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In the mess of time just before my brother was arrested, the neighbors whose mobile home was directly behind ours banned my brother from their house & from being around their son.
I donât remember this boy. I donât even remember this family particularly wellâthe couple of years before my brother was arrested, time swirled around in my head & the world looked dull, hazy, & incomplete, people half-formed & unrealized.
The only reason I know that my brother was banned was because one afternoon, the father of the boy took a chainsaw & crudely pruned our oleanders, whose branches technically had reached their property, hacking at them even beyond their property line. This was referred to as done out of anger, out of being upset with usâfor what, I was never toldâ& thatâs when I learned that my brother wasnât allowed over there anymore & nowhere near their son.
~
to be both the victim of & the sibling of, a child molester. I know a lot more survivors whose trauma was âall in the familyâ so to speak, or whose molester/rapist was unrelated to themâwhen it ended, their home was free of the person who hurt them. The idea that those serial molesters have families doesnât seem to register to people as much. No one ever seemed to treat me, growing up, like my brother had ever hurt me, it was as though people assumed that hurting other children meant he was one of *those* kinds of child molesters, & thus, I was safe.
I straddle this line of knowledge now; I donât get the relief of knowing that my leaving took the singular victim away from my abuser & I donât get the sense of abstraction that I know my brotherâs other victims get, where before they knew him, they didnât know him, and the family they have is unrelated to him. I donât get to put him down, assuming that everyone around him is safe, or that itâs someone elseâs responsibility but my own.
One of the threads of my book is about the ways my mother made me carry her trauma; how the lives my brothers live are so different from my own, because their memories of their childhood go unquestioned and unchallenged. I know more about what happened in our house than they ever will, I know more about what happened to them than they may even remember, because I was my motherâs therapist, and thus, the memory keeper. The ways that they can move on are because my mother never thrust her pain in front of them, never told them the stories of abuse so many times, the repetition locked them in my heart & head, like scripture.
My trauma is other peopleâs trauma too, stories I know, stories I donât, interweaved through half truths & justifications, lines of veins I can trace on my skin & never make sense of where they end.
I think the reason I get so angry about how people talk about sexual abusers & rapists is because itâs clear how few actually do know, in a real personal way, what a serial abuser is like. You see one half or the other, or a story, or a shadow. Every single idea people have on ways to deal with abusers, on restorative/transformative justice, hell, even on âsurvivor ledâ justice, is big grand abstractions, representations of the words âabuserâ ârapistâ âchild molester,â a body without a story & therefore, without the necessary details & immediacy that would reveal these ideas as useful or not. And what abuse does, what it actually *does,* locked within the word âtrauma,â without a genuine sense of its specificity or intensity.
~
out of a deep understanding that I live in a world with people roughly my own age who have their own stories that are utterly intertwined with my own, but I donât know them. Sometimes I try & hunt down on facebook the people who were once a part of the circle of children my brother was too close with & check in on them. When theyâre not well, I think, âDid my brother make you this way?â
Are you okay? I want to ask everyone. Are you okay? Are you okay?
~
you know that I found the newspaper article that was published when my brother was arrested for molesting a child in our neighborhood. I cried all night after reading it, because it meant my mother had lied to me. And of course she had lied to me, of course I knew that because none of the details added upâbut still, to see in on the page. Sheâd made it sound like it was an afternoon. A fuck up. âKidâs stuff,â she called it. It was *months,* I read. It lasted *months.* And he was scared. He was so scared to say what happened to him. And the years in prison my brother got are the years in prison when itâs not just statutoryâitâs done with threat, or force, or injury.
And I know my brother.
âBecause of you, I already know
how to look jeering in the eye
and not flinch.â
âDonât flinch,â was one of his favorite games. Ha, I thought he was going to hit me, and flinched. Itâs funny. My fear is funny. My threats are funnyâI canât fight back & we both know it, & even attempting just reminds me of my own powerlessness. Powerlessness feels like getting the wind knocked out of you. God, how common it was, his fist or foot to my gut & then thereâs *no air*; you open your mouth, you think youâre going to pull in air, and nothing happens. âI canât breathe,â I pleaded to him once, clawing at the blanket he was holding down over my head while I lay on the bed. âIf you couldnât breathe,â he replied lightly, âyou couldnât talk.â
I know how scared you were, I want to tell my brotherâs every victim.
