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from the repeated bouts of molestation I’d experienced. I wanted so badly to reach out and purge everything that had been locked inside my spirit, all the ugliness and all the shame. I was dying to tell my mother about the injustices I had faced, about feeling alone, about being scared. But I didn’t know how to.
    Unfortunately, I didn’t know how to articulate those deep feelings, so most of what I did say came out as yelling and was disrespectful. Sometimes I approached my mom with tears in my eyes after I got into a fight with one of my friends or was bullied, but her response was always the same. Time and time again she told me, “I don’t know how to do this, Pattie. My mom never talked to me, so I don’t know how to talk to you. Just talk to a guidance counselor or one of your friends’ moms. I love you, but I just can’t talk to you.”
    And that was that.
    Although my mom lacked in communication or affection, she excelled at performance. I can see now that her “love language” is “acts of service” ( The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman is one of my favorite books; read it to find out yours). That means she shows love by doing things for others.
    While I was growing up, Mom worked full-time in a factory. But she always came home and made time to cook for us, do laundry, get what we needed for school, make sure the house was in order, and provide what she could that we needed. (My mom still loves to do these things for me when I visit with her in Canada.)
    Today I can appreciate the backdrop behind my mom’s way of being, but as a teenager, the fact is, it hurt. I couldn’t approach her about things that were important to me. Like how I felt when my dad left; that was a big one. His leaving was traumatic. I didn’t understand what was happening, and I didn’t get an explanation. He was here one minute and gone the next.
    Because my mom didn’t acknowledge my feelings of confusion, I didn’t feel she was a safe place to use my voice. Whenever I would talk to her about something that was bothering me, I’d have the gnawing feeling I was more of a burden to her than simply a child who needed her mom. So I quickly decided it was better to leave her alone.
    Along the way I came to some pretty unhealthy conclusions: I wasn’t important. My feelings weren’t valid. My thoughts didn’t matter. So I learned how to cope with what I couldn’t handle on my own by stuffing it inside. I locked the most upsetting and traumatizing events in a place so deep, I hoped I’d never be able to dig them out.

    When I was in the eighth grade, I started hanging out with the wrong group of girls—the ones who were always getting in trouble for something. Stealing was our cheap thrill. We especially got a kick out of stealing ketchup chips and Zesty Cheese Doritos out of the school cafeteria. I know, big deal! (Wanna hear a really embarrassing secret between you and me? My friends and I called ourselves the Chipettes. How cheesy is that?)
    The six of us were big shots, rebels without a clue. We were joined at the hip and did everything together. We had slumber parties. We swapped clothes. We pined after cute boys. We complained about our parents. We shared our disdain for school. And, of course, we got off on our small-town criminal activity, like stealing chips and, when we were feeling super cocky, cheap red lipsticks from the local drugstore. Five of us also loved to sing and were involved with the school tour choir.
    One day the choir was scheduled to perform a concert at a huge mall in London, Ontario. People all over the mall—making their way through the food court, hustling in and out of department stores to rummage through clearance racks, and dragging reluctant husbands and whiny children up and down the escalators—would hear our melodic repertoire, like my all-time favorite, Chicago’s “You’re the Inspiration.” The five of us were excited about performing, but mostly we were psyched about