‘The Thistle and the Finch’

Trauma exists in so many forms. This blog, while borne out of my recovery from the 35W Bridge collapse, is about more than that – at least that is my intent. For those who don’t know me well, or know me because of the bridge collapse, the bridge wasn’t my first foray into the world of trauma. I had battled it before, though mostly at trauma’s periphery. And when trauma fell at my feet, I found coping strategies that, while in the long term were unhealthy, for the most part worked – until the collapse. When the dart hit the bullseye, my coping strategy disintegrated. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder dug in its heels, and I had to learn new, healthy ways to walk myself out of the mine field.

Below is a short-story memoir I wrote while attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the late 1990s. My journalism professor urged me to get it published, and it eventually found its way onto the pages of a UW academic journal. The topic delves into the most significant trauma my family endured prior to the bridge collapse, my mother’s rape. I’ve included it below, with her permission, because it touches on many of the same elements that I and others have experienced with trauma and PTSD, and the hope and beauty that can eventually bud from the experience.

‘The Thistle and the Finch’

In the kitchen of our family home in New Ulm, Minnesota, there is a transparency that sticks to the window above the stainless steel sink. It is of a rainbow, and below it — written in flowery script — are the words: “Whenever the Lord closes a door, he always opens a window.”

However, in my family’s case, irony flows through this modern-day proverb. In reality, none of the windows in our house open in the traditional hold-your-breath-and-yank fashion. The panes crank open on hinges, like opening a greeting card — just enough to let the gentle breeze of a cool autumn day meander into that house nestled along the Minnesota River valley.

And the doors are always locked. Even when the sultry, prairie-swept winds of summer can turn that one-story rambler into a virtual Crock Pot, the doors remain latched. My stepfather, Kirky, would annoy me when I would come home from school and find the front door locked, even though he was merely mowing the lawn behind the house.

But what frustrates me also flows through my veins. My pursuit of a respected education pushed me 330 miles eastward to Madison, Wisconsin. My roommate, John, and I rented a third-floor apartment on the south side of the city. John thought it odd when I insisted that management put locks on the bedroom doors. And John still annoys me when I come home at night from my part-time job and find the front door standing unopened, but unlocked. He can sleep through the entire night like that and never cast a worry.

I used to be like that. Since that Thursday night in mid-October 1989, I cannot even once remember the family openly talking about what happened or how it has affected my mother, my stepfather or my younger sister, Rhonda. Nobody questions why, still today, the doors remain locked.

 * * *

Back then, the cast of characters was the same, but their roles varied slightly from today. My mother, Joyce, had courted Kirky for just more than one year. I was a gangly 14 years old. Girls weren’t so repulsive anymore and acne was becoming a worry. I was starting ninth grade at the local Lutheran high school. Rhonda, at 12, had long, blonde hair and blue eyes, and was dangling on the edge between Barbie dolls and lipstick. She delighted in hosting tea parties for her Cabbage Patch Kids and transforming the living room furniture into haunted mazes using sofa cushions, a few blankets, flashlights and stuffed animals.

We lived in an old red brick house on the corner of 12th North and Minnesota streets. The three-level house was bordered on two sides by thick, chest-high hedges. Towering oak trees as tall as the house dotted the yard. On an autumn night, with the leaves fallen and the wind howling, the residence wore the aura of the setting of a spooky campfire story.

Its exterior was covered with cracks. In the summer, that abode became the home address for hundreds of box elder bugs, each slipping through the crevices and marching across the walls, onto the drapes and into the potted plants. Many times I would arm myself with the extension hose attached to the vacuum cleaner and capture the black-and-red-winged intruders like a ghostbuster. It seemed that there was nothing we could do to keep them out.

* * *

I blamed myself for the break-in that night.

