Girl Called Karen (6 page)

As I got older, it got more complicated. I even started to date. So, on the one hand I was getting from church and school and “family” this grim and serious message about
staying pure. No sex before marriage. On the other hand, I was being slowly and methodically sexualized.

One day I came out of my bedroom to find the kids gone and Mary working in the yard. Mike was watching TV in his pajama bottom and nothing else. He beckoned to me. I stood by his chair as he moved his hands up my legs to my panties. He put his hand inside my pants and fingered me. This went on for quite a while, and then he did a new thing. He opened his pajamas where men go to the bathroom and pulled out his penis. It was big and red, and it looked angry. He took my hand, and I resisted, but he guided it to his penis and made me touch it. I didn’t look. I just touched.

I hated the den. That’s where it usually happened. He came to the den one day when no one was around, and he motioned to me to stand in front of him. He pulled down my underwear so he could see my private parts. It was shocking and humiliating. I didn’t even let my little foster sister see me naked. He studied my body for a long moment and then began the stroking and massaging and fingering with yet more intensity than usual. He took his penis out and put my hand on it. He told me to squeeze it, and I did.

Miraculously, no member of the family or any guests ever happened to interrupt one of those scenes in the den. And there were a great many of those sessions over the years. They went on and on until I began to date someone seriously.

Then he just stopped!

I have been asked why I obeyed him, why I acquiesced to his ogling and fingering and poking and prodding, why I didn’t go to the nuns at school and the priests at church for help. I suppose the reason was that I desperately needed his good will. He was the only one who was there. His wife disliked me. My father had betrayed and abandoned me. In my childish way, I believed my mother had deserted me by dying. What if I lost Mike? Who in the world could I depend on?

I’d like to tell you that it was all over when I got a serious boyfriend, but there was one more time. I was nineteen, had been separated from my young husband, and was staying in Florida with my Aunt Eileen and my little sister, Grace, and my little brother, David. My foster father came to see me while on a business trip. He took my little brother and sister and me out to dinner. He was so very kind to the little kids. He got them great big ice-cream treats, and then he took them home.

Mike never said where we were going, and I didn’t ask. He took me to his hotel room. We didn’t speak. I stood there just as mute and passive as I had been all those times in his den. Silently, he undressed me, looked his fill at my body, lowered me onto the bed, entered me, and had a quick orgasm. It was dirty and degrading and a doubly bitter experience because I hadn’t known how to make it not happen.

It is difficult for the independent woman I am today to understand how the young woman I was then could
have been so passive. I buried that day like a dirty little secret for years.

One day during a counseling session, while listening to a woman who had survived multiple beatings in the hell that was her marriage, I finally came to terms with my own choices. Just as that woman had finally left her abuser, so did I, but long ago on that afternoon in Florida, I did what I had been conditioned to do.

Soon afterward, I returned to Toledo and to my husband.

Mike never bothered me again. He treated me as a daughter. He said that I would always be his daughter and that I would share equally with his other children. That, of course, was a fantasy. He died a few years later, and at the funeral, his family scarcely recognized me. Mary was barely civil, and the kids were wrapped in their own grief. “The little girl they got from Catholic Charities” didn’t belong.

Among the mourners, there may have been women who provided Mike with sexual relief after those sessions of foreplay with me in his den. I can’t remember when I first became aware of his infidelities, but I knew he had affairs.

I never hated Mike. He was not inherently an evil man. He was entrusted with fathering a young girl, and he violated that trust and did bad things. But he contributed greatly to his community. He was a leader in the Catholic diocese of Toledo. He was in Alcoholics Anonymous for years and helped many in
their struggle for sobriety. When he died, the funeral home was crowded with people who Mary and the kids didn’t know.

People came forward with the same story, told over and over again. Only the details varied. Mike helped people. This person would be dead except for Mike. This person had built a business because Mike had faith in him.

Would anyone have believed me if I had talked about this paragon’s exploits with a teenage waif in his den?

