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"I thought about the tattoo for a year or so before I booked the appointment. It was going to be a bird, and it would be on my left arm. A bird to signify hope, joy, a rising; my left arm because it&amp;amp;#8217;s weaker, shadow to the sun of my stronger right. The bird would remind me that pain fades, sorrow passes. When I got stuck imagining what it would be like to slice open the pale loaf of my forearm, there it would be&amp;amp;#8212;inked above my wrist, across that narrow blue-and-white highway of tendon and vein&amp;amp;#8212;a talisman to keep me from harm. I needed it to remind me that I would be OK. Because I wasn&amp;amp;#8217;t sure things would turn out that way. I don&amp;amp;#8217;t like the word molested for what my grandfather did. It sounds mosquitolike: small and annoying. Infested is more apt; it implies something that multiplies, thickens, something that inhabits you in ways not readily apparent to an untrained eye. My grandfather was a judge who had been in the FBI. My mother called him Daddy and bought him shirts. Summers and holidays, she brought my two sisters, Katie and Molly, and me to stay in his old, white house. When we went to St. Mary&amp;amp;#8217;s on Sundays, he wore a suit and we wore floral dresses; everybody knew him. Everybody said, &amp;amp;#8220;What beautiful granddaughters.&amp;amp;#8221; On the last leg of our trips to our grandfather&amp;amp;#8217;s house, we&amp;amp;#8217;d always stop for lunch, usually at the Dutch Pantry; there was a poem about a bird on their place mats that won you a free meal if you were 12 or under and you learned it by heart, and I had learned it by heart. The Distelfink&amp;amp;#8217;s a cheerful bird/As golden as the sun&amp;amp;#8212; I would trace the yellow bird on the place mat with my fingertip and repeat the lines in my head. Good luck and happiness he&amp;amp;#8217;ll bring/As he has always done. Every summer it was the same. My mother would look at us from across the table and ask who was going to sleep in Poppie&amp;amp;#8217;s room. &amp;amp;#8220;He smokes in the middle of the night,&amp;amp;#8221; I&amp;amp;#8217;d tell her. &amp;amp;#8220;We can&amp;amp;#8217;t breathe.&amp;amp;#8221; &amp;amp;#8220;He snores,&amp;amp;#8221; my sister Molly would say. &amp;amp;#8220;It&amp;amp;#8217;s impossible to sleep.&amp;amp;#8221; Sometimes my mother would be angry. &amp;amp;#8220;I guess family doesn&amp;amp;#8217;t mean what it used to anymore.&amp;amp;#8221; Sometimes she&amp;amp;#8217;d cry. &amp;amp;#8220;I&amp;amp;#8217;m exhausted. I&amp;amp;#8217;m exhausted, and you can&amp;amp;#8217;t do one simple thing for me.&amp;amp;#8221; She&amp;amp;#8217;d tell us how lonely our grandfather was and that we should think of his feelings for once. Because my mother was afraid to sleep alone, she would take my baby sister, Katie, to bed with her in a bedroom connected to my grandfather&amp;amp;#8217;s by a dusty, screened-in porch. Katie could sleep with the light on so my mother could read all night; plus she took up the least space in the narrow twin bed. &amp;amp;#8220;Poppie loves you girls,&amp;amp;#8221; my mother always said. She&amp;amp;#8217;d leave it at that, leave it to us. We didn&amp;amp;#8217;t want her to be sad. So Molly and I took turns: one night me, one night her, in the room with the black telephone and the pink bedspreads and the picture of Jesus on the wall and the cherry of my grandfather&amp;amp;#8217;s cigarette in the dark. In the booth at the Dutch Pantry, my fingertip traced the outline of the sunshine yellow bird, a bird with no feathers, a paper bird that could never fly away. A few months before my thirtieth birthday, I decided to get the bird tattoo. First, I went to the library. Being surrounded by books lifts my spirits. As a kid, I used to take my favorites from my shelf and line them up in a circle around my bed. Someone may cross the circle, I thought, and hurt me anyway, but then that person is cursed forever. He&amp;amp;#8217;ll bring the curse down on his head, and there