Sophia’s Story: One Woman's Survivance in the Misogynist Minefield

Womanly Work - The Grist in a Sourceress's Mill

Telling Truth to Power in #metoo times.

There is a lot wrong with our culture, but for little girls growing up, even more so. We are raised in innocence only to discover that the world is fraught with peril. We are given messages that ill prepare us for the realities of a world where the agenda of men overrides just about everything, and for the girls who come up ‘hard’ for whatever unfairness in their young lives, that agenda also puts girls in emotionally dangerous situations where they must choose between things they were never prepared or ready for.

This is the story of the decades long shamanic rite of passage I call my life. I named that part of me that is pre-CPTSD diagnosis, Sophia, to be able to lay her to rest when the time is right. The Goddess of Knowledge was an apt title for all I had learned.

At the age of 14, Sophia left home. She had trick or treated with her little 6 year old sister the night before and was still very much a little girl. The next day, she gathered up her school bag with its hidden bank book with all of $15 she’d saved in it. She slipped out the back door of her childhood home for the last time, praying that this was one morning where she would not be inspected from head to toe on the way as her controlling and usually angry mother often did.

At school, Sophia cleaned out her locker, her heart in her throat, and took the furthest bus out of town that the city provided, determined to hitchhike anywhere. She took one last look at her cute little sister she loved so much and she left, not knowing where she was headed. She just knew that she had to get away from the insanity of a violent mother who screamed and hit without warning every day she had been in her care. Now that Sophia had started to look like the man that had fathered her (out of wedlock), the resentment had increased and Sophia was being blamed, criticized and diminished on a daily basis. Her little blond, blue eyed sister was safe, she could do no wrong, but Sophia was in real danger of her mother’s lateral resentment and after a particularily ugly and threatening incident, she felt she had no choice but to get away or stay and die. It was the 12^th time she’d run, and the charm, this time, with no well meaning adult returning her to have the sense beaten into her.

That first year in the wild was measured in nights. Sophia slept where she could, learned through being raped while hitchhiking that if she befriended men they would feed her in exchange for what they wanted. She learned to not value herself so that she could stomach the treatment.  She developed skills that were not taught in school. She learned how to mince and preen, how to wiggle and wink to act available, being sexual became her survival skills. Before long Sophia was discovered by other working girls and introduced to pimps who passed her around like so much property, shipping her  from town to town. She escaped from one, was discovered by another and beaten worse than her mother ever did and forced to work before she healed.

Eventually, Sophia just became docile and just let whatever happened to her happen. By the time she was 16, she’d been raped more times than she could  remember. By the time she was 17, she’d had a baby with no idea who the father was, and gave the child up for adoption. Without dental insurance and in another country, her teeth decayed and disintegrated, causing her to consume handfuls of aspirin by the day for the constant pain. Her face was a map of acne and open sores from the constant stress, but the men just kept putting themselves in her. Not one saw past what she was to them to see who she was to herself.

By the time she was 18, she’d done hard time as an adult in a US federal maximum security jail. Being tall for her age worked against her as she could pass for being an adult and she even fooled the jail staff until her 4^th month in the honour dorm, a temporary home that was the best thing to ever happen to her, where Sophia had no men wanting to ‘touch’ her for the first time in her life. Her ID said she was 27, Sophia was 17.

 In her 19^th year, she was back in the states, returning boomeranged by another pimp, after her ‘voluntary departure’ to Canada.  By 20, Sophia had spent 6 months making heaps of money she never saw, at the Mustang Ranch in Nevada. She traveled around the western US and out of necessity, became an exotic dancer to generate business interest. Winning several amateur talent contests in men's clubs enough to earn a dance contract, for the first time in her life, she felt personal power.

On the stage, she was a breathtakingly entertaining amazon, an amazing beauty who could be anything she wanted, she learned the art of illusion, of subterfuge.  Suddenly, Sophia had a headline on the sign outside the club and she had esteem. But it was not the right kind of esteem and it was distorted, and she was still used and utilized by men as an object for their own perverse agendas. Those years, Sophia remembers spending Christmasses alone in Macdonalds restaurants, watching as other families coddled their kids and knowing that was not her lot in life. Sophia’s childhood was over.

