The first time Kathleen Anderson was sexually abused she was just four years old. That memory remains, but over the years many other horrific ones were made as she was repeatedly abused by different persons. In an effort to escape, she searched for what she thought was love and became pregnant at the age of 14; by the time she was 18 years old, she had three children.
Though life has thrown boulders at her from all sides, Anderson persevered at times literally through blood, sweat and tears. Today she is at a stage where she has made peace with those painful experiences so much so that she has written about them; her biography is titled The Pain in my Smile.
Anderson, who now resides in the US, has been in Guyana for the last few weeks promoting her book which she hopes will help victims and survivors of rape, abuse and violence. She wants to help “wounded people realise there is hope – that it’s possible for the sun to shine again”.
There was a time, Anderson said, when she had attempted to take her life, but she is now a far way from there and has told her story to “empower struggling souls seemingly trapped in the quagmire of oppression.
“I realised that as I come across people, a number of people have shared some of my experiences … but they were scared to give voice to what they had experienced and what they were experiencing. Because I had reached a point in my journey where I was better able to deal with my situation as I had many years of counselling, I decided that this story has got to be told,” Anderson said in an interview with this newspaper.
She started writing some years and she believes her story of rape, abuse, being disenfranchised, being a part of a dysfunctional family is also the story of so many other people. Therefore, she has become the voice for those who, for whatever reason, are unable to speak their truth. The book was first published in 2014, but later had some more editing done and it was revised in 2018.
‘Very difficult’
“It’s a story that is very difficult for some to tell. It shouldn’t hurt to be a child and when you had your innocence taken from you at a very young age, it interferes with your self-esteem and it takes you to places you wouldn’t like to go… Especially when it was not one perpetrator, it was a series and you are wondering what it is about me that is attracting that kind of behaviour…,” Anderson shared.
Telling her story meant some of her relatives were not happy Anderson said not only she is not close to many of them, but some were involved in her abuse. She questioned why she should not tell a story that belongs to her.
“In the book you will find there is dysfunction in the family, there are all sorts of things going on in the family that people don’t want you to talk about. When you talk about these things it brings healing and you are liberating yourself,” she expounded.
She made it clear it is not for her to appease her relatives, it is for her to free herself from the clutches of those horrific memories which for many years had almost paralysed her. On her journey, she has had to forgive in order to be made whole, which was not a natural or easy process.
“We may not be able to coexist in the same place again, but I forgive you because the forgiveness is not for you it is for me because I am healing…,” she said, adding that by the time she was ready to tell her story she was independent and not bothered by people’s opinion as this did not serve her well.
More than helping herself, Anderson said, her story is about helping others and she likened her book to a mother giving birth to a child as it took her nine months while working full time and reading for a master’s, to write the book. She said the more she wrote, the more she had freedom and a release and she is not against those who may choose not to tell their stories, but she would not be hindered from helping people who need help.
Still a child
Anderson said she became a mother to the first of her three sons when she herself was still a child; she was 14. She was not in school and the man was about nine years her senior.
“I don’t know how to classify it because honestly it was just from one encounter I got pregnant… I was living at home with my mom and my stepfather who at the time was abusing me…,” she said.
She said she believed her older sister, who is now deceased, was also abused. She never spoke about it but her behaviour told the story.
Anderson said she told her mother what was happening, but she was not believed. Later, while she was on her journey to healing, Anderson said, she became very angry as she felt her mother had failed her. Her mom has been deceased for 12 years now, but prior to her death she lived with her daughter for 21 years and they at times had a very adversarial relationship.
“She was there to protect me and I questioned how come she was not protecting me and she took that person’s side over me and so I was left at the mercy. And then it was not one person it was several persons,” she shared.
Her first encounter was when she was invited to spend the day with a couple who were well known in the church. Reflecting, Anderson believed the wife knew what was happening as while
the husband spent a while with her in the bedroom committing the hideous act, the wife was supposedly in the kitchen cooking.
