by Hyapatia Lee
After the actual dance, there was a feast and one more sweat lodge to close the ceremony and prepare us to go back to the other world. It had been a wonderful, moving experience. I wanted to do this every year for the rest of my life. I really bonded with my ancestors and the way of my people felt as natural as taking my first breath.
Once home from Sundance, I moved quickly. A friend of mine, Amy, was married to a musician who had a band called “Windwalker”. Before I left for Sundance they asked me to sit in with them on a few songs for some of their upcoming gigs. I was very happy to do so. We opened for the Little River Band and played in some local clubs.
One of the guitar players in the band, “Shred”, also played in another band and the drummer of that band, Zac Dawson, was interested in starting a new band with us. At a local club, I met a couple who was also interested. In no time at all, we were playing out in public throughout the Midwest. We even opened for the Scorpions. Our band was called Vision Quest and we had invented our version of Native American Rock and Roll.
UPIN SMOKE
I was relieved to be out of that business altogether. “Shred” and I fell in love and after a year or so, finally got married. My new husband and I were very happy. We were overjoyed when we discovered, after trying to conceive for several months, that I was pregnant. With my history of 3 miscarriages and needing to take progesterone to sustain pregnancy, I knew I needed to see a doctor as soon as possible.
With my ex-husband owing his children over $50,000 in back child support and no income but what my new husband could make at temporary jobs, we were living on under $400 per month. In the state of Indiana, Pregnancy Medicaid is available for those who cannot afford prenatal care. I applied.
The office was over an hour away and phone calls were long distance. The caseworker I was assigned to, Brad Ellis, knew exactly who I was. He even said he was a fan and wanted to know about what it was like to work with some of the men he had seen in action. He wanted an explicit description of my sexual encounters on the screen! I tried to explain to him that I no longer was involved in such work and found talking about it to be highly upsetting. Before the meeting was over, I was bleeding vaginally. I worried about my baby. Brad assured me he would file the paper work.
I contacted my doctor. She examined me by ultrasound and found that I had had a partial placental abruption-the placenta had partially broken away from my uterus and the baby was in grave danger. I was put on bed rest.
A month of waiting in bed went by. I called Brad to see what was keeping the papers that would say I had medical coverage so I could pay for my medical care. First he said he had lost them, then he told me he did not file them because he did not think I was serious about my family’s income. He could not believe we were living on such a meager amount. He was sure that I had unreported income somewhere from the X-rated movie business. I did not. He insisted I get out of bed, drive the hour it took to get there and re-apply even though this was all against my doctor’s orders. He said if I did not do this, there would be no prenatal care and I would be responsible for the medical bills I had already racked up. I had no choice. He said it had to be me physically that went to apply; my husband could not do it for me.
Having no choice, I went. This worsened the abruption and before the end of the appointment, I was bleeding again. I told Brad. He replied that maybe the baby should die anyway!
In order to pay the bills I had been living off of credit cards. This had gone on for quite a while, as Bud had never paid any child support. The amount I owed in credit cards was virtually the same amount Bud owed me in child support.
I have heard people say that when a father doesn’t pay child support, it is the mother’s fault for choosing such a looser to begin with. Let he who has never made a bad choice throw the first stone. It is a universal law that all things change and continue to change. What makes me or any other woman able to foresee all changes a person could go through in their entire lifetime? What makes us so smart that we should be accountable for another’s change? Furthermore, why should an innocent child suffer because of that change? When a politician refuses to enforce a court order of child support by blaming the victim’s mother, that is a cop out. The government is supposed to enforce the law. When a child is being neglected, how can anyone with a conscious possibly look the other way? Much worse, how can someone waste time placing blame?
We live in the United States of America, yet if a deadbeat parent wants to escape justice; all they have to do is move to another state! Our states are woefully inadequate when it comes to sharing information for the good of the children. They act like a different state is another country. It takes at least six months to catch up to a deadbeat parent after they have moved. No one seems to care that the children suffer for six months while the government shuffles paperwork and gives the neglecting parent more rights than the children have. No one cares what financial bind this puts the one parent in who remains to actually care for the children. No one even seems to care what effect this has onthe abandoned children. The system is far more concerned with letting the abusing parent have 60 days for this, 90 days for that, all in an effort to “make sure he is actually aware of his obligation”. Believe me, he was aware when he had sex with the mother, he was aware when the divorce was filed and he is very aware now. He is also aware that the government has lost it’s authority, will not enforce it’s laws and will always find a way to cop out of what should be their responsibility. A court order is a court order and should have some weight. How can the government allow people to get so far behind in child support? A few dollars is one thing, tens of thousands is another. My ex-husband had a 1099 tax return stating his income for one year alone was over $150,000.00 yet he owed over $52,000.00 in back child support. There is no excuse for a government that allows its children to be abused like this. No wonder kids no longer respect authority, authority doesn’t respect them! How can our government expect children to grow up obeying the law when they see that those who do not go unpunished?
