A Rose has Cried but Has Not Died: How I Survived

By Norma E Okun

A Memoir of Extreme Sexual Abuse and Child Trafficking:Norma Okun offers a harrowing, raw memoir of extreme childhood sexual abuse and child trafficking at the hands of cultists who destroyed her childhood—and continued to follow and destroy her adult life, including ensuring her parental rights were terminated and her husband's career

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jane Publications
• Release date: Mar 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781792305320

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

My story comes to me in pieces, hidden by elusive amnesia. This book is my attempt to put on to paper the horrific child abuse I lived through. At times, my thoughts will jump around—but at their core, is the story of how I was able to retrieve my harrowing memories later as an adult.

It is my life, and it is like a white, yet bloodied canvas from these people who are monsters. They act like the coronaviruses of this world. They are those who sell and traffic children from all over the world. This is my version of the cruelest things done to me and my children. It is my life that I write about.

My purpose in writing this book is not to accuse or to make anyone suffer any consequences. I believe in the constitution and in the justice system in America, even though it only worked for the rich and famous in my case. I watch as even now many are being torn down with the #MeToo movement and there is exposure of pedophiles like Jeffrey Epstein who are abusing and selling children. Hopefully, the abused will have a voice. If it does not become political, change does not happen. The lawyers who we hired all did the right thing for the cult. They saved them from being caught.

If the narration of this book does not always flow like the river does, it is because when someone has been abused, they have a disposition to have a dissociation problem called amnesia. If it is not addressed properly the memory will be gone and they will be putty in the abuser’s hands.

I have learned to understand that if you have been molested, you need to make it conscious. You cannot pretend with these people that what is inside you is different from what is outside you. They will destroy you the moment you try to escape. I never escaped. My abusers never went away. They followed me and my family everywhere we went.

I hope my story can help you understand your perpetrators and have as much respect for them as you would if you were trying to keep away from being contaminated with viruses. You must always be wary of the danger they pose.

I will talk a little bit about what changed my life and what I learned from the 1955 Eli Siegel broadsheet titled Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites? The same opposites that are present in the arts are present in my life and related to my very self.

I also will introduce you to Mr. Siegel’s 2-A Pleasure Described from his book Self and World. This is the description of what is most hurtful to the mind. Mr. Siegel also describes what opposes 2-A Pleasure, which is 1-A Pleasure. This is real pleasure from seeing things truly as they are.

You will read about some of what I learned from the Victorian Age, the centuries of poetry and literature and how it all could have meaning. I felt pleasure from respect and saw that its opposite, contempt, was what made me and other people unhappy. This was the drama of my very life, my very self that poetry explained; the mixed-up feelings I felt about my family, and how it described me in the cruel reality I was confronted with.

Tragedy and comedy were one, not only in the Greek drama, but also in my life. The worst that can happen to parents happened to me. Our nine-year-old son Charlie’s accusations of child abuse by the relatives brought out the cruel and vicious in the abusers, along with my husband’s accusations of satanic child sacrifice. These accusations led to our parental rights termination of our 22 months baby daughter and our nine year old Charlie. We agonized over the rupture of our family. I will share the way I was spoken to by Mario, the father who made sure I lost everything. In this book I include a transcript of a taped conversation with Mario along with excerpts from court transcripts that pertained to our children and my husband’s case. You can see how they plotted our demise in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, where we lost our children, and which then led to other losses in my life.

The abusers ask for pity and manipulate with their speech. This happened in the court hearings with the lawyers. I learned too late that amnesia is doing away with everything; it is the other side of memory. As Mr. Siegel said, contempt causes insanity. And it is what runs the world as well as ourselves. This study is my everyday accomplishment and will be so, for as long as there is breath in my lungs.

As Samuel Johnson said in The Life of Samuel Johnson by Boswell:

Getting money is not all a man’s business: to cultivate kindness is a valuable part of the business of life. (p862)

I am quoting this because it is the purpose of Aesthetic Realism to bring out the kindness in people.

