(The following is the 9th 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.)

Following on content from my previous posts on Chapter 1 of Miss America by Day, another point:

The facade is real.

At least, the facade is often real to a substantial degree, when it comes to “perfect” families, such as Ms. Van Derbur’s, or, at least, economically and socially successful, apparently normal families, such as mine was, in which child sexual abuse is occurring.

There sometimes seems to be an unspoken assumption, among many people—an assumption which people holding it may fail to articulate even to themselves—that any aspects of a child sexual abuser’s life that are considered as positive or virtuous from a societal standpoint are obviously “false”—mere fronts whose basic purpose, in the abuser’s life, has been that of camouflage; i.e., to help conceal the abuser’s abusive “core” identity and lifestyle.

And yet my experience in the case of my father—and based, as well, on various books, articles, and other materials regarding child sexual abusers, including research results, that I’ve read over the years—has convinced that a child sexual abuser can be every bit as genuine about various socially virtuous and positive aspects of their lives as any non-abusing adult.

In the case of my father, for example, I believe he was every bit as genuinely interested in and committed to his roles as a university professor (at Vanderbilt University) and as a regularly attending member of one of Nashville’s most prominent Presbyterian churches (Westminster) as a great many professors and churchgoers who are not child sexual abusers.

In the case of dysfunction on the order of, say, alcoholism or even drug dependency, society, I believe, has come a long way since the time of my childhood—the 1950s and 60s—in realizing that a person having a dysfunction such as alcohol or drug abuse can genuinely lead an entirely normal, productive, successful life in many other respects. Similar progress has, however, been quite limited when it comes to child sexual abusers, such that any aspects of their lives which involve social productivity, success, and normalcy tend to be viewed as somehow “false”—as not a part of their true, authentic identity—thereby more easily allowing the perception of child sexual abusers, implicitly if not explicitly, as being beyond the pale of what can be considered as being human—allowing them to more easily be perceived as out-and-out “monsters” rather than all too human beings who sexually abuse children. The popular categorization of child sexual abusers as “monsters” can, it seems to me, make it easier for society to avoid the task of working towards the development whatever approaches and methods might most effectively discourage at least some potential abusers from becoming actual abusers.

More on this matter of the abuser’s “facade” in my next post.

(The following is the 8th 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.)

As I proofread the ending of my March 15th post (“The key point here is that a child being sexually abused within a family context may, on some level, begin to sense the vastness of this distance—between the family facade and the reality of the abuse it is suffering—from an early age, and that this awareness can multiply exponentially the child’s massive sense of isolation, which the child already feels (again, at some level) within the secrecy dynamics of the family itself. Thus, the child realizes that not only must it keep the abuse secret and distant, within the family’s private life, from family members other than the perpetrator, but that, also, the distance between the fact of the abuse and the world outside the family—society at large—is so great as make the abuse and this outside world seem as though they exist in separate universes.”), I thought of a dream that I had when I was about twelve years old.

I’ve always thought of this dream as “The Golf Course Dream,” though it could be more precisely described as an all-out nightmare. I had the dream while sleeping on a pallet on the floor of the study of my grandmother’s house on Lakeview Avenue in Atlanta, Georgia, where we often visited on the trips we took for our vacations. I recall that I was around twelve, though I can’t name a specific reason for this other than some relatively vague, felt sense, when I’ve remembered the dream, of my body’s stage of growth at the time. The dream itself I remember more vividly.

It begins with my consciousness hovering over a broad terrace dotted with glass-topped, wrought iron tables around which fashionably dressed men and women are sitting in wrought iron, cushioned chairs, drinking iced tea and lemonade as they exchange pleasant conversation—in exactly the same fashion as my parents would chat pleasantly with other grown-ups, whether at the faculty parties they hosted at our home in Nashville, Tennessee, or on the back and side porches of the homes of relatives we would visit. The air, in the dream, is of a clear, sun-bright day, and is suffused with the clink of the ice in the men’s and women’s’ glasses and the floating, melodious, rising-falling drone of their voices—a melodiousness that, collectively, reminds me of the melodious, Southern rhythms of the voice of my mother.

My consciousness then drifts away from this scene and passes over a rolling expanse of grass like that of a fairway of a well-tended golf course, until I find myself hovering over a hole like the hole of a golf green.

Inside the hole’s dark interior, numbers begin appearing, large at first—four digits, three digits—but with each number lower than the previous, and that’s when I suddenly realize what will happen: when the numbers reach zero, the Universe will end. The entire Universe—all of it, and everything single thing that’s in it—and somehow my mind is able to intuitively comprehend, to touch the implications of this—of a Nothingness so total, complete that it will cease, somehow, even to be Nothingness—and, comprehending this, I feel an utter and complete terror because I also realize that I am the only person in the entire world who is aware of what is about to happen; that none of the adults—who should be aware, responsible, but who are, instead, chatting on the terrace, sipping their lemonade and iced tea, enveloped in the wafting cloud of their own, pleasant conversation—have the slightest idea of what is about to happen, so that the entire responsibility to stop it—stop the entire Universe from ceasing to exist—rests completely upon myself.

