Mike had to hang up and called back a half hour later. How, he wanted to know, did CPS happen to become interested in us? “I don’t know,” I answered truthfully. “Maybe Ashley running around yelling rape last night, or she said something to some therapist.” Personally, I was wondering about Marilyn because she seemed to have a handle on what was going on here, and it was very possible that after the runaway she didn’t trust our daughter to open up to me. Mike said the motorhome was in the church parking lot and was worried about leaving it there. I asked what I should do, and he suggested that I take Cal, his step-father, over to the church and have him drive it home. I could follow and help park it in our driveway, and he was sure his mom would be happy to babysit the kids while we were gone. I assured him that I loved him, and he said the staff wanted to process him, and he’d talk to me the next day. I called Cal and Luanne, and despite their anger at me, they drove over to help with babysitting and bringing back our big rig. Cal and I drove silently over to the church, and I used my keys to get in. Cal wasn’t used to such a big vehicle and scraped the bumper in our driveway, but it wasn’t a big deal. Getting it home was the thing. In the meantime, Luanne got our dinner cleaned up and put the kids to bed. Even Ashley went without sassing. I lay in bed that night just reeling. My life had an unreal quality about it, and I was so afraid of our future. CPS had the right to keep Mike out of the house forever if they deemed him guilty of molest. But even as weird as he’d become, I couldn’t see him hurting our daughter. Maybe his methods were misguided, but to sexually abuse her was beyond thinking. And despite what he thought of me, I knew I’d done the right thing in opening the letter and reading it. Maybe he didn’t appreciate me, but I felt I’d saved h is life. Thankfully, Ashley got up the next morning and went to school without any trouble. The other children were one day away from going off track for a month, out of school until the after Thanksgiving, and I grimaced at the perfect timing. Just what I needed- all of the children home when I’d be working with social workers and therapists helping Mike. But that’s my life for you. Perfect. I walked around as if I was in a trance, picking up here, dusting there, doing a load of laundry or two. I heard from Margret who knew that Mike was in Vista View, and she warned me that he was to have no contact with any of the children until she gave permission. I was beginning to thoroughly dislike her, and I certainly hated the intrusion into our family’s lives. Mike telephoned me at 11, asking mostly about Ashley. I said she was okay and was at Oakside, and he breathed a sigh of relief. I asked about his night, and he said he’d hardly slept he was so terrified. His room-mate was convinced he was Jesus Christ and had to smite sin wherever he found it. But he’d already been moved off the ICU and put into a semi-private room, and he felt a lot calmer. He said he was allowed 15 minute telephone calls several times a day and would be calling regularly. Again I assured him I loved him and said the family missed him. He started to cry and hung up. Kerri called me to set up a counseling session for that afternoon. She arrived at 3 pm and, gazing at me and smiling, commented that I certainly appeared to be holding it together. The kids looked as if they were doing okay, all considering. The house was clean. Yeah, despite everything we were getting through the crisis. We sat down in the living room and began comparing notes. Kerri said that as my calls began coming into the office on Tuesday, she pulled our family file and started re-reading her previous notes. Instead of taking them at face value, as she had when the information was first given to her, she now looked at the underlying themes. And what she saw disturbed her greatly. Mike, Kerri said, was a bully who used my insecurities against me. Ever since we began therapy, she’d observed in me a desire to please, and it was in pleasing people that I derived both my self-acceptance and my sense of failure. Mike knew this, and it became a powerful weapon in his hands to manipulate me. He had stripped me of my pride with constant and unwarranted shaming, and I had just endured it because my low self-esteem convinced me I didn’t deserve any better. She’d heard him make inflammatory comments to and about me, and at first she thought it was because he didn’t know how to hold a civilized discussion with me. But looking back, Kerri said that it was his purposeful way of disrespecting me that kept me off balance and questioning myself, wondering what it was that I was doing wrong to provoke him. The truth was that I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I was a gifted and intelligent woman, which might be frightening to Mike because I was able to keep my wits about me as he descended into childishness and despondency. The more pressure he put on me, the more I had withdrawn into a protective shell which served me well to keep what self-esteem I still had intact. I was behaving like a godly wife and mother, putting up with incredible stress from Mike and Ashley and handling it to the best of my abilities. Kerri told me that I was a lot stronger than I gave myself credit for. I would have to be a strong person to get through these past months; many people would have caved in under the pressure, but I was still on my feet and doing what was needed to take care of the family. I asked her how Mike could have abused Ashley? Especially with me not having a clue? Slowly Kerri explained that molest didn’t have to involve physically touching a victim. It was simply a matter of gaining the trust of him or her and using that trust to destroy the victim’s innocence. There were many forms involving something as simple as talking about adult sexuality with a minor up to actually having sex with a child. Anything that an adult did that was sensually stimulating, including sharing pornography or watching sex scenes in a movie, was abuse. And from what I’d learned from CPS and Marilyn, it appeared as if Mike was guilty of, if not actually molesting Ashley, to at least moving between thinking of it and acting on his fantasies. Kerri said that the patterns were all there. Mike spending so much time alone with Ashley to the point of excluding the rest of the family. Mike refusing to give Ashley consequences when she acted out. Mike trying to win her favor with unearned privileges. It was a term known as grooming, meaning that the perpetrator was preparing the victim for actual physical molest. Mike’s writing about having illicit desires, she supposed, was about Ashley and, in essence, turning himself almost into a boyfriend. Maybe he hadn’t acted on these wishes, but the fact that he had them made him a molesting parent.