will be nothing he can do to escape. Now I sat on the floor in the library stacks and read about bird lore: the raven or crow is often portrayed as a trickster; kites and gulls are the souls of dead fishermen who remain to haunt the shore. I decided I liked swallows. I remember reading that clergy in medieval Europe called them &amp;amp;#8220;witch chicks&amp;amp;#8221; because of their forked tails, but that country folk considered them sacred. I figured the witches were probably medicine women, wise crones who knew about curses. They would have put a hex on my grandfather that made all his parts fall off, and sealed his eyes and mouth shut. A witch would understand the way I was burned by his wickedness, how pieces of me withered into ash and blew away. A witch would be the mother I needed and didn&amp;amp;#8217;t have, a fierce mother who would have delivered me from evil. My grandfather&amp;amp;#8217;s abuse started when I turned six. I had a sunbonnet and a bright blond pixie haircut. I already loved to read. That summer I was working my way through the Little House series. My grandfather smelled like Ivory soap and Camel unfiltereds. You could see the skull through his head, even then, before emphysema wasted him away. He wore plaid Bermuda shorts and penguin or alligator shirts. Molly and I fought over who had to sleep in his room. I felt terrible about it. I was 16 months older; I was the bold one, the bossy chatterbox who wrote plays and directed them on a makeshift backyard stage. Molly was so shy she cried when people sang &amp;amp;#8220;Happy Birthday&amp;amp;#8221; to her. But I still made her go in sometimes. He didn&amp;amp;#8217;t do anything right when you got in bed. Usually the grown-ups were still downstairs talking or playing Risk. You fell asleep to the rise and fall of voices, squeak and slam of the screen door, creak of the stairs, buzz of his electric toothbrush. Then his hands, brown and hard as roots, were on your back, rubbing circles through your cotton nightgown. &amp;amp;#8220;Wake up, little girl, wake up.&amp;amp;#8221; And when you were awake but not really awake, because the more awake you were the more real it was&amp;amp;#8212;better to be having a bad dream&amp;amp;#8212;he pulled your head close. Even his skin breathed smoke. &amp;amp;#8220;In your mouth. You know how I showed you.&amp;amp;#8221; Your face stretched into the mask of a girl who didn&amp;amp;#8217;t exist, holes for eyes and nose, wet with snot and tears, jaw broken like a stepped-on toy. He growled and breathed like a goblin. Afterward, told you to wash your face. Lit a cigarette. You, curled shrimplike; he, splayed like a spider, exhaling smoke into the dark. Your mother lay in the next room, reading one of her thick books, twisting a lock of her hair and not listening to the sounds you made. She had a bald spot behind her right ear where she couldn&amp;amp;#8217;t stop herself pulling and pulling. She just couldn&amp;amp;#8217;t stop. It was January when I got the tattoo&amp;amp;#8212;one of those frigid Chicago days when the street grit gets on your hair and skin and you track it all over the floors. I brought Kim, the tattoo artist, a Xeroxed illustration from a birding book, and she did some drawings. She had me lay my arm palm up on a Naugahyde rest as if she were going to draw blood. She took pieces of the tattoo machine out of plastic packets and put them together, fastening a rubber band around the whole contraption. She poured the ink, thick like paint, into little paper containers, like the ones you pump ketchup into at McDonald&amp;amp;#8217;s, lined up on the countertop and held in place with pea-sized lumps of Vaseline. She pressed the foot pedal, and the needles buzzed to life. &amp;amp;#8220;OK,&amp;amp;#8221; she said. &amp;amp;#8220;Ready?