I felt freedom when I published what I wrote last week. I have more to tell, but I shared the critical fact that I falsely claimed my father sexually abused me in my mid 30s.
The feeling of freedom surprised me somewhat, but it makes perfect sense.
This story has been a prison – especially since I returned to family stories.
Shortly after my memories of sexual abuse surfaced, I wrote my father a short, cold accusing letter. I cc’d the letter I had written him and sent it to mother and siblings. I said not to contact me.
Not long after that, my mother told me that she was sexually abused by both her brother and her father. I don’t know why this didn’t make me rethink who did harm to me.
I invited my father to visit me a few months later. He said my accusations were untrue. I was sure I was right. It didn’t matter to me whether he was lying or didn’t remember.
I remember extending an olive leaf to him at that meeting. I said something about having a better relationship in the future. I guess it’s not surprising that he wasn’t interested. I think I would have tried in his shoes, but …I can’t really know the harm I did. He did say he’d never be able to spend time alone with his grandchildren because of my accusation.
Although I adored my father as a young child, I slowly became more aligned with my mother, especially in teenage years. I’m not exactly sure why. Nobody is a perfect parent. There are some tough memories.
Perhaps I needed Mom as a role model more. My mom was not the more balanced of the 2 of them; I can easily see this from my current vantage point. But my father gradually receded. At least from me.
My mother said a lot of bad things about my father, sometimes sharing even their private adult information with me. I became her confidant. I didn’t love being her confidant, but it was a package deal. My father and I had parted ways, despite those concerts he took me to. I have a few other memories of kindness and generosity from my father in those teenage years. He tried, but …my siblings all managed to be closer to him in adulthood than I was.
I do, however, consider him a role model when I look back in time.
I guess the short story is that my mother vilified my father often, and so …it seemed obvious to me that he was the perpetrator when I saw a male figure over me. I never questioned it for years and years.
Much later, well after my father’s death, I came to change my mind about this.
I cannot explain this in a fully rational way.
It had to do with coming to know his cousin, her stories, and her certainty that he would not have done this – having known him from childhood.
It had to do with information I received from helping spirits in journeys.
Perhaps, most significantly, it had to do with the ancestor work I did. I learned so much – wonderful things – about my ancestors, and I connected with my ancestral helping spirits in these lineages strongly. In this experience I came to understand that his parents, who I knew and loved, and those before them – were almost all people of integrity and love.
I also worked with my mother’s ancestors. I had to travel a long way back in time to connect with loving beings in the male lineage – her father and the men before him. At one time I was actually told to stop the process. Extra protection had to be set up so that I could not actually witness the healing process or know about the individuals involved. This was not a healthy or balanced group of people. (The healing process took a very long time.)
[I also have a strange childhood memory of my maternal grandfather that makes no sense – in the basement with him.]
Did my father and I have Karma to work out? I have no idea.
I did have a lovely dream of him long after his death.
After that visit, my relationship with my father was either distant or non-existent. For the last few years of his life, we were completely estranged.
When I told family members that I no longer believed that dad was the perpetrator, I learned that not all my siblings had believed me. I am glad for this.
My cousin was upset with me for a while; my claim had been very hard on her mom, my dad’s sister. Nobody else said much. They seem to have forgiven me.
My 2 youngest children barely knew their grandfather. This is a great sorrow to me. I’m unsure about how well his other 2 grandsons, my nephews, knew him. One lived far away.
I try not to carry shame about my grave and damaging error. I did my best. I did what I thought was right to “break the chain of abuse” in our family, as the books say.
I’m not saying the books are wrong.
I was wrong.
It’s unfathomable to me that this could have happened.
Is the lack of a tribe partly responsible for my bad choices in my life? Perhaps.
I feel that we lose a great deal in the loss of a tribal way of life.
Truth, Clarity, Awareness, Guidance, and Connection to Earth and Spirit.
Mine is only one story; there are many many others who have not stood on solid ground – others who have harmed self and/or others.
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8 hummingbird way 