Tag Archives: Elizabeth di Grazia

WHEN LOVE MEANT CHOOSING MYSELF

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Crystel walked left on the beach. I walked right. We were done with each other for the day. Discovering the wonders of El Paredon, on Guatemala’s Pacific coast, would be done alone. I was not willing to follow her, and she was not willing to follow me. The blue ocean was anything but quiet. It roared with its own intensity, a restless turbulence wrestling against itself. Beyond the break point, surfers waited. Under my feet, the striking black volcanic sand glimmered with heat and stretched as far as I could see. Tall palms and weathered beach huts dotted the coast.

Earlier that morning at the surfboard rental hut, she had said it again, sharp and familiar, “You don’t have to talk for me.” This had become her refrain at twenty-one years old. I’d thrown up my hands, “I was just asking which board might be easier for you to surf with.” This was who we were now. Crystel couldn’t let me parent, and I couldn’t stop being her parent.

Eventually, we would circle back. We always did.

I walked toward a tangle of driftwood and chose it as my turnaround point. Somewhere between that black sand and the roaring ocean, the joy of being with her returned.

At a beachside restaurant, wooden tables were planted right into the sand. A thatched roof swayed gently above, letting the warm air carry the sound of waves through the open sides. Surfboards leaned in a tidy stack nearby. Backpackers drifted in and out: sunburned, barefoot, unhurried. Mellow music floated from a speaker behind the bar. I texted Crystel the name of the place. This time, she didn’t ghost me. When the message bubble appeared with her reply, I felt surprise first then thrill. We weren’t done with each other after all.

The next morning, I brought her a smoothie and pastry in bed. I’d been up for hours, already through my own breakfast, the typical Guatemalan spread of eggs, refried beans, plantains, tortillas, fruit and endless coffee. I lounged beside her considering our air-conditioned room. It was the exact opposite of our homestay, almost unsettling pristine. It felt new, as if someone had built it yesterday and aired it out just for us. The walls were off-white. No pictures. No nails or hooks. No sign that anyone had ever stayed here before. Fresh white towels lay folded in perfect stacks. Crystel was curled up in starched sheets, a quiet bundle in a bed that felt too clean to be real.

There was no furniture. Just the bed, the air-conditioning, and Spanish music drifting from the TV.

I had gotten what I asked for, but would it work? Would four days of salt air, sun, rest, and a spotless hotel room loosen the grip of the PTSD that held tight beneath my ribs? Would this respite from dirt, crumbling sheetrock, clutter, and questionable bedding reset my body?

At last, I had a night of sleep, my body no longer on high alert, scanning for danger. I slept, truly slept. Before we left our homestay, I folded my scratchy blankets and placed the dingy sheets beside the washer, hoping a simple wash would be enough and that somehow, I could carry this newfound tranquility forward.

Our push-pull relationship momentarily eased. From the beach, I watched Crystel battle the surf, fighting against the relentless beach break. Waves slammed in from all directions, crashing into each other. Even mounting her board was a struggle. Still, she kept at it, and ultimately, like I knew it would, determination pulled her through. We strolled the dusty streets of El Paredon, followed her restaurant recommendations, and watched the sun go down side by side.

In the taxi back to our homestay, my stomach tightened. Four and a half hours ahead of us. It started as a cringe then expanded into worry. Can I do this? Will this time away be enough? I wanted it to be. I wanted what Crystel wanted, an authentic Guatemalan home, language immersion, community, conversations around the table. But the farther we drove the more numbness seeped in. That old childhood response, the one my body learned when danger was close. Suddenly, I wasn’t sure any length of time away would be enough. As the landscape shifted outside the window, I could feel my peace slipping away.

“I put your washed bedding back on the bed,” said Maria. She pulled me in for a grandmotherly hug. A bowl of warm soup and tortillas waited for us on the table.

I went to find Crystel.

“Mama Beth,” she whispered, “I think the little boy slept in my bed while we were gone. Stuff is moved around.”

“Does that bother you?”

“No. I just ignore it. I don’t think about it.”

Crayola markings covered the wall. This was probably his room when there were no guests. When we arrived, he likely slept with his parents. I had asked Crystel before we left for El Paredon if she’d like her sheets washed too. She had declined. “I just don’t think about it,” she repeated.

That night, I spread my washed sheet back over the mattress, though it still looked unclean like it had held on to someone else’s sleep. Before I layered the heavy wool blankets, I inspected the sheet closely. I searched for any sign of fleas. If I saw a patchy shadow, I pressed my finger to it to see if it moved. On one faded spot, I found the shell of a bug, small as a seed, light as paper still clinging to the fabric.