&amp;amp;#8221; When I was 11 my grandfather called me into the den, where he was watching a baseball game. He reached his hand into the leg of my shorts and pushed his fingers into me for the last time. Then he told me to bring him a beer. In the weeks, months, years after the abuse ended, I did ordinary things. But it was with me all the time. I put away the pictures and feelings from that time in my life in a drawer in my mind. I got straight A&amp;amp;#8217;s; read book after book. The thump of knobbed fingers across the nape of my neck. I auditioned for high school musicals; lifeguarded at our neighborhood pool. My sister&amp;amp;#8217;s face, crumpled and wet with tears. I suntanned; made out with boys. I went to college. To Europe. Twisted nightgown; stubble-scraped skin. No air. No air at all. I lost my virginity. Fell in love. Infested. It was with me all the time. The needle buzzed like a dentist&amp;amp;#8217;s drill. The swallow appeared, first the black outline ringed with red, then the colors like a tiny paint-by-numbers. Kim&amp;amp;#8217;s head bowed over the machine. Blood droplets oozed through the color. The tattoo swelled weltlike and sore above the surrounding skin. Adrenaline rippled through me, or endorphins, whatever pain brings on. I felt intoxicated. Ninety minutes later I had a tattoo I would carry with me for the rest of my life. Only 90 minutes for everything to irrevocably change. The truth is, I already knew things can irrevocably change much faster than that. One minute, a few seconds, even, can change your life forever. At least this was pain I chose. Still, I was astonished at myself. The whole thing felt surreal&amp;amp;#8212;unbelievable, in fact, like my grandfather&amp;amp;#8217;s nighttime brutality. I&amp;amp;#8217;m not a tattoo person; I grew up in the suburbs. I&amp;amp;#8217;ve never even had a crazy haircut. Kim placed hot-pink Saran wrap on the tattoo, then taped white gauze over that from my wrist to halfway up my arm. The bandage transfixed me. That&amp;amp;#8217;s the bandage I would have, I thought, if I&amp;amp;#8217;d tried to kill myself. If, instead of the delicate freckling of tattoo-needled drops, I had razored a thick red line and someone had saved me before all the blood flowed away&amp;amp;#8212;that&amp;amp;#8217;s how my bandage would look. I had expected to feel strong and brave and cool after the tattoo. But the bandage threw me. I felt wounded and weak. Outside it was cold and dark and there was no one to take care of me and I was too old for that anyway. I got home and fell apart. I just wailed. I hunched on the bathroom floor. I had painted the walls a brilliant shade of blue: It was like being underwater. I lay on the tiles like I was drunk or sick, pounded by sadness and regret. The tattoo was a mistake. It was just going to remind me how messed up I was all the time, every day. I couldn&amp;amp;#8217;t change anything, couldn&amp;amp;#8217;t fix anything, couldn&amp;amp;#8217;t get over anything. I had struggled with thoughts of suicide since sophomore year in college, when they first crept up on me like fog. Throughout my twenties I&amp;amp;#8217;d go for a while with things being OK, and then something would happen&amp;amp;#8212;a setback, a breakup, a loss&amp;amp;#8212;and I&amp;amp;#8217;d be back in the fog, everything warped and shivering and wet and nothing to hold on to. I worked on it, good student that I was. I read the books, I journaled, I saw a string of therapists. &amp;amp;#8220;Call me if you are making a plan,&amp;amp;#8221; is what they always said. &amp;amp;#8220;How intrusive are the thoughts, on a scale of 1 to 10? Have you thought about how you would do it?&amp;amp;#8221; Would I get a hotel room? Would I go into the woods? I worried about traumatizing the person who&amp;amp;#8217;d find me, the unanswered questions I would leave in my wake. I tried not to romanticize it, but to think seriously of the way it would be. Would I balk? What if the pain didn&amp;amp;#8217;t go away? In a way I was used to dying. Those nights in his room, when my grandfather circled like a shark, I swam away, up and out of my body. I floated near the ceiling, suspended and numb until I sank back, spent, into the shell of the girl on the bed. It was dying to not bite and scratch. It was dying to be a good girl, to shove the bad memories