I wish you had known all that I now understand.  I wish you had taken the time to look inside yourself, to understand yourself and your pain.  I wish you had made the decision to rise above the adversities in your life and be a better person - to be a better uncle.  You did not and I will hate you for it, probably until I die.  Even though you are dead, you torment me.  I often have dreams that you have come back from the grave, trying again to control my life and belittle me.

 I will not let you win.  I refuse to be like you.  My will is too strong for you to crush.  I have chosen to be a good uncle.
 Unlike you, I have not buried my pain deep within me.  I face it every day.  I grapple to free myself from the abyss of self-hatred, sadness, and the feeling of being unloved.  It is probably the worst punishment any person can go through.  And I never committed any crime to deserve it.

 You know the story of my parents’ divorce.  One day, my mom just ran away with my brothers, sister, me and the new love of her life.  She took with her credit cards, any money she could find, and loaded us into my dad’s 1965 Volkswagen microbus.  We went to Missouri to find her biological family.  My dad went to court to file for divorce.  He won custody over us and as soon as he could find us, brought us back to Arizona.

 You know that my mother’s boyfriend abused me, but you do not know all of it.  As I sit here writing this, I feel sick to my stomach.  It is not like being really sick.  My stomach feels empty; there is a deep void.  Yet at the same time, it feels like I swallowed a hundred ball bearings.  My heart is beating more quickly.  I tremble with fear.  My lip quivers and my eyes well up with moisture as I try to fight back the tears.  It feels like someone has laid hundreds of pounds of bricks upon me and I cannot escape their oppression.  Sometimes I want lie down into the darkness that surrounds me, turn my face from the light, and let it swallow me whole.  The pain will never end; it will never go away; I will suffer with it always.

 When I was in Missouri, my mother’s boyfriend beat me almost every day, with or without cause.  When my class was having breakfast at school, I ate twice that morning because I feared that the news might set him off and I would be beaten again.  He did not stop there.  He raped me and molested me repeatedly.  I cannot even remember all the times.  My other self, a personality I created to defend myself, alone holds those memories.  Her name is Gaela.  She is still trying to protect me and will not share these memories.  Gaela does not believe that I am strong enough to deal with them.  I think she is right.  I admire her strength and courage, but I am not sure she knows how to deal with these memories either.

 Her suffering -- perhaps I should say our suffering -- weighs on me.  Those invisible bricks have been there my whole life.  They crush my spirit and trap my soul in the melancholy realms of hell.  I was wounded badly when I came into your care -- when my father, my brothers and I moved in with you, your sister and your mother.  I needed you to love me, to take care of me, and to help me to feel better.  You could not see past your own anger.  You hated my mother and used me to get back at her.  Instead of loving me, you took a child who had already been trampled and beaten down by the cruelty of one man and then inflicted new wounds in areas that had been previously untouched.  You left me worse than when you had found me.

 My friends say it is a miracle that I turned out so well after all that I have endured.  Considering that my younger brother is an alcoholic and drug user, and my older brother is a relationship junkie, I sometimes think they are right.  But really, it is not a miracle; it was my will.  I made a decision: I do not want any human being to have to endure even a tiny fraction of what I am going through.  I have decided that I will sure as hell not be the cause!  People either embrace their past and suffer the pain or they bury it deeply within themselves, trying to forget it, and then inflict the pain upon others, never realizing what they are doing.  It is called the cycle of abuse.  My decision, my conscious decision, was to end that cycle, and not to pass it on to new generations.

 I wish you had made that decision.  You did not.  You were in the Marine Corps.  You said that real men never cried.  You let me wear your Marine Corps hat once, then scolded me a few days later when I cried.  “No one who has ever worn that hat ever cried afterwards,” you said to me.  You saw it as a weakness.  You were wrong!  It takes a strong man to allow himself to hurt and to cry.  It is so much easier to bury the pain and not deal with it.  The pain still comes out; however, it causes others around you to suffer.

 Perhaps contrary to popular belief, most victims of abuse do make the decision to end the cycle of abuse.  According to a survey done by Jim Hopper, who received his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Massachusetts at Boston, only thirty-eight percent of the people who were abused continue the cycle of abuse.  While that knowledge does not make my struggle any easier, it strengthens my conviction that I am doing the right thing.