Here I have felt a need to include 2-A Pleasure Described because I strongly feel that if you get nothing else from my book, this is the gift I cherish the most from the teachings of Aesthetic Realism. This is how Mr. Siegel describes the worst thing about the ego. What I felt was that 2-A Pleasure described my amnesia. I learned that it was 1-A Pleasure that brought my memory back and gave me a healthy and kind way of seeing people, families, and the world.

2-A Pleasure Described explains that every self has two sides and what one side likes, the other side doesn’t. It explores the bad side and allows it to talk in the first person and show how wonderful it is. To be sure, there is also the rebuttal by the whole self.

"The Self:

Like every other human being, I am in a fight between two kinds of pleasure. In order to decide between the two, I must see both for what they are. I have in the past accented the pains (very great) which have come with my having the pleasure which Aesthetic Realism calls ‘ego’ or 2-A Pleasure. If this pleasure is greater than the other, it would be unwise to give it up. It would be sanity, good sense to continue it. Let me try to make this pleasure as attractive as possible. 2-A Self:

1. It seems to give me a feeling of pure individuality where I don’t have to undergo the humdrum competition with other persons that seems to make up such a great part of the present world.

2. I can endlessly despise, and the more I despise the more, apparently logically, my own ego is glorified.

3. I get a sense of triumph from being invisible from humans. I can hide with great unconscious glee.

4. I am in touch with perfection; the boring and imperfect have been nullified.

5. I can make fun of everything I want.

6. Matter, objects no longer seem obstructions. I have done away with pavements, walls, furniture, stone. I am in nothing, and free.

7. I can make expeditions into the other world, which I still see as shadows, and at my leisure pretend I am part of it. This gives an added fillip to my triumph.

8. I can talk of my pains eloquently, and fool people as to their cause and meaning.

9. I can be a deceptive emperor; be present and not present in a room; know the time and not know the time; exist and not exist; and have myself, myself, myself while I fool everything and am not affected by anything. (I can pretend I am affected.)

10. I (sometimes called Ego) know this pleasure. It is what I want, and I’ll use pain, pain, pain from the world to get it; pretend I haven’t got it; and justify my continuing to have it under opposition. The Whole Self: I should know this (the above); I know it. But I, the whole self, want the other pleasure. It is greater, it is honest and it has more than this. And I don’t have to use pain to get it. It does not make guilt. It is the really indescribable pleasure from seeing things wholly, honestly, wonderfully, humorously, excitedly, truly as they are. This pleasure would take the rest of time to describe. It is infinite. It is 1-A pleasure, Real Pleasure. (Siegel, Eli, 1981, Self and World pp 357-358)

I was run by my ego and got a lot of pleasure from contempt and felt like Humpty Dumpty who fell off the wall and because of Mr. Siegel’s good will for me, I came back together again.

I attribute what happened to me, my husband, and our beloved children as the normal responses of pedophiles and child abusers who have been accused of child sexual abuse. The abused live behind a veil of foggy memory. I know that if I had a clearer memory of the events, these people would have never been, even for one minute, around my children, my marriages, and my study. They would have left me well alone.

Amnesia was running me, not memory. After the abuse I hid it away. I pretended I was not affected and was not even there. I learned that these people constantly made me feel as if they saved my life in spite of the fact that I felt every day was the last day of my life.

For instance, one time I was placed in a coffin with a snake. I was six years old. A hole was drilled in the side of the coffin for air and the perpetrator kept me confined for hours in the dark. When I was taken out, I was thankful to my abuser. I now remember I felt suffocated and no matter how hard I yelled, no one would hear my screams. The snake was one of their toy pets and was used in other rituals as well. I was going to be buried alive and no one would ever know where I went. I flew away and was never present when I was being abused. I survived by thinking whoever was in the coffin with a snake was not me. It was all dissociation.

The way to survive abuse is to stay away from the perpetrators and protect yourself by covering your mouth and never speaking to them again, just as we are all doing in 2020 to stay healthy and not be contaminated with the novel coronavirus. All the world is scared. With every drop of my blood I learned to keep my faith. Let the Lord guide your every step. Remember that good is way stronger than evil. Shakespeare and all the great poets show it. Humility is what our souls want turned to pride.

No self can truly know itself and be ashamed.