I crawled into my extra-large sleep sack, long enough to swallow my whole body and still fold over the pillow. I slid into it feet-first and pulled it up past my shoulders. The top flap had an extra panel, meant to tuck over a pillow, but I used it like a barrier, a clean layer between me and whatever might be hiding in the bedding. I cinched the hood around my neck and pulled the pillow flap across my face like a shield. It wasn’t just something to sleep in. It was something to hide in.

Sleep would not come. My body stayed alert. Racing. Listening. Braced for danger. It felt like being sixteen again, waiting for the fight in my parents’ bedroom to turn violent. There was no fighting in this house, but the clutter, dirt and disarray were enough. They carried me back in time.

“I should be able to do this,” I kept telling myself.
“It’s not so bad.”
“I can handle it.”

But those were the exact words I used to survive my childhood. Back then, I had no choice.

Here I did. I wasn’t the abused girl anymore. I could choose differently now.

That realization changed everything.

The next morning, before breakfast, I started researching hotels with kitchenettes. My worry about the homestay family losing money faded, our stay had already been paid. Jody supported me leaving, she had listened to my tears too many times. I just didn’t want to disappoint Crystel. I had let her lead our days, pick restaurants, navigate cobblestone streets, but this choice was mine. I didn’t need to keep trying to make this work.

I made the reservation, and instantly, the guilt arrived. It felt like I was going to get in trouble, really in trouble. As if someone might hit me, punish me for speaking up. A part of me felt like I’d told on someone. Betrayed them. What would happen now? Would they stop talking to me? Reject me? A bad thing was coming, I could feel it.

This had happened before.

When I reported the incest in my family to the police, the same thoughts spiraled through me, What will they say? What will they do to me? Who will I lose? And all those fears came true. They did reject me. They did ostracize me. I already knew this terrain, the ground where doing the right thing still carries a cost. I’d paid this price before, and my body remembered it before my mind did.

When I told Crystel I had made a hotel reservation for us her face fell. And then I had to ask her to tell the family we wouldn’t be living there.

Punishment didn’t come. A reflex older than motherhood. Maria gathered us in for a family photo, her, her daughter, her son-in-law, their five-year-old son, and us. Crystel and I were folded seamlessly into their circle. Grief, relief, and tears rose up all at once. Once again, I was leaving family.

Of course, our last breakfast at the homestay was Crystel’s “BEST EVER” and she was slow to meet me out front.

At sixty-five, I had finally learned that caring for my mental health was not selfish, it was necessary. I honored myself, and in doing so, I preserved the part of me that could love my daughter fully.

Crystel and I stepped forward, not perfectly, but together. I couldn’t stop the waves, inside or out, but I could decide how I met them.

El Paredon sunset

SAD TIGER, My Coffee Table Book

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Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno, sits prominently displayed on my coffee table. It’s not an illustration book of art, travel, or architecture. It’s not a photo book of exotic animals.

Sad Tiger is a powerful memoir that weaves Neige Sinno’s memory of sexual abuse and reflects upon literary works by authors who were abused and authors who wrote about abuse.

It’s the most complete book about abuse that I have read. It’s my story. My all-embracing 4-year-old, 9-year-old, teenager, and adult self-story.

Underlined sentences mark the early pages, but soon it became expeditious for me to place a vertical line in the margins highlighting entire passages. When I had an especially strong reaction to a passage, my vertical line became an elongated bold exclamation mark.  

Emotion would build in me, and I’d write in the margin. There was no order or plan for my discourse. A conversation with myself, my mother, a memory would drive me to write in the top, sides, and bottom margins. Words would be vertical, horizontal or slanted, near the author’s words that elicited the feelings.

I didn’t start out knowing that this book was going to be displayed on my coffee table. I didn’t intend to write or make any notations in the author’s memoir.

It was instinctive, like breathing. On the first paragraph I underlined, “Even if you’ve not experienced it, the traumatic amnesia, the bewilderment, the silence of the victim is something we can all imagine or think we can.”

In the second paragraph, when she wrote about the perpetrator’s assumed experience, I asked, Really that’s what it was like?

Her words rang true.  “… And after it’s over, getting dressed, going back to family life as if nothing had happened. And once the madness has taken hold, doing it again, doing it again and again, for years.”

