What has Janet Mackie been up to lately? Trying to understand both sides and stop the cycle of abuse from cycling down into the next generations of children growing up abused and struggling on into adulthood...

I commit to blog at least once a month and to answering comments and questions as best I can in response to the community of women, wives, mothers, and adult children still in pain, people in search of  a community to support them in their quest to understand child sexual abuse and what happens afterwards...

I have kept my hand in by responding to comments on Not the Life and by adding a post at least once a month.  I have also been involved in finishing up my Memoir Sex offenders Wife a Daughter's Life, a Mother's Voice Breaking Silence. (I am on my way to my writers group this morning to finish the final edits before I try to find a publisher.) In the process of writing my memoir I have realized that not oly were my own children (and I molested) as chldren but that sexual abuse is a cycle that often does not begin with us.  (My own father was molested as was my husband but that is a long story too and part of the memoir that was hard to deal with since it's easy to just hate our molester without realizing this is a cycle of abuse and we not only need to recognize and hep the abused child in our own family but make certain the abuse stops with our own generation. Often we only think abuse "happens' to girls but while 1 in 4 girls report they were molested before they turened 18, 1 in 6 boys also report they too were molested and few of them report because boys as much (or more) than girls are shamed into silence which has far-reaching consequences for the future...the future of all our children.

One of the things I now realize is that we don't have to be forever victims and neither do our children whether they were molested by a father or family friend or by another child (perhaps) another child who is our own child.

I have come to believe that we need to provide immediate effective treatment for both sides in the equation of child sexual abuse if we are to stop this cycle from 'cycling on down into future generations of children because children who are traumatized when they are young ( some who are sexual abuse but struggle on into adulthood and then molest others when they reach adulthood.

Writing my memoir I realized that my own sexual abuse blinded me in many ways to seeing the abuse that was being perpetuated in my own marriage, It also blinded me to the membory of my  own brother's sexual abuse and how each has struggled (successfully) to avoid passing down their own abuse onto their own friends children and onto their own children. The did not but at a great cost to them selves and their subsequent marriages and families. Writing my memoir helped than understand their own lives and helped them understand and be successful in engaging in their own therapy issues.  My son as well as my daughter were molested and my other son has dodged the bullet only because his older brother knew what was happening and was vigilent in protecting his younger brother.

May of us are in recovery ourselves, have found happy lives in spite of what we experienced in our own marriages, We like Evie have gone on but I believe as Wives and Mother we have experience and knowledge which we mush share in supporting all the wives and mothers who find themselves in need of our support no matter what choices they make when confronted by the "Knock on the door"

For that reason I hope you will keep coming back to this community of women who ALL want to learn not only how to survive their own "Knock on the Door" but who as women and as mother ALL want to protect ALL our children with effective and early interventions which may help to stop the Cycle as it cycles down into harming fur=tur generations of children.

For all of these reasons I welcom Evie Back. For all of there reasons I too will continue to blog  about my own "Adventures in Recovery" About ways we can save all our children and future generations from this horrendous cycle of sexual abuse  I know it sounds like an impossible hope but as mothers and women tasked with the love and lives of children if not us then WHO? If not now, then WHEN?

So let us begin. Please, let us begin to join together in a community of women to end this endemic harm visited upon ALL our children. Janet Mackie