~
because I know the risk of it
I am not allowed to misremember
to unhear the curses off my lips
or the claws Iâve ever dug into your skin, not ever
every mistake, childish and benign
lives with my accusation
and we know itâ
At the time I found the article, I was in the throes of a bout of scrupulosity I will one day write about, built off years of my brain holding my own morality hostage. The risk of being a survivor & taking the stand that what happened to you was wrong, and not just any kind of wrong, but a horrific kind of wrong, is the risk of an impossible moral standard held against you in response. You are not allowed an imperfection, not allowed a moment where you did something wrong, or else what makes you different then them? & my own mind took that logic & gripped me in it. Was I allowed to say someone had done something wrong to me, could I, and *ever* be forgiven? Whatever I said they deserved, didnât I also deserve it? Wasnât everything I had ever done wrong proof that I had to let everything go, or risk being damned myself?
And I wouldnât do it. I refused to let go of my own morality, my sense of justice, even if it meant my own death. I was willing to believe that I was a monster before Iâd believe that what happened to me required a simple forgive & forget. The only thing that stayed my hand from suicide was the thought that if my brain *was* fucking with me, I didnât deserve to die, & if it wasnât, I didnât deserve the relief of death.
Something turned over in my head that night. My sense of justice & anger calcified in a way that had nothing to do with morality at all, it had nothing really to do with me at all. I didnât care anymore, if I was good or bad, if I was a monster or not: I felt sick & furious & I finally understood what the word *restitution* meant, because I wanted to *give it.* My family *owed him.* We owed him for what my brother did, we owed him for every moment of dismissal, denial, for the ways that my brother *never cared.* And if they werenât going to pay it, then somehow, *I would.*
I would do a lot, for anyone hurt by my brother. I google his name on the regular, along with sometimes searching for my mobile home park in my home town, seeking out if anyone has ever decided to come out with their own story. if I ever find out that someone is trying to press charges, Iâll strip off the little bit of anonymity I have, & be there in any capacity that will help them.. If they want to know what my brother was like, if they need that peace of mind, Iâll tell them. if they want to know the details of what he did to me, if they donât *ever* want to know the details of what he did to me, Iâd do it. If theyâve told themselves a story thatâs helped them move onâif they believe they were hurt by a poor lost confused kid who didnât know any betterâI wonât dissuade them of that, if thatâs whatâs helped them. I want them to have their own story, I want them to have a right to their own experience of what happened to them, even if it contradicts everything that I know.
I donât care about blame anymore. I donât even care about responsibility, about who owes who & to what amount. I donât care if the consequences for what my brother did spill out onto me. Tear down our trees. Tell me I look too much like my brother & you canât stand the sight of my face. Scream at me, let me hurt with you, ask me for something & let me give it, *anything,* if it would give you back something that you lost.
I wish the neighbor had hacked our trees up harder. I wish they had cut them all downâI want them to have left evidence of their anger with us. If my brother was banned from being around their son for all the very obvious reasons he would have been, then I want them to have extracted something, to take something from us, if it helped them feel like they took something back. Who is the innocent person they would have hurt doing it? Not fucking me, because I *wish they had.*
Thatâs what people never understand about justice for us. When they talk about justice for us, itâs always a brutal economics, trying to gauge the value of our bodies vs the price that we deserve to take back. Whatâs too far? Whatâs too much? Whatâs aimed at the wrong direction? What costs more than it should? Our trauma is medicalized, in the dehumanizing sense, the one in which we are interchangeable body parts, our pain as meaningful as a check box of symptoms, but with a set of doctors who donât ever want to hear the ugly details, to witness the infected wounds before treating us. They want to heal us while rooting around with one hand over their eyes.
~
the story began to shift, our past being retold as one far happier than it had been. To watch my family attempt to retcon this past of normal suburban family values while the memories broke against my head, was too much for me. Two months later would be when my mother would tell me I wasnât allowed to be in the house when my brother was there, because I refused to be around him, because it asked too many questions why I would simply stay in my room. The story was done, finished, my brother & what he had done were buried in the backyard, a body rotting under flowers the neighbors would never see. We were moving on & I was the weed.
In the years after my brotherâs arrest, it became clear that my mother only considered what my brother was convicted of as what he had done. Even though that alone was a sufficient enough horror, she grasped it like a decontextualized event, a singular moment in time. The months he hurt that child vanished, the other family who brought charges vanished, the boy behind our houseâif it was a different boyâvanished. The meaning of all the children my brother had latched onto, too close to, all vanished. âItâs a shame no church would ever trust your brother to work in Sunday School,â she said after he got out of prison. âHeâs so good with kids.â
~
that I was abandoning my brotherâs children to a family that would not care if anything happened to them, I was letting the evidence stay buried in the backyard without a grave marker, without a pronouncement, without any check in place to help. But I was dying, staring at my wall blankly for hours, being ground down by how worthless I felt, how little I mattered. I couldnât be around him. I couldnât put a smile on my face & pretend, I couldnât speak, I couldnât fight. I had no strength, & few on my side, no one who could help in that way.
