An Ordinary Girl: Trading Up! Beauty for Ashes in the Aftermath of Abuse

By LisaMarie M. Atwood

Author LisaMarie M. Atwood was born an ordinary girl in an ordinary place and time. But her early home life was anything but ordinary as she lived out her days in the secret reality of childhood sexual abuse. The abuse she endured, the years of difficulty that followed, and God’s ultimate redemption of her experience render her uniquely qualified to share her extraordinary journey of survival and resilience.

Hers is the story of Little Miss Much-Afraid, a defenseless child who suffered the despicable cruelty of incest for the first fourteen years of her life. The story winds its way through a confusing childhood fraught with dysfunction and shame, and follows that broken child into adulthood where her invisible wounds and interfering cast-offs take center stage in marriage, parenthood, and life. Within Atwood’s narrative is found a candid and moving account of suffering and salvation, rage and forgiveness, heartache and healing. It is a must-read for all those betrayed and defiled as children, those who feel forgotten and abandoned—left behind to piece through the rubble and the ash of their abuse. Throughout these pages, survivors will see that they are not alone, that the things they suffered are not their fault, and their responses to their suffering are neither uncommon nor unexpected. The story tells of God’s unparalleled provision and points others in the direction of True North, toward the great lover of our souls, who is Christ Jesus … the One who longs to move in our lives and heal all those harmed by the unspeakable.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jun 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9781664264205

LisaMarie M. Atwood

LisaMarie M. Atwood, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, is a Christ-following wife, mother, grandmother, and friend who is living out her days with dignity, purpose, and joyful expectation.

Book preview

An Ordinary Girl

Trading Up! Beauty for Ashes

in the Aftermath of Abuse

LisaMarie M. Atwood

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Copyright © 2022 LisaMarie M. Atwood.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means,

graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by

any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author

except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher

make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book

and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

WestBow Press

A Division of Thomas Nelson & Zondervan

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in

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views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Scripture quotations taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®,

Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation.

Used by permission. All rights reserved. www.lockman.org

Scripture taken from the New King James Version® Copyright © 1982

by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations taken from The Holy Bible, New International

Version® NIV® Copyright © 1973 1978 1984 2011 by Biblica, Inc.

TM. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

ISBN: 978-1-6642-6421-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6642-6422-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6642-6420-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022907372

WestBow Press rev. date: 06/09/2022

This is a nonfiction work written under a pseudonym. The events are portrayed to the best of the author’s memory and integrity. While all of the recollections in this book are true, many names, places, and other identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of the persons involved.

For my younger self

and all the other children

who survived the unspeakable

and grew up strong

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"This is the story of how Much-Afraid

escaped from her Fearing relatives and

went with the Shepherd to the High Places

where ‘perfect love casteth out fear.’" ¹

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Contents

Section 1   Ancient Days

Chapter 1     The Ugly Truth

Chapter 2     Abuse Proper

Chapter 3     Discombobulated Disorientation

Chapter 4     Sunday-Go-To-Meeting

Chapter 5     Hiding Places

Chapter 6     The Gift of Girlfriends

Chapter 7     Unraveled Regeneration

Chapter 8     I’m Gonna Tell on You!

Chapter 9     Did Your Mother Know?

Section 2   The Great Escape

Chapter 10   On Again, Off Again

Chapter 11   Confrontation

Chapter 12   Liar-Liar-Pants-On-Fire

Chapter 13   From Rage to Repose

Chapter 14   Deliverance

Chapter 15   Profile of a Predator

Section 3   Love And Marriage

Chapter 16   And They Called It Puppy Love

Chapter 17   What’d Ya Do That For?

Chapter 18   I’m Very High Functioning

Chapter 19   Lament and Regret

Chapter 20   Back, Jack, Do It Again

Section 4   The Telling, The Toll, And The Tonic

Chapter 21   To Tell the Truth

Chapter 22   What Will the Neighbors Think!