Mike was not the stereotypical abuser inasmuch as he never tried to control my life or limit my freedom. Except for that one shameful secret, he pushed me to be the very best that I could possibly be.

Mike was intelligent. He was born to a poverty-ridden family in the hills of Kentucky. He personified the story of the poor mountain boy who carries his shoes to school so he won’t wear them out. He was the first person in his family to become a university graduate. He was teaching at a college before he reached his twenty-first birthday. Mike was bright, charismatic, and charming. He went into sales and was very successful.

Mike respected my intelligence and ambition. He was always proud of my academic achievements, and he consistently encouraged me to grow. Even with all the bad stuff, there was this supportive male figure wrapped up in the same person, and it was a desperate time. I needed his good will and love terribly.

“The Six of Us” together again after 20 years. (L to R) Larry, David, Grace, Karen, Pat, Sandy.

I
was in a dreary waiting room filled with some of the good folks of Alabama. Years earlier, I had obtained a Social Security number, made a note of it, used it for decades, lost the card, and never noticed its absence. But to get a job in Alabama, I was told it was necessary to present an actual Social Security card not just a number, so I was in the Social Security Office of Albertville applying.

There were forms. I didn’t need to fill them out, a clerk behind the barred window would see to it.

“Tell me your maiden name,” she said.

“Karen Strawn,” I said.

“Spell it, please.”

“S-t-r-a-w-n,” I said.

I was wearing a wedding ring. “Any other name?” she asked expectantly.

“Karen Mikolajczyk. M-i-k-o-l-a-j-c-z-y-k. That’s Mick-o-wize-ik.”

Now we had the attention of everyone in the room.

“Any other name?”

“Karen Skutt. S-k-u-t-t.”

She wrote it down. “Any other name?”

“Karen McConnell. M-c-capital C-o-n-n-e-l-l.”

I glanced over the room filled with rapt observers and said, reflectively, “It took me a long time to find a name I really liked.”

The owner of the name I really liked was Russ McConnell, whom I began dating in 1978.

A very great deal had happened in the two decades between my days in the foster home and my happy marriage to Russ.

I met Nick when I was sixteen. He was my first love, and for me, it was true what they say about your first love. It doesn’t last long. He didn’t have a car, and he stopped calling after a few months. It was a sad time for me.

We got together again in my senior year.

Today, all these years later, I can still remember the bittersweet struggle. I had been living five years of foreplay. Nick touched me. He made my nipples hard. We were both in a state of constant arousal.

We would make pacts never to be alone together because we wanted to wait for marriage. We went to confession.

Came the day that I knew we were going to make love. I didn’t want to do it in the backseat of an old car, so I arranged a rendezvous that offered a bed and privacy. I can’t say it was the most satisfying experience of my life, but I think I never again felt so powerful. We dated for two years, we had to sneak around, the sexual tension was painful.

Marriage was nowhere in the offing, and, as time went by, I yearned for a home, marriage, and security so badly that I began to pull away.

By the time I completed high school, I had been babysitting and working at a drive-in long enough to have some savings. I bought a car and rented an apartment and moved out of my foster home. Mary made a terrible fuss, and I had to go back. It seemed foster children were required to live at “home” till they were eighteen.

I graduated with many honors, and I was offered a scholarship to a college in Toledo. The program offered there was deadly, and I dropped out in my first quarter.

Dick Mitchell came into my life with all the swashbuckling swagger of a newly discharged marine. He was handsome, and I was crazy about him. He had a married girlfriend named Sharon. He shamed me in many situations, but he married me. Just before we were married in 1961, his sister told me that their family name was Mikolajczyk, that it was Dick’s legal name, and it was the name I would carry when I was married.

Dick and I had a classic fifties marriage for the first decade. He worked and ruled the roost. Sharon continued to run Dick’s life in ways that humiliated me up to the day she died in her early thirties.

In some respects, the assault on my womanhood, which I had experienced as a foster child and before, continued into my marriage. It was not a physical assault, but rather an emotional deprivation. My young husband often withheld sex and affection. He was still incredibly attractive and charismatic, but the lack of affection and the contrast in our different values and ambitions began to weigh heavily.

