Fortunate Daughter: A Memoir of Reconciliation

By Rosie McMahan

Rosie’s sins were never difficult to recall; they lined themselves up like baby ducks in her mind’s eye. Her confession to Father Hart one day in 1974 went like this: “I didn’t finish all my chores. I stole the Halloween candy my mom hid in the pantry. And I let my Daddy touch my private places.”

Though it begins as an all-too-common story of childhood sexual abuse, Fortunate Daughter gradually becomes a rare story of how one person heals from that early trauma. In this intimate first-person narrative, Rosie McMahan offers the reader a portrait of misery, abuse, and hurt, followed by the difficult and painful task of healing—a journey that, in the end, reveals the complicated and nuanced venture of true reconciliation and the freedom that comes along with it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: She Writes Press
• Release date: Apr 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781647420253

Rosie McMahan

Rosie McMahan was brought up in Somerville, MA, at a time when kids and dogs roamed the streets in unlawful packs and the walk to a barroom or Catholic church was less than a quarter of a mile in any direction. She and her husband moved to western Massachusetts in 2001 to raise their children. Rosie’s writing has received prizes and she can be seen reading in local venues, including Pecha Kucha (a local storytelling event), the annual Garlic & Arts Festival, and the Greenfield Annual Word Festival (GAWF). She has also been published in several journals, including Silkworm, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Black Fox Literary Magazine, the 2017 Gallery of Readers Anthology, and Passager Journal. She currently lives in Amherst, MA.

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PROLOGUE

My father died on January 11, 2011, a few months and many years after I got up the courage to ask him about how he understood the past and his ability to hurt me, my siblings, and my mother the way he did. This was almost twenty-five years after I had met with both my parents for the final time with a therapist, marking a long process of reconciliation.

During those years, there had been many moments he could have told me something to help me understand where his capacity to do harm began. Maybe it would have made a difference earlier in my life. In his life, too. I don’t know. I do know that my father hated excuses, having been raised during a time when the reasons for one’s mistakes didn’t matter.

I recall sitting with him in my parent’s kitchen in Somerville. The air was crisp on a beautiful autumn day and my mother had gone out to run errands. As I sipped my coffee, I acted a whole lot calmer than I felt. My guess is he did, too.

He started this way. Do you remember Gramma ever talking about Sinclair Connelly? I realized he was about to tell me something he never had. And that it wouldn’t be a straight line. Never was with my dad.

Sinclair was something, he said and stared out the back window, but appeared to be looking at something much farther away. He then pointed. That tree is right pretty every year at this time. See how the yella sweet-talks the blue? I cocked my head to see where he aimed his finger and thought for a second about complementary colors. Blue and yellow. Red and cyan. Green and magenta. I wondered if my dad had ever wanted to be an artist. If so, had it ever been possible for him to imagine how to make that real in his life? Growing up, I remember how he would often draw attention to beautiful patterns that would appear in the natural world. It was all I could do to hold my coffee mug steady, letting the creamy, sweet smell waft against my cheeks.

I was told to walk to their house, it weren’t more than a few miles, to do work, deliver messages, whatever was needed. He paused. I felt so proud of myself. I couldn’t have been more than seven. I also liked being gone for hours at a stretch. Richard, their son, he was about one year older than me at the time. He’s the one who told me, ‘You gots to sleep naked in this here house while you’re here.’ I thought it was strange, but I did as I was told. You wouldn’t think about disobeying adults back then. And you didn’t want nothing coming back to your kin, either.

A wave of sorrow washed over me, but I didn’t speak or move.

And I slept naked between Sinclair and their son, Richard. He looked down after the words left his mouth, and I remembered that this wasn’t the first time I had attempted to get him to talk. There was that night when I was sixteen, needing to get away and having spent the whole summer with his mother, Gramma.

We had taken a walk up to the top of Chestnut Mountain. Suddenly, there was the sound of a whippoorwill, the well-known three parts: WHIP-poor-WEEA, with a rising last note and first and last syllables accented. Dad and I looked toward a log at the edge of the small clearing, and neither of us spoke. He took out a flashlight and shined it toward the direction of the sound. Light reflected from the corneas of two pairs of eyes much closer to the ground than I anticipated.

