Nowhere but Up

by Pattie Mallette

  Let me be clear—I know my parents never intended for me to ever catch a glimpse of pornography in any format. But the fact is I did. And it made an impact on me.

  The sexual overtones that colored my life from the time I was only a few years old sometimes manifested in the way I played with other kids. This was true when I was five and it was true when I got older. I got caught playing naked under the porch with one of the neighborhood boys and once underneath the bed with a boy from school. For some reason, I was always getting caught naked with a boy.

  When I reached my early teens, a group of neighborhood boys and I would head over to an abandoned warehouse down the block to play strip poker or any other card games that required taking off our clothes. I was the only girl. So the prize? Me. Whoever won got to pretend to have sex with me naked.

  There was obviously a connection between my abandonment issues and the sexual abuse. On one hand, I craved physical affection—not in a perverse way but as a form of pure, unconditional love. On the other hand, I still guarded my heart and was adept at unplugging when things got distressing. In the moments of abuse, I learned how to clench my eyes tight and hold my breath until it was over. I tried not to think about how uncomfortable and scared I was or how I wanted to crawl inside of myself and disappear. I just held on for dear life to emptiness, a blank mind and a heart void of feelings. Though my experiences taught me to shut down and push aside the things I really wanted, I couldn’t escape the unrequited desire to be unconditionally loved the way I wanted—for the love I needed from my dad.

  CHAPTER

  Three

  Though it had been years since I’d seen him, I missed my dad. I wanted him back. Since I was a little girl, I had waited for the day the phone would ring and it would be him. I had the script memorized. He’d be flooded with remorse and regret for leaving us, and he’d tell me how much he loved me and that he was coming back and staying for good. He’d repeat “I’m sorry” until the words mended my broken heart and rid me of the sadness I had carried all those years.

  By the time I was nine, I had just a pinch of hope left. I still loosely held on to the fantasy of being rescued by him, especially because I had not connected on an emotional level with any other adult, including my mom or stepdad.

  I came home from school one day that year and bounced through the front door. On my way to the kitchen to grab a snack, I noticed my mom sitting on the couch with a strange man. They spoke quietly. The tension was obvious. My mom’s shoulders were uncomfortably stiff and the man looked nervous.

  When she saw me, my mom stood up and smoothed her pants. “Pattie,” she began in a monotone voice. “This is Mike . . . your father.” The tall, skinny man beside my mother stood up. He seemed to tower over me like a giant. He looked nervous and kept fiddling with his hands. This was him? The man I’d waited for my whole life?

  I blinked. A lot. I was caught off guard. No matter how many times I had pictured this moment in my head, I wasn’t prepared. I wasn’t sure how to react. I definitely felt a jolt of excitement; the butterflies in my stomach were flying into each other. But I couldn’t move. My feet were glued to the floor.

  My dad looked into my eyes and smiled. “Hello, Pattie,” he said with kindness. I don’t remember us having a moment anything like the daydream I had reserved in my head for the past seven years. Although we didn’t have a palpable connection, there was no extreme awkwardness between us. Our company was comfortable enough to warrant a pleasant dinner that evening with my brother, Chris. The three of us even went to the mall afterward, and my dad bought me a soft E.T. doll. I was thrilled. It replaced Thumbelina, who had been hijacked and destroyed by my brother not long after my dad gave her to me.

  That night my dad returned home to Timmins, a ten-hour drive away, but he promised to keep in touch. After the shock wore off, I was beside myself. My dad was back. I was on cloud nine that I was going to have a relationship with him. I mattered again. This was my moment, and nothing could take him away from me. Nothing.

  My dad kept his promise. I remember getting phone calls from him every now and then. He even mailed me the best gift ever. I had been begging my mom for cable TV in my room, but we didn’t have a cable outfit upstairs. My father mailed me the longest cable cord I have ever seen in my entire life so I could connect my TV to the downstairs line. My mother wasn’t happy because the cable had to run from the first floor living room up the stairs, through the hall, and into my room. I, on the other hand, was ecstatic. Cable in my room! Wow!

