Wendy Read was sexually abused by her father. The damage done by daddy dearest caught up to her, as it does with all victims. “The demands of life grow and eventually there is simply not enough energy to keep all the bad feelings, disappointments and memories under control.” Read had to deal with what happened. This book is a part of her process.
She writes of her struggle to understand the fifth commandment to honour her father and mother – one who abused her, while the other colluded through silence: “As the years went by, the weight of the commandment bent me low … Silence. Freedom. Alone. Elsewhere. Cry. Wait. Night. This was the vocabulary I tucked safely away in an inside pocket of my being… There was a hollow place inside of me where my cries echoed endlessly. …
One by one I heard their stories; rape, torture, humiliation, death threats, drugs. One by one I experienced for the first time the powerful emotions that had been locked up for so many years: fury, despair, grief, friendlessness.”
It was a long 20-year process for her to find a way to wholeness. Fully 130 pages later she writes, “But today my prayer, through grace, is this: that if, in heaven, the angels are dancing, they welcome and invite my father in.”
Read at times does bleed on the page. It is raw; your skin crawls because you feel like you are in the room with these poor, dear children, watching as caregivers molest and rape them. But she also shows glimmers of hope and she uses the words of wellness. “Now you have heard us question your wisdom and seen our indignant search for understanding. Now you are breaking into our prison snapping the bars we had reinforced with fear and shame.” Truly she is on a journey of recovery and there is the promise of life after the abuse.
