That was the first day that I faced and accepted my separation and loneliness and abandonment.
Since I got to remain at the same school that I previously attended, I kept my friends, my teachers, and the familiarity of the physical plant. That continuity and the love and protection of the sisters of Notre Dame created a protective barrier against much of my pain.
I also had my best friends. It seems that very early I learned the value of strong female friendships. To this day, fifty-odd years later, after finding each other in the fifth grade, Kathleen Maier and I are still friends. We are separated by miles and get together only occasionally, but the bond remains strong. Kathleen knew my mother. We have a history.
Judy Moon and I became friends in the seventies and know everything about one another. Judy is my touchstone. She is whom I call at 3:00 A.M. because I can’t breathe. We have raised a lot of hell together, and we are growing old together.
Mary Groff became my mentor and then my friend later in life. Those three are my closest, dearest pals. There are also Donna Farish and Linda Mosley and Carol Jean Exby and Rita Hayes.
I have my children, whom I love dearly, but these women are my family in a way that children can never be.
I felt that my foster mother was a cold, unaffectionate woman. I didn’t think it was just her attitude toward me. I don’t remember any affectionate play between her and her husband, Mike. She did express affection to her own children, and she did take excellent care of all of us. Her home was immaculate, our clothes were beautifully cared for, and she was a good cook who had a meal ready every evening for her household. In her own way, I suppose she loved her family. I know that she never loved me or even particularly liked me.
When Mike died, I attended the funeral with my husband, and she introduced me as “the little girl we got from Catholic Charities.”
What joining this new foster family meant was that I acquired three more siblings. I was twelve, slightly older than Michael, so I became the eldest of the four of us. He and I were never close, but we were not at odds, either. He was an attractive boy who was a little bit self-centered. We played when I first joined the family, but as I entered adolescence, we grew apart.
Patrick was a wonderful, sunny child who resembled his father. Mike the father was a recovering alcoholic, and unfortunately, Patrick inherited this predisposition for alcoholism. He had his dad’s wonderful, outgoing personality, but he died very young, probably as a result of abusing his body with alcohol.
Kathy and I shared a room. She was an adorable child and a pleasant roommate, even though I was six years older than she.
I felt it was good for me to have these foster siblings. I was accustomed to caring for younger brothers and sisters and expected to fill that role in my new family, but the first time my foster parents went out alone, they secured the services of a babysitter. I was outraged. In fact, logically or not, all these years later, I am still incredulous. I had taken care of my brothers and sisters for years, and I had already baby-sat outside my home. I was a professional babysitter. I did not need a babysitter.
Another issue was family outings. If I preferred not to go out with the family, they felt that I did not appreciate them, when the truth was that adolescents routinely seek some independence and solitude. Or at least that was part of the truth as far as I was concerned.
The other feature that took a good deal of getting used to was the eating habits of this family. Mary would often prepare three different meals to satisfy the palate of each family member. I, on the other hand, had come from an environment where you ate what was provided or did without. If there was something that you found really odious, you could pass on that item and eat whatever else there was. Meals back on Algonquin Parkway were not customized to fit individual tastes as they were in my new home. Fortunately! It would have been an endless task to fix special dishes for each of us six youngsters.
I saw and ate my first shrimp during this early period with my new family, and I quickly gained an appreciation for that particular delicacy. Big Mike said that I was developing expensive tastes, although I knew he really liked it that I loved the new delicacy. Mike and I enjoyed a kind of camaraderie. I cherished all the love I could get.
As far as my real family was concerned, I was utterly alone. I was needy, and I was powerless. Among my sisters, Sandra was nearest my age. I knew I could have been with Sandra and Aunt Mary Louise and Uncle Lyle if the religious difference hadn’t been the great issue. Still, I felt some satisfaction because I had chosen not to betray my church and my mother. In any case, Sandy was lost to me now.
Aside from our doctrinal differences, Uncle Lyle and I had become close enough that I had told him of my father’s disgusting invasion of my body. I expected some sort of an explosion, outrage that you could hear all the way to Toledo, and I felt puzzled and betrayed by what I considered Lyle’s inaction.
I learned later that he used his knowledge as a powerful “persuader” of my father when it really counted, but at the time, Lyle merely questioned me closely several times as to whether I had told anyone else about the episode. And then he was quiet. With my twelve-year-old penchant for simplifying all complexities, I confirmed for myself that this was something I must not talk about, a secret that must be buried somewhere deep within me and never told. Adults, it seemed, could never be trusted.
Perhaps that explains why I was such fair game for Mike, my foster father. It was a pleasant day, the day it first began. I was thirteen, thin, certainly no Lolita, though I had big dark eyes and a chubby face. I was on the phone.
The phone was a sore point with me. One of the most disagreeable rules at my new home was the telephone limit. I was allowed five minutes and no more. In teen-talk, that would hardly get you past the amenities. I have to admit that I was always pushing the limit while I was glued to the phone in the little niche outside the kitchen and the den. Mike chose a peculiar way to deal with my disobedience.