The only thing is, I have absolutely no idea of what to do to stop it, and as I realize all of this the numbers continue dropping, to double, then single digits, and then, so suddenly, it’s there, shining against the hole’s background of black:

0

I wake to a terrifying scream that doesn’t stop, then realize it’s my own. I’m sitting bolt upright on my pallet, my pajamas drenched in sweat. Soon I’m surrounded by my mother, father, grandmother, and other relatives, who live at my grandmother’s or are also visiting, all of them staring at me with mouths agape, the adults’ voices climbing over each other as they ask in urgent tones what’s wrong. My screams die down, then cease, and, even though I can see in the adults’ eyes how disturbed, frightened even, they were by my screams’ abandoned intensity, they’re already mouthing reassurances:

You had a nightmare—that’s all . . . There’s nothing to worry about . . . It was just a nightmare—there’s nothing to worry about at all.

Can I link The Golf Course Dream directly to my abuse? Trace the neuronal pathways between the two? With our present state of knowledge, linkage of such a direct nature is, of course, impossible. I can say that ever since, in 1989, I recovered the bulk of my memories of my father’s sexual abuse, possible connections have readily suggested themselves. What follows is one such interpretation:

I can see the zero as representing the abuse itself, and the descending numbers as some small sliver of time during which some part of my childhood identity—a part that wanted to believe I had control over my world; imagined I had the power to stop the abuse, if only I could think of how. But I couldn’t stop it, of course, and there was no one to help me, for the adults who might have done so were completely unaware of—or, at least, in denial of—the situation, lost as they were in their world of pleasant conversation, sipping their iced tea and lemonade—the kind of world my mother seemed to so love inhabiting, whether with relatives; her friends at Nashville’s Westminster Presbyterian Church, of which we were members; or at social gatherings with other Vanderbilt professors and their wives. (I say “and their wives” since Vanderbilt professors, during that time of the late 1950s and early to mid 1960s, were, almost without exception, male).

And just as with the zero in the dream, the abuse, as it happened, did, in fact, shatter and end the Universe as I knew it, or at least as I wished it to be. A Universe of order and serenity, in which my central integrity would never be violated and my existence never threatened. In which those persons in my life on whom I most relied would, proving themselves worthy of my trust, protect me.

The distance was vast, indeed, between my family’s facade of pleasantness and normalcy which we presented to other relatives—the first ring of society outside the circle of my immediate family—and the reality of the abuse I was suffering. The Gold Course Dream represents, I believe, the acuteness of my awareness, at my mind’s deepest levels, of the reality of this distance and the subsequent extremity of my feelings—again, at my mind’s deepest, largely subconscious levels—of isolation.

(The following is the 7th 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.)

To add to my previous post about Chapter 1 of Miss America by Day :

It should be emphasized that the facade of perfection or, at least, thoroughgoing normalcy, behind which child sexual abuse occurring within a family is often concealed can be understood as involving a family-wide dynamic in which, if the facade is to attain its greatest possible vibrancy, all family members must participate—the dynamic being one of concealment to the outside world not only of any indication that child sexual abuse within the family may be occurring (something which family members often succeed in concealing even from each other; even from themselves), but, also, of concealment of any indication that there exist any problems of significance within the family at all.

An example, with respect to my own family, of this broader concealment, extending beyond behavior involving child sexual abuse by the perpetrating family member, involved the emotional-verbal abuse I recall my father not infrequently directing towards my mother, myself, and my siblings—abuse which involved quite elevated levels of anger that many people, I think, were they able to have observed such behavior, would agree crossed the boundary into what could be classified as rage; my father’s tantrums (for I think these instances in which my father would explosively direct his venom at his wife and / or one or more of his children could be readily characterized as such) regularly involving the hurling, on his part, of epithets such as “You jerk!”, “You jackass!”, “You stupid fool!” followed by “How in the name of heaven could you . . . ” followed by whatever action or inaction on our part had so riled him. His face would be literally quivering and flushed with, yes, rage, as he would hurl these epithets, with, as I recall, his fists clenched, though at his sides.

(I can recall only one instance of my father’s having been physically abusive towards me—outside, that is, of the physical abuse constituted by various aspects of his sexual abuse—and that instance was relatively, within the entire spectrum of domestic physical abuse, quite mild and transient.