 I will not be the kind of uncle you were.  I will not!  Instead of passing my burden down to my sister’s children, I want to give them love.  I want them to know, without any doubts, that I love them.  While I tell them that I love them, it is my hope that my actions alone would assure them.  Through this love, I want to build their self-esteem.  They come running when they see me.  They jump into my arms and lavish my hugs.  Because they know that they are loved, they love me in return.  And they behave for me.  Jane and James Ritchie, leading child psychologists in New Zealand, and authors of Spare the Rod, write that when children feel good about themselves, they will act good too.  They further write that too often “punishment, especially corporal punishment, . . . occurs simply because parents and children are getting on each other’s nerves. . .” (79).  Physical and verbal punishment has nothing to do with real discipline, it is about expressing aggravation.

 I will not hit my niece or nephews or yell at them.  But I have disciplined them.  I bought my niece a bag of marbles at the local dollar store.  It came wrapped in packing tape, and as she quickly and eagerly unwrapped them, she discarded the tape on the floor of my car.  While it is not always the cleanest vehicle, I am pretty good about not letting trash pile up in it.  I asked her nicely to pick the discarded tape up off my floor, and she said no.  I am told that kids do this, that they want to know how far they can push people.  For them, it is learning boundaries.  This was a boundary and I needed her to know it.  ‘What do I do now?’ I thought.

 Her mother had told her more than once that I was a grown up and that she needed to listen to me and do what I asked.  That was not helping right now.  Had I done this with you, I would have been hit or called a rotten or ungrateful little brat.  You would have made me feel stupid and worthless.  This was likely the worst battle of wills that she and I had ever engaged in, and I was determined to win.

 My solution: I snatched the marbles from her and promised to give them back as soon as she picked up the tape from my floor and threw it away.  She did not like this arrangement and whined, pouted and shouted for me to give them back.  My reply was always the same.  “You know what you need to do to get them back.”

 I was sitting in my grandparents living rooom and twenty minutes went by after our last confrontation.  She came into the room with the tape in her hand.  “Here, can I have my marbles back?” she asked.  “Go throw that away and you can,” I replied.  Again, we were butting heads.  She did not want to throw the tape in the garbage.  She begged and pleaded and finally gave in, throwing the tape away and then crying.  I returned the marbles to her and thanked her for doing what I had asked.  At that point she did not really want them back, and was mad at me the rest of the afternoon.  She easily forgave me, however, and after a similar incident, in which I wanted to her to use proper grammar when asking me for candy, she now does whatever I ask of her.  She knows that I am much more fun to be around when she does what I ask.  I did win -- without hurting her physically or hurting her feelings.  According to the Ritchies, “unless parents consider the feelings of the children, they can hardly expect that children will learn to consider their feelings” (81).

 In the case with my niece and the marbles, it was important that I considered her feelings.  By doing so, I was teaching her to consider not only my feelings but the feelings of everyone else she meets.  I was teaching her to be courteous, in a way that people will respond positively to, without damaging her self-esteem.  On yesterday’s news, they were talking about how disorders such as anorexia and bulimia are tied to a person’s self-esteem.  They said that a parent’s best weapon against preventing their children from suffering from these disorders is to give them a healthy self-esteem.

 A few years after that, at the end of a road trip with my niece, she jumped up to give me a hug.  She accidentally knocked me in the mouth with her head, splitting my lip and causing it to bleed.  I staggered back in pain.

 “Are you okay?” she asked.

 “Yes, I am okay.  How’s your head?” I asked in reply.  She said that she was okay and said that she was sorry.  I knew that she felt really badly that she had hurt me.  I assured her that I would be okay and hugged her good-bye.
 If I had ever done anything like that to you, you would screamed at me, “Watch what you’re doing!”  You probably would have called me careless or, if you were having a bad day already, stupid.  I, like my niece, would have felt bad enough already and that alone would have caused me to be more careful.  I have noticed that adults are pretty hypocritical when it comes to things like that.  If you had hurt me while “rough-housing”, you apologized and expected that to be enough.  When the situation was reversed, my apology was never enough.  I had to endure a blow to my self esteem because you were mad.  I had to be different.  I still remember what it is like to be scolded.  I still feel that shame and tension that is put on children by such language.

 According to Anne Echols, a certified psychiatrist in Phoenix, Arizona, a person’s emotional growth can often be stopped after a such traumatic event.1  For me, it means that I have the emotional capacity of a 5 year old.  When my brother-in-law’s sister yells at my nephews and niece, I cringe.  She says things like, “Don’t give me that look.  That’s not gonna work on me.  I’m not stupid.  When I tell you to do something, do it.”.  I often wish that I were not there.  It is like I am the one being reprimanded and I hate every minute of it.  I want to jump up, grab ahold of her and say, “Stop it!  Don’t you remember what it was like to be talked to that way?”  I have never done it.