down and eat cornflakes for breakfast like a regular family. Dying is not easy, but it&amp;amp;#8217;s familiar. I wanted to choose to live. I wanted to be brave enough, strong enough. I kept dating lost boys, birds with broken wings. I wanted to save someone. The person who needed saving and the only one who could do it was me, but I was still six, barefoot in my nightgown with my sister, whisper-fighting over who had to go into my grandfather&amp;amp;#8217;s room. I was still 11 with a retainer and shorts with an elastic waistband, fingers cold around a bottle of beer. The day after the tattoo, I got on a bus in a twilight heavy with unfallen snow. By this time the bandage was off and the tattoo was a small sore spot on the inside of my left forearm. It still felt like a mistake, not a symbol of joy but a scar, a persistent and miserable reminder of pain. My eyes wandered to the advertisements overhead. One panel, directly across from me, featured a poem. It was by Emily Dickinson: Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops at all, And sweetest in the gale is heard; And sore must be the storm That could abash the little bird That kept so many warm. I&amp;amp;#8217;ve heard it in the chillest land, And on the strangest sea; Yet, never, in extremity, It asked a crumb of me. Hope. Is the thing. With. Feathers. It was &amp;amp;#8220;the strangest sea&amp;amp;#8221;: a CTA bus, a winter twilight; and a nineteenth-century poet was my nurse, my wise woman witch mother, taking care of me, pulling me out of harm&amp;amp;#8217;s way. It was right in front of me, all around me: hope. Life. I can&amp;amp;#8217;t tell you that I got off the bus and strode blissfully into my future. But I did get off the bus and buy groceries and go home and cook dinner and wake up the next day and the next one after that. I kept on making friends and falling in love and working and writing and dreaming. People used to think that when a child died, swallows carried its soul to heaven. That is what made me decide on the swallow tattoo. It would serve as both a remembrance of the parts of me that didn&amp;amp;#8217;t survive and an acknowledgement of my capacity to rise above, away from the painful past. I recently went to a family wedding. The bride was someone my grandfather probably molested, except none of us really knows what happened to the others. Occasionally someone alludes to &amp;amp;#8220;the family situation&amp;amp;#8221; or &amp;amp;#8220;all that stuff that happened,&amp;amp;#8221; but we never talk specifics. One woman asserted that she had simply decided to let go of our past. She told me I could use a shamanic healing ritual to help release my anger. Another showed me the raw spot on her leg that she compulsively burns with a cigarette. &amp;amp;#8220;I don&amp;amp;#8217;t know why,&amp;amp;#8221; she murmured. &amp;amp;#8220;I&amp;amp;#8217;m in school, things are going better, I just can&amp;amp;#8217;t stop this one thing.&amp;amp;#8221; My sister can be obsessive about structure and security when it comes to her young sons. We survive like anything survives&amp;amp;#8212;intact or partially so. Sometimes the damage is not apparent to the untrained eye. In muted blues and greens with a pop of peach-colored belly, the swallow flits across the white underneath of my arm&amp;amp;#8212;accompanied now by two others. Sometimes it startles me still, to see it there. It&amp;amp;#8217;s a bold mark. But I suppose it is beautiful. And it&amp;amp;#8217;s mine now: remembrance of pain, acknowledgement of strength. With the swallow tattoo, I wanted to mourn my losses, bury my dead and then move on. But here&amp;amp;#8217;s the thing: I don&amp;amp;#8217;t think you move on, really, from the past. You do, but you don&amp;amp;#8217;t. You carry it with you. You make it as light as you can. As light as feathers. Meet Our Brave Winner Is it possible to move on after abuse? Glamour talks to the author. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.glamour.com/sex-love-life/2010/03/i-chose-to-live-one-womans-story-of-surviving-sexual-abuse>