I was in awe, too, that my family could go on as if nothing had happened. The sexual abuse, the violence, the awful words said quietly, shouted, or screamed. Survival was day by day, moment by moment. Wary and alert, vigilance didn’t stop the abuse. I could never escape but I could steel my body to not feel when it came. Even today, 51 years later, I can easily recall my stomach dropping and my impending sense of dread when I realized that I was trapped in a car in the middle of winter on a remote road. My older brother forced me to the back seat. We were supposed to be going to my beloved Aunt’s house—the reason I agreed that I would ride along. A gunshot sounded. No, I realized, with his weight pushing down on me, it was a tree limb snapping from the extreme cold. I don’t even remember if we made it to my aunt’s or what we did once we arrived.

I hear my brothers’ saying, Why are you still writing about this? (As if we were ever really going to have a conversation about their assaults). I answer, Fuck you. It’s mine to write. You shouldn’t have fucking raped me if you didn’t want me to write about it.

“A person rapes in order to exist,” I underlined. I have long thought that my oldest brothers raped me to have some semblance of power in the family. A response to the chaos of our life with our alcoholic father, our mother, and the on-going bedlam of being farm poor with 11 other siblings. Calamity struck every few years. Our barn burnt down when I was in 3rd grade. A few years later, our house burnt down. It wasn’t if something was going to happen, it was always when. My belief was they raped me because they could.

I pressed pen to paper, Where were you, Mother? How could you not know? I wish someone had saved me! I wish someone cared enough. Was brave enough. Had the courage to confront what was easily seen.

In the end, I saved myself and my three younger sisters. Like the author, I reported the abuse to the police when I was 19. I was afraid that my mother wouldn’t protect them, the same as she didn’t protect me. I would never have forgiven myself if I allowed it to happen to my sisters. I was no longer at home, mothering them, protecting them.

And like Sinno, I am drawn towards books written by survivors. She says:

“Many books are published every year by survivors. Mostly fiction. Whenever I come across one, I always like to flip through it. Some are well written, some not. Either way I read them with the same eye. I am looking for a description of the facts. I want to know exactly what he did, how many times, where, what he said, and so on.” Same, I wrote in the margin.

I came across her book, Sad Tiger, in The New York Times book review section, May 2025. Sinno has said that Sad Tiger was written “out of necessity”, as an act of survival and understanding. Writing it was a way to reclaim her own story – to move from being the “object” of violence to the “subject” who names it.

House of Fire: A Story of Love, Courage, and Transformation is a book that I had to write. The sexual abuse that happened to me isn’t me. It was done to me. It doesn’t define me. With writing House of Fire and telling my story, I brought the truth into the light and claimed my freedom. I cut the cord that bound me to my family and found me.

Keeping quiet about abuse lets abusers win and minimizes your own life. Says, I’m not important. I’m not as important as the abuser. As the pedophile.

Fuck you, I say.

I love my life. There’s a deep peace in sitting on my deck, listening to chimes as leaves whisper and clouds float through the blue sky. I am in the moment, knowing my truth, living my truth, and speaking my truth.

I’m immensely proud of who I am. Who I always was. A fighter with a belief in myself.

I don’t write so that the abuse disappears. It will never disappear. It’s in my bones. My thoughts. My world. My very cells.  

An elongated bold exclamation mark highlights one of the author’s final sentences, “Like so many others I was raped, I was defiled and betrayed at an age when all you have is trust, and yet I grew up to become an adult who has not raped or defiled or betrayed another person in return.”

Same. With my wife, I’ve raised two children to adulthood. Slowly, intentionally, I made my body mine again. For so long my body was numb to pain and my tears stayed locked away. Now they flow easily. That is the work of love.

I have a coffee book that’s all about me, my travels, my journey, and it sits next to mine.

I Like to Laugh

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Valentine’s Day dance

I like to laugh. Uproariously. I like to banter. When words or actions touch my heart, I like to cry. I savor conversations that lead me to your spirit and you to mine. I want to feel safe.

Jody and I found a welcoming community where we belong. Our spirits, the essence of who we are, no longer need to be hidden. Our sense of being different has melted away. We fit.

On our arrival, several Minnesotans stopped by our RV lot, gave us a dern-tootin’, you betcha Minnesooota hello. “Dun-chya-no, dere’s a dance dis evening at the clubhouse. Yah. Yah. You wanna come wid?”

Shortly after we met a lady walking her dog. After chatting, we realized we had found ourselves a dog sitter.

Winter games, one week of competitive fun play, started the day after our arrival. Variations of ping pong, billiards, shuffleboard, bocce ball, corn hole, mind games and kids’ games kept us busy from morning to night. Over 120 community members participated. All organized by volunteers.

The Resort encompasses fifty acres and features 278 homes and RV lots. Many overlook freshwater lakes, conservation areas and preserves.

What’s not to like?

The Resort is a predominately lesbian, gated community.

