Far From the Tree

by Solomon, Andrew

  Three days after Lori threw out one of her boyfriends at five in the morning for calling Bobby a nigger, she met Ringo Smythe via an online chat room where she was telling a friend about it. “Promise me you won’t take this guy back,” Ringo wrote. She and Bobby met him at the carnival where he worked the games. Bobby begged his mom to give Ringo a try; when I met Lori, they had been together almost a year, the longest either of them had ever lasted in a romantic relationship.

  Still, Lori worries, given Ringo’s background. “I come from a convict family,” Ringo said. “My dad met my mom in a whorehouse, and she did drugs. And I’ve seen a lot worse stuff on the carnival circuit, so it’s pretty hard to freak me out with anything.” Ringo broke off midstream, then asked me to hit him hard. “I don’t feel no pain in my arm because my dad used my arm as an ashtray.” He rolled up his sleeve to show white scars from his shoulder to his wrist.

  Although Ringo professed not to believe in psychotherapy, he agreed to join the family counseling sessions at which he discussed marrying Lori and adopting Bobby. First, he had to track down the woman to whom he was still married so he could file for a divorce. Both Lori and Ringo were burdened by massive debts. Still, Ringo had made major changes since he and Lori met. “I can’t stand the heat. I hate trailers. I hate cats,” he said. “I’m here in Arizona in a trailer park with five cats.” I asked if that was all for Lori, and he said, “Yeah, Lori and Bobby both.” When I visited, he had taken a leave from the carnival so he wouldn’t have to be separated from them and was working the graveyard shift at Target.

  “I don’t think about Fred a lot, but when Ringo does certain sexual things, I have flashbacks,” Lori said. “I have bad days and good days. And sometimes the bad days last a week. But we do family things all the time. I would never think of going back to the past and changing anything—I’d have another kid, but not my Bobby. I got my boy.”

  • • •

  “Where did I come from?” is one of the first urgent questions of childhood. A response that includes terror and powerlessness can undermine a child’s feeling of safety. Many rape victims who bear children have to explain why they’ve had babies at an inappropriate age, in the absence of a stable romantic relationship, or despite lacking financial or emotional resources to provide care for the child. The extent to which a woman feels judged may determine the scope of her concealment or denial. Telling a secure child who isn’t looking for answers the story of his or her conception can itself feel like an act of violence. Mothers who were unable to protect themselves are gratified by their ability to protect their children, and shielding them from such awful knowledge is part of that safeguarding. So one mother pledged online, “My son will never know the details of his conception. I don’t want him thinking he wasn’t wanted or conceived out of love.”

  The withholding of traumatic information is as loaded as the telling; often, the child gleans knowledge accidentally from people on whom it has no direct bearing, then feels betrayed by a lifetime’s secrecy. In short, there is no good time or safe way to share the news, but concealing it can spell disaster. Holly van Gulden, an adoption counselor, explained, “Keeping secrets especially between generations within a family system implies the material withheld is shameful.” To what extent is a mother’s choice to spare her child the circumstances of his conception protection, and to what extent is it a dangerous form of denial? Even considered decisions about sharing or withholding fundamental information can have unintended consequences. One man who learned as an adult that he was conceived in rape said the knowledge freed him from seeing his mother as “the ‘bad girl’ or ‘tramp’ image that is sometimes associated with unwed mothers.” The disapproval his mother had sought to evade by harboring her secret had blighted her son’s view of her and, by extension, of himself. Children easily perceive and absorb humiliation, and if they are the nexus of a parent’s shame, they bear it as a heavy weight.

  To learn that you are the kind of person most mothers would prefer never even to imagine can produce an angry self-doubt similar to that of people with genetic anomalies who believe that selective abortion would invalidate their lives and eradicate their heirs. Some rape-conceived people have become antiabortion activists as a way of marking the fact that they were born. Lee Ezell, raped by her boss at eighteen, gave up her daughter Julie for adoption without ever seeing her. Twenty-one years later, Julie found her, and they shared a joyful reunion. “I’m so thankful that the choice was not available in 1963, when Lee could have been so tempted to easily end my life,” Julie said. When Lee met her son-in-law, he said, “I want to shake your hand. I want to say thank you for not aborting Julie.”

