ONLY THE NAMES ARE CHANGED

What is Real and What is Imagination?

Memoirs 11

Life on Wellington Street was busy and confusing. The Catholicism of the extended family dictated patterns which began to make sense, only to have those patterns disrupted for no apparent reason. Mémère and Pépère would invoke the rule of meatless Friday’s and going to confession Saturday’s and communion on Sunday’s for their children.

Since I was now old enough to take part in the confessions and communion, I was included. Meatless Fridays became days when we would eat fish and chips. On Saturdays I would go with my aunts, uncles and Mémère to say confession. Then on Sunday’s we would all head off to church.

Mom was exempt from these rituals as she wasn’t Catholic, something that worried me. Learning that only Catholics could go to heaven, I began to pray that she would stop being stubborn and become a Catholic. Though Dad was a Catholic, he rarely went to mass and no one said anything to him about it.

One part of the weekly routines which was enacted each week, a routine which included my mother, was the Saturday evening party involving playing cards and games, singing and dancing, and eating. I soon learned how to play thirty-one, a card game that almost all could play, including my brother and I.

Since I was now seven, I was included in the cast of performers for the entertainment part of the evening. My contribution was to sing, which I loved doing. My brother and I would get to dance with our young aunts as well to finish off the entertainments.

Then, just before midnight, all games and entertainment stopped so everyone could have a final snack. Come midnight there would be no food eaten until after communion the next morning.

One Sunday morning I woke up very hungry. I hadn’t eaten late the evening before, nor much for the Saturday evening supper as well, because I wasn’t feeling well. My mother took pity on me and gave me a small bowl of Puffed Wheat to eat while everyone was busy getting ready for church.

I then dressed and soon joined my aunts and uncles and grandparents as they headed out the door to a nearby church for Sunday morning services. All was well with the exception of a slight sense of not feeling well.

I joined the line for communion behind my two youngest uncles and was followed by Mémère and Pépère. I took communion not thinking about the fact I had eaten just an hour earlier. As I walked back towards our pew, I got sick and threw up all of my breakfast cereal.

Besides the pain of vomiting, I was horrified. I had committed a sin, the sin of eating before receiving the Eucharist. Now everyone in the church would see I had sinned. I had sinned twice as threw up the host I had received.

I had desecrated the body of Christ within me. I wished I could just crawl away and disappear, become invisible. But, I knew I was never invisible in God’s eyes. The God I knew punished more than my father could ever punish by condemning me to Hell where I would burn forever.

The state of horror in which I had submersed myself wasn’t reflected in the attitudes and opinions of my family. I was just a little kid and little kids got sick. But for myself, it was a different story. For myself, it became something of dire importance between God and myself.

I saw myself through his eyes as a sinner and sinners had to be punished. I resolved to become a living saint so that perhaps God could forgive me. It seemed my only hope at that time.

I resolved to never again break a Church rule or disobey a priest or a nun who were the living eyes and ears of a God that could grant me Heaven if I would only be good. With that resolve, I became vulnerable in a way that I would learn to my peril.

As my story continues, the issue of memory has been something that has bothered me, sometimes tortured me. Quite a few memories have continued since various events in my life happened. Sometimes those memories were placed in the background and ignored as I kept busy with day-to-day life.

However, with midlife and the growing uneasiness I was feeling, it was as though I was living and perpetrating a lie, the memories returned from the background to add to the uneasiness and contribute to a growing depression. I knew those memories were authentic.

However, when other memories began to emerge, I wasn’t so sure of their accuracy. At the time, I dismissed those memories as more due to my mood than to factual history. Over time, and with listening to the stories and memories of others, I had to readjust my thinking to accept that these memories emerging from a denied past were real.

I then searched the field of psychology to find a scientific answer about forgotten memories of children re-emerging in later adult life. There is a study called, Adult Memories of Childhood Trauma: A Naturalistic Clinical Study, by Herman and Harvey, 1997 that describes the issues of memory with which I had been wrestling. Bottom line, these memories are more likely to be of real events than manufactured.

It has been a struggle to write in spite of all the work done to heal. Even to admit what had happened to me as a child, still elicits some sense of personal failure and shame. For forty years I had blocked out any hint of awareness that I had been sexually abused as a child.

Of the abuses remembered, physical abuses at the hands of my father, I had repressed by for the most part though I hadn’t completely forgotten them. So, when images from childhood began to emerge as I dug deep to heal during analysis, images that involved priests penises and sensations, I responded with disbelief and doubt.

It all had to be my imagination. Yet as the images began to become clearer as I worked through psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, I learned more and more about how such sexual abuse works on the psyche and how it influences behaviour and self-identity. I came to accept the truths of what my memories presented to me. I realised my way of being in the world contained too many signs of having been sexually abused for me to continue denying the truth of what the remembered images were telling me.

Sexual abuse began, as best I can remember, when I was in grade two in a Catholic School in the Overbrook area of Ottawa during the 1956–1957 school year.

Two years later, in the fall of 1958, another priest in Alberta also found that I was ripe for his special attention. Were my parents aware? Why didn’t I report? Was I guilty of complicity in having these adults engage in sexual molestation? I can’t answer these questions though I do have some thoughts why I don’t have answers.

When a child, and sometimes even an adult, suffers trauma, there is a survival response of burying the traumatic event. They simply disappear into black holes where they work below the level of consciousness influencing responses to life and relationships. And, given my previous magical thinking with regards to religion and the Catholic faith and the fear of going to Hell, I had learned to stay silent and to obey without question.

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Thanks to the following for following along with the story this far:

Carrie, Benighted, Patrick OConnell, Adrian CDTPPW, JB The Talker, Maddy Mirza, Block Wife, and katoshi