  A few months after my dad’s visit, my brother had made plans to spend the summer with my dad, his wife, and his extended family. On the morning Chris was supposed to leave, my mom got a phone call. It was only six thirty in the morning. I didn’t hear the phone ring, but I did hear the door to my bedroom creak open and my mom walk over to my bed. I was groggy, still in a sleep fog.

  “Pattie, I’m sorry,” she told me. “Your father died last night. He had a heart attack.” She told me my brother had already left for Timmins and would attend the funeral.

  It was peculiar. I felt nothing. It was like almost at the sound of those words, the finality of the statement, my heart instantly turned off. Every bit of hope that had stemmed from being reunited with my dad vanished. As I’d done time and time again in the past, I detached myself emotionally to protect myself from feeling anything at all. I became completely disconnected to keep myself safe from even the slightest bit of emotion. I did, however, feel sorry for my mom and ask her if she was okay. She, of course, was fine. I allowed myself to be led by her example, so I too was fine. No muss. No fuss.

  Six years later, some of the volcanic emotions that had been buried that day started steaming their way to the surface. I went to visit my dad’s tombstone in Timmins. Most of our relatives on both sides lived there, so our family made the drive at least once a year to visit. On a clear sunny day, absent of any noise outside of a landscaper trimming nearby bushes, I stood in front of his grave and yelled at the top of my lungs.

  For about an hour, I screamed at the inanimate slab of stone in hopes of surfacing the emotions I knew were inside of me. I was angry but not full of rage, though I knew the rage existed somewhere. I had spent my life stuffing down emotion, shoving aside my hurts and pains, pushing legitimate feelings down so deep that apparently even I couldn’t dig them out, not even by staring at the tombstone bearing my father’s name. I yelled at him for leaving me too early, for abandoning me twice, but even as the words flew out of my mouth in a verbal storm, I didn’t emotionally connect. I was still so far removed from the deep part of my heart.

  My internal walls had been firmly reinforced by abuse and disappointment. The emotional disconnect was my obvious defense strategy, the only way I could continue living a normal (whatever that means) life. Abuse? Disconnect. Emotionally absent mom? Disconnect. Dad dies? Disconnect. It wasn’t long before those defenses worked against me. Being a pro at disconnecting did, however, give me one advantage.

  My ability to disconnect from reality helped fuel my love for the arts, especially acting. I always thought I was going to be an actress. When I was around nine, I made appearances on Romper Room and Big Top Talent, a Canadian television children’s talent show where I recited a monologue from Anne of Green Gables and told the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. I was a ham who loved not just the camera but pretending I was someone else.

  I’m sure I gravitated toward playing characters because it allowed me to step away from what was happening to me. Acting also gave me a sense of control. I could use my voice to make people laugh or cry. I could be as loud and dramatic as I wanted. I also loved to sing. All through middle school and high school, I took every drama and choir class that was offered. I was in the school choir every year and had major roles in almost every school play. I was quite literally a drama queen. I also spent seven years taking dance lessons. I couldn’t get enough of the arts.

  When I was ten, I performed in the Stratford Shakespeare
Festival, a celebration of the theatrical arts that runs from April to November every year. More than half a million tourists from all over the world visit our little town during that time to see wonderful performances of plays by Shakespeare and other greats. I was cast for two roles in The Government Inspector and played a peasant girl and a rich girl.

  I loved the hustle backstage before the performance—sitting in the hair and makeup chair, wearing frilly costumes, being doted on by the older actresses. But being onstage thrilled me even more. It gave me a sense of freedom. My heart wasn’t burdened by feelings of abandonment, fear, or rejection or by those wretched dirty feelings I still didn’t understand. I was free to act, to be dramatic and perform from a place in my spirit that captured innocence. I was unfettered as a kite.

