I Will Find You by Joanna Connors

Author:Joanna Connors
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780802190338
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2016-04-13T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“Once in a while I think of things too bad to talk about”

David Francis was true to his word. He did fuck me up. Not that I recognized it. I thought it was all over, that he was gone for life.

I was determined not to play the self-pitying victim, that despised female role that the writer Leslie Jamison describes as “The Girl Who Cried Pain,” so I wore the costume of a woman who had never been a victim, never been raped. I had strength and resilience. I was Woman. Hear me roar.

If I got depressed sometimes, well, didn’t everybody?

I had a pattern. One day, for no reason I could ever discern, I would awake filled with foreboding. A gloom would slip over my spirits—just a shadow at first, easy to deny. Over the next few days, the shadow would grow deeper. I would carry on, acting as though all was well. But all was not well. I would feel the way I felt as a child when I walked home from a friend’s house at dinnertime, the sky turning dark. I’d look into the windows of the houses I passed, catching glimpses of mothers cutting onions or stirring something on the stove, kids doing their homework at the kitchen table, fathers watching the news in the living room. From the outside, those lighted windows looked like pure happiness, yet they brought on a feeling I couldn’t name until much later. Melancholy.

When I admitted to myself that I was depressed, again, I would find a therapist, go for three or four sessions, talk about my childhood and my marriage and my stressful job but gloss over the rape—“I got over it,” I insisted—and then abruptly stop going when the therapists suggested otherwise. When they wanted to prescribe antidepressants, I refused. They scared me.

In between therapy attempts, I pushed against the depressions with restless activity. I couldn’t curl up in bed and give in to them: I had two children, I had a job with daily deadlines, we owned a house that always needed something repaired, usually something expensive. I drove to doctors’ appointments and hockey practices and dance classes. I attended school parents’ nights and volunteered in my children’s preschool and elementary school classes. Once a month, I prepared healthy afternoon snacks for those classes. I bathed my children in oatmeal when they had chicken pox. I bought poster board and felt markers for school projects, and helped my son set flame-resistant baby clothes on fire for a science fair experiment. I decided to completely gut and renovate my kitchen. I kept myself so busy with ordinary life and insane home improvement projects, I didn’t have time to resolve anything about David Francis for the next two decades.

He and the rape remained where I left them, buried and secret, until the next depression arrived, the next three sessions with the next therapist, the next time I had to tell the story to someone new.

After the trial, I went to the second therapist in my string of therapists.

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