They must be nesting, he said. They use the light of the moon in their courtship with one another.

That call is unusual. I can’t imagine being raised around that noise and ever wanting to leave it.

Well, they weren’t the only sounds I heard.

What do you mean?

Ever quick to change the subject, he said, You seem like you’ve enjoyed being here.

It’s been good, but I don’t like how Gramma pretends to be all good and then judges everybody so harshly, especially Mom. I wanted to talk more about other sounds that made him leave his home, maybe the sounds that taught him to do what he did.

I asked, Why’d you leave North Carolina if you love it so much? It seems like the place you’re most yourself.

I had to; there was nothing for me to do here to make a living. And my dad was a hard man to be around.

But you seem happier when you’re here.

In some ways. He stretched his legs out and leaned back toward the heavens. It’s always easier being somewhere that you don’t have to work. There’s no stress. Like a lot of men, I can be a good man for a little while.

I blurted out, Do you think you did bad things to Mom and us kids because of how you were raised? and then despaired that my question sounded accusatory. We were talking to one another honestly. I wasn’t afraid, and he wasn’t antagonistic.

Nah. We make our own decisions despite what happens to us. My brothers are good examples. They didn’t get raised no differently than me, he said and then paused as if to say something else but didn’t. Instead, he put his head in his hands like a warrior taking a rest.

Maybe we’re not the only ones deciding, I said. You did some bad things to us. You do know that?

I do.

I worried before coming here, back to where you were born and raised, that I was broken forever.

I was worried I might have broken you.

For what you did?

That, and for who I was.

The words shot like an arrow, from a quiver of wisdom: what everyone in my family would love to hear, finally spoken.

How defeated he seemed then, I now thought, sitting there in the kitchen almost thirty years later. How defeated he seemed now. Everything around us got quiet; I felt the house and all the furnishings lean in and listen. It went on for years, he said.

What did they do? I asked, not certain if I really wanted to know.

They molested me. Touched me, kissed me. I never liked it, it felt yucky. It made me feel bad, partly ’cuz it made me feel good.

You never told anyone? I asked, but knew what his answer would be.

Nope, kids didn’t tell on adults, ever. We’d were too afraid we’d get in worse trouble for telling.

He looked at me. It wasn’t until going through treatment that I said a word to anyone. The only other person besides you who knows is your mother.

And with that, something set loose in me. Dad was not who I thought he was. And I felt myself became someone else, too. I didn’t know who we were, not to ourselves or to one another or the world. A part of me unfastened, and I felt more able to see the heart of the matter. Listening to his story, something I couldn’t have imagined as possible, let alone helpful, created more space for mending what was broken in me. And I remain unbroken now. We did something special, my whole family and I, that allowed us to heal and not just be identified as defeated. That is my hope in writing all this down and handing these pages to you. That you, too, in whatever ways you need, can do the special thing that will heal the broken parts in you.

PART ONE

Molest: from Old French molester or Latin molestare ‘annoy,’ from molestus ‘troublesome.’

Child maltreatment is the abuse and neglect that occurs to children under 18 years of age. It includes all types of physical and emotional ill-treatment, sexual abuse, neglect, negligence, and commercial or other exploitation, which results in actual or potential harm to the child’s health, survival, development, or dignity in the context of a relationship of responsibility, trust, or power.

—World Health Organization

The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.

—Ida Wells

1956

No Meat Without the Bone

My parents met and fell in love in 1956, the same year Rosa Parks quietly but firmly took a seat at the front of the bus, Dwight D. Eisenhower was re-elected president of the United States, and Elvis Presley made his first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show . That year, a gallon of gas cost twenty-three cents, the polio vaccine developed by Jonas Salk was made available to the public, Play-Doh was introduced to the world, and Jackson Pollack died in a car crash.

This part of the story isn’t mine, at least not in the sense that I experienced it. But I include it because it shaped me as much as anything, maybe more so. What’s here, gathered mostly from my mom, reveals more about what I don’t know. And that’s important, too. For all of us. These people we call our parents. We know them, and we don’t know them. For better. For worse.

