Trying Not to Look Too Good
by Valerie Smith
I've seen sexual abuse survivors (some of them celebrities) talk about their experiences on TV talk shows. Delta Burke is one that I recently saw. She looked so beautiful. She was a beauty queen. I just marvel at how these women look.Throughout most of my life, (I just turned 50), I went out of my way to make myself look unattractive. For a long time I felt that somehow the way I looked had something to do with what happened to me. Rationally, I knew this was not true. But that is the thing about the scars that abuse leave. They are not rational. Part of it was that, another part the persistent, haunting feelings of worthlessness. The world continues to turn. The people you meet have no idea and you can't really tell them. You develop defenses. Throughout my 20's and 30's, I rarely wore makeup. Sometimes I drank myself into oblivion and didn't give a damn how I looked. Other times, I just did the minimum, washed my face, brushed my teeth and hair, put on my clothes and that was it. My explanation to anyone who asked why I didn't wear makeup was 'I have bad eyesight,' even though it galled me to even have to have an explanation. It made me feel even more pathetic if you can understand that. You'd be amazed at how many people did ask or said things like you should wear some makeup, you should wear some jewelry, you should do this about yourself, you should do that. People who just liked giving advice that wasn't asked for with no idea. The way I saw it, I couldn't really tell them why I didn't like to wear make-up, it was none of their business anyway and why couldn't people just leave me alone.
When I was a teenager in Catholic school, we weren't allowed to wear make-up so that was that. But when I got out of there and went to live with my brother and father, I started going to secretarial school. I started to experiment with makeup like all normal teenagers do. Dad's reaction to me putting on make-up was far from normal. Criticism, ridicule and straight out "Get that sh*t off your face." I heard this so much that I became kind of secretive about putting any makeup on at all and kept it to a bare minimum, a little mascara, a little lipstick. According to him, I was putting it on so I could go out and whore around. When I went out with my girl friends, I was a "lesbian." It didn't take long before the real reason behind his obsessive interest in my looks and efforts to isolate me from the rest of the world became manifest. After I was 17, I never called him Dad again.
For years after the abuse, I wore loose clothes. Oh, yes, I wanted attractive clothes, I wanted to look attractive, but anytime I wore something that attracted attention, even a little attention, negative or positive, it was too much for me. Even in my 30's, because I have nice legs and look younger than my age, when wearing a close fitting pair of jeans earned me a flirtatious remark from a man in his 20's, I was taken aback. I became most comfortable in loose jeans and loose shirts. Besides the constant verbal abuse and its repetitive refrains ringing in my head, a great deal of my guilt and self-blame had to do with my Catholic upbringing, I'm sure of that. Examine your conscience. That examination lead me to believe that I had in part provoked my attacker by wearing short skirts in the preceding year when the mini-skirt craze came out. God was certainly punishing me. In later years, I was able to separate what I was taught by the Catholic Church and what I was taught by people. Even so, a part of me always KNEW that it was not me and that is the part that has helped me to survive.
I was 17 when this happened to me. None of the neighborhood boys ever bothered with me from the time I got out school at 16 and from when I turned 17 till I ended up at my mother's, they said I was "jailbait." The first time I told what happened to a lawyer I was working for, he told me that 17 was the age of sexual consent in our State. (The boys thought it was 18, the lawyer 17 ... since then I've been told it was actually 16 - and currently it is 16) You would also be surprised at the number of people who treated me like a little Lolita. My father wasn't the only one who made me feel like it was my fault. I am sure that I'm not the only one in the world something like this ever happened to. I was a mixed-up, scared little girl, in what I perceived as an unfriendly world, so I operated upon the beliefs that I had at that age and some of them were way off base. I asked myself years later, why didn't you go to the nuns for help? Part of the reason was that turning my father into the authorities would in my mind have resulted in the loss of my brothers and sister. This is particularly ironic, since thanks to my father, we are lost to each other anyway. Another reason was that in school, one of the girls I knew had been abused by her step-father and she was sent back to live with her family. She came back to the school and asked the nuns to let her stay there. She came back with her girlfriend who was also one of the girls who had been a charge of the school, her experiences having apparently turned her gay, and the sisters only let them stay a few days and threw them out. This is probably not what really happened. It was my teenage perception of what happened based upon the stories the girls were telling each other. I also believed that convincing the good sisters that I was a liar would be a piece of cake for my father.
I would test the waters and tell people bits and pieces of my father's abusive ways. To this day, I can count on one hand and still have a few fingers left, the people who gave me any useful advice. If fathers aren't still trying to molest their own kids, then why are there still so many teenage runaways and throwaway kids?
I've never much liked that phrase "if I can help one person." I want to do more than help one person. I want to change the way the rest of the world looks at abuse, too. That's a pretty bold statement for someone like me. But the way I see it, a few voices CAN become a million.
That's me up there. I have make-up on, a little mascara and a little lipstick.
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