  Some speak grandiosely about how they evaded abortion, as though they had been wily double agents in utero. They sometimes fail to empathize with the trauma to which they are connected. Sherrie Eldridge, conceived in rape and surrendered at birth for adoption, writes of being disappointed when she was reunited with her birth mother forty-seven years later. As her ten-day visit with her birth mother progressed, their incipient relationship grew strained. Her mother said that the reunion had brought a lot of pain to the surface. “Am I so bad that I would cause her pain? I kept asking myself,” Eldridge writes. “At that time, I knew nothing of the horrendous pain a birth mother experiences both at relinquishment and reunion. I was dealing with my own pain and unresolved grief.” Eldridge assigns her birth mother’s grief solely to separation from her child, with no apparent awareness of the excruciating afterlife of her rape.

  • • •

  For years, Lisa Boynton thought her most important secret was that she had been abused by her grandfather since she was five. When Lisa was in seventh grade, she saw a census form on which her father had identified her as “stepdaughter.” He had never wanted Lisa to know, her mother, Louise, told her, because he was afraid Lisa wouldn’t love him anymore. Louise said she’d become pregnant at fifteen by a boy from school. “I was angry,” Lisa said. “I’m still angry. My whole family knew that he wasn’t my real dad, but no one told me.”

  The following year, Lisa and some friends were hanging out with a friend of theirs, Donny, who was “mentally retarded.” Lisa was in eighth grade; Donny was twenty; they had made out a few times, but she never expected it to go further. She went upstairs with him to see something, and he raped her. She screamed, but nobody responded. When she came downstairs, shaking, and asked her best friend why she hadn’t helped her, the friend said, “Oh, I thought you were just getting it, finally. It always hurts the first time.”

  Ironically, only after Lisa’s rape—which she kept a secret—did her grandfather’s habitual abuse come to light. Her mother overheard her telling a friend about it and prodded her into confessing the whole story. Lisa begged her mother not to tell her stepfather. “She said, ‘Just go to bed. It will be all right.’ And she must have gone downstairs and told my dad. I heard him throwing things, curses flying out of his mouth.” They notified the police. Her stepfather’s father pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years on probation. Lisa received a letter of apology from him, but it sounded “as though a lawyer wrote it,” she said. “To me, it meant nothing.” Lisa’s stepfather cut off relations with his own father.

  The relationship between Lisa and Louise, despite this energetic support, remained bewilderingly strained. “My dad went above and beyond to make me feel like I was loved and part of the family,” Lisa said. “It was my mother who always blamed me for things; my sister was always innocent.” After the rape, Lisa became promiscuous. Like many victims of child sexual abuse, she had no sense of boundaries about physical intimacy. “I would sleep with anybody,” she said. “Even though I’d been raped by Donny, I continued to have sex with him willingly, up until I was in eleventh grade.” She added, almost in bewilderment, “I guess I’d confused sex with love ever since my grandfather began abusing me.”

  Then one day, when Lisa was twenty, Louise confessed that she herself had been raped and that she
didn’t know who Lisa’s father was. The story was eerily similar to Lisa’s own. Her mother and her best friend had gone out with two older men, and they’d stopped at the men’s house. The best friend and one of the men disappeared together, and the other man invited Lisa’s mother into another room, where he raped her. Then the first man came in and raped her, too. When she learned that she was pregnant, she didn’t know which of them was the father. When Lisa pressed her mother for names, Louise gave obviously fictitious ones. “I don’t think she’s telling me the whole story,” Lisa said. “Little things just didn’t add up. I couldn’t tell her I was angry that she never told me, because I could hear the sadness in her voice. And I never wanted to bring it up again. I’m going to die with a lot of unanswered questions.”

