When Christine was 4 years old, she didn’t have words for what happened to her.
“I had been raped when I was 4 years old by my 58-year-old uncle,” said Christine, who requested that the Monitor not use her full name. “Within weeks my mother said, ‘Oh Christine, I guess I just don’t love you anymore.’ And I said, ‘why?’ and she said, ‘Oh, you know, you know.’ And that was it.”
But Christine didn’t know why.
“Even if I knew at the age the difference between boys and girls, this was a man and my brain could not even comprehend what had happened to me, and it just blocked it,” she said. “I thought that was the trauma of my childhood: to never understand why.”
But at 65, not only can she say the words, but she’s given voice to that little girl for whom no one spoke up. In doing so, she’s found not only forgiveness for those who’ve hurt her, but a way to help other survivors find their way out of the darkness.
One result of this process – an exhibition of beaded dolls titled Forbidden Forgiveness – will be on display at The Studio in Laconia starting Friday.
The muslin dolls, with their elaborately beaded hair, skillfully drawn faces and often brightly colored clothes, are not only the embodiments of the complex physical, psychological and emotional effects of rape, but the tools Christine used to find grace and healing in her own life.
“Any time a person can use creativity to heal from and work through a difficult experience, it gives hope to someone else who might be suffering, especially if they feel that there’s no outlet available,” said Melissa McCarthy, owner of The Studio. “Rape is such a hot-button topic right now; Christine has chosen to see the grace in healing and forgiving, chosen ‘survivor’ over ‘victim.’ Anyone viewing the dolls in Forbidden Forgiving will see how even the horror of rape can be transformed through art into a healing moment of grace.”
But getting there was a journey, often a painful one.
“My mother had not been a good mother,” Christine said. “She blamed me for being raped. . . . She blamed me for everything that was wrong in her life, and she was always after me.”
Christine said as a result, she was an anxious child, prone to breaking out in hives and raging insomnia. That is, until her father gave her, what she calls, the gift of God.
“He lived his life looking out for me, but he couldn’t be there every minute of the day,” Christine said. “My dad one night was rubbing my back while I was trying to get to sleep and said, ‘Christine, don’t you ever tell yourself that you are okay.’ And I said, ‘yeah, but nobody believes me.’ And he said, ‘but God does. God believes you. In fact I believe it’s God that’s telling you that you are okay.’ . . . My dad didn’t attach any religion to this God. . . . I think that my father gave me a sense of God without a religion attached, and I am so grateful, because I always had forgiving in my heart.”
That saved her more than once in her life, she said. It saved her after her teenage boyfriend raped her during a drunken black out. It saved her in college during the 1960s, when rape was something that happened with some regularity – as it did again to Christine – but was never spoken of. And again, when as a young woman, she was kidnapped and nearly sold into prostitution in Las Vegas, she said.
“I tried to commit suicide in my life four or five times,” she said. “And it was always my dad that appeared to me saying, ‘Christine, this is not the answer. What would your son do without you?’ And things like that, kept me alive.”
She also found an outlet through art and managed to carve out a successful career that included becoming an illustrator for a physics department in Madison, Wis., and as an illustrator for the space science department in Minneapolis tasked with designing little rocket ships that would fly into the aurora borealis to measure electromagnetic waves.
She was also a scientific illustrator in earth sciences at University of California – Riverside and an art director in Los Angeles, achieving the latter while also raising a son on her own.
Eventually wanting an antidote to Los Angeles, she moved to Vermont and opened up a studio in 6,500 square feet of a defunct diner. For years, she was a clay artist, though she never threw a pot. Rather, her pieces were drawings in clay.
About 10 years ago, her mother, who still lived in Madison, Wis., where Christine grew up, started slipping into dementia. Christine found herself going back and forth between Vermont and Wisconsin, a decision that led to her losing her studio and going broke, she said. But she continued to care for her mother. One day, Christine’s mother had a moment of dementia, slumped against a door.
“She looked at me and said, ‘Oh Christine, I guess I just don’t love you anymore,’ ”
Christine said. “And it shocked me because I had only thought I made up those words from when I was 4 years old, but here is my mother saying them precisely to me. It hit me again like a sledge hammer. Except, this time, I wasn’t a child.”
Christine looked at her mother and told her it was okay. She explained to her mother in that moment that she had lived her whole life without her love and had other mothers and big sisters who helped guide her.
Christine then repeated to her the stories her mother would tell about the hard life she had growing up on a farm, being too responsible from a young age, having a mother who was too busy for her, who died when she was 13 and a father forever changed by a massive stroke. Christine encouraged her mother to forgive them and to forgive herself. She told her mother it wasn’t her fault, just as the rape wasn’t Christine’s fault.
She then bundled her mother up and tucked her into bed.
“I almost hypnotized her to sleep, I told her she would sleep deeply tonight, that tonight she wouldn’t wander, and that we didn’t have to talk about anything the next day if she didn’t want to,” Christine recalled.
The next day, in a moment of clarity, her mother told Christine how much she respected her and thanked her for giving her new eyes on her own life.
“She lived for one more year, and we had in that one year a more-than-special relationship,” Christine said. “And I know that if I hadn’t forgiven her, we would never have had that beautiful moment together.”
While forgiving her mother was a giant step, the healing process has continued through Christine’s work. Last year, while working on a project for an art class she was taking at Harvard, she invented her beaded dolls.
One of the assignments was to put words onto a piece of art. One of her classmates said something to the effect of, “oh yes, the words my mother used to always say to me.” This of course, had a different meaning for Christine given the history with her mother, and it spoke to Christine. She took a trip to a craft store where she found small, blank, muslin dolls. Perfect, she thought.
“I thought of how I could make a doll like me at age 4 when my mom started her tirade,” she said.
She used bright orange paper to make the hair, an homage to her Irish grandmother. Next, she wrote out the ugly words her mother would say to her, or the things she believed about herself after the rapes on little pieces of brightly covered paper that she fashioned into a skirt for one of the dolls. She then fashioned a bright pink cummerbund on which she wrote in bold letters with loud exclamation points “No!”
She made one right after the next, some reflecting the blows she took at the hands of people in her life or time in the corporate world. The dolls seemed to open the flood gates.
Christine, who lives in Northfield and works under the name MerryWoman, is in the process of developing a screenplay and book titled Grace After Rape, which explore the psychological, physiological and physical effects of rape. Both the film and book will offer help to survivors on how to heal.
Further, she’s developing a blog and Facebook community, also Grace After Rape, where victims can anonymously publish their stories and a second Facebook page called Grace Before Rape, where she’ll publish articles relating to rape, as well as ways women and men can protect themselves against rape.
“I took a self-defense class in my 30s called Below the Belt and that’s when the rapes stopped,” she said. “I encourage people to take self-defense classes, whether it’s Tae Kwon Do or Jiu Jitsu; they should know how to protect themselves.”
Finally, in addition to planning more exhibitions and public talks about her experiences, Christine is also working on a children’s book, written in a child’s language meant for young rape survivors. The books will come with a blank muslin doll where the child can express his or her own distress as a method of healing.
“That’s why I’m so grateful that I’ve lived,” Christine said. “Because now that I am 65, I can speak out about this. I can gather the victims voices so they can be heard.”
Forbidden Forgiveness will open Friday from 5 to 7 p.m., with a talk from the artist at 6 p.m. at The Studio, 598 Main St., Laconia. It will run through Sept. 16.