I wondered what our son and daughter would think of us owning an RV lot here. Would they feel welcomed? Would friends, relatives, nieces and nephews, want to visit? How would I feel living 24/7 in a community of women? Was I essentially gating myself from the outside ‘real’ world? Was I labeling myself a lesbian? (I hate labels).

These questions bothered me. I listened to my body. Paid attention to how I felt when joining activities, walking the dogs, and visiting residents. Jody and I discussed on many occasions the path that brought us here.

What I like most about The Resort is the feeling of acceptance regardless of age, body size, clothes style, or how you look. Friendliness awaits as soon as you step out of your house or RV. Waving Hi, saying hello, is natural and expected. The Resort is safe. I can be myself. I can have meaningful conversations.

My unease finally came to rest when I determined that Jody and I did well for ourselves. The Resort is a wonderful resting place for our spirits. We enjoy the camaraderie and budding friendships. What matters most is that it is a place for us.  It’s a home where we are comfortable and laugh often.

Are You My Mother?

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A visit to the Everglades. Alligator mother.

“Where is my mother?” the baby bird asked.

I will go and look for her,” he said.

So away he went.

He did not know what his mother looked like.

Where he would find her.

This popular children’s story speaks of the importance of belonging, finding your tribe, your people. The kitten, hen, dog, cow, were not his mother so the little bird went on. The boat, plane, and snorting steam shovel were not his mother.

Jody and I started our RV adventure on September 30, 2024. Along the way, we asked ourselves the question, “Are you, my mother?”

Our search for belonging, for community.

Perhaps it’s because 2024/2025 are political years. Perhaps it’s because we are a married couple. Perhaps it’s the insular nature of an RV park.

The answer continually echoed: we don’t belong here.

We didn’t find one couple or one person in the 210-site park we could share ourselves with.

Instead, we escaped the park in our RV to take in long breaths at the ocean. In November, I flew to Texas to buy a car, and drove it back to Florida to increase our ability to leave the RV park.

Once our search started, we decided that even though the park was beautiful and the folks friendly that it was more important to have a feeling of acceptance and inclusion.

Inching ever closer, Jody and I have given notice at our RV park and are moving to a community in Fort Myers on Saturday.

It’s important to not settle. Not try to fit in. To trust ourselves. Be proud of who we are.

 

RVing Mishaps Along the Way

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“You don’t have to tell people about this,” Jody said. I agreed.

No one needed to know that we drove into a car wash knocking our air conditioner off its frame. Our 29 ft. Class A motorhome didn’t fit. This was something Jody and I were never going to do—drive into a car wash with our RV. Immediately, we knew we made a mistake when we heard a loud “Clunk”. After we both screamed, I slowly backed out of the car wash. Jody inspected the ceiling of our RV and could see daylight. This was not going to be an easy fix.

Belonging to well over 20 RV websites: RV Lifestyle, RV Maintenance – Repair & Remodeling Group, RVing with Dogs, RV Traveling with Cats, Winnebago Motorhome Repair, 50 and Over RV’ers, 60 and Over RV’ers, Full Time RV Living, RV Group for Beginners, RV Owners Helping RV Owners and many more, we were knowledgeable and aware of the hazards. We discussed horror stories.

For gosh sakes, we had even gone to a weeklong RV class.

There was a sign at the car wash that said RV WASH. We didn’t look closely enough to see that the arrow was pointing to the OUTSIDE of the bay.

There have been other mishaps.

I trust my mirrors. They don’t lie. I don’t need to see directly behind our RV. I use my side mirrors effectively. Backing all 29 ft. into my cousin’s driveway with him guiding me, I forgot that we had our E-bikes on the hitch. I dented the right corner of his car with the E-bikes. Ooops.

Jody and I have learned that she should be on the phone directing me with her shrieks and yells while I am driving out of or into parking spots. My cousin’s “STOP” is so much more mellow than Jody’s. I know her nuances, her breathing, her certain shrillness.

Jody’s role is to be the fixer. She handled getting the air conditioner repaired. When an exterior storage compartment was damaged due to an object flying off a semi on the freeway, she ordered the part from Winnebago and will oversee the replacement. She diagnosed a leak in our bathroom shower and ran after an RV serviceman in a KOA to get it repaired. Our backup camera is now working because of her efforts.

My role is to clean the grey and black waste tanks weekly.

It’s been three months since we’ve left Minnesota in our RV. We’ve learned that we can live together in a tight space. And, if something breaks or gets damaged, we will fix it same as if you fall over in a chair, you don’t stay down. You get up, find the humor, and carry on.