Three months later, halfway through the pregnancy our son was stillborn. People’s belief that I had more money than I actually did had killed our precious son. But the insult and injury didn’t stop there. Brad took it upon himself to turn me in for Medicaid fraud! After a complete investigation it was found that not only was I in the right and Brad responsible for my son’s death, but legally, I was not required to go down to fill out the paper work to enroll to begin with! The state has a law that when applying for assistance would bring a hardship, the caseworker is supposed to go to the applicant’s house!
Of course, there was no monetary reward for having had my son, the fourth baby I had lost, murdered by the state. It would be no consolation if there were. There are no lawyers that are willing to sue a branch of the state that they are allowed to practice in. I was left to live with the fact that four of my six pregnancies had ended in death and that the last one could have been saved if it weren’t for the government! It was the government that didn’t stop my stepfather from raping me repeatedly. It was the government that allowed my real mother to abandon me at first, then come back into my life and take me away from the woman I knew as mother. It was the government that had never caught the man who broke into my apartment in Talbott Village to rape me. It was the government that did not enforce its laws and protect its people that had let me down yet again. It was the government that did not enforce a court order that put my family in poverty and caused me to need the services of Medicaid to begin with. If the government was not interested in enforcing laws and protecting people, why do they keep insisting they are? It’s only propaganda. We are not that much better here in America than the cave men were millions of years ago. Men still beat their wives to death, sexually abuse and murder their own children and the fantasy that there is a system in place to prevent such things is merely an illusion.
I was the one who had to live with breasts full of milk, empty arms and an excruciating pain in my heart that
would never ever heal or go away. I assume that after all the letters from the ACLU and the head of the states Medicaid unit that Brad just went on his merry way with all his children born alive. I had never had a family and now this pond scum had taken away my short-lived happiness. It was all my world could do to restrain me from committing murder and /or suicide. My baby was lost on the other side and needed me and I felt I had to go take care of him.
For two years we tried to conceive again. I was inconsolable. Nothing was pretty in my world anymore. Things I used to enjoy and take pride in no longer mattered at all. Food tasted like sawdust. I woke every morning with tears streaming from my eyes before I was even fully awake.
One typical night I was up crying, unable to sleep when my husband said he smelled smoke. Our house was on fire. It was lucky that we were awake. The house was an old farmhouse that had first been built in the 1800’s and it filled with smoke faster than I could ever have believed. I called 911 and got Kevin and Keith out as my husband tried to put out the fire. The volunteer fire department came within minutes but the house was a total loss.
Our neighbors, the nicest people I have ever met, helped us. I had smoke inhalation and had to go to the hospital. They tookcare of the kids and let us stay at their place for a few days while the Red Cross got us a place to stay. Old electrical wiring caused the fire. We had lost everything and were now homeless.
How much pain, torture, disappointment and heartache can one soul stand? Where is the point of no return, the last straw, which makes one give up forever? How many times can one keep a stiff upper lip, hold their head up and just go on? How can one person’s shoulders take all the weight of the pain this world can bring? How can one force their body to take another breath when there simply is no more will to do so? At what point does the dog who has been kicked too much simply loose the will to live and decides to just lie down to die? At what point does the human will break like a severed spinal cord? How many tears does it take to completely drown out the fire of ambition?
I felt like I had sold my soul for my house and all the things I needed to feel equal to everyone else. Now it was all gone. I could never go back and do what I had done before and so there was no way to replace these things. Standing there in the snow watching my house burn, I got the strangest feeling. I wanted to see it all go. What did it matter anyway? “They” had won-I had lost my son, my sanity, my ambition and will to go on. What good were these things without my baby? They were all tainted with bad memories anyway. I wanted to run inside and burn up with them. Perhaps that’s why I had smoke inhalation.
I didn’t want to include this chapter. I knew it would be very depressing, but so are the first three chapters. I wanted to end this book on a happy note. This is an autobiography though, and this is what happened in my life. I have tried to be totally honest with both the reader and myself. I have analyzed and reanalyzed my life. I have tried to look at every issue from all sides of the Medicine Wheel.
Some may accuse me of being overly emotional. Let them walk a mile in my moccasins before judging. Women are supposed to be emotional. Nature made us this way so we could take proper care of the children. When a breastfeeding woman hears a baby cry, her breasts respond by giving milk. To ask a woman to be less emotional is to ask her not to be human. If men were free to be more emotional, perhaps we would have less war, poverty and abandoned children in the world. Swiftdeer calls emotion “e-motion”-energy in motion. Our feminine energy is emotion and there is nothing wrong with that!
