Like many people who live through sexual abuse as a child, for many years I was deeply ashamed of myself. This shame had the effect of cancelling most of my memories of my dad, who died before the abuse began. It was as if by blanking out his love for me – I could keep it clean and separate from the child I became after his death.
Until I began to work with a psychotherapist in my thirties, all that came up when I thought of my dad was a few brief glimpses of him, amid a general blankness. Though our conversations helped give them definition, they were still isolated mountain peaks rising from thick, grey mist.
It was only when I began to make album without photos that I began to see the hills and fields of our daily life as father and daughter that the mist had been covering. This work is still on-going.
I am working on a poem about a photo my grandmother kept beside her bed. My dad holds me on my christening day. I haven’t seen the photo for thirty years, but I can still see his smile. It radiates joy and pride. Another poem is about when he came to my bedroom window early one holiday morning, with a creel full of shrimps fished on the beach for our tea.
When I draft and redraft, it is somewhere between sewing and darning. As I find the words, I join myself back together, thread by thread, stitch by stitch.
Last June, shortly before the Brexit vote, I made a daytrip to Brussels, where we were living at the time of my father’s death in 1972. I was eight then.
I took the Metro from the Eurostar the church where his funeral was held. It was a weekday and empty. Where had been a mass of flowers and noise and people, was quiet, maybe a little shabby.
Immediately I walked up the nave, I had a sensation of being surrounded by warmth and safety. By making this pilgrimage, forty-four years later, I somehow set free the part of myself which had locked away what my dad’s love actually felt like.
Sitting in the pew I last sat in with his coffin right in front of me, close enough to touch, I became again my daddy’s Aly. I was a whole child, as well as an adult making a life as best I could in the aftermath of severe trauma.
That memory has served as a compass ever since. It informed my decision to share my own process of self-recovery through writing, in this blog. My journey is one that many people who have been sexually abused in childhood need to find a way to make for themselves, in order to reclaim the identities which should have been theirs from the start.
Below is ‘odyssey’, which I’m still writing about this experience.
odyssey
too high for my hands
you move in your orbit
lost under lilies
your loved face hides
daddy if I heard your voice
would you know me
hoist white heart sails
my ship of matchsticks
eurostar to brussels
slide into the platform
shut nave turn your key
rapportes-moi où j’étais
daisy june morning
jackhammer november
jelly down crusher rocks
I will shoot through you
*
church roof apex
tree song hymn place
jesus hang velvet dress
tears of not crying
bodies packed like chocolates
air of perfume prayer books`
before here always Sunday
now the lord is my shepherd
tight-rope forwards
wind gift dips under me
oak gleam petal flowers
gold glitter handles
big voice vicar
goodbye daddy
inside long box
quiet as pencil
no more wheelchair man
no more floppy legs
no more electric motor fast on grass
no more run beside you
from me night gone
iron lung breathing
wibbly drawing intensive care
you in bed from sideways
DADDY SAYS HELLO ALY
I can write better
home before morning break
mummy on green sofa
*
spray again belly self
float out wind kiss
sea-saw arm fall
soft cotton daddy shoulders
tip toe bristle feet
hairs read vibration
set down wet sand
six-eye swivel
silver water wind ruffle
jump splish splosh
watch out slippy green
sea smell gull song
heavy in big water net
me with daddy pushing
tired legs salt sting
mermaid up cliff carried
lie along nursery dark
sheets shiver hot nylon
baby brother sleep tight
scare-me shapes move closer
big hand push back fringe
kind fingers stroke soft
lighthouse daddy strong as rock
here to save your aly
*
in dead body church
warm shawl cuddle
kindness thick as soup
come to feed this kitten
With thanks to Tim Dooley, Catherine Smith, John Mee and Emma Mackilligin who have all read this in various drafts.