Knowing They Know that You Know
Keeping the Secret Anyway Under Mitigating Circumstances
In 1955
When I was four years old, Jesus Christ visited me in the dead of night. In my mind, I asked for his protection. I saw and felt him put his palm in my body. I’ve felt protected since. So excited, I rose, found a bit of glass on the floor and with it scratched:
I carved it in the top drawer of my bureau. The “J” was backwards and the rest of the letters were wonky, (hardly surprising considering my age, the hard wood of the bureau and a small bit of sharp glass as my carving/writing tool.)
“Wow, what a dream.”
But when I looked at the bureau and saw what I had done, I knew it was not a dream. I knew I would be in trouble for scratching up the furniture.
My parents never said a word about it. They pretended it wasn’t there. They never looked at it. When I drew on the television screen with crayon, my mom yelled and screamed at me, so it wasn’t like they weren’t into the punishment thing.
36 years later
I was visiting M & D (Mom and Dad) at their new house in a coastal town on Long Island Sound in Connecticut. My father was using my old bureau to story his income taxes. The top drawer was open, I saw folders of old tax files.
“Oh look, you’re using the ‘Jesus drawer’ to protect your taxes,” I said venturing a joke. Normally I’d get one of two responses: a sarcastic “very funny” or a grunt. Neither of them occurred. Instead I received a rigid tightening of all his muscles and then an exhalation as I moved on.
I didn’t think anything of it at the time.
The “Jesus Drawer”
It wasn’t until I flew back to California and had a flashback that my uncle raped me when I was four years old and subsequent events, that sense came from the “Jesus Drawer”. A few years later, in therapy, the “other events” surrounding the “Jesus Drawer” emerged out of my first EMDR session. My father got drunk and he…
In 2000 visiting M & D at their home in North Carolina. My plan was to confront them about “the Jesus drawer” aka the abuse. When I arrived, it wasn’t there. I asked my father about it.
“I got rid of it,” he said. But he kept other furniture that was as funky as or more funky than the bureau. His doctor had told him that the Pulmonary Fibrosis was getting worse. His breathing was not yet labored. Given his disease and five or six years he had left, I decided not to mention Elephants in the Room.
I visited him in ’05 when he had accepted the need for oxygen and then with my sister in early ’06. In September of ’06 he passed on my birthday.
Nine Months Later
His spirit asked for my forgiveness while I was making my dinner. I was relieved that he had acknowledged the abuse and everything else:
Thanks to Diana C. for the inadvertent prompt from: When Your Family Asks Why You’re in Therapy.