  All the secrets and lies have had a corrosive effect on Lisa, who, in her thirties, still doesn’t feel like part of her own family. She has spent a good bit of time looking at online forums that have made her feel less alone. She eventually got a degree in social work, and as a group-therapy leader she counsels women who’ve experienced similar traumas. Her personal and professional lives are consecrated to recovery. “I minimize my issues and problems,” she reflected. “But I’m the first to say, ‘Don’t minimize yours.’” She lives with a female partner and has a daughter from a previous relationship, to whom she is deeply attached. “I felt like I always had to look out for myself, because nobody else is going to look out for me,” she said. “I want my daughter’s life to be completely different from mine.”

  When we met, Lisa was seeing a therapist she liked, yet she had never discussed the rapes with her therapist. Instead of seeing them as connected, she viewed them as ludicrously coincidental. “I didn’t think anyone would believe me,” she said to me. “Even to myself, it seems far-fetched that someone could be sexually abused and raped—and then find out my mother was raped, too. The only people who know all the pieces are my mother and my partner. And now, you. I wanted to escape the trauma I experienced at my grandfather’s hands and everything that came after that; however, I now know it is something that will always stay with me and I will not ever fully recover. What I can do is use my experiences to be a better social worker to my clients. I’m able to identify with and relate to them—but in a healthy way, without disclosing my own abuse.”

  • • •

  Prejudice against rape victims and their children is as real as it is irrational. One blogger wrote, “Hmmm, so many children, born out of incest and rape. The CWS [child-welfare system] is overwhelmed and under-prepared. My suggestion? PUT THEM TO SLEEP LIKE UNWANTED PETS!” Even among people with less extreme points of view, prejudice is deeply ingrained. In disdaining and fearing rapists, as most people do, it is only too easy to disdain and fear their progeny. Liberal acquaintances who were all for Deaf politics and neurodiversity expressed unease about raising a child with “those genes.” The innocence of the child is conditional in this domain. To the mother, he is an incarnation of the rape; to the world, he is the rapist’s heir.

  In the face of such bias, a mother may envision her parental relationship as euphoric—either through authentic religious ecstasy or to avoid acknowledging her ambivalence. Kathleen DeZeeuw, in Victims and Victors, says, “It was Patrick, my son, conceived in rape—whose life I had tried to snuff out—who taught me how to forgive. He was willing to forgive not only his biological father, but also me (for physically and verbally abusing him as a child).” Another mother speaking out in the same book said, “My daughter’s identity is in being a child of God. She was the gift that brought me out of fear and darkness into the Light of authentic Love.” The miracle is always twofold: of the child who overcomes his fearsome genes, and of the mother who trounces her initial dread. Rhapsody is helpful to both mother and child. One antiabortionist wrote, “I am the product of rape, and not only rape, but of incest. My mother sacrificed her needs for mine, carried a shame that wasn’t hers, and brought a baby into this world that in this day and age probably would not have made it. But she didn’t stop there. Being unable to provide me with the things a child needs—like security, food, a roof over my head, schooling—she denied herself the right to keep me, her child. She selflessly let me go for adoption when I was seven.” There’s an element of will involved in understanding one’s own relinquishment as an act of devotion.

  • • •

  When she was three, Tina Gordon called her mother “Mom” and was immediately rebuked. “Don’t you ever call me that again,” Donna said. “I’m not your mother.” “But what am I supposed to call you?” Tina asked. “You can call me Donna,” her mother replied. Tina’s great-grandmother told her later, “It’s not your fault. She was raped when she had you.” Tina had no idea what her great-grandmother was talking about. “When I learned how to read, I looked it up in the dictionary and understood the violence part, but not the sex part,” Tina said. “For a lot of my life, though, I felt damaged.” Tina watched her older sister, Corinna, say “Mom” over and over and watched her receive at least sporadic flashes of love and attention. “I always had to remember that I was the stepchild, so to speak,” Tina recalled. The only loving thing her mother ever did for her was to make her sweetened hot milk before bed. Ironically, however, Tina’s estrangement from Donna may have afforded her a measure of protection from her mother’s destructive tendencies.