The marriage was so painful that after several months, I loaded up a few possessions in my rattletrap car and left Dick and drove to Florida, where I visited a friend who gave me a parakeet in a cage. The parakeet and I went to live with Aunt Eileen and Grace and David. I got a job and considered going back to college. But I missed Dick, and I missed Doris, my surrogate mother, and I missed my hometown.

So after a few months, I gassed up the rattletrap car and drove back home to Dick, leaving the parakeet with Aunt Eileen. Other people kept giving her more birds. Eventually she became known as the Bird Woman of Seventh Terrace.

My absence had not been a wake-up call for Dick. Sharon was still a factor, and, in some ways, the hardest part was Dick’s playing at being unencumbered. Then there was his obsession with
speed and fast driving and racing cars, enlivened by alcoholic encounters and police at the door at least once.

He ran the roost and earned a living. I took in ironing to add to our income. When my son, Rick, was six months old, Dick vanished for three days, leaving me without a car or a telephone. After a thorough discussion of that episode, we got a phone, and he never disappeared quite that long again.

I wanted desperately to own a home, and I struggled to save money so we could buy a house, but it was an uphill fight because my husband spent every spare penny for fast cars and accessories.

We had a cheap apartment above Tribe’s Tavern in Toledo, and our living-room floor was strewn month after month with auto parts. I took in other people’s ironing, and I babysat.

When Rick, my first baby, was two years old, a neighbor hired me to take care of her three preschoolers, aged five, three, and two. All four children were breakfasting in the kitchen one day when I got a phone call from a girlfriend and stepped a couple of feet outside the kitchen so I could hear. It became ominously quiet in the next room. The
five-year-
old neighbor had discovered a new skill and somehow managed to open the refrigerator door. My little Rick grabbed an egg carton and systematically broke twelve whole raw eggs all over the kitchen table and the floor. Anyone who has ever tried to mop up
one raw egg can imagine what a job I had cleaning the floor and four egg-bedecked little kids. Today it sounds like a funny scene. It wasn’t then.

I pestered Dick until we bought a rundown little dump in a blue-collar neighborhood. The first night in our new home, I put my boys to bed (at that time there were two) and worked for hours to set my home in order. Then I sat and wept.

As long as we were in an apartment and just starting out, I could delude myself as to what my life was about. Now I had to consider that this was it. Somehow, I thought, I belonged in this house in this neighborhood in this world. Get used to it.

I was faced with the reality of marriage, motherhood, and a decrepit little old house that was eleven hundred square feet of shoddy construction. Downstairs, I could sit in one spot and survey the entire floor plan, which consisted of a small living room and a kitchen with eating area. Upstairs my little family slept in the two bedrooms, both of which had sloping ceilings making it impossible to stand erect anywhere but in the middle of the room. There was a small landing at the top of the stairway, which ultimately became another sleeping area under the eaves. Between the house and the garage was an attached, enclosed, unheated breezeway, which would serve as a playroom. The space between the unpainted walls and the floorboards provided an unobstructed view into the crawl space, as well as some interesting drafts.

I didn’t know it that night, but six months later, the cranky old furnace would catch fire. The fire did not cause extensive damage beyond destroying the furnace, but the firemen created a number of new holes throughout the house. I will never forget the young firefighter who yelled at me to get out of the house immediately as, totally unaware of the very real danger, I carefully gathered food and clothing for my babies.

That first night, as I sat in my new home, I was more despairing than I had ever been in my life. But after making myself a cup of tea, I thought, “No, this is not where I belong. I can make a difference. I can make my life matter.”

I began to create a plan. First I looked at the positives. The exterior of the little house was attractive, and the great big yard was lovely. I would enjoy the yard and fix up the house. As to the rest of my life, I knew that I had to be patient. When my boys got a little older, I would go back to school. As I examined those things that had worked for me in the past, I knew that education was the key to getting ahead, that having fun and enjoying the
now
would sustain me, and that viewing the present living arrangement as a temporary growth opportunity would provide me with a positive perspective. Life would improve. I had already learned some of the techniques of reframing (which I’ll discuss at length later), so I knew how I could keep improving my performance at whatever I tried to do.