 “Shouting at children,” the Ritchies write, “may cause them to stop what they are doing and scurry off as far as possible out of earshot, but unless explanation follows, children will not learn why their behavior incurred their parent’s displeasure” (76-77).  Shouting at a child teaches that child nothing.  It is an easy way to get a moment of peace, but is not a lasting solution to a behavior problem.  On the other hand, they write that when adults reason with children, they grow up to be reasonable people, and that when adults use positive behavior controls, children learn how to manage the world so that they receive these kinds of responses.

 My seven year-old nephew recently poked one of his classmates with a pencil.  I asked him why he did it.  Like a typical child he responded, “I don’t know.”  Rather than berating him for giving me such an answer, as you would have done to me, I suggested several reasons why he might have done so.  While he still did not have an answer, I went through each of my examples and asked him how he could have dealt with the situation better.  He again said that he did not know, so I made several suggestions, some of which were just for fun.  I was teaching him to be rational.  I was showing him alternatives to violence, rather than perpetuating his violence by hitting him or poking him with a pencil as an example.

  In my psychology class, we learned that for every negative comment children receive, they must receive ten compliments in order to feel as good about themselves as they did before the negative comment.  When I think back to my days at grade school and realize how often I was teased by the other children, I am overcome by the enormous responsibility that adults have to preserve the self-esteem of the children in their lives.  What kept you from seeing this?  Why did you feel the need to humiliate me for mistakes that children are almost destined to make?

 In her book Positive Discipline, Jane Nelsen (a licensed marriage and family counselor) urges her readers to think back to a moment when they were being humiliated because of a mistake, and ask themselves how they felt and whether it made them want to do better in the future (13-14).  I wish you, too, had taken a moment to think about how you felt about being treated the way you treated me.  I wish you had been able to remember what it felt like when someone did not respect you.  “Where did we ever get the crazy idea,” Nelsen asks, “that in order to make children do better, first we have to make them feel worse?” (13).  It is a crazy idea.  When someone puts me down or talks down to me, I try hard to make his or her life as miserable as that person made mine.  When a person treats me with respect and dignity, and is willing to show me my mistakes, without making me feel badly, I will always react by supporting that person above and beyond what is required.  I know this personally.

 It is not easy for me to live with the gaping emotional wounds that plague me, but I do it not for me, but for the people I love: for my nephews and niece.  It allows me to be the kind of uncle that I never had.  These children under my care will not suffer the way I have.  They will not be surrounded by darkness, wanting to give up and let it swallow them wholely.  Unlike you, I have closed that door and locked it - with love.

Your Nephew,
James
 
 
Notes
1. Dr. Anne Echols told me this during a counseling secession on May 8, 1997.
 
Annotated Bibliography

1. Child Protection Leader, September 1994.  “The Link Between Child Abuse and Domestic Violence.” Englewood, CO: American Humane Association.
 
 This article was a report on the statistics between child abuse and domestic violence.  It suggests that child abuse is common in households with domestic abuse.  It also suggested that children in abuse situations often mimic the behavior.
 
2. Hopper, Jim. “Child Abuse: Statistics, Research and Resources.”  World Wide Web: www.jimhopper.com/abstracts, revised on 7/24/98.
 
 Dr. Hooper had done a research study and listed his findings on the World Wide Web.  On his site, he explains his methods of gathering data and how it is presented.  The article contained statistics on the cycle of abuse.
 
3. Kharfen, Michael.  “HHS Releases New Statistics on Child Abuse and Neglect as Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention Month begins”.  Washington, D.C.: National Clearinghouse on Child Abuse and Neglect Information, April 1, 1996.
 
 This article contained more statistics on child abuse and neglect.
 
4. Nelsen, Jane, Ed. D.  Positive Discipline.  New York: Ballantine Books, 1996.
 
 This book contained many insights into how to discipline children without damaging their self-esteem.  It contains a psychological background to child discipline as well as many hints for using discipline in a positive manner.
 
5. Ritchie, Jane and James.  Spare the Rod.  North Sidney, New Zealand: George Allen and Unwin Australia PTE, Ltd., 1981.

This book contained ideas behind discipline and corporal punishment.  Its main theme was how to discipline children without resorting to violence, shouting, etc.  It studied the effects of poor discipline on children.
 

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