by Melody

 

Cracked Wheat

father comes
quiet to
my room
at night,

tears away
sheets and
innocence.

mother makes
warm wheat
for breakfast,

new grain
broken before
water boils,

brown sugar
& butter
more than
eleven-year-old
should eat.

my tongue
tastes morning,
my mouth
holds seeds of truth:

harvest will come
for wheat

and tares.

 

The other morning I made cracked wheat for breakfast. I asked myself what it was I loved so much about this simple meal. It’s a favorite of mine. The answer unexpectedly overwhelmed me–

When I was a child and was being abused I often ate cracked wheat for breakfast. What I realized the other morning is that the grain itself bears witness of truth for “Truth shall spring out of the earth; and righteousness shall look down from heaven.” Psalms 85:11.

The Savior’s witness of all truth exists in each molecule of his creation. In the very moment of eating that wheat (unconsciously as a child and now consciously as an adult) I am reclaimed and healed by Christ’s atonement. I am the wheat. Cracked, broken. I am also a witness for His justice. Truth is in my mouth.

Ugo Betti said, “To believe [in god] is to know that all the rules are fair and that there will be wonderful surprises.” The poem is my personal expression of this idea.

Melody Newey earns a living as a registered nurse and lives to write. Her poems have appeared in Segullah, Utah Sings Vol VIII and Utah Voices 2012. She owns her history — the beautiful parts and not-so-beautiful parts. She writes about all of it.

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(Trigger warning for violence, sexual, physical, emotional, and spiritual abuse.)

I am an abuse survivor.  When I was a child, I was exposed to a pedophile.  Then the pedophile used my body repeatedly, rendering me psychologically injured and scared.  He managed to engage me, groom me, and then use me.  When he stopped assaulting me the fourth time, he terrified me so much that I never told a soul until I was in college seeing my first counselor.  I was 20.

I used to count 4 instances of abuse on one hand, but have since been able to see that abuse is more than just the assault itself.  I was assaulted four times, but I was abused far more often as I lived with the constant stressor of social and sexual deviance in my home life.  It still makes my mind into a bit of a pretzel when I think of it in this new way, but I’m practicing and it gets easier each time.

So now, instead of saying “I was sexually abused 4 times”, I simply say that I lived with a pedophile who used my body.  He used me sexually when he groped me, but he also used me in a myriad of other ways.  He manipulated me, he intimidated me, he lied to me, and many other unhealthy, hurtful things.

Abuse is so far-reaching, permeating the air in the room, the times between assaults, all the way to the perimeter of that relationship one has with the deviant.  I’m finally getting clarity on what that means.

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(I found the beginning of this post buried in my drafts folder. It was very emotional and distraught because I was in the middle of a painful situation with my sister.  Almost a year has passed and we’ve all found some peace and healing. After spending the weekend with this sister and her husband I thought it was appropriate to revisit this post with a different perspective)

“It’s like you’re stabbing yourself in the leg. And I’m caught between agonizing over your pain and getting frustrated that you’re bleeding all over me.”

This is what I told my 20 year old sister last year when she justified re-uniting with her then-abusive husband. At the time I couldn’t hear the self-centeredness in my words.  Her first year of marriage had been a rocky one, ending in a split that I expected would end in divorce. I knew he was wrong for her. I KNEW IT.

But she didn’t.  They have been back together for almost a year now and I’ve probably only said a dozen words to him until our family trip this weekend.  In my mind I kept thinking that if I ignored him, he would go away. She would end the marriage and get back her life and go to college, live her dreams.

Her dreams? No, those were my dreams. She never wanted to go to college. She expected to marry young, not unlike me, although I managed to wait another year and had the decency of NOT being a teen when I wed.

But it’s not about ME, I keep telling myself. It’s about her and her happiness. It took me a long time to understand this. I spent many months really upset by the choices she was making (and the responses from other family members) and trying to talk her into changing her mind. I even wrote a post about how sometimes answers to prayers can be wrong.  But looking back, my problem was that I thought I was right and I could control other people.  Both of those attitudes are problematic in relationships.

The fact that I’m ten years older than my sister doesn’t mean I’m necessarily more mature or better at relationships.  I know she looks up to me and wants me to be proud of her. Looking back, I know it was hard for her to have disappointed me with her choice to stay married. It’s only been recently that I’ve realized I was proud of her for being kind and understanding to me even when I was being belligerent and decidedly unkind about her husband. In those moments, I learned the truth behind the question, “Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?” I’d always thought I could have it both ways, but I’m learning now that I can’t.

Forgiveness is a virtue I’m a little rusty at. But, I’m getting better. We invited Lil Sis and her husband on a family trip with us this weekend and had the chance to watch them interact. They were very happy, respectful of each other, and worked together well. This has given me hope in the power of change. It’s also given me a greater desire to forgive and stay out of other people’s business in the future.

In the end, though, I’ve realized that I need forgiveness from my sister for adding to her pain when I ought to have been helping relieve it.

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 by kmillecam

It took me until I was 18 and had moved out of my house to finally wander my way into the Counseling Center at BYU. I was having trouble in school, trouble sleeping, general anxiety. There began my awakening to what I was. I was abused as a child. I finally spoke the words aloud. I was broken. I was a victim.

The first time I told someone about my sexual abuse it was to my therapist at BYU. I was 19 by then. Through therapy I gradually put names on the abuse: physical, emotional, sexual, and spiritual. The sexual abuse took the forefront. I look back now and am shocked that my therapist did not insist on calling the police or a social worker when I told her. I was convinced that I was the only victim. But she knew that I had younger siblings still living at home. She knew that my father was the perpetrator. She knew that statistically it had probably happened to more of my siblings. I wish she had done something. Admitting that I came from an abusive family was so new to me at the time. I did not feel comfortable navigating those waters. I definitely did not have the guts to blow the whistle on my father. I did not even know that I should have blown the whistle on my father, that my siblings were in probable danger. A social worker or police officer should have been notified. My father should have been stopped.

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