Beautifully Broken, Seeing Beyond Trauma

By Laural Hemenway

Beautifully Broken, Seeing Beyond Trauma

This story is about life and death, but in reverse. It begins with a death and ends with a life. Both are Mine. On October 7, 2014, a part of me suddenly and violently died. More than two years after the events that occurred that day, I was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Since then,

• Language: English
• Publisher: LAURAL HEMENWAY
• Release date: Dec 22, 2017
• ISBN: 9780692969441

Laural Hemenway

Laural Hemenway is a highly accomplished attorney who has specialized in family law and related cases for nearly 20 years. She attributes her proven track record of success to her ability to persevere through failure.

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Back Story

Iwas born in 1960 to two young parents who probably should have never had children together. My Father was a veteran from the Korean War and obsessed with aviation. My Mother grew up on a farm in an area of a mid-western state heavily populated by German immigrants. They were married at a time in American history when it seemed like all of the Hollywood starlets from the 1950’s were marrying leading men and having beautiful children. Their lives were painted with the brush of domestic bliss though in reality they rarely lived the happily ever lives that were portrayed by the media and read by young women like my Mother. My father wanted to go to the moon, and my Mother did not understand him at all. She wanted to live the simple life of a stereotypical Mother portrayed by Hollywood who was adored by her children and worshipped by her husband.

While it might seem that my Father’s dreams were less realistic than my Mother’s, they were not. He ended up getting his GED, graduating from college with advanced degrees and working as an engineer and project manager with the highest classification of security for the most influential space exploration companies and government agencies in the world. One of the last projects he worked on before retiring involved launching a capsule into space, collecting particles of solar wind and returning them to earth in hopes of discovering evidence of the creation of the universe. The capsule ended up crashing in the desert due to a faulty switch that was never properly tested by the manufacturer. I can assure you that my Father was vindicated and left no stone unturned until the specific cause of the mishap was identified. He and I have a lot in common in that sense. As one of his closest friends recently told me, I am my Father’s daughter.

Much of the information gathered in space through this project was destroyed in the crash, however, the particles that survived are still being tested in secret government funded laboratories. Interestingly, I have the distinction of saying that my Father and those who worked with him on this mission went farther into space searching for God than anyone in the history of mankind.

But that was all done later in his life, and after my parents divorced. I was four years old when I was first informed of their separation while sitting between them on the front step of our house. Though that was over fifty years ago, I still remember it. Both of my parents wanted my brother and me to live with them. For some reason, they had the bright idea of putting a four-year-old between them and asking her to choose which one of them she would spend the rest of her life with. When they told me that we were not going to live together as a family any more, I became upset and instinctively reached for my Mother. I was not choosing her. I didn’t know I was choosing anyone. Almost immediately after hugging her, I reached for my Father to include him, but he was gone. He mistakenly thought I chose her over him. That may have been the last time I ever saw him. It is a classic example of how a failure to effectively communicate can alter the course of one’slife.

From that event occurring on the front porch, I was driven to Hell in the back of a station wagon. I had previously been a typical middle class kid who roamed the neighborhood with other middle class kids. It was a pretty good life from my perspective. When we arrived in the state we moved to, we were homeless and dirt poor.

Admittedly, there is nothing wrong with being poor, so long as you are honest. The man we ended up living with, however, was not honest. He was a criminal who worked hard at not working hard. He robbed banks, burned down houses and ran moonshine through counties patrolled my men like Buford Pusser. His most interesting occupation was that of a deputy sheriff in a small town. For that job, he carried a gun. I remember the gun because it was used in various forms of violence witnessed by myself and my brother over the years.

The abuse we witnessed was not limited to assaults against outsiders, however. We were often the targets. In addition to the physical abuse, there was also sexual violence. I was the victim. The first occurrence was shortly after we were extracted from middle class suburbia. I was either four or five years old. I think I was four. The details are etched forever in my memory but unimportant for the purposes of this book. I tried telling people what happened at the time but no one believed me. My abuser made sure of that by telling people I was a liar and by discrediting me whenever possible. I became the bad kid who really never did anything bad.

During the ten years between the time we moved and the day I got married, I faithfully attended a fundamental Christian church three times per week. My Mother was a devout Christian and made sure we were there. She also encouraged us to take advantage of extracurricular activities such as Church camp, band, choir and various club meetings, competitions and events.

Needless to say, my normal childhood had derailed somewhere in the Twilight Zone. I did very poorly in school until the fifth grade. I was dyslexic and never read on the level of my peers. It was embarrassing to be asked to read out loud. I stuttered and mixed the words up horribly. I was bullied and made fun of mercilessly by other children. This occurred during a time before anyone taught children about the evils of bullying. I did not have nice clothes, I was not athletic, and I was not built like a cheer leader which made me a target in a small town where those traits are most admired and rewarded. Most of what I wore came from second hand stores or from a charity, which was even worse.

Before fifth grade, I was often taken out of class and tested for various disabilities but none were verified. For some reason, I can’t explain, in the fifth grade, things started to click. I discovered that I was smart. It may be because the sexual abuse stopped during this time and that contributed to my increased intellect. I’m not sure about that. I just know that I started excelling in my schoolwork without really even trying.

