Guest Blog Friday

Welcome to the inaugural edition of "Guest Blog Friday!"

I'm pleased to host my friend and co-WestSide Books author, Beth Fehlbaum.

She's the author Yalsa Quick-Pick Hope in Patience.



Writing as Healing: 

How writing The Patience Trilogy

helped me move beyond a history of childhood abuse

I was eight years old the first time I wrote about being sexually abused:  “Sssh!!!!!!   He likes to squish my boobs!  Last night in the green chair…”

            I wrote those words in a small diary—the kind with a little lock and key—but anyone knows the lock can easily be ripped away.  I don’t know why the secret I felt compelled to commit to paper was safe within that cardboard cover. 

 I hid the diary in the back of my desk drawer and carried it with me when we moved from the house in rural Texas—the one with the green chair in the den where I’d nearly fallen asleep in my stepfather’s lap and he’d felt me up for the first time.  I was so shocked, I’d pretended to be asleep, and the next morning, when he called me outside and told me to “slap his hands”, I acted like I didn’t know what he was talking about.  That experience became this scene in my first book, Courage in Patience (this is the revised, 2011 version; the book was first released by a now-defunct Canadian publisher, Kunati Books, in 2008):

 Less than a year after they married, he gestured to me to sit on his lap. I did so, enjoying the idea of having a daddy like my friends did. I got so relaxed and content there, I dozed off. He started rubbing my brand-new breasts. I wasn’t actually all the way asleep, but it freaked me out so much that I pretended I was.

            The next morning, a Saturday, my mother told me to go outside because Charlie wanted to talk to me. I approached him like I would come up on a King cobra, full of dread and feeling like a tightly wound spring. His back was to me as he bent under the hood of our car, changing the oil.

            "Mom told me to come out here. Said you want to talk to me," I spoke to the sky as I watched a black vulture circle over something dead.

            He mumbled something and I said, “Huh?”

He backed out from under the hood and took a deep breath.  “Kiddo, slap my hands.” He paused as if waiting for my response.

            "What? Why?" I played dumb, hoping that none of what happened in that chair had really happened. I was nine years old, and I already knew what he was doing was wrong.

            "Last night … in the green chair …" Now it was his turn to stare somewhere else.

            I tilted my head and my voice was so high it didn’t even sound like me. "What chair? When?"

            He smiled that closed-mouth smile from his "model" picture.  “Never mind, Kiddo. You can go back inside now.”

            My heart pounded in my ears as I walked away from him. The morning sun was blinding and felt hot on my hair.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When I was in high school, I pulled the diary from its hiding place and burned it in the fireplace when my parents weren’t home.  Couldn’t risk anyone learning the truth about what my stepfather had started doing to me when I was in fourth grade.  The abuse escalated from touching to rape by the time I told, and that was the physical part.  In addition, he played mind games with me and controlled me through threats to leave my mom. 

I became angrier and angrier the longer the abuse went on, and when I was fourteen, I told my mother what was going on.  She neglected to do anything about it.  I drew on this experience as well when I wrote Courage in Patience—because even though twenty-odd years had passed since the day I told her, the feeling of numbness and disbelief were just as raw and overwhelming for me at age 40 as they were when I was 14.  Unlike me, the protagonist of The Patience Trilogy, Ashley Nicole Asher, tells a teacher and CPS acts on her outcry.  She is placed with her biological father in a tiny East Texas town, and her life begins anew.

After the day I told my mother what was going on and she did The Big Nothing,  I endured about six months of her seeming angry and my stepfather ignoring my existence before a switch flipped inside of me and I became The Perfect Daughter.  I did the housework, laundry, ironing, cooking, worked for the family business, began calling my stepfather “Dad”, aaaaaaaaannnnd developed an eating disorder that to this day vexes me.  I also kept writing, especially poetry.  I don’t have any of the pieces I wrote.   Like the diary, I destroyed any evidence on the chance that my mom might find it and be upset.  My whole life was about keeping her comfortable.

Fast-forward to 2004, when I was 38 years old, 100 pounds overweight, on an express train to Crazy Town, and taking four other people—my husband and three daughters—along for the ride.  Simply put, I could not cope with the secrets anymore.  Committing them to paper and burning them hadn’t done jack-shit to deal with the past.

I entered therapy and, true to form, tried to process the agony I was experiencing by putting the pain on paper.  About eighteen months into the recovery journey we were on together, my therapist suggested that I try writing a novel.  It took me about four months of stopping and starting and being stuck on the question of “WHY?”  Why did this happen to me?  Why didn’t my mom act on my outcry when I was fourteen?  Why has she turned her back on me now?  Why does she refuse to know the truth? 

One day, I decided to imagine what it would be like to be someone else having the experience of recovering from childhood sexual abuse  from  one parent, and deliberate indifference on the part of the caretaker parent. That’s how Ashley Nicole Asher came into being, and Courage in Patience, my first book, was written.  I never even planned to have it published; once I finished it, though, I realized that I had been helped so much by the experience of writing it that it might give hope to others on the same journey.  Even though I was thrilled to become a published author,  I was so afraid of upsetting my mom and ruining any chance that she might still come around and be willing to know the truth about what happened to me that I asked my publisher to not be completely forthright  in my bio.  He came up with the story that I knew what it’s like to be an abused child because I’m a teacher and have worked with abused kids in the past.  But, honestly:  nobody bought that story, because anybody who reads The Patience Trilogy can tell that the person who wrote it has lived it.

            I thought I was through with putting my pain on paper.  I wasn’t.  I was still in therapy and trying like hell to accept the way things are with my mom: we have no relationship, and I couldn’t wrap my mind around the fact that she didn’t love me with the same fierceness I feel for my three daughters.  Through writing Hope in Patience (WestSide, 2010), I came to acceptance.  It was excruciating to write; I wept when I wrote the scene in the hospital room, when Ashley’s mom tries to get her to admit that her stepfather, Charlie, who has just been killed in an accident, was a good man.  AND— I no longer allowed my fear to silence the person I had become.  I publicly identified myself as a SURVIVOR of childhood sexual abuse on the book jacket of Hope in Patience, as well as everywhere else.

            At the end of Hope in Patience, Ashley begins dating a boy she’s had a crush on.  I explored what it’s like to be a person trying to move on with her life and experience normalcy in the third book in the Patience trilogy, Truth in Patience.  I also gave Ashley the gift of a face-to-face confrontation with her mom about Truth and what it means to her in the life she has carved out for herself.  I have not experienced this myself.

Truth in Patience is not yet published; my publisher, WestSide Books, is for sale, and not currently acquiring new works.  I am in Publishing Purgatory, along with Selene and the other WestSide authors.

            I still have off-days once in awhile, but I made it through the recovery process.  It took six years of intensive therapy; a kick-ass support team comprised of my husband, daughters, and therapist; iron-clad determination to make it through the journey to hell and back; and writing the trilogy of a fifteen-year-old girl who finds Courage, Hope, and Truth in a tiny Texas town called Patience . 

            Beth Fehlbaum is the author of The Patience Trilogy.  Visit her website; friend her on Facebook; follow her on Twitter. And, for goodness sake, PLEASE help Beth and the other WestSide authors spread the word that WestSide Books is FOR SALE!  Beth is wrapping up a month-long campaign which has included making a general pest of herself about WestSide being for sale, AND an offer of a free raccoon to the buyer of the company!