From Meek to Mighty—The Rocky Road from Fractured Child to Whole Adult

Audiobook

This collection of 54 essays has been rolling around inside me for decades, but it wasn’t until 2017 that I sat myself down to begin researching everything I could find online about childhood sexual abuse. I myself was a victim of incest as a minor child and was looking for context. I had questions: What kind of parent has sex with his child? How does our culture support sexual predators? How did the Canadian Criminal Code half a century ago let us victims down? Why did the mental health “industry” ignore the manifest effects of sexual trauma on child victims? Why do ordinary people presume childhood sexual abuse only happens in third world countries or in poor families but never (never!) in white middle-class suburbia?

Maybe it was the #MeToo movement that prodded me to begin the undertaking along with my growing anger at the impotent response by the Canadian government to the unfolding revelations in the media of untold numbers of missing and murdered Indigenous women. The feds created a commission to look into the matter while collectively reducing these women to an anodyne initialism, MMIW, which like all initialisms has become meaningless. MMIW will never carry the same weight as missing and murdered Indigenous women. The initialism lets you look away. The words force you to look.

By the end of 2017, I had finished researching; I spent 2018 writing essays about a range of topics related to abuse using my own experiences to shape the narrative arc. I described the abuse I suffered in the late 1960s at the hands of my biological father, its traumatic aftermath and my ultimate regeneration. By Christmas 2018, I’d completed 10 drafts, content that I’d accomplished a big part of my original mission: I’d plucked, literally, the damaged parts from myself and felt lighter, less angry, more myself as a consequence. The double-spaced single-sided typescript weighs exactly 3 pounds. I’d removed my own tumour, along with the pain and its deadly potential.

I continued to let the typescript sit, thinking it superfluous in light of unfolding events. Surely #MeToo would rectify everything? Sadly, I see nothing has changed. Harvey Weinstein, Peter Nygaard and the likes of the late Jeffrey Epstein et al. prove the problem remains. These guys are the tip of the iceberg, the poster boys for white male privilege. They are the sacrifices we’ve made as a community to absolve our collective sins. We-the-people supported these monsters and will likely continue to support monsters until something intervenes to convince us to stop. What will it take? Their sins remain ours as long as we pretend that nothing is happening.

Then came the revelation of the massacre of Indigenous children locked in juvenile prisons we euphemistically call residential schools. Make that one more anodyne rendering of the truth. The adult victims are now telling the truth, the horrific truth, that those hellholes were not as homey as the name we assigned to them suggested. That truth has in turn turned personal, reawakened in me the anger I feel toward the man who abused me for years and the woman who pretended not to see.

That man who was my father left his father’s farm when he was 18 to hitchhike west to join the RCMP. He would have been exactly what “the Force” (as the Mounties call themselves) was looking for: a tall, white thug of average intelligence carrying a chip on his broad shoulders and itching for a fight. As a young recruit drunk on the ersatz power his brown-shirt uniform conveyed, he found fights aplenty, told me proudly how many times he had to “boot down the doors of the drunken ‘Indians’ [sic] and cart them off to jail.” (Five hundred years after Columbus we were still calling Indigenous people “Indians”.) My father did not mention the children left behind. I can only imagine those children now as they were then. Cowering, terrified, and soon to be carted off themselves to the residential jails where the remains of so many now lie in mass graves.

To the survivors of those atrocities: the white man who broke down your door and stole your childhood is the same man who came home and stole mine. We are connected in that way. But I will not steal your thunder. I will not appropriate it. Your thunder belongs to you; it is yours to express.

I have enough thunder of my own to last a lifetime.