Between Two Bedrooms
Who was really responsible for my sexual trauma? The answer both surprised and liberated me.
The culprit was me, I first thought. At the age of 15, I felt crushed under a grimy boulder of guilt and shame. As with most teenagers, the cause defaulted to myself, tyrannized my mind, and paralyzed me. Does anyone else know? Are they going to find out? Will they see it in my eyes? Will they suspect anything?
I was so terrified that, when I showed up for breakfast, I was shaking.
It remains, to this day, one of the most traumatic experiences of my life. Not the sexual encounter. No, the traumatic part was my entrance into the kitchen to face my family the next morning. I recall it vividly. The brown-blue carpet on the kitchen floor, the big corner windows overlooking the mist rising above the St. Clair River, Mom flipping eggs at the avocado-green stove, Dad standing inside the open fridge door pouring milk into a glass, my older sister Dana eating cereal at the table, my little brothers running about.
Dana looked up from her cereal and asked, in front of everyone, “Um, Laurie, were you in our bedroom last night?”
I instantly blurted, “Um, no,” as if the question were ridiculous. Dana, after all, had a reputation for both talking and walking in her sleep. But I felt nauseous, like I was the defendant walking into a crowded courtroom.
Then Mary walked in, glaring at the floor. Glum, silent, a cloud of charcoal rage hovering over her shoulders.
I felt instant guilt. It was me. I did it to her. I made her angry and sad. I glanced at her, careful not to stare. Was she going to spill the beans? Of course not, I reasoned. But she was mad at me, I was sure. Very mad. She blamed it all on me.
For good reason, I thought. She was not in love with me. She had not come into my bedroom. I had waited until my younger sister Ronda was asleep on the top bunk beside my double bed, then crept across the hall to Mary’s bedroom. I checked to see that Dana was asleep in the top bunk and snuggled up on top of the covers beside Mary on the single bed. I wanted a hug. And a kiss on the cheek. Bedtime snuggles were all I lived for. Though I did not know it, I was a young lesbian with hormones raging.
Why this 23-year-old friend lived with us at all remains somewhat of a mystery. She was a loner who came from a dysfunctional and abusive family. She herself, I learned later, had been raped by her own brothers. After her first visit to our church, where my Dad was a pastor, she became a regular visitor to our home, sleeping on the couch almost every weekend. This habit continued for one or two years. The ostensible reason was to learn God’s word at the feet of my father, but the real reason was to find friendship and comfort. She spent most of the time talking with Mom, and often right inside Mom and Dad’s bedroom. It’s no wonder Dad did not like her.
At the fresh ages of thirteen and fourteen I would wait until everyone else was asleep, then creep downstairs. I would sit on the edge of the couch while Mary was lying under the covers, and the two of us would chat in whispers and muted chuckles. I was not interested in the conversation and remember none of it. All I wanted was the finale. The long hugs and the kisses on her neck, the scent of honeysuckle following me back up to my bed where I continued my waking dreams of her skin against mine.
When my father accepted a new post 800 miles away, Mary could not bear the thought of being abandoned by her adopted family. It had nothing to do with me. It was Mom she wanted to be close to, and Mom seemed to enjoy the constant attention. When Mary asked to move with us from Vankleek Hill to our new home at Bluewater Bible Camp outside Wallaceburg where Dad was going to be the Director, Dad very reluctantly complied.
On the snowiest January of the decade, we arrived at the lodge. I was assigned the bedroom with my little sister, and Dana was assigned the bedroom with Mary. Though devastated with this arrangement, I could not let on. Instead, I strategized. I could just continue the midnight snuggle tradition, and hope Dana fell asleep before Mary did.
I had no clue about sex. I wanted nothing beyond hugs and kisses. I was woefully uneducated, all the moreso because I was a blooming dyke in a Baptist home. Had I been offered relevant information, I would have declined with a weak smile and a no thanks. I was an upstanding ambassador of Christ, and sex with a man loomed as a daunting requirement of some future marriage. I’ll deal with that yucky stuff later, I thought. If other adults suffer through it, so can I. Meantime, find me a girlfriend and give me hugs and kisses. It’s not sexual, that’s disgusting. We’re just friends.