~ The Aesthetic Method in Self-Conflict by Eli Siegel (1981, p98)

Even now as I quote from Aesthetic Realism, I am again falling in love with the principles of this theory as I did when I first met the definition of beauty in Mr. Siegel’s monumental work, Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites? This is an example of 1-A pleasure Described.

For instance, in question 2 Sameness and Difference Mr. Siegel asks: Does every work of art show the kinship to be found in objects and all realities?—and at the same time the subtle and tremendous difference, the drama of otherness, that one can find among the things of the world?

Now, when keeping our distance from others is more important than ever to save lives, we need to respect closeness and separation from each other. In child abuse that balance is disrespected. The perpetrator has given themselves the right to get close to you, to humiliate you and to even kill you as viruses do.

From all of the fifteen questions I learned that art had the drama that is inside people, as presented in a character as Othello, I learned jealousy could be inside me. Art showed me good from wrong. What was close to me was a sunset and a God I prayed to who was also distant and inside me at the same time. I wanted to keep close to me what made me strong. There are things in art and other places that can be close to me that will not hurt me. I learned closeness can be love.

Our sameness, our differences, our closeness and how we are separate from each other and the world is celebrated in every poem that the American poet Walt Whitman wrote. I quote from Whitman’s Song of Myself:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself, and every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

CHAPTER 1

Fragments of Memories

Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?

1. Freedom and order. Does every instance of beauty in nature and beauty as the artist presents it have something unrestricted, unexpected, uncontrolled?-And does this beautiful thing in nature or beautiful thing coming from the artist’s mind have, too, something accurate, sensible, logically justifiable, which can be called order?

The Car Accident that Broke My Legs, A Visitation Dream, Early Abuse and Living in Guatemala, Memories of My Real Mother, Living in Bayside, Queens, El Salvador and Pumpkin Hollow Upstate New York, Mrs. Clark’s Foster Care, Coral Gables, Florida, Times Square and Forest Hills, Meeting Mario’s Partner,

My memories are in fragments and jumbles. My memory started to come back in the year 2000 when I remembered my first family I belonged to: my dad John, stepmom Jackie, her husband Ari and uncle Bobby. I remember watching on September 11 as the twin towers in New York City tumbled down after two planes came crashing into the buildings: crashing with people dying by the thousands. I distinctly remember my memories were just like those buildings tumbling down. I had to see the debris inside my mind and find the structure. I would say this is the hardest work I have ever done. Nothing would prepare me for what was waiting for me. How I sat one afternoon and began to write with pen and notebooks, memories one after the other. I was so intent on writing what was being revealed to me that I did not tell my husband anything of what I was writing down.

For instance, I had a dream in the year 2000 that inspired me to write about my memories. I saw someone I recognized as John-John, the son of JFK, who came down with his wife waiting for him, after a plane crash. He told me he was my brother, and he picked up my husband’s arm in the bed while he was sleeping. I saw his beautiful wife wearing her bridal gown and both went up to the light holding hands. I remember it was amazing how real it was. After that was when I began to write down my memories and gave birth to this book.

The abuse started with my stepmother Jackie who was watching my brother and I playing in a small yard. I was around three or four and my little brother was two. She picked me up from the patio and took me into a dark room where a man was laying down on the bed. She sat me on top of him facing towards the wall. I could not see who this man was. He fingered me and touched me in a way that made me wonder why my stepmom would bring me here to have this man do this to me. He kept on asking me as he dug deeper if it hurt. I remember that it stung and burned. Looking back, I realized it was my uncle Bobby, and my memories continued with the two of them. My uncle Bobby was the one who abused me the worst. He would take me into the kitchen late into the night, sit me on top of the kitchen table and do outrageous things to me. My stepmom and he both took turns.

The abuse from my stepmother Jackie began when she decided I had played with the drawers in her boudoir and would accuse me of something I had done. This time she said I had messed up her drawer. She took my head and hammered her wooden brush with such force that it lodged in my head and I had blood running down my neck and face.

Another crucial memory happened around a fountain. I was being driven to school, I was five and had a chauffeur and a nanny. The driver would not stop as my nanny opened the car door and pushed me out. The back wheel ran