And I was determined to make something of myself in spite of what I’d missed out on growing up, in spite of the sexual abuse and the rape, in spite of not having a father or a family and nearly no mother. I wanted to learn, and I wanted to help other people the way I wished I’d been helped.
I believed I had enough to go on. I had my natural curiosity about people and life. I was gregarious and could make friends easily. The traumas I’d experienced had made me tough—and wise. I’d learned a lot about people—who was safe and who wasn’t. I had my mother’s sharp wit and intelligence. And I also had her stubborn determination—her ability to put her head down and just keep moving no matter how strong the wind or how much dust got in her eyes.
Just as I had no fear when I jumped into the ocean for the first time, I had no fear of LA. I knew that, just as I’d had the will, strength, and the courage to fight my way to the surface of the water after a huge wave knocked me down and propelled me under the water, I could fight my way back whenever I got knocked down in the future.
Yeah, I was going to make it.
Epilogue
“The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
I did make it. I survived my childhood with its many traumas. I escaped Bakersfield, with all its craziness, and found my way to a much better place. I managed to reach all the goals I set for myself—to finish college and to help other people in ways I wished I could have been helped as a child. I was able to take the one talent I had discovered—my ability to write—and make it the vehicle for both helping others and making something of my life.
I’m also happy to say that I was able to fulfill my dreams of living close to the ocean and to travel the world and be exposed to different cultures. Instead of just collecting artifacts like elephants and masks, as Ruby had done, I actually rode an elephant in India and visited a mask making shop in Bali. I visited Australia and observed the aboriginal people there, and I went to New Zealand and learned about the Maori culture.
In high school, the male psychiatrist I saw told me I was a well-adjusted girl in spite of what I’d been through. He told me I didn’t have to let my past ruin my future. But he was wrong. As smart as I was, as “well adjusted” as I seemed to be, the truth was, I was just pretending. The truth was, I was a scared, troubled young girl. Yes, I survived my childhood, and I survived starting over in LA. But, over the years, cracks started to appear in my façade. I wasn’t as strong as I appeared to be. No one gets away with pushing down all the pain I was carrying.
In spite of my escape and my success, I don’t—unlike some other “recovery” memoirists—want to give readers the message that I was able to just “get over it” the way so many people expect victims of child abuse to do. I think this is an unreasonable and cruel thing to expect of former victims. No one just “gets over” a childhood like mine, no matter how strong they are.
It was these kinds of messages that got in the way of my healing from the neglect and sexual and emotional abuse I sustained as a child. I prided myself on being a strong person. I convinced myself that I could move on from my childhood and not look back, and for many years, this is what I attempted to do. But as the years went by, all the pain and fear and anger that I had buried in order to move on began to seep out like waste from a capped sewer. All the debris of my painful childhood began to infiltrate my daily life—especially my relationships. And the family traits—the alcoholism and narcissism that I so despised in my mother, my uncle Kay, and my aunt Natalla— came seeping out as well.
All my childhood, I fantasized about escaping Bakersfield. When I finally did, I felt liberated and hopeful, certain that nothing was going to hold me back—that I was finally the master of my own destiny. But I soon found that it wasn’t going to be all that simple. I had taken Bakersfield with me. As much as I tried to leave the pain behind, the memories of the people and the events I’d experienced there haunted me like ghosts in a graveyard. I found that the people and events of Bakersfield had shaped my personality. They had created the template from which I would fashion my life, my future relationships, and patterns of behavior.
There would be other Rubys, Sunnys, and Yvonnes. There would be other Steves and Harveys, Richards and Johns. We may think we’ve moved on when, in reality, we’ve just substituted new faces onto the people who have influenced us the most. We may try to forget the traumas of our childhood, but they linger on, hovering just under the surface, waiting to reemerge. They haunt us, hiding in the shadows, until we unearth them and face them head on.
Finally, at age twenty-five, after two previous attempts to get good therapy, I found my way to a talented, compassionate therapist who was able to help me take down the wall of defiance and protection I had built up starting at four years old. This therapist helped me uncover the long-buried feelings of pain and sadness and anger and fear. And, unlike my mother, she validated those feelings, encouraged me to express them, and
