THIS SUMMER...

Have you ever had to keep a really big secret? Do you remember how it felt to keep that secret? If it was a good secret, like the time Jeff and I wanted to surprise our kids with a trip to Disneyland, it feels like you could just burst before the big day arrives and you can reveal the great news! Or, like Christmas Eve when you know you’ve gotten the perfect gifts for your kids and can’t sleep in anticipation for their excitement in the morning. Even so, keeping those secrets takes energy and effort, doesn’t it? I’ve kept a few secrets in my lifetime. Some of those secrets have been terribly painful to keep. Lately I’ve been thinking it’s time to let them go…

This summer I will travel to the places where my childhood was cut short, innocence stolen, trust stripped away, to help me let go of these terrible secrets. I don’t know what I will feel, I don’t know how or if it will help me, and I am trying not to have expectations, but it feels like the right thing to do at this point. I‘ve been told many times, confronting your fears and losses is the best path to leading you out of them. It’s a path I know way more intimately than any person would ever want to, but the alternative is denial, and that was not getting me far. This summer I will take my mom back to these places, at her suggestion, and hope it will give us both a reason to let go of guilt or blame for things that ultimately, neither one of us could control. This summer I will take my kids to these places, to show them that we all have fears to face, that we all need to keep fighting, and that I am not afraid anymore. This summer I will re-visit a time and place where I was unable to protect myself, where I was vulnerable, afraid, confused, and damaged, but this time I will be strong. This summer I hope to leave parts of me there… The dark parts, the broken parts, the parts that died a long time ago, yet I’ve carried with me for all these years. It’s time for me to lay those parts down where they should have been left to begin with, and to leave a little lighter. One more step on my path to being whole.

Why blog about it? Because it is really no secret that 1 in 4 girls, and 1 in 6 boys, will be sexually abused by the age of 18. Look around you, look at your daughters, your sons, your nieces and nephews. Look at your grandchildren, your friends, your neighbors, look at how many people you know, then look long and hard at those statistics. 1 in 4 beautiful, innocent, undeserving, little girls, young ladies, or women may be struggling with the weight of this kind of terrible secret. 1 in 4. There shouldn’t be shame in what was stolen from the innocent. Keeping my secrets isn’t helping me, and is, in fact, a bad example to the 1 in 4 girls whose lives will be snatched by a greedy hand, shaken to pieces, then left to try to put things back together.

This summer I will turn 40. It’s about time I made this journey… there have been a few years where I wasn’t sure I would choose to keep fighting. I’m glad I did. There is still a long road ahead, but I believe that I will be miles farther on my journey, after this summer.