When I was a little girl growing up in Beulah, North Dakota, the rodeo came to town every year. I loved watching the cowboys as they roped the cows, as they did their stunt riding, as they had their shooting contests and as they marched in our annual parade. So much male energy entranced me. I had two older brothers who I adored and to me, my father was my hero, much like those cowboys at the rodeo were. My Dad was President of the VFW, he was manager of the Occident Lumber Yard and he was highly respected and loved in this small town. He had had twelve years of piano lessons and had played with Bob Crosby\u2019s orchestra while he was in the Marine Corps during World War II in the Hawaiian Islands. This made him a celebrity of sorts. He was strong, brave, the smartest man I knew, loving, affectionate, adventurous, handsome and could fix anything that was broken. What else did anyone want in a father? I was his favorite and I had heard people in town say, \u201cThere goes Bernie Leick with his daughter; he has three other kids that live in his house too”. My Dad had delivered me in the middle of a snowstorm so I could almost add, \u201cdoctor\u201d to the list of highly esteemed qualities my father had. He was my hero and remained so until he died at which time I thought my world had ended.<\/p>\n
A few years later, I recognized that he had another quality; he was a child molester. Accepting the truth of that statement was the hardest thing I have ever had to do. I had heard other women who had been sexually molested by their father refer to him in the same manner I did mine. It was as if we had grown up thinking that and refused to admit that our fathers had a deeply tarnished image. My daughter said to me while I was in recovery that she had always been looking for someone to rescue her from the horror her life had become as a result of being sexually molested by my second husband.<\/p>\n
Why do so many of us who have been sexually abused as children need to have our perpetrators on a pedestal? Why do we search for someone to rescue us? We don\u2019t know that we already have the person who can rescue us, ourselves. We are the only one who can Repair the damage done to us in our childhood. If we want to go through a complete and healthy recovery, we have to admit that our fathers were not heroes and that no one is ever going to rescue us.<\/p>\n
I recently lost my older brother Brian. I took losing him harder than I thought I would. He too had my father as a hero. Growing up, my siblings and I worshipped our father. Once out of High School, Brian left home to join the Navy. When he found out that Dad had sexually abused me his rage was a frightening thing to see. My father was no longer his hero. But he still had to have someone as a hero. He found one, John Wayne. He began collecting John Wayne memorabilia, spending money on posters, movies, framed photos, gun and knife replicas, busts and anything he could find on the Duke. Most of the time, once he left the Navy after 14 years as a medical corpsman, he worked menial jobs, just enough to keep him in cigarettes and booze, and enough to buy more John Wayne memorabilia. He had found someone to replace Dad. When he died, he left me his John Wayne collection, which was considerable. I didn\u2019t need a hero anymore and while I liked John Wayne as an actor and like most people found The Quiet Man to be one of the best movies I\u2019d ever seen, I couldn\u2019t display Brian\u2019s collection with the same idolization of John Wayne. Instead, I created a John Wayne memorabilia display in honor of my beloved brother. It included the flag the Honor Guard presented to me at his burial. In my brother\u2019s military discharge papers, I found that he had received nine different decorations, medals, badges, commendations and citations while he was in the Navy, most of it in Vietnam. He had never said a word about any of them.<\/p>\n
My brother is now my hero and while he didn\u2019t realize it, he was more of a hero than our father ever would be.<\/p>\n