I had trouble sleeping those first few weeks that autumn. I would wake up in the middle of the night with terrible headaches. My mother attributed them to “growing pains,” her same diagnosis for the stomach cramps I would often get. She kept the aspirin bottle in a cupboard in the kitchen. Because my sister and I slept upstairs, I would have to trudge down the wide wooden staircase, through the front foyer, across the living room adjacent to where my mother slept, and into the kitchen in order to calm the tremors rumbling inside my head. With a gulp of tap water, I would traipse back up the stairs and into bed.

Except that night, four days before my mother’s birthday, I didn’t wake up — and that’s what hurt me the most.

While Rhonda and I soundly slept upstairs dreaming about Care Bears and clear complexions, our mother stood in the foyer in her soiled nightshirt and her back to the wall. As she clenched a steak knife from the kitchen drawer, her eyes darted back and forth across the living room like high-speed pendulums. Where two months later the Christmas tree would stand, she waited in the corner for the police — or for the first shadow that moved.

 * * *

I didn’t know right away that she had been raped. I was awakened at 12:30 a.m. My mother’s best friend, Sonja, rapped on my bedroom door. Sonja was the first person my mother had called — even before dialing the police. She told me later: “I was scared to death of the police. They were men.”

Sonja told me to grab some clothes to wear to school tomorrow, for my sister and I were going to stay at her house overnight. I tossed a pair of jeans and a shirt into a duffel bag and descended down the stairs in a sleepy stupor. In the foyer stood two policemen and Sonja’s husband, Mike.

I remember Mike saying, “I’m going to find that son of a bitch and kill him!”

I couldn’t understand Mike’s anger. Later I found out that Mike and Sonja’s two daughters had been sexually abused at their daycare. They knew the feelings that now lay at our threshold. What it was like to be tied down with kryptonite chains. To be stripped of all control over something that was inherently yours — your family, yourself.

 * * *

 The Lord had closed a door.

 They never found him. The police kept asking my mother if she had been involved in any recent arguments with Kirky, even though he was working the graveyard shift at the local factory.

 “At first they didn’t believe me,” my mother said recently with residual anger. “They wouldn’t actively search for him. If someone had stolen my microwave or television they would’ve been more apt to find him.”

 The investigator said that without an accurate description the police would be hard-pressed to find him. The DNA from the semen on her nightshirt would be put on file, and in the course of conversation with other authorities he would “keep an ear out” for any similar cases.

 * * *

The rapist had opened a window.

The basement window, with a glass cutter. It was a small window, yet just big enough for an average-sized adult to slip through. It sat at ground level behind a dormant flowerbed. That damn hedge stood between the window and the dimly lighted street.

The basement was a catacomb of unfinished rooms — cinder block walls and cement floors. The rooms housed our used cardboard boxes, winter sleds and the washer and dryer. Spiderwebs, strung like silver garland, completed the decor. Sunlight rarely found its way into the basement’s corners, and at night it had the blackness of a cave.

He must have slithered along in the darkness — in and out of the black chambers — until he reached the landing below the basement steps. When we returned to the house a week after the rape, the black dirt fingerprints still clung to the stairwell, inching their way to the top of the steps and the unlocked basement door. The police had botched the fingerprints during their investigation, so the prints were of no use other than to haunt.

He climbed on top of her and held his filthy, blackened hand over her mouth, threatening to “knock her out” if she did anything. She submitted.

Later I asked her out of frustration why she didn’t scream, waking us up. I would have beaten him to a pulp, knocked him unconscious with a bat, killed him. No stronger definition of maternal love have I found since the words that came in her response. She gave up control to a rapist because she didn’t want him to go upstairs and find my sister and me.

 * * *

It wasn’t like a family crisis was alien to the three of us. Tough times seemed normal for my mother, sister and I. It was what brought us closer together. My parents divorced when I was 5 years old. They would argue constantly about my father’s drinking. The yells would echo through the hall and slip under the door of the bedroom that my sister and I shared. I would cover her ears with my soft, tiny hands so she wouldn’t hear them shouting at each other.

We were always moving. Somewhere the rent was a little cheaper. Mom went back to college to get her teaching degree. We lived in low-income housing. Dinner came in the form of a TV dinner or a chicken pot pie. I can recall the time when we got to have cheeseburgers rather than plain hamburgers in our Happy Meals on special nights out. “New” coats and clothes were often hand-me-downs or Goodwill.