On this particular day, everyone had gone out except Mike and me. I was on the phone. He came and stood beside me. Instead of telling me to end my chatter, he began to massage my arms and then my back. I was grateful for the rare affectionate gesture. I kept on talking. And talking. He continued to stroke my skin up and down my torso very gently. I began to feel paralyzed, and I didn’t move. His hands slipped lower and touched my skinny behind softly, almost as if by accident. It made me feel funny.
He stopped the minute he heard Mary’s car enter the driveway, so I knew immediately that this was a secret.
Every time my foster father and I were alone – and it seemed to happen a lot – he would touch me. His finger teased me for weeks before he put it inside me. His hands played with my little-girl nipples, making them hard and sore. I never said a word to him. I never acknowledged even to myself what was happening. Somehow I knew I should try to avoid him, but the day always arrived when we were alone, and I couldn’t evade him.
I was a little girl in so many basic ways. I didn’t have my first menstrual period until I was fifteen and only then did I begin to fill out. I loved to run and play, and I escaped constantly into books. I had good girlfriends.
But, along with the little-girl pursuits, there evolved the secret life. Mike never came into my room or into the bathroom. I was never denied personal space or privacy. The thing was that I was fair game in the public rooms of the household, and I just couldn’t hide out forever.
I never seemed to figure out when Mike’s probings and proddings and sexual caresses were going to happen. We never talked about it. I always stood motionless. Both of us remained silent. We never looked at each other’s face.
Our relationship got terribly skewed. Sometimes I asked to do something or go somewhere that ordinarily would have been denied, and Mike would give me permission. Not always, but sometimes I’d get special treatment.
I developed a dislike for Mary. If she would love him and be good to him, he wouldn’t bother me, I thought. If she were a good m
other, she would protect me. I believed she knew what was going on and failed to intervene because it got her off the hook. Anyway this was all a great big secret in this devout household that had been entrusted by Catholic Charities with the upbringing of a bewildered adolescent girl whose mother had died unexpectedly, whose father had abandoned her and parceled out her five brothers and sisters all across the country.
As I got older, it got more complicated. I even started to date. So, on the one hand I was getting from church and school and “family” this grim and serious message about staying pure. No sex before marriage. On the other hand, I was being slowly and methodically sexualized.
One day I came out of my bedroom to find the kids gone and Mary working in the yard. Mike was watching TV in his pajama bottom and nothing else. He beckoned to me. I stood by his chair as he moved his hands up my legs to my panties. He put his hand inside my pants and fingered me. This went on for quite a while, and then he did a new thing. He opened his pajamas where men go to the bathroom and pulled out his penis. It was big and red, and it looked angry. He took my hand, and I resisted, but he guided it to his penis and made me touch it. I didn’t look. I just touched.
I hated the den. That’s where it usually happened. He came to the den one day when no one was around, and he motioned to me to stand in front of him. He pulled down my underwear so he could see my private parts. It was shocking and humiliating. I didn’t even let my little foster sister see me naked. He studied my body for a long moment and then began the stroking and massaging and fingering with yet more intensity than usual. He took his penis out and put my hand on it. He told me to squeeze it, and I did.
Miraculously, no member of the family or any guests ever happened to interrupt one of those scenes in the den. And there were a great many of those sessions over the years. They went on and on until I began to date someone seriously.
Then he just stopped!
I have been asked why I obeyed him, why I acquiesced to his ogling and fingering and poking and prodding, why I didn’t go to the nuns at school and the priests at church for help. I suppose the reason was that I desperately needed his good will. He was the only one who was there. His wife disliked me. My father had betrayed and abandoned me. In my childish way, I believed my mother had deserted me by dying. What if I lost Mike? Who in the world could I depend on?
I’d like to tell you that it was all over when I got a serious boyfriend, but there was one more time. I was nineteen, had been separated from my young husband, and was staying in Florida with my Aunt Eileen and my little sister, Grace, and my little brother, David. My foster father came to see me while on a business trip. He took my little brother and sister and me out to dinner. He was so very kind to the little kids. He got them great big ice-cream treats, and then he took them home.
Mike never said where we were going, and I didn’t ask. He took me to his hotel room. We didn’t speak. I stood there just as mute and passive as I had been all those times in his den. Silently, he undressed me, looked his fill at my body, lowered me onto the bed, entered me, and had a quick orgasm. It was dirty and degrading and a doubly bitter experience because I hadn’t known how to make it not happen.
It is difficult for the independent woman I am today to understand how the young woman I was then could have been so passive. I buried that day like a dirty little secret for years.
One day during a counseling session, while listening to a woman who had survived multiple beatings in the hell that was her marriage, I finally came to terms with my own choices. Just as that woman had finally left her abuser, so did I, but long ago on that afternoon in Florida, I did what I had been conditioned to do.
Soon afterward, I returned to Toledo and to my husband.