  Throughout elementary and junior high school, I filled up my bedroom with awards and trophies from singing and acting competitions. I even got accepted into an acting agency in Toronto, but it required me going to auditions on the weekend. My mom and Bruce refused to make the hour-and-a-half drive, so I couldn’t go. I was devastated. It was the one chance I’d had to hone something I was actually really good at. My dreams were crushed.

  As much as I loved acting and drawing from different identities and personas when I was younger, I still couldn’t escape how others were violating my body. You can’t fake an accent to cover shame. It was hard to reconcile the sexual abuse that had been happening to me since I was a little girl. Even though I’ve since been through intensive counseling and healing, even today certain memories and feelings don’t just go away. There are still moments when I can see the little girl in me crouching low in the shadows, afraid, unheard, confused, ashamed.

  When I sought counseling many years after the abuse, I learned from my therapist that young victims of trauma carry those wounds, most of them covered up and even deeply buried, into adulthood. As a little girl, I did what I had to do to adapt in my abusive environment. Because I did so, however, the five-year-old me never had the opportunity to address the injustices. I couldn’t voice how abandoned I felt. Or how hurt. Or how betrayed. Or how ashamed. I never had the chance.

  During one of my visits, my counselor recommended an exercise where I, as an adult, could visualize my younger self during this traumatic time and walk through some of the pain. The older me could defend and even protect the younger me who felt alone. She told me I needed to mentally travel back to the age when the abuse first showed up. The adult had to connect with the child, no matter how painful it was. I had to go back in time and allow the little girl to talk. I had to give her a voice.

  My initial reaction was to say no. Revisit my inner child? Please. It sounded like psychobabble. However, my reluctance almost always gave way to trying different exercises, even if they lay outside my comfort zone.

  So one day in my therapist’s office, I closed my eyes and pictured myself as a five-year-old girl. I was surprised at how rapidly the vision in my mind unfolded. A little girl sat on a bed and hugged her knobby knees to her chest, rocking back and forth as if in slow motion. Long, straight, dark hair with a heavy bang framed her delicate features. Normally bright and clear, her greenish-blue eyes looked dull and lifeless, aimed at the floor. I noticed her shoulders sagged, weighed down by a burden too heavy to bear.

  I asked the younger Pattie if I could sit with her for a bit, and she said yes. We sat in silence for a few minutes, and then I heard a soft whimpering. Faint drops of tears cascaded down her tiny cheeks. I asked her what was wrong. “My mommy doesn’t love me,” she whispered.

  For the record, I don’t remember feeling unloved as a little girl. My mother wasn’t a bad or abusive mom who neglected me. On the contrary, I know she worked hard and did the best she could at raising me. I don’t think that was necessarily the point of my reconnection with my five-year-old self. I feel I simply had to acknowledge the hurting and confused child in me. I had to comfort her, to tell her that everything would be okay. And most of all, I had to allow her to exercise her voice—the voice I never knew I had. The voice I finally found when someone told me it was okay to say no.

  I was ten when a thirty-second public service announcement (PSA) helped me gain enough power to turn the tables on all the abuse I had been experiencing up to that point. I was mindlessly watching TV when a pint-sized African American boy whom I recognized as Webster from the TV show of the same name talked to me as he moved through a set of giant, colorful letters of the alphabet.

  My ears started ringing when I heard, “Sometimes grownups touch kids in ways they don’t like.”

  It was the first time I had ever heard someone verbalize exactly what I had been feeling for the last five-plus years. This kid knew how I felt. My heart started beating wildly in my chest. I thought it was going to break through my skin and take off like a rocket. Then I heard the voice of another little kid in the background who mentioned something about his uncle touching him in an icky way. Yes! I wanted to shout through the screen. Yes, that’s right! It feels icky. It feels gross.

  The kid continued to talk about feeling funny when someone touches you and tells you not to tell anyone else. And then Emmanuel Lewis said the magic words that gave me a semblance of control. That gave me a way to put a stop to the abuse. That gave me my voice.

  “Say no. Then go. And tell someone you trust.”

