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My Exclusive & Private Club

By on April 6, 2017
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By Elizabeth C.

I really hope I will never have to welcome you to my exclusive and private club.

Do you know how your membership starts?   Your local police force comes to your house and arrests a family member for indecent acts like Luring, Invitation to Sexual Touching, Possession of Child Pornography and Exposure.   The headline shows up in the paper, it’s on the radio and the TV too, you can’t escape the fact that your life has just exploded. You don’t know how hard your next few months are going to be. You don’t know anyone who’s been through this. You are scared and mark my words you are really angry.

I belong to an extremely painful and private club, a group of people you have likely never given a second thought to. I am the criminal’s family member. I am their collateral damage. I am one of the forgotten ones who watch each newspaper headline or news story and my heart tears open all over again. It happens every time. A headline on a newspaper, a scroll on the bottom of the evening news and each time I see them my heart breaks. Each time I know there are more victims than the story names. Each time I wonder how this family will get through this. My heart breaks wondering if this person has kids, grandkids, and a wife.   How are they going to cope? I wonder how much they will be ostracized, victimized, bullied, and gossiped about. I read the comments on the articles, I want to post but then I realize that if I do, I open myself up to reliving the pain and fielding the anger society has for these men.

As much as I want to believe that our pain crosses people’s minds, I know it doesn’t. What I became is fodder for anger, questions and gossip.   I saw comments on my family’s story about how I should have known, how come I didn’t stop it, how evil this man is, how grotesque he must be, how he probably abused his own children….   You name it I saw it.

I don’t want to welcome you to my club. I don’t want to watch someone else live my life for the past 5 years. I want to welcome you to the club of aware friends and family. I want to welcome you to open and kind conversation. I want you to feel comfortable with me and my children, I want you to not pass judgment, not bully, not ostracize, and not gossip about me.

You, each and every one of you, can help make a perpetrators family a little less of a victim by being a kind human being.

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FB_IMG_1490890440653Elizabeth is a single mother of two young men. After having been married for almost 20 years, her marriage imploded in a cataclysmic event. It lead to crippling self-doubt, shame, fear and brought to the surface a deep seeded desire to help others. Over the past 5 years Elizabeth has become a lover of inspirational books, a seeker of clarity, a searcher of peace, a lover of learning and a writer of things she cares about.

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