My mother was a Registered Nurse and lieutenant, working on a locked unit for Korean War vets at the Philadelphia Naval Hospital. At twenty-six years old, she was still single, though she was the oldest in a first-generation Italian family where girls grew up and got married out of high school. It has taken me many years and a lot of growing up to realize how much my mother worried she might never meet someone right. She carried a feeling of isolation and loneliness because of not fitting into a category that was easily understood. Proud and Italian, but aware that her ethnic group did not support her aspirations to become a nurse. Educated and professionally ambitious, but yearning to settle down and have a family. A teacher and supervisor, yet easily frightened and self-doubting. Assuming her chances might improve if she lived closer to her Boston home, my mother requested a transfer back east from California.

A small, pretty woman with dark brown eyes and a thin waist, she was walking down the hall one afternoon in her dress blues when she approached my father, then a corpsman working at the front desk. It was her job to get the daily report on the patients, veterans of the Korean War, and introduced herself to the man who would become my father.

My father, wearing an entirely white uniform, had been sitting at the front desk, hunched forward, with his bony elbow resting on his knee and chin in hand. Handsome with a full head of black hair, my father was tall and skinny as a flagpole. The oldest of seven children raised in the mountains of North Carolina by Baptist parents of Scotch-Irish descent, he was obviously younger than she by at least a few years. Yet he was completely at ease in his surroundings. All the nurses relied on the corpsmen for safety, but my father was called upon more than any of the others when a patient got out of control. Rumor had it that he was every nurse’s dream, even though the older staff cautioned my mother more than once that he could also speak out of turn and be sassy.

She was curious to find out for herself.

That weekend, when everyone went to the enlisted club, she would go to the Officer’s Club and seek out my father again, despite the rule that forbade her from romantic involvement with staff below her rank. It was a rule that wasn’t widely observed, and my father didn’t seem to object to breaking it, either.

One night, as they parted from one another, my father hung back and leaned against her black car, lighting up a cigarette.

This sure is a pretty Chrysler you got, Miss Rose. Not nearly as pretty as you, though.

She blushed and covered her mouth to hide a smile. Are all southern men as gallant as you?

Can’t say as I know. But I’d love to take a drive down to Atlantic City and walk on the boardwalk over the W. W. Memorial Bridge with you.

Only a few months passed before my father proposed as they sat in a local diner for a late supper.

I knew you were the one for me the first moment I laid on eyes on you, Miss Rose. He gave her knee a gentle squeeze. Except, I can’t rightly figure out why you never order more food.

He’d ordered two meals for himself, heavy on the meat and potatoes. She looked down at her half-eaten buttered corn muffin, then pushed it away. I don’t understand how a man who eats so much stays as thin as you.

How many times have you told me that you always wanted to live on a farm? my father asked. And who cares about our religious differences? I’ve always wanted to be a Catholic. Even after being ‘saved,’ I knew I would convert someday. We could make a nice life for ourselves, back where I come from. I know all about the work it takes to make it happen.

She said no that night, but he was persistent. Unlike any man my mother had ever dated, he listened to her when she spoke, seeming to want to understand her, and he was modest, almost too much so. Weeks went by and she continued to put him off because the practical concerns about their differences seemed too great to overcome. I’ve thought a great deal about what made him so certain that she was the one for him. True love? Destiny? Escape from the tyranny of rural North Carolina?

They married in July 1958 at a church in Medford, Massachusetts, named after Pope Clement of Rome, a saint recognized by the anchor at his side—presumably the one he was tied to before getting thrown from a boat into the Black Sea for his attempt to undermine the king of France. Both of my mother’s sisters were married in this same church, but unlike my mother, they’d chosen men who were Catholic and Italian.

At the top of the granite stairs, my parents paused for a moment before exiting the large entranceway as heavy, cold raindrops poured down from the skies.

It’s raining buckets, Ned, my mother whispered to my father, clutching his right hand, feeling her engagement ring rub against his thin gold wedding band. God help us!

My father held a large black umbrella over both of them and pulled on her arm as if to make a run for it, but she hesitated.

You won’t get wet with me, he said, and threw his jacket over her shoulders to keep the handwoven satin gown dry.