  My mind raced. So many different thoughts cluttered my brain in that moment. All I have to do is say no? Is it really that easy? Will it work?

  I was nervous but desperate enough to try it out. I knew the touching had to stop. My stomach churned when I thought about it. I had to wait for an opportunity to say no. I had to wait to be touched in that awful way.

  I sat numbly in front of the TV as the show I was watching earlier continued in an indistinct blur of colors and sounds. Fears began to manipulate my mind. I started to think of all the reasons I shouldn’t say no and should continue my MO and keep quiet, not rocking the boat. What if I say no and he gets mad? What if me saying no makes him get violent? What if I say no and he rejects me and never talks to me again? But my biggest fear was, What if it just doesn’t work?

  In the end, my desperation to put an end to the abuse overrode my anxiety. I knew I had to do it. I knew I had to say no. The PSA gave me just enough courage to try.

  One day it happened. My original molester cornered me and initiated the familiar routine of peeling off my clothes and taking turns touching. Before he could do anything further, though, I mustered up all the courage I could find and meekly said, “No. I don’t want this to happen anymore.” My voice was barely above a whisper, as loud as I was able to speak, but make no mistake, it was clear.

  Then I said it again, this time a tiny notch louder.

  “No.”

  What happened next amazes me to this day. He nodded, said “Okay,” and walked out of the room. He never touched me again.

  I found myself in the same situation again a few weeks later, with the other longtime offender. When that young man started his own ritual with me, I whispered my conviction in that same subdued voice. “No,” I told him, just as I had the other guy. “I don’t want to do this anymore.” And with that, he never again laid a hand on me.

  Finally, I had found my voice. And I found bits and pieces of just enough strength to use it.

  What I didn’t do, however, was tell anyone about it. I didn’t understand why I had to tell someone I trusted. None of my abusers had ever explicitly told me not to tell anyone. I just didn’t. Why would I want to, anyway? There was no need for someone else to know about my unbearable shame.

  During the few seconds it took to say no, I was a part of the present. I wasn’t distant. I didn’t unplug. I didn’t close my eyes and pretend time had stopped and bad things weren’t happening. I acknowledged that things weren’t right. That what was happening to me had to stop.

  While the word no was my permission slip to speak up and defend myself, I quickly learned the word wasn’t magic. It worke
d to stop the abuse from occurring, but it didn’t release me from my emotional turmoil. Emotions that I kept at bay. Emotions that multiplied and mutated as time passed.

  When I’d feel sad, my instinct to cry was overpowering, but an even stronger part told me to zip it. When I’d feel afraid, I’d want to reach out for help, but I’d remind myself it was better to ignore it. It took a long while for me to reconcile my voice and my heart.

  CHAPTER

  Four

  I spent most of my early teen years in my bedroom, zoned out from the rest of the world and from my dark memories. I buried my head in my journals, where I would furiously write about how life sucked and how miserable I was. It was the genesis of my depression, bouts of which lasted well into my adulthood. I didn’t know how to deal with my pain, so I wrote poem after poem, every one of them telling the story of a girl with a broken heart. My words painted the picture of a teenage identity crisis, my obvious depression, and hints of confusion about my sexual trauma.

  I try so hard

  To be what others want me to be.

  I am forever being someone else,

  And for this, I know not who I am . . .

  It hurts to pretend.

  I feel as if I don’t fit in anywhere . . .

  I am responsible for things I do and decisions I make,

  But wrong choices are made and disaster occurs.

  When things are built up inside,

  Whether it be frustration, anger, or confusion,

  The thought of suicide is possible to occur . . .

  No one knew the kinds of destructive things that festered in my heart. Outside of seeing me act out in rebellion, in small spurts at first, my family probably didn’t even have a clue something was wrong. You want the ones who are supposed to love you the most, even unconditionally, to take the time to look beyond your messy parts or rough edges, but I didn’t feel like my mom or stepdad were interested in doing that. I guess it’s hard enough to parent a teenager, let alone decipher the hieroglyphics of a broken one.