  Donna had had a nervous breakdown in college and was abusive to both Tina and Corinna when they were young. Donna was living in Florida when Tina was born, and a friend called Donna’s mother to say that there was a new baby. “It might already be too late for the older daughter,” the friend said, “but you’ve got to come and get these kids and maybe save this baby.” So Tina’s grandmother went to fetch the two girls. She found that Corinna was missing parts of her finger pads because Donna had put her hands on the stove as a punishment.

  Tina and Corinna grew up in Mississippi under the far more loving care of their grandmother, who taught school by day and cleaned houses by night to keep the family going. Donna would visit and say that she was going to reclaim Corinna as soon as she got back on her feet. She made no such promises to Tina, who soon gave up seeking any kind of approval from her mother and focused on her grandmother and aunts, who proved far more reliable. As a result, Tina saw her mother’s hypocrisies with greater clarity than her sister did. “If we were watching television, Corinna would sit on Donna’s lap, and I was just on the floor by myself,” Tina said.

  When Tina was eight and Corinna was ten, their grandmother died at fifty-eight. Donna, close to forty, was clearly unable to handle them both. A great-uncle they barely knew felt they shouldn’t be split up and agreed to take them both, so they moved to Connecticut. Aunt Susan and Uncle Thomas gave them material security, but ran an alienating, strict household, and the girls were unhappy. Donna would send care packages and Christmas presents to Corinna, but nothing to Tina. Uncle Thomas told Donna that if she couldn’t send presents for both daughters, she shouldn’t send anything. After that, there were just letters: cold and formal ones to Tina, effusive ones to Corinna promising to take her back. Two years after a fire at the house in Connecticut, Corinna was caught trying to set fire to it again, and she was sent to a juvenile facility. Another uncle took her in briefly after she was released, but then she wanted to move back in with Donna. Donna would have none of it, and Corinna was utterly devastated. Aunt Susan and Uncle Thomas weren’t willing to have her back. So at fifteen, she ended up living on the streets in Mississippi.

  Tina found it painful to be in her uncle’s house when Corinna was not allowed to be there and decided to go to boarding school. “I’ve always just had maybe a little bit of a survivor instinct,” Tina said. She was admitted to a girls’ school, where she was one of seven black students in a population of one hundred and sixty. Her aunt and uncle cut her off after she was disciplined for smoking pot. “I started to be known at school as ‘the orphan,’” Tina recalled. Meanwhile, Corinna was hustling and
doing drugs; she had developed AIDS by the time Tina started college at New York University. “Donna contacted me to disparage Corinna,” Tina remembered. “I said, ‘I understand why she’s made the choices she’s made. Other people have had a huge part to play in that.’ Donna said, ‘What other people?’ I said, ‘You and others.’ That was the end of her trying to reach out to me.” The sisters, however, kept in touch, and Tina visited Corinna repeatedly in the last year of her life, when she was twenty-three.

  “No matter what Donna said or did, Corinna would tell me that I should reach out to Donna, forgive Donna,” Tina said. “Because I knew it would mean a lot to Corinna, I actually called Donna and asked her to call Corinna and say that she loved her and that she was in her prayers—just to reach out to her before she died. Donna said, ‘I don’t think I can do that.’ Then she said, ‘I know I haven’t necessarily made good choices, but if I can make that up to you, tell me what I can do.’ And I said, ‘If you call Corinna, all is forgiven and forgotten.’ She said, ‘I’ve heard that she’s prostituting, and I heard she was using drugs.’ And I said, ‘First of all, you don’t know if that’s true or not, and secondly, what does it matter? She’s dying. You don’t have to call and talk about her life or what she’s done. It would just mean a lot to her if you would call and say that you’re praying for her, thinking of her. Something. Anything.’ She said, ‘I don’t know if I can do that.’ And she didn’t.”

  Tina enrolled in Columbia Law School, and as her accomplishments accrued, Donna began to seek her out. Donna called to ask whether she was going to be invited to see Tina graduate with honors. Tina said, “I haven’t talked to you in years, and the last time I talked to you I made a request of you and you couldn’t even do that. So why are you trying to be a part of my life now?”