The Forgotten Girls by Monica Potts

Author:Monica Potts [Potts, Monica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

8.

Trauma

When I returned to my hometown as an adult, older adults who had known me as a child told me things—gossip, confessions—that they never would have told me as a child. Vanessa’s mom, Susie, told me she’d been molested when she was about thirteen. “Most girls were,” she said casually. “Half of Clinton. Christian, non-Christian, hillbilly, hick, a lot of girls it happened to. It was one of the closet secrets.”

To get out of that situation, while she was still young, she’d married a Christian man. In the beginning of their marriage, she told me, they were so strict about traditional observances that she’d walked ten paces behind her husband. To me, that helped explain why she’d encouraged Vanessa to move to Colorado and get married at fifteen. It was how Susie herself had escaped.

Susie was describing a population, it turned out, that was living with unresolved trauma. Stories emerged everywhere of abusive parents and husbands, of sexual abuse, of neglect and poverty. For much of the time I was growing up, the town lacked mental health care, missing enough social workers or others who might have helped children facing abuse. These insular religious communities tried to resolve their problems in pastors’ offices, in private—and some were surely told, as my friend April was, to pray for their abusive boyfriends or husbands.

Susie was also right that people didn’t talk about these problems directly, though rumors always flew everywhere. She herself had always tried to be up front about her own family’s problems, though her honest accounting had been used against her, she thought. Other parents had used her honesty as ammunition to blame Vanessa when their own daughters started acting out. Susie readily admitted it when Vanessa got out of line. “You as a parent, when you stick your head in the sand and don’t take action when they’re young enough [for you] to take action, to beat the dog out of them or ground them or scare them, by the time they’re fifteen and sixteen it’s too late,” she said.

People in Clinton did bury their heads in the sand to avoid being judged, but many of the problems there—both in individual families and in the community as a whole—were, I could see now, just too big to handle. Few people or institutions had the resources to deal with any of them or to fix the biggest issues. Only after I went home again did I understand how exhausting it could be to push against a whole town’s worth of trouble—the widespread poverty, the lack of social institutions, the abuse hidden in isolated homes. Rather than face certain defeat, people gave up and tried to preserve whatever they had left.

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