Our Guestblogger today is Melinda Warshaw, an adoptee in a closed domestic adoption. She is active in adoption law reform in NY, and also the regional coordinator for Westchester for Unsealed Initiative to pass a bill of adoptee rights in NY. Melinda has two sons aged thirty and twenty-eight. This is the autobiography of her search for her lost self as an adoptee in a closed adoption. We are honored that she has given us the opportunity to post her manuscript on our website. The manuscript will be presented in chapters twice a week – Monday and Friday.

 © 2006 All rights reserved

Melinda A. Warshaw  

Chapter Six: Secrets (continued from here)

I believed him. He knew Darin and I were afraid of her. Dirty dancing nude for him was fun at first. The next time we went into the woods, he brought the girl next door. “Bean show Jane how you dance. Remember what I said I would do if you don’t.”

I began my dance.

“Take off your clothes. Now do a strip tease and stick twigs up there between your legs.”

I gyrated around until the tears began streaming down my cheeks as he had me in his total control. “Please stop,” I sobbed.

He and the neighbor girl laughed and threw my clothes up in a tree leaving me there shaking, naked and alone deep in the woods. I retrieved my clothes from the tree with a long stick, put them back on and followed the path home pretending like nothing happened even though I was trembling and in shock.

“Where did you get all those chigger bites and those bruises?” asked Joy during my nightly bath.

“Outside playing,” I told her.

What a good actress I had become! I hid the abuse and continued to appear like nothing was out of the ordinary in my life. Playing my flute in the band and orchestra lifted me out of my fears and totally wiped away all my fears and sad thoughts. Music gave me pleasure and a natural high. I performed the classical piece Pipes of Pan from memory perfectly for the elementary school judges, but I was really the pied piper playing in a dark and ghostly realm.

The goings on with Rob had everything to do with my sucking my thumb until I was twelve and locking my door at night. Rob’s abuse was the reason why practicing for my ballet recital became so traumatic for me. During dress rehearsal all the ballerinas gathered in a circle passing a pink piggy bank around to music. The moment the music stopped, whoever was holding the bank had to perform the recital alone in front of everyone. The music stopped and I was holding the little pink piggy. I stood there, frozen consumed by a flashback of Rob torturing me in the woods and stripping for him, panicked and ran out of the room to roll up in the fetal position on the floor out of the sight of all the parents and the ballerinas sobbing uncontrollably. The teacher and Mother had no idea why I was so upset. They thought something was emotionally wrong with me as an adoptee, and yet when the head ballerina was sick for the performance a week later at The Dayton Art Institute, I took her place on the stage and miraculously performed the dance perfectly.

I was so mad at Rob for abusing me. I waited until I knew he was in Darin’s room one night, filled a glass full of my urine, knocked on the bedroom door and without looking threw the warm liquid into Darin’s face.

“Oh no, I thought you were Rob! I’m so sorry, Darin. Please don’t tell Mother. Where is he?” I asked my little brother.

Image Credit: flickr