Two months later, on a rainy night in March, the snuggles turned to something else. We began kissing on the mouth. This was certainly beyond my wildest fantasies. The kissing became more insistent and we found each other’s tongues. Mary pulled me under the covers, wound her legs around mine and shoved her hands up my pajama shirt to fondle my breasts. The ecstasy I felt was, quite literally, too much for me to bear. Nobody had ever told me what an orgasm was, and I felt a wave surging through my entire body with a force I could not control.
A gasp lurched up from my belly, and my jaw clenched just in time before it escaped my lips. I pulled away in fear. What was this? I whirled around, heart pounding. Dana tossed and mumbled in her sleep. I darted out the door.
I crossed the hallway to my bedroom and pulled the covers up tight. I was wet between the legs with no idea why. I thought I had to pee. My eyes were also wet with tears — not from crying but from stifling my gasps of pleasure. I lay there staring at the ceiling, heart racing, sobs threatening to erupt. God was up there and he was not pleased. He was disgusted. My God, the God I worshipped, had turned his face away from me. I had committed a heinous crime against him. My holy Creator, I knew, could not look upon sin so he could not look upon me.
Thus began the most torturous, lonely time of my life. With nobody to talk to, I plunged into a full-blown depression that lasted for years. Those who define hell in the physical terms of trench warfare, abduction, torture, starvation, imprisonment, abandonment and solitary confinement may find it a stretch to believe I was in hell. But to this day no anguish in my life comes close to it. And the source of the anguish would eventually shed light on the true villain.
The Christian idea that Jesus’ sacrifice wipes away our guilt seemed to have no weight in this moment. I really did believe I was redeemed and forgiven and headed to heaven when I died. I really did believe I was one of God’s chosen people. No matter what kind of sin I committed before or after my salvation, I really did believe I was, in God’s eyes, pure and sinless due to Jesus’ death and resurrection. And yet, here I was, thinking God had turned his face away from me. Here I was feeling like the worst sinner in the world — worse than murderers, burglars, and rapists — feeling utterly abandoned and hopeless.
The thought occurred to me: all I have to do is confess and repent and ask God’s forgiveness. Then I will feel better. Of course God will forgive me! Had we been Roman Catholic I could have headed to a confidential confession the next day. But in the Baptist church there was no such option. I had to confess to my fellow church members including my pastor, who just happened to be my Dad.
My Dad, if he knew, would kill her. I pulled the covers over my head as the sobs took over. I could not wake Ronda. Dad would kill Mary, I knew it. I couldn’t tell him. He would subject me to a verbal thrashing at the least, and would instantly evict her. I would never see her again.
How could I confess to anyone? This thing I had done was nothing less than repulsive. It was so far outside the realm of the known and the condemned that it had no name. The term homosexual was not in my vocabulary, and I had never uttered the term lesbian. Confessing my sin would turn me into scum. I would no longer be Laurie. I would be scum.
The sin was not really the issue. What tormented me was that I had to keep it secret. A secret like that. All to myself.
And what was Mary thinking? What would she do? Did she love me? Or did she hate me now? In the ensuing days it became clear she blamed me for everything, and she did indeed hate me. I tried to tell her I was sorry. I tried to make amends. But she shunned me. This was the worst hurt I had ever felt.
We left Wallaceburg a few months later and moved to Winnipeg, where I remained banished from Mary’s friendship even though her bedroom was right next to mine. I left home for Bible College in Toronto, worked on Bay Street for a year as a receptionist, attended church every Sunday, earned two degrees in Waterloo, stopped attending church, and pursued a third degree in London. Ten years after Wallaceburg I came out of the closet while attending McMaster University. I am lesbian, hear me roar. My teenage make-out session with Mary was a sexual awakening. I had nothing to be ashamed of.
Fifteen years after Wallaceburg, I launched my consulting career, met my first girlfriend, and moved into an apartment with her on the 25th floor of a Leaside high-rise. It might have been she, or a therapist, or one of the many political books I was reading, that pushed me off in another direction. I decided my make-out session with Mary was not my sexual awakening. I had been sexually abused.
I proceeded to refer to myself as a victim, and Mary as the perpetrator.
Still living in Winnipeg, and now with a husband and kids, Mary had maintained a close friendship with my mother, who now lived one hour away from me. One day my sister Dana called to tell me Mary was coming to visit. With the encouragement of a friend, I determined I was going to confront her somehow. I gathered my things, hopped in my Rabbit, and headed to my parents’ place.