Chapter 23   Broken Trust

Chapter 24   If I Only Had a Brain

Chapter 25   It’s Complicated

Chapter 26   Little Miss Much-Afraid

Chapter 27   The Twenty-Fourth Floor

Chapter 28   Unshackled

Section 5   Hallmarks of Healing

Chapter 29   Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

Chapter 30   Dismantling the Lies

Chapter 31   Indictment Dismissed

Chapter 32   The Anguish of Ambivalence

Chapter 33   Of Millstones and Men

Chapter 34   Forgive and Forget

Chapter 35   An Honorable Heritage

Section 6   Existential Angst

Chapter 36   What’s God Got to Do with It, Got to Do with It?

Chapter 37   Suffering and Sorrow and Grief, Oh My!

Chapter 38   What’s It All About, Alfie?

Section 7   May I Have The Floor, Please?

Chapter 39   This One’s for You

Chapter 40   An Ordinary Girl

Beauty for Ashes

Acknowledgements

Notes

Bibliography

About the Author

SECTION I

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ANCIENT DAYS

Chapter 1

The Ugly Truth

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"…[T]here are few topics in modern life

that are more repugnant to consider

than the abuse of a child

by the very persons entrusted with his care."²

O ne in three girls, and one in five boys. ³ Or one in four girls, and one in six boys. ⁴ Or one in seven girls, and one in twenty-five boys. Or just one in ten children altogether. ⁵ Depending on where you look, these are the widely-accepted, current-day statistics for the number of children who will be sexually abused by their eighteenth birthday. More precise statistics include the fact that every seventy-three seconds, an American is sexually assaulted. And every nine minutes, that victim is a child. Meanwhile, only five out of every one thousand perpetrators will end up in prison. ⁶ On January 1, 2022, the population of the United States numbered in excess of 332 million people. ⁷ Of those 332 million people, There are 42 million survivors of child sexual abuse living in the U.S. today. ⁸

The rampant rates of sexual violence against children are grim—staggering and unsettling to ponder. But as disturbing as the statistics are, they are a conservative gauge at best, as [D]ata from the Department of Justice suggests that 86% of child sexual abuse goes unreported altogether.⁹

I was that girl. The unreported statistic. The invisible victim of child sexual abuse.

Chapter 2

Abuse Proper

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M y memories of abuse are among the earliest memories I hold. The molestation began as far back as I can remember—well before I entered kindergarten—and would continue until I moved out of state with my mother and brother following my parents’ divorce. I was fourteen years old when I finally broke free of my perpetrator. I was so young then, just a teenager. I had not yet driven a car. Or voted. Or even gone on my first date. Yet I had already experienced the most horrific and devastating ordeal of my life. The severe and chronic nature of the abuse, the setting in which it occurred, and the abuser’s close familial relationship and access to me all served to compound the trauma and resulted in unimaginable harm that even I myself can barely comprehend to this day. This was the catalyst that would set the stage of my life and my way of being in the world and was the experience by which I would view and measure all other realities.

My earliest recollections were of pain, discomfort, and confusion. Later they would include degradation and humiliation. The molestation perpetrated by my biological father occurred in any number of settings and circumstances. I was violated in my parents’ bed, in his pickup truck, in the bath as he played drop the soap, which would inevitably be found and used. But most of the time, I was violated in my own bed. And I remember clearly the horror of it, the smell of him, the cadence of his breathing, what he said to me, how I begged him to stop.

Incest is tricky and insidious, and the trauma of it can produce any number of by-products in the human psyche. Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, the writers of the comprehensive and groundbreaking book The Courage to Heal, address trauma associated with sexual abuse:

If you have been sexually abused as a child, you have a lot in common with people who have gone through other types of traumatic experiences—an orphan living in a war zone, a shopkeeper held up in a robbery, a driver in a head-on collision, a veteran struggling with memories of war.¹⁰

For me, the outcomes over time were predictable and would include sleep disturbances, flashbacks, somatic (body) memories, episodes of panic and generalized anxiety, depression, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—specifically, Complex PTSD.