In 1980, Sophia was 22, she’d been in a robbery and left to die, in a bondage dungeon where her customers were the cream of the West Hollywood crop; men, of course, lawyers, judges, accountants, CEOs, they all frequented the little twisted business. The sight of what was in those back rooms, shackles and whips, so frightened the little old man with the silver gun who was robbing them that he tried to kill her and one well placed bullet severed her carotid so that he almost succeeded. Sophia lost over 50% of her blood that day. But her death was not meant to be and a few months later, as soon as she healed, as soon as she restored the use of her atrophied arms, she escaped  by flying to Alaska, arriving the day before Christmas, appearing at the door of a brothel with 20 dollars to her name and all her worldly goods in one small suitcase, hoping and praying that they had a place for her.

Sophia was trying to get away from the life that took her to every major lower 48 city and every major city in Canada to the endless use of men, and she was hoping that she could find the means to escape once and for all, in order to survive. It was dawning on her that no woman lays down like that because she wants to, no woman, given a choice of a life with dignity or one of being overtly sexualized, would choose the path that Sophia had been forced to endure.

And escape she did. Through meeting people who helped her get ‘out’, she soon learned how to waitress in the clubs she used to work out of, then she learned bartending, then management. She graduated to working as a caterer for the medical offices and left ‘the lifestyle’ behind just before her son was conceived. Sophia was 30 and finally had a pregnancy where she knew who the father was, who was not conceived in accident. Sadly, the transient roofer who loved her moved on and she never let him know he had a son. But that was ok. Compared to the long, scary, dark and dangerous road that took her 16 years to escape, single motherhood was a piece of cake, or so she thought. She got healthy, found another man who claimed to love her, and had her dental work repaired and replaced. But happiness evaded her when she traveled back to Vancouver to straighten out her citizenship, engaged to this man who loved her back in Alaska, but arrived in Canada to be greeted by a letter written in his new girlfriend’s hand, telling her they were through. Sophia brushed herself off, and started over. Again.

In the coming years, Sophia raised her son, began underground ventures supporting women and met a man who promised to love and take care of her and her boy, forever. She even waited a whole year before she kissed him, believing that was how a ‘good girl’ acted, but still, just after they moved in together, Sophia tearfully confided her sordid past to him. She could not abide being in intimacy and planning a marriage with someone and not have him know her horrible story.

Instead of sheltering his precious woman in his arms, he pushed Sophia away and shortly after that, when she discovered she was pregnant with her daughter, he sued Sophia for custody based on the secrets she’d confided, resulting in losing primary custody of her daughter. 

Fast forward through many years as a single parent.  Sophia’s son, fatherless, acted out and was a traitor to the family with his lies and deceit to the point of her having to utilize tough love in his late teens to protect her daughter and their life. His antics made holding a job increasingly more impossible for her and it wasn’t until he was out of the house that Sophia considered finishing her education by going back to school. Those years were spent involved intimately with her underground organization, dedicated to educating women about menstrual health, and working as a volunteer with the local women’s centre,  the women’s shelter, a women’s society and a food security group.  When she became a teen, Sophia’s daughter returned to her mother out of her own free will, and Sophia used the horrors of her teen years as a model of what to protect her daughter from. She never told anyone again about her past. That was too dangerous, she’d learned. For a long time, she believed that the consequences of people finding out about her past were too severe in a world that could never understand.

Sophia was determined that she was NOT going to let the same thing happen to her daughter. As Sophia moved into University, she began to work for deans, department chairs and the office of scholarly activities, a far cry from being forced to her knees in alleys for the reward of a hotel room later or a greasy meal, all that she was worth or valued for. Suddenly she felt a different kind of inclusivity, of worth, or being a valid human.

It was paying kindness forward that encouraged Sophia at 45, to take in two sisters, teen friends of her daughter’s, who’s mother was dealing with challenges. The girls had been raised to take care of her because she  couldn’t take care of herself and in Sophia’s care, those girls flourished and became whole, no longer needing to fight off the men their mother brought home.  Soon they brought Sophia another young teen girl who had lost her mom at 10, and who had been labeled a difficult child because of her rage at the unfairness of it all. All in all, Sophia raised 5 young people to adulthood, four of them female.

