Hi, I'm Janet Mackie co-blogger on Not the Life:   I posted on Not The Life I Chose  months (years?) ago to tell you  I am writing a memoir. This is an up-date. I've learned a lot about myself and about sexual abuse in the process and I want to tell you about where the project is at this point.  ( The current working title: Treated Like a Girl, Stories of a Sex Offender's Wife, A Daughter's Life, A Mother's Voice Speaking Out)

from Janet Mackie: Author, Blogger, Activist, Ranter, and Writer and fellow traveler on Not the Life!

Back when I got up courage to start writing, I had no idea the amount of time actually completing my 85000-word memoir would take in hours away from blogging and posting, educating and bitching (and what’s left of the rest of my own too short life.) If you are thinking or writing out what's happening to you, I would recommend you start now, whether you write a memoir or journal, it takes time to get at the truth of your life.

I am now at the stage of 'final edits'  thank God.  I'm finally down to writing the Book Proposal and then a query letter to find an agent to locate a publisher willing to publish Treated Like a Girl, Stories of a Sex Offender's Wife, A Daughter's Life, A Mother's Voice Speaking Out.   

In the process,  I found out just how crazy-making it is to try to teach myself how to write a publishable book while at the same time discover and face me-myself-and-I and my feelings of regret and guilt in a memoir.  I  found a "history of incest" cycling down through my own family in the pile of letters and sepia photos. I remembered reasons for the whispered and silenced family stories I found in the Pandora's Box my father left to me at his funeral.

 I persevered because I thought if I somehow made sense of what happened to me and mine, if I connect the dots, the same cycle of child sexual abuse might  not continue to harm and silence more children, and grandchildren. Not only in my family but  in yours. So, in the end I persevered in spite of the pain because the pattern, the 'history' of abuse cycling down through my own family's relationships was a revelation that help  me and might even help others here on Not the Life make sense of what happened to them when the Police knocked on their door. 

Anyway, Treated Like a Girl is my story. The story,  I finally found the courage to write and speak about. In the process, I broke the chokehold of fear and shame and sexual abuse that silenced and blinded me, continued, and in the end, led to the sexual abuse of my own children and threatens future generations if we continue in to allow it to grow in toxic silence.

So, I hereby promise, this Memoir will be published come hell or high water sometime in 2017. It's my story but also the story of Family.  It traces a larger history of Incest, Gender Politics, and sex Phobia preventing  the examination and discussion of  how this all got started, of preventive measures, of Sex Offender Registry, of Family patterns, and the future of child safety if we continue to keep silent and apply old solutions that never worked to keep us and our children safe.  

Treated Like a Girl  is finally in what I think of as the last exhausting trimester of gestation! Soon there will actually BE proof of the blood sweat and tears it takes to BIRTH a BOOK  in the modern internet age, the Age of ZIKA and Irrational Justice Gone Mad. A book I was afraid to write but somehow did.

Please Stay tuned because ...Once  Treated Like a Girl, Stories of a Sex Offender's Wife, A Daughter's Life, A Mother's Voice Speaking Out sees the light of day I have another on the way.

My next book (tentatively titled Juvenile Sex Offenders: Rough Trip Trough the Justice System) is about early intervention and finding the way forward. Many (but certainly not all) little boys 'treated like a girl' and incested as children go on to molest others. Just as not all but many women, molested as children go on, as I did, to unknowingly marry men, strangely like our own fathers, thus setting up the cycle for our own children to experience the same harms as we experienced. 

Treated Like a Girl and  Tough Trip is are both about developing a prevention mind-set in order to save our own sex curious impulsive children some also labeled Juvenile Sex Offenders, JSO's from re-enacting the cycle in their own lives.  

Tough Trip tells personal stories told to me by Mothers who have, themselves, heard the knock on the door and experienced the aftermath of 'justice' with their own sons. Sons, once they are labeled and remanded to adult 'justice,'  they are  refused re-entry to our homes, run through a seriously flawed adult criminal justice system and forever denied redemption by Registries in today's society.  Often Child Victims (with mothers like the women who come for support and comfort to Not the Life) these youngsters are branded Moral Lepers (along with the husbands and fathers we wives and mothers  are concerned about...right along with the rest of the 850,000 others on America’s State Registries, their families too, experience the collateral damage we all know so well. )

Anyway:  Back to the topic of getting  Treated Like a Girl finished and published.  Women have posted on Not the Life have given me the courage to speak out as a mother and daughter and wife ...So stay tuned please and THANK YOU ALL for your courage in posting and providing support to me and to all the other women sharing their lives here on Not the Life...