Survivors Standing Tall

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I have created Survivors Standing Tall (SST) as a welcoming space for fellow survivors and their loved ones who have something burning inside, something wanting to be to created, sung, danced, painted, or spoken out loud to the world. It is especially a place where outrage and anger, disgust and despair are considered acceptable and necessary states of mind in the course of healing and finding the legs for standing tall. Survivors Standing Tall is not necessarily looking for happy endings or stories of redemption, because that is often something we feel compelled by our faith communities to force into being long before we are ready. 

 

I've also created Survivors Standing Tall as an archival home for my past and future writings on the topic, gathered together in one location. Some of the writers with whom I worked closely as editor on Our Stories Untold posts requested that I move their writings from OSU to SST, along with my own. 

 

Please note that the blog posts on this site dated before June of 2017 originated on the website Our Stories Untold, with gratitude for the work of OSU's founder Rachel Halder, and present director Hilary Scarsella.

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HOW I GOT HERE

 

 

The character playing victim's attorney Mitchell Garabedian in the Oscar winning film "Spotlight" sits in a restaurant with a Boston Globe reporter, munching on a sandwich. 

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"If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse a child," he says.

 

I was raised and abused in the village called Anabaptist Mennonite.

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As is common for many of us who are sexually violated as children, I became the target of continued abuses off and on through out much of my life, nearly all of them by boys and men inside the Mennonite community. But I kept every incident hidden away as fast as they occurred. I pushed them down into a massive fog of repressed but not quite forgotten memory. It's what I needed to do to survive. 

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On a national lecture-drama tour of Mennonite colleges, I said publicly for the first time that I was an incest survivor and named my father as the perpetrator. It was 1992. I mentioned it briefly during my time at the podium. That was all I could handle. But it broke a little crack in those decades of silence. Going public to Mennonite audiences brought many more Mennonite-related survivors of sexual abuse to me over the following years and decades. I also started a file of the names of Mennonite perpetrators. I've never stopped considering it a privilege to be a friend and ally to any survivor or family member who needs to tell someone, or talk to someone who understands.  

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From the summer of 2013 until the summer of 2017, as editor at Our Stories Untold blog, I helped survivors and their loved ones tell their untold stories for the first time. I wrote about institutional church cover-up in cases in which I was directly involved. I saw first hand how getting 'onto paper' and into the public sphere a secret, shame or burden that we have no good reason to carry holds many benefits. It is a powerful step in healing our own wounds, helps make it safer for others to come forward, and holds to account the church officials who choose to put the public safety at risk by protecting one of their own.

 

Four years of editing Our Stories Untold helped me more fully understand the impact of sexual violation on my own life and it fueled the slow discovery that I really, really did not have to remain silent about my own hidden pain. After two years of helping others tell their experiences, and with the support of others, I was ready to write out more details of my own untold stories. On September 15, 2015 those details went live. Nearly 60 years had passed since my little girl Barbra's first violation.

 

I hid my personal account in the Stories section of the blog, which had no email alerts or intentional circulation. That was all I could handle. I was shocked when it began to circulate widely, bringing hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of readers. More survivors (mostly Mennonite) reached out to me until I realized with growing astonishment and horror that the problem among Mennonites is epidemic, pandemic, and a public health crisis. I also realized I now had the strength to not only stay among the living, but to stand tall and speak up. I was overwhelmed by the loving, supportive Comments left online after my post. I realized with relief that there were many others from my Mennonite community who believed me, saw me, and stood with me. I discovered I had relatively little to lose in coming forward compared to other survivors I knew. Thanks to so many who have buoyed me up and believed in me, I'm at a place now in my elder years, where the work of advocacy and activism does not drain me or depress me, but rather fills me with hope. Every awful testimony I hear makes my resolve even stronger to keep at it for as long as I can. I am today both sobered and encouraged to see the thousands of articulate and passionate young survivors taking the microphone from so many corners around the globe. 

 Supportive groups of special women friends played a critical role in getting me here and slowly helped me crack through and begin to dissipate the anxiety I often felt, but worked hard to hide, when relating to groups of people.

 

I dreaded Sunday School classes my entire life, tight circles of chairs in closed rooms. Committee work, board rooms, small group projects, I forced myself to do, but often dreaded. Trust is tenuous. Betrayals devastating. The anxiety that comes from extending vulnerability to others can still make me curl up inside.  I eventually came to understand these fearful feelings stemmed from having been sexually violated by a group, a pedophile ring, made up of men from my community who I was supposed to be able to trust. That trust was horrifically betrayed. Some haunted old hidden feeling that has no words can still start to rumble when I enter a working group, any group, where authentic engagement and participation is expected.

 

But there is one special group that deserves mention here.  It has lasted longer and gone deeper than any other. 

 

I first met what became my Southwest 7 women's group at a conference of biblical feminists outside Los Angeles in the mid 80's. We started to meet regularly in the greater Los Angeles area, sitting in a circle for support and friendship. When the meeting times would roll around, as much as I wanted to go, I resisted going and found some excuse. But they kept pulling me back in; and something kept making me go. We spent a magical weekend together in Santa Fe in 1986 and then made plans to try to keep gathering once a year, every year.  We recently celebrated 30 years together, now spread from Kenya to California, Virginia to Washington. The Southwest 7 helped me beat into submission a self defeating, irrational, but very real fear of small groups of people. They have walked with me from the time I was completely blinded to the truth of my life, to my standing tall within it today. They most certainly helped get me here and will no doubt help keep me here at this place of advocacy and activism.

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FAMILY 

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I was born in Iowa, the youngest of six children born to Clarence and Sally Graber. We grew up on a dairy farm near Mt. Pleasant, a town some distance outside the large Mennonite communities of Wayland, Kalona and Wellman. I always felt like the odd-one-out going to Mt. Pleasant public school through my elementary school years.  We didn't have TV; I could not wear pants (except under a skirt! Gah), even to football games; I had to sit on the sidelines during P.E. square dance class; and I couldn't  go to the movie theater with my friends --until Mary Poppins came along.

 

Arriving at Iowa Mennonite High School was a dream! I was with other Mennonites! I suddenly belonged!  IMS turned out to be a wonderfully, safe and nurturing experience for me. Though I've talked to others who were not as lucky, I can't recall a single sexually violating incident in those four years as a teenager in the Iowa Mennonite High School communities. I'm grateful for that. 

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Eastern Mennonite College led me to Harrisonburg, VA where I graduated with an English degree in 1972, then in 1981 returned to join the faculty of what became Eastern Mennonite University.  In Harrisonburg I met my husband Dale Metzler, who has been my rock, my business partner, my best friend. He keeps me laughing, isn't afraid to see me cry, and has my back. 

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I never birthed babies, perhaps because of the experiences of childhood. I just know I never felt a strong desire for children. There seemed to be enough of them in the world. I was blessed with 13 beautiful nieces and nephews. And Dale's children became beloved 'bonus' children to me when we married in 1994. They are far away in California but have brought us the joy of three grandchildren and two grand-doggies.

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