My anonymity is sacred to me now, so I cannot tell you where I live, after loosing my safe home in Indiana, but I do feel very lucky that everyone in my little family is safe and healthy, including our dogs. We have gone on, like the Phoenix, rising out of our own ashes, to breath again. I do not have plans for the future, only to make it through each day, one at a time.
I hope this book has opened minds, expanded beliefs and most importantly, inspired change, both personally and socially. Thank you for taking the time to read it.
THE END
Looking back at my life, the choices I have made, the mistakes and the shit that just happened, I try to make some sense of it all. Some believe that all things happen for a reason. If that is true, then I would like to think that the sexual abuse I experienced repeatedly as a teenager and the career I subsequently embarked on, led to something good. Maybe my career did something positive for society or a few people in it and that is the good that comes from the things that were so very bad.
Maybe my life’s example will help to stop the evils that lead to my occupation. I hope people will start to give the bonding of a baby to its major caretakers the sacred, undeniable respect it deserves and go to great lengths to see that it is not destroyed. I see no evidence that this is true, however. Children are shuffled like pawns in a chess game between parents in custody battles. Adopted babies are torn from the only family they have ever known with no thought about how it will affect the child, when a birth parent changes their mind. Single mothers are thrown in jail for minor first time offenses or for protecting their own lives and their children are ignored by the courts and left to suffer needlessly. Today there is a greater tendency for school counselors, police and therapists to stand behind an abused child and do what is necessary to stop their torture. The more incidents that are recounted and believed the less an abuser feels like he can get away with his vile atrocities. There are many more support groups than there were back when I was a child. Therapists are starting to realize how prevalent such incidents of sexual abuse really are and have begun to act appropriately.
Even so, how many victims, both younger and older, walk around with a secret pain? It takes a lot of courage for a child to go against what a parent or authority figure says you must do under penalty of death, to tell someone else what is happening. This dark secret causes the victim to feel dirty, ashamed and at fault. Children can not rationalize and see that they are not to blame. The very nature of the crime and its ramifications make it terribly hard for children to tell their horrible secret. If a child is old enough to know that telling could turn her remaining parent against her and cause a substantial loss in the family income that could put them on the streets, it is even more difficult to do.
As a society, we owe it to our children to protect them from these situations and support them when they fall innocently to victimization. People who turn their backs to cries for help should meet with repercussions. Our criminal system needs to begin to put a child’s rights over parent’s rights. Too many parents are irresponsible and child-like themselves. SOMEONE has to let the children have a safe childhood above all costs. When a victim sees their proven abuser slapped on the wrist she believes there is no justice and that no one cares enough to protect her. She gets the message her feelings and safety doesn’t matter and spends the rest of her life acting accordingly.
We owe it to all victims, be they of incest or rape, male or female, a way to heal in a society that supports them. Victims don’t need nurses and therapists doubting the basic facts of a crime in order to protect their own fear of vulnerability. Victims don’t need a group therapy program where they are lumped together with all the other rape victims from the last week and told they are “over it” when the six-week limit is up. Victims don’t need to see their convicted rapist set free after six months, or worse, not serve any time at all. This is a crime against humanity that will scar a victim for life, most often causing violent and deadly repercussions during childbearing and times of depression. It should be punished accordingly and if this society wasn’t so patriarchal, I believe it would be!
A large number of women working in the sex industry have been victims of rape and/or incest. Most I have spoken with swear they enjoy their work and see it as a healing experience, even if they may not feel exactly comfortable with the sexually explicit parts of it. Personally, it did help me become more at ease with my own sexuality and in control. I learned so much about the human sexual condition and
it’s deviations. Even though I’ve read just about everything I can find on the subject of sexual healing, nothing compares to the real life experience
I’ve been exposed to. Having heard thousands of stories from fans and co-workers there’s not much that I haven’t learned about sexuality. If it helps victims, no matter how few, there must be something good to be said for it.
Of course, society’s attitude towards sex workers is very damaging to their self-esteem, so the individual must weigh the pros and cons. Perhaps if society could get over their puritanical views on sex and move into the 21st century, the experience would be one of a purer healing.
On the other hand, it depends on what part of the sex industry one is talking about. There is quite a difference between dancing in a bikini bar and being a porno star or streetwalker in New York City.
What about the porno star? In doing movies, posing in magazines or dancing in gentlemen’s clubs, there is a big risk to one’s anonymity. Fame and fortune are not synonymous, but the assumption by society that they are, is a testament to the fact that everyone agrees they should be. People subconsciously acknowledge that anonymity is very valuable. To give it up is worth a fortune. The value of anonymity is the lack of being judged by others. The opposite, fame, is a constant judging by others. You are in the limelight, under the microscope, in the spotlight, the public eye. Some will find you too promiscuous, others, your “peers”, too prudish. ‘Tou can’t please all the people all the time!”