Suddenly, Sophia found herself degreed, without kids and with the attentions of a man who professed to be Christly, a career soldier who understood that we all come from somewhere and who never put judgment on her, while she was in his good graces, for the past she’d endured. He acted like he cherished Sophia for the most part, and she felt so relieved that she was safe at last. She had come so far by the time she was 53, and she could finally feel herself gluing together those bits of broken girl, to become someone who was whole and stronger than ever. She became a writer, an artist, a poet and a wife, something she appreciated with every cell in her body.

But once again, unfairness struck when Sophia’s world crumbled upon discovering her husbands illicit affair that had lasted the duration of their relationship. When Sophia discovered the dishonesty, she never thought to bite her tongue, it never occurred to her that her status had declined in his eyes and when she called him on it, she was stunned to hear his voice  accusing Sophia of being to blame for his dishonesty.

Her husband admonished her for being a drain on his life, even though she’d devoted three years to solely taking care of him and making a loving home in return for the kindness he showed her,  so grateful for any little scraps of redemption cast her way. Maybe it was her fault.

The military spousal abuse unit told Sophia to escape with her life, as soldiers noted for their ptsd often turned violent when cornered by their dishonest actions, and before she knew it, she was back on those same streets, this time, sleeping in the car. But now she is a different Sophia, educated and refined by the grist in the mill of her unfair existence.

Sophia is still in limbo, but now she has good women (and even the odd male) friends of long standing who have adopted her, who have known her through decades of overcoming adversity, and who inherently know that she is a good person worthy of helping. Because of their kindness, Sophia has been housed and can begin to put her life back together, but she can never forget where she came from. And she never falters from paying the kindnesses forward when given the opportunity to help another young woman escape from the unfairness of our sexist, highly sexualized and sexually demeaning culture. Today, Sophia felt like she had to stop job hunting and home hunting for a minute, so that she could confess, share and witness her story. Many people have no idea about the secrets she’s carried all these years as she is a walking miracle yet still she can’t wrap her brain around valuing herself because she’d been so hurt and mistreated in her developing years, in spite of knowing the miracle that is she.

There is a little Facebook meme that went around recently that goes something like, when you see someone having a bad day, you don’t know what they’ve had to endure, you can’t see hidden handicaps and it would be nice if you could smile their way instead of passing judgment. Sophia is one of those people who you can’t see what she’s carrying in the way of handicaps or differences of ability. Perhaps after reading this, you will better understand girls and women like her.

Sophia is done hiding the truth. 

There is a quote that came out about 20 years ago, in a song by Ani de Franco. Ani sings ‘silence is violence, and a good brain ain’t worth diddly, if you don’t have the facts’.  Sophia has always had a ‘good brain’ although being  shot in the head filled her memory capabilities with swiss cheese, but she didn’t have the ‘facts’ until she majored in Women’s Studies and delved deeply into the sociology of western culture’s tendency to support gender bias, specifically by diminishing women’s rights.  While acquiring her bachelor’s degree, Sophia also heard another quote that struck home, by Sally Kempton, ‘it’s hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head’. How true. 

Women grow up feeling the need to teeter on heels that push their uteruses forwards causing a physical invitation to men to utilize their unproven wombs to be accepted, valued and validated because that is how we are taught to value ourselves. We apply cosmetics that mimic the flush of sexual availability and fecundity, and men grow up learning to only appreciate the superficial exterior of women. Those boys who do not grow up because of their unaddressed traumas become dominators and usurpers, perpetrators of abuses directed at those innocent young women who dress in manners that attract the kind of attention they have no idea what the consequences will be. ‘Giving our power away’ is what women are taught by media, by magazines, by the hootchy kootchy ass shaking half naked dancers on music videos and as a result of the influences flooding them from every side, young girls mince, preen so that they will feel acceptable. They have no idea of what they're attracting, so lampshaded by the effective gaslighting of our misogynist culture.

Now that she’s come clean, she can start finding a way to helping others break free. And if she’d known how good it feels to get it off her chest, she would have done it a long time ago.

The Beginning

Today, the name Sophia is being surrendered to a new evolution as her owner decides to invest herself in compensating for a prematurely shortened girlhood. Even at 61, its never too late to start. There's a new name to come for this whimsical, creative creature. Stay tuned.

To find out more about one organization that advocates and works tirelessly to rescue girls trapped in these horrible existences, click on the url below.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Living-Water-for-Girls/310735163856?v=info&sk=info