“You have a child in your home and you are not seeing the child nor your husband and you are not going to check to see what is happening?” she asked rhetorically.
Anderson said she believes her mother was also abused and as such it was difficult for her to confront what was happening to her children. Her stepfather, who is also deceased, was the father of her youngest sibling. Her mother had five children.
“It was a really hard journey for me. I was very bitter and very angry and it caused some not so nice behaviours. By the time 18, I was the mother of three children,” Anderson said.
She recalled that her mother had threatened them that if any of them got pregnant they would be put out of the home. So when she became pregnant, “all hell broke out. It was a very distressing and unhappy pregnancy and then I didn’t have the support.”
While the father of the child never denied him, he also did not support him and Anderson said it was an embarrassing situation.
“So here am I, a young teenager, pregnant, eight days from giving birth and I didn’t even have a pin…,” she recalled.
She was 15 years old when she became employed as a charwoman at the then Ministry of Transport and she left her son with her mother. All three of the men for whom she bore children were much older than her and it was later, through therapy, that she recognised that she was looking for her father with whom she never had a relationship.
The father of her last son was 25 years her senior, while the father of her second son was 12 years older than her. The father of her second child also did not support his son, and she recalled that when the baby was five months old her mother put her out.
“I was sitting on the steps and he [the baby father] had to pass to go to his house. He came home one night and he saw me sitting on the steps with him and he came out back and he said, ‘give me my child if you don’t have any place to live. I’ll take him to my parents and when your circumstances get better I’ll bring him back’. I never saw him until 16 years later,” she recalled. The child’s formative years were spent in Berbice.
Anderson said she had to make a choice to move in with the much older man, who was religious, as she had nowhere to live and believed it was the best option at the time. Again, she said, she was ”disappointed” as while she had somewhere to live the man was very promiscuous and even took other women into their home.
She then got a break to travel to Barbados and with the help of others managed to remain there as her mother was a Barbadian national.
Determined
Anderson said she was determined to have a better life and even though she was initially turned back at the Barbados airport on her second trip there, she returned shortly after as her papers were already being processed. Her sons were left with her mother and their fathers.
She lived in Barbados for a few years before moving to the US where she connected with her father, who surprisingly processed her papers and she became a legal citizen. In the meantime, Anderson said, she returned to school and she “did whatever job I could to survive because I know I had children back home that were depending on me…”
She was not afraid of hard work but at the back of her mind she always wanted to complete her education. She returned to high school and later enrolled in college. She eventually sent for her children and her mother. Her second son came later, and she described the experience as “traumatic” as his father had told him that she had abandoned him and was about to throw him under a bus when he saved him.
“And so he came filled with that anger… but we were able to work it out eventually… Even now, I wouldn’t say the relationship is 100 percent because as a result of not having a mother in his life he also had his own trauma. And you know that is why hurt people keep on hurting people, unless you address that hurt and that’s why I decided to write the book,” she said.
Anderson has associate’s and bachelor’s degrees in hospitality and a master’s in business administration with a focus on leadership. She recalled that initially she did “odds and ends” jobs until she became employed with the New York City Department of Education where she remained until she retired eight years ago.
Now 65 years old, she shares that it was her faith in God that sustained her through her difficulties and challenges. “That is what kept me going. He was my rock. He was my everything,” she said.
Anderson never married and she said she pledged not to have any more children. She now has a “reasonable” relationship with her siblings and she has four “delightful” grandchildren.
“I live alone, but I am not alone and I am not lonely because there is much to do. I do motivational speaking. There is always somebody on the phone with a situation to help, so I give back,” she said.
She also travels a lot, which is one of her hobbies. That, and spending her days helping people are enough to give her satisfaction.
“I thank God that I am where I am in my journey. I am not where I want to be because you know you always have to keep striving but I am very, very thankful that I am not where I was,” Anderson said.