From that point on, if I was told I could not do something, I worked twice as hard as anyone around me to prove that I could. I was involved in every activity that I could participate in. Every minute spent away from home put distance between me and the terrible things that happened there. I got married at the age of fifteen (almost sixteen) and never moved back home. I was married and had three children before divorcing nearly 30 years later.

During my marriage, I sang in a band for a couple years when my husband joined the Army and we were stationed in Hawaii. We later moved back to the Atlanta area where he enrolled in a school for medical professionals and I became a cosmetologist to help pay our living expenses until he graduated. I worked for about a year and a half in a styling salon with some amazing women who taught me to laugh and to interact with people. I was a very shy reclusive person for most of my life before that, even though I never missed an opportunity to involve myself in extracurricular activities. I was a bit of a misfit with almost zero self-confidence. Part of the reason for my shyness was the strict religious education I received that taught me that women were inferior. This reinforced what I was taught in other areas of my life. The women I met and worked with in the styling salon in GA in the mid 1980s, changed my life. They accepted and loved me. I never had more fun at a job than I did there. They made me a better person in everything I did in the years that followed.

My time there ended with the most magical event of all. I became a mother. Nothing was ever the same after that. I later had two more children. My husband graduated and became a very successful doctor. We were financially very well off. When my second child was six months old, I started college. People sometimes told me that I was not smart enough to make it through, but I graduated three and a half years later with a 3.85 GPA. I majored in Economics with minors in Business Math and Political Science. A few years after that, I started law school. I graduated four years afterward with the third highest grades in my class. The first and second highest grades were attained by brain surgeons. Literally.

On March 1, 2000, I was hired as an Assistant District Attorney (ADA) prosecuting domestic violence cases under a one-year grant. When it ended, I worked as the child support attorney in our county. The office then had about 8,000 open cases and one attorney. I was not particularly happy in that position. I often felt the child support laws were unfair to fathers. What I really wanted to do was to prosecute child abuse cases.

About that time, a grant was received for the first specially designated child abuse prosecutor in our county. I requested and was granted the position somewhere around 2001. I thus became the first female criminal prosecutor in my jurisdiction. As such, I was not always accepted or respected in the fraternity of my male counterparts. I worked hard to attain a level of expertise as a trial lawyer and an advocate for children which I thought would earn me the respect of the establishment. I rewrote the grant I was working under within the first year to include a position for a forensic investigator. Nobody really knew what that was. I pretty much just made it up to create a position for a woman who came to me in desperate need of a job. She later became my assistant and twelve years after that, she became my Judas by utterly betraying my trust.

I remained in the same position until October of 2014. By that time, our county had grown to several times the size it was when I started, but I remained the only prosecutor of child abuse and child rape cases until the day I was fired. I sometimes asked to be reassigned or to have another attorney share my caseload, but my requests were not granted. No one else in my office wanted anything to do with my cases because they were the most unpredictable and the hardest to prosecute.

Over the course of my career as a prosecutor, I had battled with some of the best attorneys in the country defending the rights of abused women and children. I won over 95% of the cases I took to trial, and they were some of the most difficult cases any attorney has ever prosecuted. I wrote laws and served on a task force to evaluate changes in State child protective statutes, policies and procedures. I was a warrior and an advocate. I did the right thing because it was the right thing. I protected the innocence of children. In many ways, I was fearless. I was not weak and I was certainly not a victim. I had distanced myself from the child whose screams were silenced as she was violently raped nearly a half a century earlier by hard work, faith in God and success. My children, Elise, Cordelia and Ryan, were raised with every advantage I could give them. They are all three now college graduates, married and self-sufficient. Their Father and I divorced in 2005 and I married my second husband, Andrew in 2007. Although I never saw my Father again after 1965, I talked to him on the phone a couple times and his family contacted me often. After my Father died in 2013, one of his best friends reached out to me and told me that my dad had kept up with my career and was proud of me.

The traumatizing events that occurred in October of 2014 and the utter disrespect with which I was tossed aside as insignificant and worthless not only ended my life as I had known it, but also belittled every accomplishment I had ever made. In my opinion, a male attorney would not have received the same treatment that I did.

I was a 53-year-old successful female attorney at that time. I was no longer young. I knew realistically that one day, my heart would stop beating and that death would be the inescapable end of my existence. I sometimes contemplated what would happen to my soul when my body ceased to contain it. In contemplating my own death, however, I had no idea that it was possible for part of me to die, but not all of me. I never knew that what made me Me could cease to exist, and leave behind nothing but fragmented shards of my soul. Like a broken window pane in a wooden frame, my body continued to function even though everything inside of it felt broken beyond repair, and frozen in a silent scream. Perhaps this description sounds cliché or overly dramatic, but I assure you that it is neither. The death I experienced, was not visible to an observer, but it was literal and absolute to me.

The end of the me that was my recognizable self, occurred quite suddenly when I was blindsided by the realities of human prejudice, and discrimination as an unexpected series