It was evening and my father and mother were in a hurry to leave for some sort of social engagement, our babysitter having already arrived. I imagine they were, most probably, leaving to attend a party held by some other member of Vanderbilt University’s Economics Department’s faculty, for this was when we were still living in the house we inhabited until my father received tenure—the house on Central Avenue, featured in my ebook Preludes—and my impression is that at that time it was highly important, even absolutely vital, that my father and mother participate regularly in such department-related social functions in order to maximize the possibility of my father’s being approved for tenure.

In any case, my parents were just at the point of hurriedly leaving (perhaps they were running late) and as my father was about exit the living room to go out onto the front porch, I, wanting him to stay for some reason which I can’t now recollect, grabbed his arm or in some other way attempted to physically impede his departure, whereupon he, as I recall, grabbed my arm, forcefully wrenched it, and roughly pushed me away, eliciting from me an injured cry of, “You hurt me!”; my father angrily replying along the lines, as I recall, of You’re right I hurt you, for bothering me when we have to leave!

And that’s the sole instance of physical abuse, outside of his sexual abuse, that I can recall my father inflicting upon me, nor do I recall any instances of his having been physically abusive towards my siblings or my mother, though, of course, there may have been instances of which I’m not aware.

I think I should add here that I’m excluding from classification as physical abuse the spankings my father sometimes dealt me and my siblings when we were small for various misbehaviors which I don’t now recall; spankings of the sort that he administered—involving no more than one or two dozen moderately forceful applications of the flat of his palm or, perhaps, a rolled newspaper to our bared or underweared bottoms—not then being considered, by a great many people anyway, as being in any way abusive in nature.)

[Added After Initial Posting:]

Of course, the attempt to conceal significant problems within a family from the outside world is not exclusive to families in which child sexual abuse is occurring but extends to families generally. However, the distance between the outer facade of normalcy, if not outright perfection, which a family may so assiduously make efforts to maintain, and the problems the family is concealing can, in the case of a family in which child sexual abuse is occurring, be thought of as exceeding by orders of magnitude the distance involved in the case of families in which no such abuse is occurring and in which open discussion, within society, of the problems being concealed—such as alcohol addiction or verbally or even physically abusive behavior, depending on the degree of the physical abuse—is comparatively less taboo. The key point here is that a child being sexually abused within a family context may, on some level, begin to sense the vastness of this distance—between the family facade and the reality of the abuse it is suffering—from an early age, and that this awareness can multiply exponentially the child’s massive sense of isolation, which the child already feels (again, at some level) within the secrecy dynamics of the family itself. Thus, the child realizes that not only must it keep the abuse secret and distant, within the family’s private life, from family members other than the perpetrator, but that, also, the distance between the fact of the abuse and the world outside the family—society at large—is so great as make the abuse and this outside world seem as though they exist in separate universes.

(The following is the 6th 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.)

In Chapter 1, which is titled, in partial irony, “Blessed by Being Born Into a Perfect Family,” Ms. Van Derbur, in telling detail, skillfully describes the dichotomy between the image her family presented to society in her hometown of Denver, Colorado—of the archetypal “perfect” family—and the far less than perfect reality behind this societal facade.

Reading this chapter again, a number of things struck me in particular for their resonance with my own experience growing up in a middle class, high status family in Nashville, Tennessee, including the massive contrast between the image of Ms. Van Derbur’s father’s public persona and what he was doing in private to at least two of his daughters (Ms. Van Derbur and her oldest sister, who, as Ms. Van Derbur recounts in Miss America by Day and elsewhere, publicly disclosed her own childhood sexual abuse by their father after Ms. Van Derbur had disclosed hers).

Ms. Van Derbur describes her father as having been “successful, charitable, charming and gracious.” As a “Renaissance man” who could play the piano by ear (“the kind you would hear in a piano bar at 2 a.m., the kind of music Frank Sinatra sang”) and recite poetry from memory. Who built the business he bought from his father-in-law into the largest mortuary chain between Missouri and California. Who was one of Denver’s civic leaders—a “highly recognized and esteemed member of the community.” Who for several years had a weekly radio and television show featuring his inspirational readings. Who once a year played the male lead in Denver’s civic theater and became president of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. Who, as an active alumni supporter of his college fraternity, was elected president of the National Inter-fraternity Council—the body governing all college fraternities in the US. Who was a major donor to the Boy Scouts of America, a 33rd degree Mason, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of a home for handicapped children, and a board member of the University of Denver and Colorado Women’s College. Whose obituary appeared on the front page of Denver’s local newspaper.

Similarly, my father, though not nearly as publicly prominent, active, and successful as Ms. Van Derbur’s, enjoyed, to a substantial degree, a favorable public persona—as a professor in the Economics Department at Vanderbilt University; a member of Westminster Presbyterian Church, which counted among its members some of Nashville’s leading citizens; the “head” of a family with a beautiful, intelligent wife (my mother) and three children; and as a man whose eloquence, wit, and gift for telling jokes others found quite attractive and entertaining (at least from what I perceived as a child and was later told to me by my mother) at parties and other social functions.