What follows are letters that my father sent my mother when they were separated, immediately following their honeymoon. I didn’t find them, I didn’t even know they existed, until after both my parents died. Hidden away in my mother’s closet. They reflect a time in their relationship to one another that I sensed had existed but didn’t know for certain. They were both still in the Navy and obliged to finish their assignments before they could be stationed somewhere together. My father was nineteen years old.

July 28, 1958

I can see you right now, standing there at the airport waving good-bye. I had a kind of feeling of hope I don’t have anymore. But one I will have when we are together again. Seems a bigger part of me was staying there with you. A part that I am just finding out this past week. It is now the bigger part of my life. It is the happiness, the beauty, the warmth, it’s just everything. I’m not going to feel right until we are together again.

July 29, 1958

I missed you last night. Took me a long time to go to sleep. I kept thinking about you. Oh, I love you. I do. I miss you all the time, especially right now as I write you this letter. Everything is gone without you.

August 4, 1958

You are more than likely writing me. There are no words for some things. Anyway, we are both probably going to feel like this until we are together again.

August 7, 1958

Received a letter from you today. Really enjoyed hearing from you. When I read your letter, I want even more to be with you . . . The nights are very pretty lately. They, like just about everything, remind me of you and my love for you.

August 11, 1958

Don’t know how long I can take this not seeing you. Seems everything just crumbles when we have to part. But someday things will be alright. I wonder if you are sleeping now. Will be glad when we are both out of the Navy. Then we can start making some definite plans. I do hope that you are soon pregnant. Whatever will be, will be.

August 14, 1958

Things will be much better as soon as you get out of the Navy. Then we will be able to spend all our time together. Hot dog.

August 22, 1958

Went to the 6:30 a.m. Mass this morning. Seems very strange, you not being by my side. Course we are both praying to the same God. Who hears and answers our prayers. About all for now. I love you. I love you. I do. That’s a fact.

August 29, 1958

Dearest, I better write you. First off, I love you. I really do. And gosh if something don’t hurry and turn out so we can be together. I don’t know what we’re going to do . . .

My parents assumed that after you got married, you got pregnant. But a few years passed and that didn’t happen, and they didn’t know what to do. They had made the decision to live in my mother’s hometown, and she went to her doctor for tests. None of these included my father. If a couple couldn’t get pregnant, the woman was assumed to be the source of the problem.

Her doctor, a middle-aged Italian man who’d been practicing medicine since 1945, finally said, I can do nothing more for you, Rosaria.

Do you think Ned and I should stop trying?

This matter is not my concern. It’s for you and your husband to decide. I know a woman. She wants to give her unborn baby up for adoption, he told her.

My mother held her breath. What do you mean?

She’s a very sad lady. She has one child and cannot take care of another. The baby is due in a few months. The end of September, I think. I don’t remember exactly. But you have to meet her. Are you interested?

Of course.

She sat down slowly. Was it possible she would have a child? And so suddenly? Her father taught her that things happen for a reason, always for a reason. That God gives you only what you can manage. That people with difficulties are stronger, chosen in fact because of their power and made stronger through their effort to cope. Was she strong enough to become a mother in this way?

I will make the arrangements, the doctor said. I know a lawyer. He helps me out with this sort of thing. Don’t tell anyone but your husband. Do you understand?

My mother, overjoyed at the possibility that her dream might come true, simply said, I understand.

My mother went alone the day of the meeting. I don’t know why, but I assume my father was working. It was muggy, and a harbor breeze blew in the window of her car as she sat cleaning out her purse, watching for a pregnant stranger to come along and decide her fate. Finally, she left her car and went inside the office building in Davis Square, where the meeting was to take place. As soon as she entered the lobby, she locked eyes with a tired-looking woman, arms folded across a huge belly. She appeared much older than someone in her mid-twenties and smelled like cigarettes and lavender-scented talcum powder.

My mother walked up to her without hesitating. I want you to know that I will love this child as my own.

The woman nodded, almost in tears. My husband died in a car crash right before I found out I was pregnant. This baby will be our second. I can barely take care of my first child. I wish it weren’t this way, but it is.

I promise I will honor your sacrifice my whole life.

It was that simple. Together, they went upstairs to the lawyer’s office to make it all official. On the papers that they all had to sign, my mother found the