When I asked to speak with Mary privately, she declined and said, “Anything you need to say, you can say here.” In front of my brother, two friends, and my parents, I proceeded to confront her right there in my parents’ living room, raising my voice and saying exactly what my therapist had coached me to say. “I have been carrying this pain now for 15 years. I’m not doing it anymore. It’s all yours.” I blamed her for taking advantage of my pubescent innocence, and then punishing me as if it had been my fault when it was all her fault.
At first she denied any memory of the event, but within a few minutes she broke down in tears. I walked out of the house, jumped back in my car, and drove off.
I had been a victim, I thought, but was no longer a victim. I was a survivor.
Ten years passed. Now I was ready to forgive Mary for everything. On a trip to Winnipeg to attend the NDP Leadership Convention, I called her to say hello. She responded politely and actually talked to me briefly. I did not feel like a victim. I did not even feel like a survivor. I felt free.
A few years later, I joined a personal growth group. For three hours a week we met and discussed challenges and found ways to heal childhood wounds. The subject of Mary came up, and they asked questions I had never addressed. Why was Mary living in your home? Why did you not feel safe talking to your Mom and Dad about it? If this happened to your daughter, would you not want them to tell you? And would you not rush to their aid?
This was new information. Maybe Dad would have protected me. When I was two years old, we were visiting friends and their mutt attacked me in the mouth, inflicting me with a lifelong scar. After Dad drove us to the hospital to get stitches, he grabbed his shotgun from the back of the coat closet in the front porch and called his friend. “Either you kill that dog tonight, or I will come over and will do it myself.” When Dad was mad, he was ferocious. The dog was dead by morning.
Of course he would protect me! I wanted to go back in time, reach out for that teenage Laurie, and tell her, “Go knock on Mom and Dad’s door. Tell them what happened. Tell them how scared you are. They will comfort you.”
With the encouragement of my group, I visited my parents and asked Dad if we could talk privately. By this time he knew I had accused Mary of sexual abuse many years earlier, but we had never once discussed it, and I assumed he had never discussed it with Mom either.
I did not relish this moment, but felt it could be an opportunity for bonding with my Dad. Since the day I had announced my lesbianity many years ago, he had denounced it as sinful and made no bones about it. But he was still my Dad. I briefly recounted what happened at Bluewater in the spring of my 16th year. “I realize now, Dad, that I could have told you, and you would have supported me. If I could go back in time, I would like for that to happen. Would you be there for me?”
He did not hesitate to reply. But instead of saying, “Yes, of course, sweetie. Of course I would be there for you,” he began spewing forth condemnations of my repulsive sin, how disgusting it was, how I could have chosen to walk away, how he was approached by some men when he was younger and he just walked away, why couldn’t I?
I sat beside him stunned, mouth open and dry, eyes watering. Laurie was 15 years old again, lying in bed, feeling alone in the universe staring up at an angry God. Her fears had been well-founded: she could not confess to anyone. She had to face it all alone.
There would be no redemptive bonding. I never spoke to my father again, and he died within the year.
I shared the experience with my older sister Dana, who hugged me and comforted me. I went home and slept on it.
Wait a minute: would Dana have been there for me? Dana was a warrior in her own right. She could be fierce and indignant in her love of justice. Yet when I was a teenager, I did not see her as a protective big sister. I viewed her as a liability, an enemy even. Was that all a big mistake? Would she have supported me?
I called her the next day and asked to get together for dinner, just the two of us. I wanted to talk about what happened at Bluewater. She met me at a middle eastern restaurant in Westdale, close to McMaster University where I had come out of the closet back in 1989. I asked her, “Would you have been there for me?” Without hesitating, she replied, “Yes, I would.”
All these years Dana had wanted to be there for me. She had been there for me the whole time. She would have been devastated and enraged. She would have told Mom and Dad, and told them to get rid of Mary, right now. She would even have protected me from Dad’s wrath. She hated Mary. She hated her because she invaded our family and usurped our mother, taking time away from us. Dana resented it more than anyone, and I don’t blame her. Yet I had ignored her.
At the age of fifty, I gained a Big Sister. It was a stunning revelation. I drove home with a smile on my face.
Before dawn the next morning, with my cat purring at my head and my mind meandering at the edge of consciousness, fuzzy views ever so slowly came into focus. The story had changed dramatically. Back at Bluewater Bible Camp, in Mary’s bedroom, it was daylight and Mary had left for work. Dana and Laurie were in the corner of the sunroom at the back, surrounded by tall trees and overlooking the river. She was holding her little sister as she sobbed.