In my experience, to some people it’s nothing short of incredible that men with public personae as positive and “normal” as those of Ms. Van Derbur’s father and my own could sexually abuse their children. Whereas such people might readily accept, as a general proposition, that appearances often do not reflect—and sometimes to a massive degree—the total reality of a situation, and might just as readily accept the plausibility of imperfections on the part of such fathers—imperfections concealed behind a “perfect” or, at least, highly favorable facade—on the order of, say, an alcohol addiction or verbally or even physically abusive behavior towards their wives and / or children, such people seem to find it impossible to believe that the imperfect behavior of such men could in some cases extend to child sexual abuse.

Why such incredulity? My sense is that the reasons have to do, mainly, with the substantial degrees of shame and taboo that continue to surround child sexual abuse as a topic for intelligent, calmly considered public discussion. The very idea that men so “normal” and successful as my father and Ms. Van Derbur’s could engage in behavior whose mere discussion still suffers so from the depredations of shame and taboo is, to some people, simply unthinkable.

For survivors who’ve been abused by such highly successful men—or, in some cases, women—the possibility of such behavior is, of course, entirely plausible.

(The following is the 5th 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.)

Following on my previous post regarding the “Why?” section of Miss America by Day, in the case of child sexual abuse occurring within a family, we can find a correlate, of the “intimate details” criticism of public disclosure by survivors of their abuse in the “family matter” criticism. The “family matter” criticism involves the assertion that child sexual abuse occurring within a family is a private, family matter with the resolution of any problems arising from such abuse not being served by any public airing or discussion of the survivor’s abuse allegations.

But this family matter line of criticism, as I see it, fails entirely to appreciate the point of view held by the publicly disclosing survivor with respect to their family of origin: for the publicly disclosing survivor (as is also the case for many survivors who never publicly disclose), the family is already completely broken, at least with respect to the survivor’s allegations of abuse. Barring an admission on the part of the abusing family member of the abuse perpetrated on the survivor, and a plea by this abusing family member, made to the survivor, for forgiveness—developments which have little but the remotest possibility of occurring—there is zero chance of resolution and healing within the family.

This is why comments regarding Dylan Farrow’s allegations of child sexual abuse against her adoptive father, Woody Allen, that have expressed hope for a healing that would occur among the members of the Allen-Farrow family (the by now decades-long break-up of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, due in substantial part to this very issue, notwithstanding) would, I think, tend to have as absurdist a ring to many other child sexual abuse survivors as they do to me. Woody Allen’s admission to Dylan Farrow’s allegations of his sexually abusive acts would be a necessary, though by no means sufficient, component of any possible route to the realization of such a family-wide healing, but, given Woody Allen’s absolute assertion and apparent belief belief that he committed no abuse, the possibility of a family-wide healing is as about nil as nil can be, making any hope that the Dylan Farrow’s abuse allegations could somehow find a successful resolution if treated strictly as a private, family matter, forlorn indeed. This would seem to be pretty self-evident whether one believes Dylan Farrow’s allegations of abuse are true (as I do), believes Woody Allen’s denial, or is undecided, but to some commenters it apparently isn’t. (You can read Dylan Farrow’s response to Woody Allen’s New York Times Op-Ed piece denying any abuse here—her response succinctly making a number of the points asserted by commenters who’ve supported her, including various commenters on Woody Allen’s piece.)

An especially off-putting aspect of such “family matter” comments is that they seem to be looking completely over the head of Dylan Farrow, now an adult woman in her late 20s, and her public statement regarding her adoptive father’s abuse, as though Dylan Farrow and her statement were invisible.

The “family matter” line of criticism also misses the societal dimension of public disclosures by survivors of their abuse. One of the major benefits to be derived from such public disclosures is a substantial raising of public awareness of the reality of the occurrence of such abuse, even—in cases such as that of Dylan Farrow—within “respectable,” affluent, high status families. It is to be hoped that such raising of public awareness will result in the creation and strengthening of laws, policies, and public and private initiatives which help protect children from such abuse and assist survivors in their healing. Even if a survivor feels strongly supported by their non-abusing parent and/or one or more other family members, they may still want to publicly disclose for such worthy reasons.

Both the “intimate details” criticism and the “family matters” criticism of public disclosure by child sexual abuse survivors of their abuse appear to be both born out of and to reinforce the continuing virulence of toxic shame and taboo with regard to such disclosure. But it is precisely the suppressive effects of such shame and taboo that we must strive, above all else, to overcome if child sexual abuse is to be dealt with in an enlightened fashion.