For years after I ran away, ghosts of my brotherâs children clawed at my brain; Iâd fall asleep imagining a future with them screaming at me why I didnât save them, why I didnât stay, why I didnât do more. I couldnât think about what he did to me without thinking about them, without the bile & terror rising up inside me. It took me years to settle their voices, but they too, have calcified on me, frozen in a mid-scream, their bodies asleep on my back, quiet, but with urgency. Less letting go of guilt, more staring as the fire burns your neighborhood down; a grim acceptance, a rush of rage banging against your own sense of powerlessness.
We tell stories about romance & family, about the ties that bind beyond the physical world, & for me this feels like an inverted form of it; I am tied to people who donât know that Iâm tied to them, I am tied to possibilities of people & I cannot put them down because carrying them feels like the only thing I have to disrupt the banality of how many of us grow up like this, how many of us internalize that it really *doesnât* matter.
~
Trauma, abstracted, simple, the things that they euphemised behind that word. Trauma, safety, healing; easy words among people imagining the loner rapist, in a small house at the end of the block, nearly friendless. Remorse, healing, restoration, until the scar is invisible to everyone in the community, until everyone gets to put it down.
Every message of healing assumes an enclosed state. You were hurtâalways past tense, always when the moment is doneâand now itâs over, & now itâs time to move on. Your trauma is a misplaced echo of a finished pain, a circle you can hold in your fist until one day you let it go, down the drain of history because thereâs nothing more that can be done. & yet I am a tangle of every child my brother ever hurt & every child he, in potential, could hurt, & to let it go for a moment makes me feel like every callous hand that has ever turned their back on me because my trauma was too inconvenient for them. I donât get to put it down.
When people talk about our safety, they mean our physical safety. They donât mean a safe place away from the memories. My brotherâs past victims got that. His arrest was their complete freedom of him. They were not there the day he got out of prison, going to the mall to buy clothes, their mind wasnât full that day of intrusive thoughts, until their hands grew clammy & their face went white & they begged their mother to go to the car before they fainted. Their holidays were not an ultimatum of seeing my brother, or not being allowed to be there. âAre you *trying* to be cruel?â my mother asked me, when I started packing up my things.
This is my trauma, mine to carry alone, away from my brotherâs past victims. Whatever healing would have needed to happenâthen or nowâwould never be bloodless. So no one will imagine it.
~
âThe Next Christian Sex Scandalâ that interviewed Boz Tchividjian. Heâs one of the few Christians I still particularly pay attention to, someone who I actually contacted when I wanted to know if there were any Christian resources I could send my mother that talked about abuse well. His org, GRACE, often does independent investigations into abuse within Christian organizations.
A lot of that piece covers their investigation into a missionary boarding school, & the sheer, overwhelming amount of abuse that took place there. âWe lost a little bit of our soul on that investigation,â Boz said. And I think about what it does to others, to know what was done to us. Thereâs a part in the article where he says, outside of his wife, âI don't trust anyone 100 percent-I've seen too much, too many scenarios. What I have to wrestle with is how do I deal with that? How do I balance that tension, between not trusting anyone and knowing that we have to function in life?â
Reading that felt like a strange mix of emotions. The most messed up kind of feeling cared for. You walk into our trauma & you stare it, flinching with us along the way, until it gets under your skin, until you understand just what it was that was done to us, and that means that the scars are on you too. He doesnât root around with his hand covering his eyes. He doesnât treat survivors like this is a formula to some neat & tidy healed end. And maybe that is what it means to offer your hand to a survivorâyou surrender yourself to a life that echoes our own trauma. That thatâs what it takes, to do something survivor-led. Not even your politicsâyour willingness to shoulder something.
He makes tweets often about being in an airport just makes him wonder how many victims of abuse are around him, & ever time he does, I feel like he understands just what it is that abuse leaves you with, just a little. I too, take walks in the evening sometimes, wondering how many children are being hurt in that very moment. I canât pass a child without wondering, âAre you okay? Are you okay?â
You get jittery & on edge & people call it trauma, & it is, but itâs one you take.
Because someone has to.