I am certain that many times Mom’s checkbook balance read zero, but she never let on to Rhonda or me. Instead of allowances for successfully completed household tasks, we got stickers to put in our sticker books. Other kids raved about the roller skates of G.I. Joes they had purchased with their allowances, but Rhonda and I didn’t care. They didn’t have a sticker that smelled like bubble gum.

In 1985, Mom graduated from Winona State University with a 3.8 grade point average. “My grades were high because studies were an escape from the everyday problems,” Mom would later say. She found a job teaching first- and second-graders in a public elementary school just outside of New Ulm. We didn’t need the food stamps anymore.

 * * *

Although in the past strife had sewn us together, paranoia caused by the rape was ripping us apart, stitch by stitch. Mom couldn’t be left alone. A friend or relative would spend each night sleeping on the couch. Each day after school Mom would pull into the driveway and honk the car horn as my cue to come and get her. It became a daily ritual for me to walk out to the driveway and escort her back into the house — a distance of 30 feet.

Public places nauseated her. Friends would do our grocery shopping, run our errands. Rhonda and I couldn’t even sit in the back seat of the car when she drove. Anyone sitting behind her made her nervous.

“I remember for almost a year I would go to bed and think: ‘How am I going to wake up? By an alarm clock or by having a hand over my mouth?'” she later recalled.

 * * *

We moved out of the house three months later.

At the time of the attack, there were no crime victims’ support groups in Brown County. Mom received counseling from a local therapist but had to drive 35 miles to Mankato for support therapy. The weekly half-hour drives continued for several years. The lack of local assistance chewed away at her. She took the initiative to write a grant to the state of Minnesota, recommending funding for physical and sexual assault victims in Brown County. She later served on the county’s first Victim Services board. This was her way of therapy, making certain that others had an outlet for their pain and confusion, while at the same time keeping her mind off of her own.

 * * *

It has been 12 years. Mom and Kirky married in 1991. The four of us moved into the rambler on the other side of town. Mom is now teaching learning-disabled children at the elementary school across the street from our house. Normally she walks to school when the weather isn’t brutally cold or rainy. She is different now. Sober. The smiles are infrequent. Stress used to be a motivator, but now it is only stress. She gets headaches.

In addition to teaching, Mom also works part time at the city’s most popular family restaurant. On Sundays, after church services conclude, the place floods with people. She paints on a smile to mask the weariness and pours more coffee. Any one of those customers could be him. She would never know it. And it doesn’t seem to matter quite so much anymore.

“I think it was someone who knew me to some extent but not closely,” she said. “I thought I would always remember his voice, but now I think I wouldn’t anymore.”

 * * *

Hanging outside of the kitchen window on a string is a plastic cylindrical bird feeder filled with thistle seed. It is there to attract the finches that migrate north to southern Minnesota during the short summer months. Sometimes there are as many as 10 finches, attired in bright reds and golds, clinging to the feeder that swings like a slow pendulum in the gentle breeze. Inevitably, some of the thistle seed falls to the ground and weeds sprout.

You need the thistles in order to grasp the beauty of the finch.

Rape isn’t an act – it doesn’t happen and then go away. You don’t wipe away the tears and start over. That night each of us was cut open. The wounds healed but the scars remain. Each of us has learned to step outside again. But when we return to our homes, we check the locks twice.

* * *

Followup

A followup to this short memoir: a few years ago my Mom, after having pretty much given up hope of her rapist ever being found, received word from law enforcement that a DNA match had been made. The man was in prison for other crimes (not surprising) and faced a judge for his crime against my mother. The sentence ended up being a handful of months. On sentencing day, I had the opportunity to address him, and I did exactly that. But for all the anger I wished to extol, I was more sad than anything. Sad for my Mom. Sad for his two daughters watching their father, once again, go back to prison. Sad for all the time and years lost for so many.