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<\/span>My husband is an only child. He says that growing up he felt the lack of siblings. He lived in the country so he played army by himself in the barn; he played with the chickens in the chicken coop. He devised endless ways to enjoy his own company. He still has that talent and a couple times a day comes up to the library where I\u2019m either reading or on the Internet to say he\u2019s going \u201cshopping.\u201d In his world that means he\u2019s going down to his thousand square foot woodworking shop, contemplate repairing some things he knows I\u2019m waiting for, but more likely browsing through \u201ccar and motorcycle\u201d magazines by the hour, lost in his own little world. He is not a social animal unless you count Facebook or Flickr where he has a huge audience that wait for his world famous wit to emerge so they can add their own world famous wit.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span>Me? I\u2019m one of five children who grew up in a happy Catholic family. First, my two brothers were born within 15 months of each other. Next came me. I adored growing up with my brothers. They took me to my first day at school. They allowed me to play trucks in the dirt with them, walk across fences with their buddies (one of who, Jerry Bennett, became my first boyfriend) and later on go shooting with them with our 22s for prairie dogs or rabbits (I never remember shooting any so I don\u2019t think our heart was in it). Another sister was born 14 months after me (good Catholic family) but we never got along and in my memory, I blacked her out of any happy experiences I had. Then eight years later came my baby sister, Jeanne. (They must have gone without sex for eight years and then one night slipped. My guess is they never had any after that). I was fortunate. Mom gave Jeanne to me to raise. <\/span>She grew up thinking I was her mother. She slept in a crib next to my bed. I got up in the middle of the night to give her her bottle, change her pants and rock her back to sleep while I sang lullabies.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span>Many childhood sexual abuse victims had a sibling for a perpetrator. My heart goes out to them as, again, I was fortunate. My only memory of sex with my siblings was when I was about three years old and me, my siblings and a bunch of neighborhood little kids all met behind a bush. We made a group decision to check out each others privates. <\/span>We swiftly yanked our pants and panties down to our ankles and stared at each of the others. \u201cYours is missing, one of the boys hissed at me.\u201d \u201cNo, it\u2019s not. It\u2019s just inside. You have to walk around with yours hanging down all the time. Too bad.\u201d After several other smart aleck remarks we pulled our pants up and wandered off, having just lived through our first sexual experience. Years later, as adults, my sister told me she\u2019d been gang raped by our brothers and a bunch of other little kids. Since she described the setting for the experience (behind a bush in North Dakota), the ages of the kids (all pre-schoolers) and the various children involved I assumed she was talking about the same experience I went through which I certainly don\u2019t remember as a gang rape. <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span>When I was 13 and my father came into our bedroom where I lay on the bottom bunk with my rosary under my pillow and raped me, she was in the top bunk. While I was in recovery she told me she witnessed it (which certainly explains her galloping paranoia). My baby sister, three years old witnessed it as well. <\/span>From that time on until she was ten she spoke in a strange, lispy language no one understood but me.\u00a0 I was to find out many years later that most people thought she was retarded.\u00a0 At the age of four, she still wet the bed on a nightly basis and, like me, startled easily, her limbs trembling at any unexpected noise.<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n Our family descended into a pit of hell, one where we wandered around like zombies, withdrawn and pale faces terrified of something but we didn\u2019t know what. <\/span><\/span>My family life reminded me of a camp of mutilated and injured soldiers from some obsolete war, indescribable in its agony.\u00a0 All the figures were shadowy and disoriented, as if only half-alive and that half living in a well of misery.\u00a0 We moved in and out of our days appearing to wait for some catastrophic happening, all of us knowing that once it did, we were ill prepared to handle it. <\/span>We avoided each other as if each of us carried a deadly disease. <\/span>My relationship with my beloved brothers ruptured, our chain broken, the links irreparable. <\/span>Despair at losing my brothers, who never spoke to me except with derision, plunged me into deep despair. <\/span><\/a>My father found a new job an hour\u2019s drive away and only came home on weekends. <\/span><\/p>\n My mother had discovered my father\u2019s middle of the night raids. <\/span>The following is an excerpt from my memoir, I Never Heard A Robin Sing. <\/span><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n No longer did she get out of bed and fix us hot cereal and chocolate in the morning.\u00a0 No more did she avidly question me on how my day went when I returned home.\u00a0 Now, she was asleep when I went off to school.\u00a0 We fixed our own breakfast, stumbling through burnt toast and soggy cold cereal.\u00a0 When I came home, the house was dark, Marine Corps blankets covering the windows and the breakfast dishes sitting on the table in an accusatory manner.\u00a0 There was no dinner happily cooking in the oven and no cheerful sight of Mom listening to her soap operas, shushing me until they finished their fifteen-minute segments.\u00a0 Instead, she lay in bed in an emotional stupor, depressed and withdrawn.<\/span><\/em> <\/span><\/em><\/p>\n The change in Mom slipped into our lives almost as if programmed.\u00a0 Was this just another stage in mothers?\u00a0 I wondered if she were ill.\u00a0 With little or no communication amongst my siblings and me, we didn’t dare discuss it.\u00a0 As time passed, I realized that Mom had indeed changed for good.\u00a0 My heart was frightened and hollow when I approached our home and saw the Marine Corp blankets, signaling that mom was still in bed.\u00a0 I tried to waken her, to get her to eat, oftentimes grooming her as I would a pet.\u00a0 She’d lie in a state of apathy and sorrow, and have me shave her legs, wash her face, or comb her hair.\u00a0 I felt someone had taken my mother from me and left this strange lady in her place.\u00a0 What had I done?\u00a0 Was she angry with me?\u00a0 Didn’t she love me anymore?\u00a0 There was no more affection, no more interest, no more my mother.\u00a0 I grieved deeply.\u00a0 As time went on, my sorrow and bewilderment, planted seeds of a neurosis that only grew with the passage of time.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n Our happy Catholic family was dead.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n