Suddenly all that loneliness had evaporated. Yes, Laurie had a secret, but now she had a big sister to share it with. What a waste. Instead of suffering for all those years, the confusion would have lasted a single night. Regardless of whether Mom and Dad found out, Laurie would have had a devoted friend to help her through it.
This newfound clarity ushered in a newfound curiosity. What else was I missing?
That morning my eyes opened to see the first rays of the sun climbing up my wall, casting a pinkish hue onto a bunch of books sitting on my cedar chest, all read and marked up in the margins. Symbiotic Planet by Lynn Margulis, The Nature of Economies by Jane Jacobs, Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins, The Web of Life by Fritjof Capra, A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle, and Loving What Is by Byron Katie. What a thrill it was to witness these authors upend perfectly reasonable concepts, throw back the drapes, and discover how things actually work. Why not do the same for that 15-year-old teenager and see what I could find?
My goal was to learn the origin of the trauma, what happened in that hallway between two bedrooms back in 1977. I donned my trenchcoat and magnifying glass, and returned to the scene of the crime.
The answer astounded me. It turns out there was no sexual abuse. It turns out the trauma was not sexual at all. The trauma was concocted exclusively in my mind with a mix of myths and ignorance. Every ounce of it.
It started with a common teenage tryst, the stuff of fairy tales, Disney movies, Shakespearean plays, and most of our life histories. Love has nothing to do with it. It is driven by pubescent hormones that demand expression and lead to awkward explorations. It always takes place in secret, in the dark, at night, in the bushes, in the back seats of cars, in movie theatres. Boys sneak over to the girl’s home, stand in the bushes and whistle, and girls climb down the fire escape. You don’t have your first make-out session on the living room sofa sitting across from your parents. It’s always clandestine, and always in fear of being found out. The secrecy is part of the excitement.
I was an innocent, love-drunk teenager chasing the object of my desires in the dark. At the age of 23, Mary was familiar with sex and I was not. Though the age of consent is somewhat arbitrary, she would have been guilty of violating some law. But I am interested in neither legal nor moral judgment. I just want to understand what was going on in my own body and mind.
And here is the long and short of it: my body experienced nothing less than pure bliss. I remember it like it happened this morning. It was my sexual awakening.
But my mind would have none of it. Within a few short minutes, it caught up with my throbbing genitals and issued a proclamation. This is wrong.
Instantly I recoiled, trying to catch my breath, squirming to disentangle my legs from hers. This is wrong, I repeated in my head.
I stood up and glanced at Dana. If she saw me, she would be horrified and would say, This is wrong.
I walked away from the heights of unspeakable sexual pleasure, closed the door, crossed the hall, and opened my own bedroom door. If Ronda knew, she would say, This is wrong.
I huddled under my covers and stared at the ceiling. The voice got louder. This is wrong.
In the time it took me to cross the hall, the most beautiful sensations of my life were replaced by one tyrannical thought that plunged me into the depths of self-loathing.
One tyrannical thought.
Where did this message come from? It had to come from somewhere. At my age and circumstance I had no tools to even ask the question, let alone examine it. I simply accepted the assertion as absolute truth and allowed it to run my life.
What was wrong, exactly? Oddly enough, it did not come down to sexual orientation. Had Mary been a man, I still would have called it wrong. The first thing was that orgasmic wave that threatened to overtake me. Anything like that had to be wrong. It was uncontrollable. It must have been the devil. Anything that makes you lose control of yourself is, by definition, sinful. Gay or straight makes no difference.
The culprit here is a lethal pair: ignorance and fear. They go together. As Alejandro Jodorowsky quips, “Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.” Instinctively, we humans are afraid of what is unfamiliar — all the moreso for a child of 15 who had been given zero sex education and encouraged not to investigate it at all. What if someone had told me about an orgasm, what it felt like to have a wet pussy, what to expect? All I knew of sex was the reproduction part. Nobody said a word about the pleasure. Not a single word.
Second, I had been thrust into a different era. Kissing on the mouth is what adults did, people in movies. Not me. I was not prepared for it. A few years earlier when I sprouted breasts, I felt a similar shock and rage, that something was being done to me I had not asked for. I wanted to be a girl, not a woman. Then I began menstruating and the anger intensified. I did not want this. I wanted to be a girl, not a woman. And now this. It was not my idea. I did not want to be an adult yet.
