Jane Rowan

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

Beyond Memory --Healing from Sexual Abuse

Beyond 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.

Beyond 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 Chapter 1 - Pandora's Box

A childhood memory swam into my consciousness, one that had never been hidden but suddenly felt ominous. It was a humid morning in August 1995. The air flowed softly in the window and a catbird sang in the cherry tree just outside my bedroom. I needed to get going to prepare for guests who were arriving, but first I sat up in bed and propped up a pillow behind me. I grabbed my spiral-bound journal from the bedside table and began scribbling:

I am three or four and I hurt between my legs. I'm perched on the toilet in the big bathroom in our house at Shell Beach. The door is opposite me and the light streams in from the window on my right. I feel the sting when I pee. My mother says that I slipped in the bathtub and fell on the bathtub rim. I have no memory of anything that caused the hurt, but I know I don't believe my parents' story of how it happened.

Fear grew like a cancer in my stomach. If my parents' account wasn't true, then what had happened? Who hurt me? How?

No way. Surely not. Not my father. I don't know how to tell what's true. I don't want to make things up.

This was Revelation Day, the day that started me on a long, arduous, and transformative journey into my past. How did it happen that a 52-year-old woman suddenly woke up to the possibility of long-ago abuse? What forces had kept the issues at bay so long? What had changed to make this memory re-emerge and demand to be reinterpreted?

copyright 2006-8
Jane Rowan