My Breakfast with Monica
By: Stefanie Wilder-Taylor
Photos by Alex Asher Sears
www.ashersearsphoto.com
In my world of chick lit and parenting tomes, it’s no wonder that Monica Holloway's new memoir, “Driving with Dead People” haunted me long after I put it down. Her book describes with unflinching honesty, amazing clarity and surprising humor, a struggle with a violent and sexually abusive childhood. The book tells the story of Monica’s childhood growing up in her rural hometown with a cruel father who had a love of filming car accidents with his video camera and showing them as home movies, along with a selfish non-protective mother and three siblings who also weren’t spared her father’s temper. Not so surprising, the adult Monica struggles with feelings of inadequacy, fear, confusion and self doubt, feelings way too many of us can relate to.
 A reviewer from the Washington Post described DWDP as “Painful reading, but the author's belief in human goodness despite evidence to the contrary is inspiring. In addition, she achieves an irresistible narrative style.” I completely agree and after reading that Monica had grown up to marry and have a son, I wondered how a person makes sense of the things that happened to them in their childhood when almost everyone else in their family prefers to remain in denial. This wasn’t just a woman’s struggle it was a mother’s struggle.
Luckily for me – and you, I got to sit down with Monica at a café over coffee, turkey sausage and eggs and find out how she coped. Having only her author’s photo to go off of, I was relieved that she looked exactly like her picture, wide beckoning smile and short cropped bangs. I had to wonder if her bangs were sort of an unconscious nod to a more innocent time. I didn’t want to ask this one right off the bat, after all it was a first date…but I did get straight down to business.
“How did you decide to write a book?” I asked with a mouth full of hash browns. “I had a one woman show that I wrote in 1992. When I had my son and he was a tiny, tiny baby I was bored. I thought I would lose my mind. All I could hope for was the UPS man to say hello.”
Amen. I could so totally relate I almost couldn’t swallow my potatoes.
“As a baby my son had profound stranger anxiety and I couldn’t take him out of the house.” It turned out that Monica’s son, Wills, was diagnosed on the autism spectrum - something that would have a profound effect on her family’s life.
“I got a computer and started writing. I took classes at UCLA just for fun. My husband kept introducing me as a writer. But I really felt like I was just a mother and I felt like with everything going on with my son it was enough.” Hell, even with nothing going on out of the ordinary with your child, writing a book is hard!
“But I stuck with the writing, got a writing group, and my feelings changed. I decided I wanted that too. Once my son got a better team around him, I felt the pressure on me to work with him everyday was not as strong. Although even once he got into a good preschool, I still had to sit in my jeep in his eyesight everyday. People felt bad for me and would bring me Chai lattes but I couldn’t leave. So I wrote in my car. The first piece I had published was in The Mommy Wars anthology where I wrote about my decision to stay home with my son. I wanted to work part time but there were clearly problems with my son’s development early on and I felt I needed to be there.”
Through the help of friends from Monica’s writing group, she managed to get an agent and the book deal followed immediately after. Monica didn’t even know at the beginning that she would be telling the story of her chaotic upbringing and subsequent sexual abuse but she said, “it just came flying out of me. I felt like I’d waited my whole life to tell that story.”
She also felt it was a story that needed to be told. “By remaining silent, things in my family appeared “normal” when they weren’t. My siblings and I didn’t get the help we needed. The statistics are stunning. According to The Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, every 2.5 minutes, someone in America is sexually assaulted. The UN reports that 150 million girls (14% of the world’s child population) are sexually assaulted each year. 73 million boys are assaulted, which is 7% of the world’s child population. Victims need to find the courage to speak out, even as adults. We need to tell our stories. If perpetrators know they will be exposed, they will most definitely stop violating children.”
And one thing it certainly took to write her story was courage. I was in awe. I asked her what she imagined the response would be from her family to her telling the truth about herself and her family in a book. Her answer shouldn’t have surprised me, knowing my own family. “In an unrealistic daydream I had hoped that my mom and my other sister would be so sorry and that somehow we would all end up in therapy or back together. It’s laughable now. I’d hoped she [my mother] would take responsibility for what happened to me. But the only reaction I got was in a letter to the Diane Reams Show (an NPR radio show) where I was going to be interviewed. Once the show got a letter from my mother and my sister refuting the book, they cancelled my interview. What’s worse is the producer from the Diane Reams show wrote a handwritten note assuring them that I would not be on the show.
Screw them, I thought. And then I said “Screw them! More importantly, did it help you to write your story?" “My reaction has been all over the place. I’m glad the book is out and I’m glad I’m not carrying around these secrets. I thought the book would feel really cathartic but that has not happened. But whenever I give public readings, women come up to me and tell me that they have been sexually abused as well, it’s very overwhelming to me. It’s still a huge problem that needs to be dealt with.”
I decided to ask the question that had been on my mind from the start. As a fellow victim of a highly dysfunctional family, I could more than imagine how her childhood had affected her mothering. But I asked her just the same.
“I felt the need to put a human fortress around my baby. I jumped too fast and was really overprotective. It took several years until my son was three or four to feel like I was a good enough mother. I was still in touch with my mother who was telling me I was not a good mother and that I was ridiculously overprotective. There was a reason I was overprotective and I don’t think that helped my son, but I had no model. I don’t think there’s any new mother who’s chilled out. I felt for a long time that I don’t deserve this happiness and that something’s going to go wrong.”
“So when did that feeling go away or has it?” I asked finally. “I remember the exact moment” She told me. ”It happened when Wills got to the middle of kindergarten and we had an aid for him. He was really happy and he was in the middle of kids laughing, and right then, my life changed. I never took my life for granted. I knew one way or another that if he could get through that, we could get through anything and that we would have a happy life. I’m still working to get past my past but my present is happy.”
I’m a sucker for a happy ending aren’t you? |
|
