Jane Rowan

Memoir is still in revision. See my memoir blog for details.

The River of Forgetting--Healing from Sexual Abuse *new title*

The River of Memory is a memoir-in-progress describing my journey of recovery from childhood sexual abuse. It begins on an August morning when, as an adult, I recalled an early memory and realized that something ugly had happened. The book details the process of discovery and of healing through long and deep therapy. It is a love story of finding the wounded little girl inside of me and loving her back to wholeness.

The River of Memory is different from most other memoirs of abuse because I never claim to get all the facts clear. I don't try to tell the whole story of my childhood. Instead I track the process of learning to believe myself and uncovering the many consequences of the abuse and secrecy--the mistrust, dissociation, PTSD, hypervigilance, and difficulty with relationships. At the same time I find my joyous and creative inner child alive inside me after all those years.

Excerpt from The River of Memory

Prologue: Rivers of Detail, Oceans of Fog

It’s one of the good memories.

My father is bending over the hull of the upturned boat, picking out the old caulking, scraping away at last year’s paint and barnacles. He uses a putty knife to push ropes of smelly, tarry oakum into the cracks. He will paint the boat gray, with a rusty fouling-resistant paint on the underwater part to keep the barnacles from slowing it down.

The fierce sweating sun is trapped on the oyster-shell shore between the steep bank and the water, making an island of heat. My father wears cut-off pants and one of those ribbed cotton undershirts with the thin straps. His shoulder muscles bunch and his freckled skin is red. He has a cap to protect his balding scalp, or else he has tied a handkerchief at the corners to make a rough covering. He swears occasionally when the knife slips.

I come near him and poke at the soft blisters of gray paint. I can only stand the heat for a short while, but I scrape until my little arms get tired. Then I walk out onto the wooden dock to watch the tide come in and the fishes swim.

The sun-bleached scene is clear: the brown leather sandals I have to wear against the sharp oyster shells, the scarred wooden sawhorses holding up the boat, the strands of brown seaweed doodling the high tide mark, even the nails in the cedar posts of the dock. Hours of pleasure and idleness.

I have other memories, blurred in a sickly fog. Urgent night voices behind closed doors. “What can we do about it?” “There’s nothing we can do.” “She’s too young to remember; she’ll be all right.” And memories murkier still, fastened into my spine and pelvis with binding force, huge with emotion, no pictures.

What is truth and how do I know it? Is it in the Kodak-sharp image? In the wrenching gut, the nausea? How do I keep the clear-cut detail and also give the nebulous shadow its weight, neither denying the other?

Scenes
The beach is perfectly clear,
little blue eyes looking up from the oyster shells,
crispy pencils of reeds beached and dried,
my father laboring hotly over the hull of the boat,
all perfectly clear.

What are the details of a fog?
Memories that had to go far away,
wedged into the deepest recesses,
stripped down, fragmented.
Unwanted sensations, but no place
no texture to the floorboards
no pattern of the wallpaper
no light. No feeling of the rest of my body
no person who is doing this to me.

All I know is
the dizziness that overtook me
pulling my body backward in a spiral.
This fog is my fog
this lack of detail is the tale I must tell.

This voice is not only my voice.
Others have wandered the same landscape.
At the edge of the downward spiral of labyrinth
is a hut where pilgrims may rest.
I see their footprints in the dust.
And I know I have built the labyrinth,
I have called back the little girl who leads me there.
I told her, I believe you, I am listening
so she could speak, though her speech had no words.
My faith created the hut in which we rest.
When these words make our scenery appear,
it is a magic we are doing
writing our life into existence.
It is an offering to the others
our sisters in the fog.

copyright 2006-8
Jane Rowan