Chapter Thirty-Eight Nobody’s Girl #3
Today, I’m turning my sights to the future.
I like to think about a time when all my Survivor Sisters and I might gather together again.
Right before the pandemic hit, I’d rented a house for all of us in Aspen and told those of us who couldn’t afford the airfare that I would buy their tickets if they wanted to come for the weekend.
COVID-19 forced us to cancel that plan, but I still think about reviving it.
The goal isn’t to reopen old wounds—we’ve all done enough of that.
I just want to spend a few carefree days with these women, who understand me in ways no one else can.
But mostly what I need to do is to be here, fully, for my family.
In recent months, Robbie and I have moved toward a healthier way of living, together.
At my request, he took my pain pills, on which I’d developed an overreliance to soothe my physical and emotional pain, and locked them away in our safe, changing the combination.
Day by day, it was as if I were stepping out of a dense fog into a clearing where I could see again.
For months he’d been handling all our household chores, from grocery shopping to cooking to cleaning to all the drop-offs and pickups from school.
Now I’ve begun getting up early again. Recently, when Robbie said he wanted to get more serious about his martial-arts practice, I told him he should spend a few mornings at the gym—I could make the kids’ lunches and ferry Ellie to where she needs to go.
(Alex and Tyler both have their driver’s licenses now.) For the first time in a long time, my husband feels as if he can rely on me.
That is the highest praise I could hope for: Robbie is seeing me, once again, not merely as someone to take care of but as his partner.
And my children? Alex, who is eighteen, has graduated from high school.
I’ve teased him that I’ll never let him move out, but he is planning an independent life, probably running his own business.
Tyler—now seventeen—is enrolled in the highest-level high school classes, which he is acing, and his Australian Tertiary Admission Rank scores (sort of like SATs in the United States) are off the charts, which means his dreams of attending university and becoming an architect may well come true.
And my daughter? Ellie’s the most badass teenage girl ever, and she teaches me something every day.
She has joined Australia’s Emergency Services Cadets program, which teaches young people the skills needed to respond to fires, floods, earthquakes.
She’s planning to be a paramedic—to save people for a living—or maybe a paleontologist. Either way, she wants to learn to fly helicopters.
Despite my own tomboy roots (or perhaps because of them), I’ll admit there was a time when I tried to push her toward ballet lessons or the cheerleading squad.
Ellie told me, “No, I’d rather climb on someone’s roof or rescue their dog.
” I am buoyed by the knowledge that my kids will leave any realm they enter better than they found it. What more could a mother ask?
Sometimes I fantasize that Ellie and I will eventually run a therapeutic horse farm together, doing for other people what Ruth Menor’s Vinceremos once did for me and so many others.
And we may just pull that off. Not long ago, Robbie and I bought a forty-acre farm just outside of Perth.
Already, we’ve got three sheep and three hives of bees, and Robbie has constructed the Taj Mahal of chicken coops.
When I’m there, I wake up to the laughing sound of kookaburras and delight in watching kangaroos and emus making themselves at home right in our front yard.
Robbie’s next project: building me a pond with a little island in the center.
After that, we plan to convert an existing outbuilding that was once a quail hatchery into four horse stalls.
I may never be able to ride again because of my neck, but still, I know being around horses will do me good.
If you’ve read this far, I hope my story has moved you—to seek ways to free yourself from a bad situation, say, to stand up for someone else in need, or to simply reframe how you judge victims of sexual abuse.
Each one of us can make positive change.
I truly believe that. I hope for a world in which predators are punished, not protected; victims are treated with compassion, not shamed; and powerful people face the same consequences as anyone else.
I yearn, too, for a world in which perpetrators face more shame than their victims do and where anyone who’s been trafficked can confront their abusers when they are ready, no matter how much time has passed.
We don’t live in this world yet—I mean, seriously: Where are those videotapes the FBI confiscated from Epstein’s houses?
And why haven’t they led to the prosecution of any more abusers?
—but I believe we could someday. Imagining it is the first step.
In my mind, I hold a picture of a girl reaching out for help and easily finding it.
I picture a woman, too, who—having come to terms with her childhood pain—feels that it’s within her power to take action against those who hurt her.
If this book moves us even an inch closer to a reality like that—if it helps just one person—I will have achieved my goal.