Healing Rape Baby One Trip at a Time by Micah Stover

                 Paul Sableman CC



Healing Rape Baby One Trip at a Time

My father was a rape baby. Because of this, he wasn’t really, properly loved. My grandma was fifteen. My dad was the third of eight kids. My aunt told me they both nearly died during his birth. The chord wrapped around his baby neck, in their old farmhouse with no running water. Poverty inside and out. 

She wasn’t raped by a stranger. It was her husband, my grandfather. It took me a long time to understand sex must be consensual to not be rape. Back in the Tennessee hills where my dad grew up, women – especially wives – were property. They did what they were told, sex was no exception. 

My grandpa was a drunk with a temper, damaged deeply from the war. Battle wounds overlaying mental illness, undiagnosed. No psychologists in those days, in those parts. Mental illness was weakness, and weakness was cowardice, and that you conquered with God and sheer will. 

I never met my grandpa, but when the psilocybin takes me to the dark ancestral cave, I smell moonshine and whiskey on the walls. I hear her first in a scream and then in a scared, animal whimper – stop – she pleads. I sense terror coursing, the kerosene lamp dimly lighting the corridor through which she frantically crawls. I feel the back of his calloused hand and huge, furry knuckles strike her cheekbone, her small five-foot body smacking to the floor. Sometimes when I see her, she fights back. Sometimes she doesn’t.   

They didn’t get divorced, but they weren’t happily ever after. There was death energy plastered to doors and windows, every portal for escape sealed shut by the lacquer of shame and residual trauma. His father – even from the grave – was the biggest presence. 

Driving the windy roads to get there, I sat frozen in the back – obedient, silent, scared. Kids feel even what they can’t name. The feral country dogs barking and chasing after our golden, diesel Mercedes, engine purring. Dad cursing the dirt as it kicked up a cloud of orange dust, trailing long behind us. That car, his only empirical evidence of rising above the squalor. 

I wonder if any of those eight babies came from love. Perhaps my dad is the most broken because he was the only rape baby. Perhaps his contempt for his mother and for me is bound up in that rape story, waiting to be told, waiting to be unraveled. He wanted the mother I had, one who wanted a child as much as he was a child who wanted to be loved. His karma lost in the void longing. Perhaps telling our story won’t kill him, but rather infuse life into a lineage otherwise fraught with doom.

*

I felt fear before love, and shame before safe. These were the values instilled. Intimacy was sin, unless sanctioned by god. My grandparent’s shame became my father’s and his shame became mine. Passed down the generational line – sexual trauma – like Morse code or an ancient dialect, traveling through time and my family right alongside big lips and sharp tongues.  

My dad scathed past poverty, but the rape baby layers stuck to the bones. The absence of tenderness and touch. The vulnerability love requires. It was more than he could muster. So, he raised me from the broken place, teaching me to be hard and gritty, humble and sorry. I’ve been saying sorry for as long as I can remember. But not anymore.  

He provided for me, beyond the cellular residue of dirt poor. I had access to education. When I nearly died of depression, my parents got me help. He didn’t believe in therapists or any of that other intellectualized nonsense. But he paid for it, for me. That was his love language – providing and working – rather than drinking and whoring. He was better than his father. And that’s not nothing. But it still wasn’t enough. My life looked like privilege and felt like rot. Sometimes when dad couldn’t contain the rage, he struck me, knuckles just like the one’s in the cave.

*

Time folds in on itself in psychedelic space. Nothing is linear. My eyes peel back for signs. I am a little girl. I am my grandmother. I’m a teenager. A daughter. A mother. A baby. I see everything at once. The grand, tragic tapestry of my lineage revealed.

Then I see my sons far in the horizon. They’re safe, but only from afar. I’m holding back a tsunami of pain so big and old and deep that it feels like it will destroy me. Instantly, it is clear. They are the reason I am here. Their emancipation from this lineage story of soul crushing trauma – that is all matters, my solitary mission. My body begins to tremble and shake. 

“Breathe,” my therapist says, her voice slow, gentle, firm. “The animal body knows the score. It’s doing what it needs to do. You’re shaking the trauma out, layer by layer, memory by memory. Don’t resist. You’re safe now.” 

Curled in a ball, a grey blanket wrapped around me, her hand grazes my shoulder. I flinch at first, then release. Her hands are soft, not calloused. She is not going to hit me. She is not angry. I taste safety in my mouth, it’s brand new like I am brand new. My lifetime, forty-two years of anxious are lifting off my chest, spilling from my diaphragm. Every ancestral injury I took on that wasn’t mine going, and then gone. All the epigenetic markers for mental illness, depression, violence and abuse, one by one, deleted like corrupt files inside my mind. 

The only way for me to heal was necessarily extreme. The truth was too unbearable. My ego simply wouldn’t allow it, wouldn’t let me stop running and pretending everything was ok, that I was ok. That I could control the rage inside with a strict regimen of hypervigilance, striving and self-denial. Twenty years of talk therapy hadn’t made a dent. Talking isn’t how you repair these kinds of deep, insidious wounds, camouflaged into the very construct of my DNA. Rather, this work requires a kind of triage intervention, a metaphysical soul surgery. 

If someone had told me I’d grow up to be a mama hallucinating on mushrooms, I’d have said they’re crazy. But I also understood all too well what we don’t heal, we hand to our babies. This is the landmine of intergenerational trauma, and that was not going to be my offering. So, guilty as I felt doing something so unconventional, so potentially dangerous and rogue – I persisted. 

The girl in me who’d spent a lifetime chasing perfection had to let go in order for the real me to blaze through. The psilocybin released her from the cave by showing what was hidden. Now she gets it. Now that she’s in her power and not her pain. She’s vulnerable, but unafraid. She’s brave and wise. She is a damn good, imperfect mama. She is me, and we are finally free, now that the ghosts are gone.
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Raised on a farm in rural Tennessee by evangelicals, Micah is a far way from home in Mexico where she lives with her husband and two sons. Micah works as an integrative support therapist with trauma survivors and is in the final stages of revision on a memoir chronicling the path to heal intergenerational sexual trauma with psilocybin and guided psychotherapy.

[email protected]
www.sugarfootjourney.com
www.micahstoverconsulting.com

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