Hello, from Janet Mackie

Hi. My name is Janet Mackie. Evie asked me to join her blog as a co-contributor so I’ll be putting in my 2 cents worth every few weeks for awhile and hoping to learn from what’s happening in your world. My name isn’t really Janet Mackie but it’s the one I use when I talk or write about my life. Maybe next time I’ll talk about identity and secrecy and shame,and all the reasons that (even when we truly did not “know”) we still feel it is necessary to remain anonymous.

Anyway, I was molested by by my father (and spent years being angry with my mother.) Then I grew up, fell in love and married a man much like my father. We had three children.

Needless to say on the surface things seemed at least OK most of the time but eventually the truth intervened. It Was Not the Life I Chose. I had thought that no matter my own childhood, if I worked harder, tried to make my family better, safer, if I was somehow a better wife and mother, then my family could be happy. My daughter eventually grew up and married a man who was very like her own father who molested her all through her childhood.

In my private life I was married to a sex offender for 20 years. In my professional life I was a social worker investigating CPS reports, putting children in foster care and recommending court action in cases of child sexual abuse. I helped to start a chapter of Parent's United in my community but was blind to the reality of my own situation. Eventually my father died and the child inside me was freed from silence. And I was freed to hear the truth from others. I began to journal and write and searched on line for other women/wives/daughters who had experienced life with a sex offender and to understand and respect women’s differing roles and responses toward the offender in their lives and the ways we all try to grow to meet the horrendous challenge of life after being blindsided., after “finding out.”

I began to understand the roots of my own pain and sorrow. What happened to me as a child was bad enough, but that I had unwittingly created a marriage in which incest could replicate itself was hard for me to forgive. I realize we are not destined to be forever alone and isolated in our trauma, not forever lost in pain and sorrow and disbelief. I found courage to journal and write truthfully about what happened to me and mine. Others like Evie have found courage to blog and others to share and comment in spite of their experiences.

As we find courage to go on line to blog and share our stories we learn from each other how to take back our equality and stop letting others define us as women destined to create and maintain tight little Father's Know Best Families whose members are then expected to live happily ever after in socially ordained respectability. On line men and women may begin to connect the dots, create a community, compare experience and failure and, yes, grow and share strength and success. We discover from each other’s perspectives how others, male and female have begun to reshape the future and trust themselves even after experiencing incest, rape and marital devastation.

As we come together women realize that incest is not an isolated incident occurring only in some other family. Fathers rich and poor molest. Those who are so inclined watch child pornography and troll for minors on line. In addition children are sexually assaulted by coaches, teachers and priests, young men and women are raped and pressured sexually at work and in the military by powerful males who think they are so well protected by their power positions in the family, in the community and in the military that they will never face the consequences of using power to take sexual advantage. I believe that as we succeed building a community of women, sharing and growing, speaking truth ( dare I say consciousness-raising) we will find power to protect ourselves, our children and the children of other women, children in future generations.

But hope begins with us. We have to have courage to live through all of this, redefine ourselves, reimagine a women’s “place” and claim our own equality. If not, 1 in 4 women and 1 in 6 men will continue to report having been sexually molested not by strangers but by their own fathers, teachers, coaches, military officers, all people they who took advantage of trust.