Our son David arrived when Rick was in his terrible two’s. Daniel was born eleven months after David, so I had three exceptionally lively little ones at home.

My brother, David, came to live with us when he turned fifteen.

Somewhere along the way, I quit ironing for pin money and got a job at the Betty Crocker Division of General Mills, Inc.

The best thing that Dick and I managed to do was to produce our three healthy sons. Some of my insecurities from my father’s desertion affected them much more than I realized. I never wanted them to think that I would leave them, and I said so often. I didn’t learn until they were grown that my words were frightening, instead of reassuring.

In spite of everything, they have become fine men, and I am very proud of them.

I haven’t included most of the bleak times. The greatest disappointments occurred with romantic relationships. My early abandon-ment and the sexual abuse certainly shaped my view of men and romantic love. My first marriage to my children’s father was a union of two people with opposite values and conflicting goals. He was the feisty marine, home from Korea. He seemed much older than the other boys and was obviously attractive to all the girls. At first I felt that I didn’t deserve his attention. Before and after we married, he spoke so scathingly of everything I did that I actually began to feel that I deserved his disdain.
It was not a good feeling. He never expressed affection, but was crushing with his criticism. He withheld sex as a means of controlling me. When I finally sought to end the marriage, I was astonished to learn that he was devastated.

In the end, all that Dick and I had in common was our three sons. I will spare you the unhappy details of the breakup of the marriage. Suffice it to say that we were divorced in 1973.

By the time of the divorce, my life was wrapped up in my sons and my work at the plant. I had been hired for the production line and then (to Dick’s displeasure) was promoted to supervisor. I was the second woman at all the plants of the company to become a supervisor.

My second husband was Scott Skutt. That marriage was based on pure fantasy. The man I fell in love with did not exist. I thought that he was understanding and poetic. He was, in fact, very good looking, soft spoken, aware of world issues, and sensitive to people’s feelings. What I didn’t know when we married was that he was also homosexual and entirely conflicted about his sexuality.

I married Scott in 1975. Less than a year later, we were divorced, and I was saddled with a humongous debt on my credit card that Scott had incurred in extravagant gifts for me and my sons and the lavish entertainment of a homosexual lover.

The demise of this union shattered me. Not only had
I failed again, but my rival was not even another woman. As dreadful as that would have been, I knew it couldn’t approach the deadly blow I suffered by losing my husband to a male. It felt as though my very womanhood had been trampled in the dust.

As outward physical evidence of my pain, I lost twenty-five pounds. When I dropped to 107 pounds, my surrogate mom, Doris, threatened me with hospitalization. My hair was drab and untrimmed, my complexion had gone sallow, and my energy level was at lowest ebb.

Scott had left in August. Six weeks later, I went for a walk and noticed that the leaves had changed and the world was aglow with amazing color. I went home and wallowed in one last purge of self-pitying tears. Then I made an appointment for a haircut and splurged on some clothes that fit.

The beauty of nature had touched me and called me back to join the living world. My sense of my human worth returned, and I reviewed my short-term relationship with Scotty from a different perspective. That was useful. I realized that I had learned a lot about myself. I knew that never again would I be so captivated that I lost my identity or sublimated my needs and ideals.

My third husband, Russ McConnell, was sixteen years my senior, and a lot of people have accused me of looking for a father. I can only tell you that I finally found a man who dearly loved and valued me
and whom I respected and loved. He had a great sense of humor, danced superbly, and was always eager to frolic. He liked joking and really loved women. He was also serious and hard working, and life with him was always good and mostly fun. We were together for more than twenty years before cancer robbed me of my best friend.

It had taken two failed marriages, untold strain on my children, and disastrous consequences to my bank account before I got it right with a good, rewarding relationship with a man.