All throughout my childhood and for years after, I had a recurring dream … more accurately, a recurring night terror. In the dream, a big black dog stood outside our house, peering in through the second-story windows of my brothers’ shared bedroom. A vision of Stephen King’s Cujo,¹¹ it was a ferocious creature—gigantic, otherworldly, and horrifying in the extreme. With bared fangs, fevered gnashing, and spittle on the glass, he growled and barked in a hair-raising cacophony of terror and menace as he tried to break through the glass to destroy me. With as much gusto as Chicken Little who heralded the news that the sky was indeed falling, I ran downstairs to relay the urgency of the matter to my family, as my paternal grandmother, my paternal aunt, and my mother sat around our small kitchen table while visiting and eating ice cream. But despite my earnestness, my report of imminent peril was brushed aside and I was dismissed with patronizing chuckles. And then I woke up. The nightmare would be a regular staple in my life for thirty years, and it never once varied.

As a young girl, I was constantly hopped up on toxic stress hormones, and hypervigilance was my close companion. I came to dread the dark, lying in my bed, and waiting. Waiting for the television to shut off. Wondering when he would come for me. Listening for his footsteps as he crossed the open dining room that separated my bedroom from his. And in between the waiting, the wondering, and the listening, I girded my loins and followed my regimented checklist. Were my pajamas snug enough? Were my covers tucked in tight enough? Were my eyelids still enough to feign sleep? But my status, whether awake or asleep, was incidental to him.

One of the most chilling instances of his brutality occurred as I slept. It was early when I rolled out of bed that morning. I was still sleepy. So instead of getting up and around as I normally would have done, I retreated to the living room to curl up on the couch and soon fell back into a deep morning sleep. He was already on top of me, fully engaged, when I was abruptly awakened—startled, disoriented, and in a state of panic. His rape and objectification of me while in a state of slumber, coupled with his dead demeanor afterward, will always be one of the most difficult memories I carry. When he was finished, he simply stood up, zipped up, and walked out the door for work without so much as a single word or glance back, leaving me shattered and alone to manage the fallout.

On the front side of his molestations, there was usually a lead time. Generally, I would be awake and oriented to my surroundings. Because I had become highly conditioned to his patterns and signals, I could sense him coming from a country mile. And with my keen awareness came the benefit of time—time that allowed me to either slip from his grasp or brace myself for impact. On the back side, there was generally a period of sleep to serve as a buffer. Those wee small hours provided a line of demarcation from the abuse and were vitally important in terms of restoration and recovery. Sleep—my hiding place where I could roll over, cover my head, and bury my experience—provided a recalibration of sorts and allowed me to compartmentalize his nighttime acts from my daytime life. But with the early-morning episode on the couch, there was neither lead time nor a period of recovery—no buffer on either end. Although he would sometimes surprise me with a deviation to his routine, this was outside the norm of how he generally operated. And as a result, I had no mechanism in place with which to respond to his surprise attack.

It was morning. I had to get up. I had to wipe my tears, clean myself up as best I could, get dressed, get breakfast, and get ready for school. To add insult to injury, I had only recently learned from an older brother how babies were made, through an object lesson with the rabbits we raised in our backyard. I was horrified! I spent the majority of my fourth-grade school year ticking off the months on my fingers, with the worst kind of anticipation, believing I had become pregnant. I was nine years old.

As I grew in age and reason, I began to develop strategies and tried any number of tactics to keep my abuser at bay. One such strategy involved rearranging the furniture in my room, moving my bed into the direct sightline of my bedroom door. That’ll fix him, I reasoned. Surely he won’t dare! But in his bold arrogance, almost as if he relished the challenge, the molestation was not curtailed. If anything, it ramped up, as if he were saying, Move your bed any place you want. I’ll do as I please. Many times, he never even bothered to shut the door. Other maneuvers to stall him were ineffective, as were my efforts to appeal to his dark heart. All my tears and pleas fell on deaf ears. He was unfazed and undeterred. The abuse was a fixture during the first fourteen years of my life.

