When it came to writing about having been molested by my dad, the don’t talk rule kept me quiet and in self-doubt until I was sixty years old. He fondled my sisters’ and my breasts all his life, until he was ninety-two years old.
My knowing that I had to write the story had begun developing some years before my mother passed away when she was ninety. The grandchildren had been kept away from him. We sisters didn’t often get close enough to our dad for him to get us anymore. It was a tragic warping of our relationships with him that made me need to understand why he did it. I also wanted to get him to apologize, before it was too late.
A few years earlier, I had embarked on a fact-finding mission which lasted until he died. It had yielded some stunning results.
I had never stood up to our dad. Only one of us had. After my mother died, no one could safely look after our dad in our own home. For three years, my siblings and I visited him in the nursing home. I couldn’t always have a safe distance. Also, he began making inappropriate comments about what I was wearing. One day, having a panic attack while passing a semi-truck on the freeway, I saw my new growing fear of big trucks was actually my fear of my dad. I knew then I had to stand up for myself. Shortly after that, I was able, for the first time, to get mad at dad when he said something inappropriate and confront him. That changed everything, for me. Events followed that moved me so deeply, none of my self-doubt could finally stop me from writing the story that became LION TAMER MEMOIR.
When my dad died at ninety-two, I began writing. It wasn’t a smooth process. At first, I tried over and over to write the story and found I couldn’t. That was because to write it would be a betrayal, I felt. I couldn’t get passed the don’t talk rule. One day, I was so frustrated, I slammed my computer shut (broke a hinge) and told my husband “I need to go to that survivors’ recovery group.” I went and within a month had gotten rid of the inner censor that had told me all my life I couldn’t write my own story. I was clicking away on the computer. Still, doubt plagued me. How could you write this? Why would you? But a deeper knowing that it was an important story for others who can relate on many levels pushed me to pray to God and to my dad for a sense that it was okay to keep on. That sense always came fairly quickly.
Over the next twelve years I wrote the LION TAMER MEMOIR series: How It All Turned Out and the four prequels—How It All Began, The Cauldron (editing in progress), A Perilous Task (editing in progress) and The Elusive Self (editing in progress).
The story I initially meant to write—what happened in the events leading right up to my father’s death—I learned, as I wrote, wouldn’t make sense if I didn’t start the story further back in time. I had joined a writer’s workshop where the writers helped me understand the need for backstory in order for everything that followed to make sense. The protagonist (myself, who I call by my middle name, Marie) needed to be motivated in her thoughts. She needed struggles for there to be plot. And themes needed to be developed to give the story meaning. I kept having to go farther and farther back in time to explain what brought Marie to a certain understanding or a failing to understand, what lions within herself motivated her improvident actions, moved her to keep silent and fear the lion who was her father, and what prompted her to tame her father and her own lions within.
Though courage came and went, the inner knowing that the story needed to be written never left. So, now, the story that had to be told is finally nearing completion.
P.S. Some readers ask why I speak of the protagonist (myself) in the third person and why I named her Marie. I found I couldn’t write the story using my own first name, Therese. It felt too close. I tried fictitious names. That didn’t work. Then I tried my middle name, Marie. It was perfect.