I faced a profound identity crisis.
On top of all this was Mary’s gender. I had engaged in an act that was unidentifiable. Two women, two girls? What was it? It was not sex, it could not be love, and it had obviously jumped the friendship fence. It had no name. Anything that has no name has to be too scary to identify. Therefore it was perverse.
Of course, I could not have articulated all this reasoning. It was all subconscious, and all the more insidious for remaining that way.
Thought: I cannot tell anyone. It is too horrible. God could be the most tender, forgiving dude on earth and in heaven, it did not matter. I could not bring myself to confess what I could neither identify nor understand. I could not tell Mom because she would not know what to do so she would just tell Dad and then all hell would break loose, windows would be smashed and doors would be kicked in.
Thought: it was all my fault. Yet another instinctive human reflex that plagues us from infancy, we default to the conclusion that everything in our lives is caused by ourselves. It did not occur to me that Mary carried any responsibility. I was the one who initiated the whole thing. I was the pervert.
Thought: Mary will not be my friend anymore. She will hate me. This thought was well-founded. She did. I believe she was in love with my Mother and used me to express her frustrated sexual desires. The whole incident turned her into a bitter, grumpy woman from that moment on. Thoughts of self-loathing ran her life too.
Thought: I am alone. This thought was patently false. Dana had been there for me the whole time.
Thoughts, thoughts, thoughts, zipping so fast that I could not articulate them, blasting around my skull with such ferocity that I dared not face them. And they ran my life.
Fifteen years after the worst night of my life, another thought. “It was sexual abuse of a minor.” I welcomed the chance to lay blame on someone else. It gave me consolation, a sense of justice, and the opportunity to confront my alleged abuser. But it was a false accusation. Had I blasted Mary for abandoning me, I would be justified. I could blame her for punishing me if I had any proof she did indeed do so. But I could not hold her responsible for making me suffer what I suffered. She did not tell me it was wrong. She did not tell me to stop. She inflicted no pain and is responsible for none of the trauma.
And trauma it was. That invasive proclamation This is wrong had seized me, forcefully, and tossed me into a state of terror. According to one of the world’s leading experts, Dr. Peter Levine, trauma happens when you feel physical danger yet cannot fight, flee or scream. In some cases your assailant prevents you from doing these things, and in other cases you choose not to do those things in order to save your life. Whether the danger is real or physical is not relevant. How long the perceived danger lasts is also not relevant. It can happen in a split second. I thought I was in danger, that the intense, strange sexual feelings were the enemy. Though I fled the scene, I remained paralyzed in a cage of my own making, unable to fight, scream or sob. For years.
This retroactive investigation gave me a chance to rewrite my own history. I dug up the mounds of shit that had mired me during my most intense developmental years, and uncovered the truth at the core of it: unbridled pleasure. Mary gave me my first sexual experience and introduced me to a whole new world of lesbian sensations. Free of the shame and menacing mental messages, it was a beautiful thing.
This all dawned on me one day while traveling on the bus watching the countryside go by, winding down the escarpment from Greensville to Dundas. I chuckled to myself. Byron Katie is right. What happens to me seldom, if ever, causes suffering. There is nobody to blame, nobody to forgive. My thoughts are the villains. All I need to do for healing is to identify them, question them and turn them around.
Now that I identified and questioned them, I was ready to turn them around. It was time to go back and change the whole story — not what happened, but what I had thought about it.
As teenage Laurie tingles with delight under the covers in Mary’s bedroom, and she hears that voice say “This is wrong,” Laurie giggles and thinks, Oh, this is right. This is SO right.
When she feels afraid to be swept away by this uncontrollable surge of electricity, she giggles again and thinks, Oh, this is what it feels like. Omigosh!
When she feels afraid that Dana will hear her gasps, she thinks, That’s my Big Sister. She loves me.
When Laurie goes back to her bedroom she sports a big smile. I’m a woman now. I can’t wait to do THAT again.
When she looks at her little sister, she thinks, Just you wait. You’re never gonna believe it.
When she thinks about her Mom and Dad, she thinks, They’re never gonna find out. It’s my little secret.
When she looks up, she imagines a long-haired hippie called Jesus who smirks and winks, and says, So whaddya think? Quite something, huh? Don’t worry, your secret’s safe with me.
And she sleeps like a baby.
