A Girl Called Karen - A true story of sex abuse and resilience. Karen McConnell
facing young people in our country.
Six months later, I received a call from the local office of Senator Shelby informing me that we were to receive $573,000 to build the new shelter. I screamed in delight.
The whole construction process was infinitely more complicated than I had ever imagined. Starting with environmental surveys right on through the interior finishing, I learned more about the construction business than I’d ever wanted to know. Thank goodness, I had one very dedicated board member who helped me every step of the way.
The most devastating point in the process was when the bids were opened and the lowest bid was $200,000 higher than we anticipated or had money to cover. We gave up many of the finer amenities in order to get within striking distance. One of my board members bought and gave us a small home and four acres abutting our property to facilitate the access.
When we had to move our building plans into the countryside, we incurred close to $50,000 in additional expenses for providing utilities.
There were many challenges. I am, after all, a social worker, not a building project manager.
In March 2002, we moved into our new building. It looks like a home, not an institution. It has a great big front porch with wide-bottomed rockers. The rooms are bright and cheerful and welcoming. No brick walls or tile floors. It is a home.
At the agency’s annual dinner in October 2002, the Board of Directors of Tennessee Valley Family Services presented me with the template of a bronze plaque that reads, “This is the house that Karen built.”
Today the plaque is mounted above the fireplace so that everyone who enters the home can see it.
The “house” symbolizes my life up till now – that unique structure with its secret rooms and closets, its tremendous family room, the narrow twisty staircase with its half-built safety rail and almost-safe landing, the rooms for learning and growing, the sociable veranda that’s great for people watching and neighboring, the long corridors that don’t go much of anywhere, and the capacious kitchen with the counter that sweeps like a stage across the family room.
What an incredible array of events has taken place in my time on earth! That evening when my board of directors recognized my achievements by unveiling the bronze plaque may well have been the highlight of my professional career. It capped a life that ran the gamut from an idyllic early childhood to the shocks of sexual abuse and desertion to acquiring skills of resiliency.
I have given birth to three children, accumulated three more through marriage, and nurtured two foster children. They have produced eleven beautiful grandchildren. Only two actually carry my DNA, but they are all my grandchildren.
Long after my children were born, I got a B.A. and eventually my master’s in social work. I moved from taking in people’s ironing to becoming the first woman supervisor in a cake-mix factory to surviving the emotional stresses of a dedicated social worker.
This book is rich with case histories culled from my professional colleagues and my observations and studies in my chosen field.
You could say that these life experiences, good and bad, have offered diversity so unusual as to enliven and authenticate my observations. I have written as candidly as I could, mistakes and all, though no tome could be big enough to include all of my blunders.
I have told my story because I think it illustrates some of the most important skills embodied in resilience. There are people who come by it almost instinctively, like the young book publisher who was frustrated by his company’s profit-and-loss statement. So he canceled his appointments, left his ever-ringing phones, walked across the street, and sat alone quietly on a park bench for two hours. When he went back to the office, he put changes into effect that transformed his struggling young business into a thriving, growing, prosperous company that became a legend in the publishing world.
There was nothing magical about it. He had simply stopped viewing publishing as it had been traditionally conducted. He took a long hard look at each of the operations of his company, studied them in a new way as if he had never considered them before. Without realizing it, he had used Element No. 7, the ability to reframe, which I have described in my chapter called “Capturing Resiliency.” That’s how he worked out a more efficient way of running his firm.
Other people have no idea what resiliency is, where to get it, or how to incorporate it into their daily lives.
But we can all learn. I was lucky enough to see how my accomplishments came about and how to keep building on successes as the years go by.
So can you. There are guidelines here.
I have identified in Part III the seven factors that contribute most to resilience, and I devoted an entire chapter to each component. I have observed from my research that these elements can be taught to adults and children alike. I recommend them to anyone who is searching for help in guiding young lives beyond tragic beginnings. And they are a wonderful aid to all those adults and adolescents who are looking for more and better choices in their own lifestyles.
I wrote this book especially for foster parents, therapists, social workers, child-care counselors, house parents, clergy, project counselors, law enforcement professionals, teachers, and all those men and women who care about our children and our civilization.
Does anyone need to be told that our young people are our future? Personal resilience and societal responsibility are yoked for the advancement of humankind.
Two-year-old Karen sitting on her mother’s sewing bench.
Sometimes when you bury things, the memory stays but details get lost. I’m not sure of the date or time of what I’m about to tell you, but I remember for sure every detail I’ve written here. And more besides. I’m certain no adult trauma or sophisticated inquiry or appalling case study will ever scrub the shock of that awful night from my mind.
I know that before it happened, I had been scared, and I wanted my mother. I was eleven at the very most. My mother was not there, and I went looking for her scent and the comfort of her place. It was late, and my father was not home when I curled up in my parents’ bed. Sleep came quickly, deep and hard. Waking came gradually and in stages.
A hand was between my legs, touching, stroking, kneading. I froze. I didn’t breathe or move or make the slightest sound. I felt funny in a pleasurable, scary kind of way. The hand kept touching me down there in the place my parents said I must never touch except for when I should wash myself in a hurry. The nuns at school said so, too, and they threatened us girls with eternal damnation if we let anyone put their hands Down There.
I knew I wanted that hand to stop, but I didn’t want it to stop. Maybe, I thought, if I just take tiny breaths or don’t breathe at all, this will turn out to be the weirdest, most shocking nightmare I ever had and I can forget all about it when I wake up. But even as I forced my breath into the littlest sighs, the hand went on roaming over my Secret Place, first lightly, then faster and more insistently, fondling and fingering, rubbing and circling until suddenly an invasive, brutal finger rammed into my flesh and plunged all the way inside me.
It was a real nightmare, it wasn’t a dream.
I never knew you could shove something right into the flesh down there. I never knew there was an opening to a cave that could almost devour a rude exploring finger. I never even knew I had a hole down there.
I