I think about what it costs, to care about about us, to truly imagine what justice would look like. When people say the community will handle us, they donât know how antiseptic it all is for them right now. The therapists, the doctors, who have put our trauma in their clean little vials & we leave it on their shelves. The lovers who stay up with us half the night while our memories come, fast & jumbled, & sometimes we wonât recall them in the morning. The people who hold us togetherâfor better & worse, for good reasons & for badâto make the glamor of healing hold, to hide from you the worst parts of what happened to us, and what it did.
And it would be fine, I want to tell peopleâyou donât have to look into the well of it all, you donât have to listen to the story, if they would just stop rooting around, acting like doctors while covering your eyes from the sight of blood.
~
People talk about it like a moment in time, like penance, with an end point, like there can be a too much of it. Like someone can be remorse over sexual abuse & then be done, bounce back, shake it off their shoulders. Like they hope that remorse will heal usâagain, in that bloodless wayâenough that it would be unfair for our abusers to keep holding onto it when we areâor shouldâbe fine.
Is it fair, people ask, is it fair that it follows them around forever?
âWe lost part of our soul that day.â How do you confront the trauma you caused, and not take some of it on you? Is the worst thing you could go through the glassy-eyed stare that happens when you feel the pain & powerlessness you inflicted on someone else? Not about punishment, or vengeance, or even justice. The people who care about us lose half their soul just listening to what was done to us. What would you have to lose, to come back from having done it? Can you have remorse, can you offer restitution, can you even take the first step, without grieving your hair grey listening to what you put us through?
No one has ever even asked my brother to care. Heâd get angry at you if you didâthose eyes flashing in the injustice of it all. Heâd fold his arms & heâd fall silent, & he would wait you out until you shrugged your shoulders & gave up & pretended it all away again. No one has asked him to put the name of the boy he hurt on his lips, the name of the child behind our house, the name of the boy whoâs family dropped charges, the name of any other child he hurt. No one has asked him for honesty, for remorse, for a sense that anything that he did even mattered. And no one ever will.
I donât need healing, or closure. I donât need someone to attempt to make my brother care, to waste their time thinking either his shallow & clumsy apologies are sufficient, or trying to micromanage his anger. I donât need to believe in a future where abusers donât exist anymore, where we have cured them of their laughter at the sight of other peopleâs pain, fixed their desire for power. I need a megaphone in front of his bedroom window, I need the truth emblazed on the sky overhead, I need everyone to hack up all of his trees & tell him to stay away from their kids, I need him toothless, powerless, I need to wake up in the morning knowing he is *incapable* of hurting anyone else, ever again.
I need enough people willing to lose a little bit of their soul to make it happen. I need enough people having to deal with their own echoes of this trauma, asking themselves how they can 100% trust anymore. I need people willing to put their eyes on our wounds, cleaning our blood off their shirts at night, a little broken. I need Bikers Against Child Abuse, but for all of us, so that one day maybe I can put down these stones of childrenâghosts & potentialsâtheir terrified hands clutched around my neck, knowing that there is someone else that can stand guard. So that one day the faces of children donât make me wonder, âare you okay? Are you okay?â
in the difference between vengeance & fairness, in whatever the hell ârestorativeâ means, in a bloodless healing, in an economics where our bodies are translated into emotional or physical denominations so that the knives can cut through our needs, ensuring we donât ask for too much. They put our trauma in vials, pain neatly closed off, with a simple endpoint, a checklist of steps to make sure we donât spill out too far, too make sure our blood doesnât get on anyone else.
No. The cost of my trauma is that I am made up of memories I donât have, experiences I never witnessed that I never get to put down. You canât wreck me anymore. You canât threaten me with the idea that I would be just like them, with the removal of community, with my own imperfections flung into my face, or with any other tool used to silence victims, to make us sympathize with the person who hurt us, to make us clean up our trauma & pretend it away for the sake of everyone else. My anger is hard & impenetrable, stone that cannot crumble away. I donât care if Iâm good. I only care to give back what my brother took. Because he wonât do it. So I will.
I am the sibling of the serial child molester, I lived with the kind of abuser you can only see in the abstract, I saw all the dimensions of him. I donât get to put him down. No matter how far I go, or how old I get, until the day he dies, he always lives with me. Nobody thinks about us, the ones related to those who hurt others, too. Nobody, not even the leftists who cut the world exclusively into categories of oppression & classes, even imagine us as a class, as a trauma shared among all of us child sexual abuse survivorsâamong all of us sexual violence survivors.
âHow individualist,â I wish I could fling at them, bitterly, âto think I could heal until every single one of us is safe.â
