian families. Presbyterian churches often number among their members a significant portion of any community’s leading citizens and serve as emblems of cultivated thinking, success, and social propriety. This certainly seems to have been the case for Ms. Van Derbur’s church and for the church—Westminster Presbyterian—my family attended and became members of after moving to Nashville.

It was against the backdrop of these shared affinities—or, it might be more accurate to say in this context, behind the facades they conveniently provided—that Ms. Van Derbur’s and my experiences of being sexually abused in our childhoods—both of us by our fathers—played out, and it is due to these affinities, I believe, that I immediately felt a special resonance, from the opening pages, upon first reading Miss America by Day nearly ten years ago, and continue to feel such a resonance as I re-read it now; and feel, as well, such a deep and special sense of gratitude to Mr. Van Derbur for having written her book.