Sitting in the ashes of this wreckage, I trembled. Alone. Feeling desperate. Not knowing where to go for some kind of wise counsel or help. Not knowing how people would respond. Penniless. Single after a near lifetime of married life. I was afraid. This was new territory for me and I had nobody to help chart this course. I didn’t know one other person who was the spouse of a pedophile. I needed help, but had nowhere to go!

The first few months after the sentencing of John are somewhat of a blur in my memory. If I hadn’t journaled, I doubt I would have remembered much at all. I remember thinking, “You have to pick yourself up and go to work. Face people. Face the facts. Face your new life. You have to do it. You’re walking alone now. Who’s going to help you? You have nobody.” Alone is perhaps the loneliest word of all.

We’d all like to think that others will come running to our rescue, but the reality is that doesn’t often happen. And, when it does, it’s most often short-lived. Foremost on my mind was the fact that I needed to keep the two youngest girls and myself in a house. It’s interesting to me as I look back in my journal, but never once did I doubt my ability to do this. Every now and then, you feel kind of proud of yourself, and this was one time I’m so glad that I didn’t allow my thoughts to go awry. Instead, I sat and thought. I sat and prayed. I took a pencil and paper out and wrote down every bill, and was determined some how some way to meet this financial challenge. I’ve always heard that the financial challenges in life are the easiest to overcome, and I found this to be true. Sure, it was hard taking on a mortgage, food, gas, electricity, fuel oil (we spent our first winter alone freezing — and I do mean freezing! I found out what it was like to be denied a month of credit for fuel oil. What a learning lesson that was!

After about eighteen months, with the help of two daughters who were an amazing help, the finances were figured out to the degree that we were okay. We ate a lot of peanut butter and jelly, but you know what? That was alright. We were together. We had a roof over our heads. And, we were beginning to find some inner strengths that had been hidden.

The hardest part and the most fearful part, perhaps, came from facing people after the sentencing. John’s prison time began around the same time as Jerry Sandusky’s. If you remember there was a lot of murmuring going on about Jerry’s wife. Did she know the abuse was going on in their home? Had she heard about the abuse in the showers? Didn’t she pick up on anything that clued her in on Jerry’s molesting children? Every time that topic came up I cringed. I still do. I still feel like I need to begin explaining and defending myself for not knowing. This is a horrible guilt that I’m working on. To this day, a decade later, I question things. Why didn’t I notice something more than odd behavior? Did my girls give me hints along the way? Was I living so far from reality that I couldn’t see what was happening? I was having so much trouble freeing myself from self-blame. Every time someone spoke to me I pictured them accusing me in some way. “Didn’t you know? I left my kids with you. Now I wish I never had!” Those thoughts roared through my mind like a semi-truck speeding without brakes. Night after night, I soaked my pillow blaming myself for not seeing and not wanting to face another person who “might” be accusing me of being a negligent mom and friend.

Fear is something that crept into my new life early on and all but immobilized me for a while. While I was able to get the physical things a bit organized such as the finances, I was far from getting myself in a place of some kind of peacefulness and strength. My life and my children’s lives were drastically changed by the actions of the man we all once loved and adored. Our lives would be forever altered by another person’s actions and that scared me to death. Because I now knew that not just “other children” had been molested, but some of “my own children” had been harmed in the most grievous ways, I was so afraid of what might happen next. How were my children handling this family crises? How were they facing their friends and acquaintances? This was not only bitterly sad, but this was an anguished embarrassment. This isn’t news that you like to share with the world. It’s shameful. It’s harrowing. It’s downright hard to have everything you ever believed in come unglued! Plus, I felt like the entire world’s eyes were on us — watching, waiting to see how we would travel through this miry mess of tragedy.

Fear of the unknown settled in my heart. I became physically ill. My blood pressure soared. I suffered from panic attacks. I had low to no energy. I became depressed. I was scared out of my mind that I’d say the wrong thing to the kids and it would trigger them or push them away from me. I withdrew from life for a while not knowing what to do. I think that I needed this time alone just to collect my wits. I had to find some way to gain back strength so that I could be some kind of help to my kids. I had to find some way to bring us together so that we wouldn’t fall away from one another. The burden was heavy. So very, very heavy. How many times I wished life would just go back to when I thought things were normal and happy and good!

Next time I will talk about the first step to getting a grip on fear. Fear is a nasty thing to live with. It really does penetrate every part of our lives if we don’t do something to stop it from escalating. If you find yourself in a fearful situation right now, please make sure you come back for the next blog. I think it will help you. I pray it will help you.

Thank you to every one of my readers, friends, and encouragers. You have helped me and my family tremendously on this journey back to life!

With much love,

Clara