Be careful how you touch her for she’ll awaken

And sleep’s the only freedom that she knows

And when you walk into her eyes you won’t believe

The way she’s always paying for a debt she never owes

And a silent wind still blows

That only she can hear and so she goes¹²

Chapter 3

Discombobulated

Disorientation

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F or most, the sexual abuse of a child is exceptionally difficult to assimilate. And if difficult for a mature, fully functioning adult, how much more confusing and difficult for a child to grasp? With limited life experience and still-developing emotion, intellect, cognition, and body, children formulate their ideas about themselves and the world around them based largely on their experiences. For good measure, toss in the fact of a child’s egocentric nature that says, Everything is about me, so this must be about me. This must be my fault. So it is with incest. Absent intervention and rescue, a child will arrive at a set of erroneous conclusions in order to survive. And somewhere along the way of all that concluding and surviving, the intolerable yet unstoppable experiences are ultimately internalized, normalized, and rewritten in a patently false and twisted work of fiction, to the great detriment of the child.

Throughout the entirety of my formative years, I lived in a state of helplessness and entrapment, under a constant threat of predation. My development as a child was structured entirely around my survival, and my filter for everything in life was tainted by the sexual abuse being perpetrated upon me by my own father. Moreover, it was disorienting as I walked through my day-in and day-out experience in the quagmire of abuse, struggling against the enormity of it all and hopscotching the hidden land mines that were all around me—the ones that only I could see. While attempting to reconcile what I instinctively knew was wrong and harmful—an assault against my young body and personhood—with the outward appearances of my so-called normal family life, I inhabited the tension of two worlds. I had to smile and be sweet and get along and behave and otherwise act against the monumental lie that was my life, while ignoring my intuitive sense that those who were charged to provide love, care, and protection did nothing of the sort. And the collision of those parallel worlds created a huge chasm of dissonance.

On one hand, there was the appearance of stability and consistency. My parents had good jobs and provided a nice home. We rarely moved, and I always attended the same school and church. I made friends easily, earned good grades, and otherwise enjoyed many of the expected rites of passage for kids growing up. But behind closed doors, the odious secret reality of my sexual abuse was always with me.

I was born and raised in the Midwest, in the broad and fertile Corn Belt of Indiana’s till plains, along the banks of the Big Walnut Creek. Aside from my home life and the secret I carried, growing up in this small college town where I lived was, for me, a magical experience during a magical time. I’m quite sure I will romanticize it for the rest of my life. As I grew older, I enjoyed unrestrained freedom. If my bike could get me there, I could go. And I rode my bike all over that town, spending long summer days with my mates, lazing and sunbathing by the municipal pool and local ponds, and evenings in the parks, watching my brothers play baseball.

I was voted Most Likely to Streak in the seventh grade. I studied French and piano for many years. There were Girl Scout campouts and Camp Fire Girl meetings, and I went door to door selling cookies and candy in the frigid winter months. I sang my heart out in the school choir, and even made the morning show of our local affiliate television station. Slumber parties were the order of the day. I played softball, performed in baton recitals on the open-air stage, and painted on an easel while enrolled in Art in the Park. And how I lived for Saturday nights at the Youth Center, dancing and giggling with my gaggle of girlfriends.

As a high achiever, I worked hard to cultivate an exterior veneer of the good daughter. I was proud of my academic performance, and I strived to be first in all of my endeavors throughout my elementary school days. But the underlying motivation of wanting to be good and do well was wrapped up in the hidden hope that my efforts and performance would somehow be enough to earn my parents’ approval—to satisfy that deep longing for love and care that I legitimately craved as a daughter. On another level, I strived to be good outwardly to offset how