Mike never bothered me again. He treated me as a daughter. He said that I would always be his daughter and that I would share equally with his other children. That, of course, was a fantasy. He died a few years later, and at the funeral, his family scarcely recognized me. Mary was barely civil, and the kids were wrapped in their own grief. “The little girl they got from Catholic Charities” didn’t belong.
Among the mourners, there may have been women who provided Mike with sexual relief after those sessions of foreplay with me in his den. I can’t remember when I first became aware of his infidelities, but I knew he had affairs.
I never hated Mike. He was not inherently an evil man. He was entrusted with fathering a young girl, and he violated that trust and did bad things. But he contributed greatly to his community. He was a leader in the Catholic diocese of Toledo. He was in Alcoholics Anonymous for years and helped many in their struggle for sobriety. When he died, the funeral home was crowded with people who Mary and the kids didn’t know.
People came forward with the same story, told over and over again. Only the details varied. Mike helped people. This person would be dead except for Mike. This person had built a business because Mike had faith in him.
Would anyone have believed me if I had talked about this paragon’s exploits with a teenage waif in his den?
Mike was not the stereotypical abuser inasmuch as he never tried to control my life or limit my freedom. Except for that one shameful secret, he pushed me to be the very best that I could possibly be.
Mike was intelligent. He was born to a poverty-ridden family in the hills of Kentucky. He personified the story of the poor mountain boy who carries his shoes to school so he won’t wear them out. He was the first person in his family to become a university graduate. He was teaching at a college before he reached his twenty-first birthday. Mike was bright, charismatic, and charming. He went into sales and was very successful.
Mike respected my intelligence and ambition. He was always proud of my academic achievements, and he consistently encouraged me to grow. Even with all the bad stuff, there was this supportive male figure wrapped up in the same person, and it was a desperate time. I needed his good will and love terribly.
“The Six of Us” together again after 20 years. (L to R) Larry, David, Grace, Karen, Pat, Sandy.
PART TWO
Learning and Getting Stronger
CHAPTER EIGHT
Marriage and Divorce
I was in a dreary waiting room filled with some of the good folks of Alabama. Years earlier, I had obtained a Social Security number, made a note of it, used it for decades, lost the card, and never noticed its absence. But to get a job in Alabama, I was told it was necessary to present an actual Social Security card not just a number, so I was in the Social Security Office of Albertville applying.
There were forms. I didn’t need to fill them out, a clerk behind the barred window would see to it.
“Tell me your maiden name,” she said.
“Karen Strawn,” I said.
“Spell it, please.”
“S-t-r-a-w-n,” I said.
I was wearing a wedding ring. “Any other name?” she asked expectantly.
“Karen Mikolajczyk. M-i-k-o-l-a-j-c-z-y-k. That’s Mick-o-wize-ik.”
Now we had the attention of everyone in the room.
“Any other name?”
“Karen Skutt. S-k-u-t-t.”
She wrote it down. “Any other name?”
“Karen McConnell. M-c-capital C-o-n-n-e-l-l.”
I glanced over the room filled with rapt observers and said, reflectively, “It took me a long time to find a name I really liked.”
The owner of the name I really liked was Russ McConnell, whom I began dating in 1978.
A very great deal had happened in the two decades between my days in the foster home and my happy marriage to Russ.
I met Nick when I was sixteen. He was my first love, and for me, it was true what they say about your first love. It doesn’t last long. He didn’t have a car, and he stopped calling after a few months. It was a sad time for me.
We got together again in my senior year.
Today, all these years later, I can still remember the bittersweet struggle. I had been living five years of
foreplay. Nick touched me. He made my nipples hard. We were both in a state of constant arousal.
We would make pacts never to be alone together because we wanted to wait for marriage. We went to confession.
Came the day that I knew we were going to make love. I didn’t want to do it in the backseat of an old car, so I arranged a rendezvous that offered a bed and privacy. I can’t say it was the most satisfying experience of my life, but I think I never again felt so powerful. We dated for two years, we had to sneak around, the sexual tension was painful.
Marriage was nowhere in the offing, and, as time went by, I yearned for a home, marriage, and security so badly that I began to pull away.
By the time I completed high school, I had been babysitting and working at a drive-in long enough to have some savings. I bought a car and rented an apartment and moved out of my foster home. Mary made a terrible fuss, and I had to go back. It seemed foster children were required to live at “home” till they were eighteen.
I graduated with many honors, and I was offered a scholarship to a college in Toledo. The program offered there was deadly, and I dropped out in my first quarter.
Dick Mitchell came into my life with all the swashbuckling swagger of a newly discharged marine. He was handsome, and I was crazy about him. He had a married girlfriend named Sharon. He shamed me in many situations, but he married me. Just before we were married in 1961, his sister told me that their family name was Mikolajczyk, that it was Dick’s legal name, and it was the name I would carry when I was married.
Dick and I had a classic fifties marriage for the first decade. He worked and ruled the roost. Sharon continued to run Dick’s life in ways that humiliated me up to the day she died in her early thirties.
Girl Called Karen Page 5
