Wanted
by Karla Jynn
I grew up in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania, a bucolic town built around the writings of an eighteenth-century Christian mystic. Our religion, Swedenborgianism, shaped my mom's family for six generations. Our renowned Gothic and Romanesque cathedral, finished in 1928, was handcrafted by European artisans, the rich red of its stained glass resurrected from a formula lost to the world since medieval times.
Being a young Bryn Athynite put me in the “fortunate” column. I walked to friends’ houses, ballet class, and the private church schools I attended for 14 years. On the way home, I sometimes stopped at Sonson's general store--our only commercial space--to sneak a Drake’s cherry pie. I'd eat it out back, guiltily, the pregnant crust belly oozing glutenous juice from the sugary berries. The community pool was in walking distance too, where I went on my own once I'd passed the “white tag” test, proving I was safe in the deep end.
By 1967, at age 12, I was tall and well-developed. Like many girls, I both wanted attention from boys, and felt ashamed for wanting it.
In school, we had religion class and daily worship services, but that wasn’t enough; even history and social studies were oriented toward The Lord. The boys and girls were divided into separate classrooms, but the boys’ teacher, Mr. Brown, taught math, my worst subject, to all of us.
Mr. Brown was short, pudgy, and self-effacing, with dark, fluffy hair. He invited me to stay for after-school help. Feeling like a loser, I thought I should, though saying yes also made me cringe. Only losers needed special attention.
In the silent classroom, he pulled a chair close to mine and leaned in next to my shoulder. The stiff sleeve of his white shirt brushed my bare forearm. As we worked, he bent his head around, gazed in my eyes, and said, “You know, you’re very pretty.”
I did not know. I froze. Where do I look? What should I say? The praise pulled me in opposite directions. It felt like rotten eggs, but I was starving, so I swallowed it anyway.
One day my mom came to the middle school to pick me up after math help. She was our church’s elementary art teacher, and Mr. Brown was an accomplished sculptor who did claywork after hours. They chatted about art supplies while I stood in the doorway staring down the dark, silent hall.
I heard Mr. Brown ask, “May I sculpt a model of Karla’s head?”
I turned around and looked at them.
“Yes!” Mom said, not checking with me. “That sounds wonderful.”
My stomach jumped. I wasn’t sure how this sounded to me, but definitely not wonderful.
I sat for Mr. Brown several times in the stillness of the late-afternoon classroom, each time feeling the mix of flattered and queasy sensations. One day, he casually suggested, "How about we meet in my home studio? I concentrate better there."
Mom had no problem with that.
The following Saturday, in his kitchen, Mr. Brown introduced me to his wife, who shyly looked my way as she murmured a hello. I eased onto the edge of a plastic chair next to one of his three young kids. They stared at me while I ate cheese and crackers I couldn't taste.
I shifted in my seat and wondered what his wife thought. My curvaceous child-self felt grossly out of place with these two grownups and their hushed brood. Mr. Brown grinned, holding the Kool-Aid pitcher aloft, asking, "Anyone for more?"
He and I walked silently up two flights of stairs to his studio. He motioned for me to sit in a cold metal folding chair. I perched there and watched him watching me as he pinched and shaped the clay.
"I'd like to sculpt your shoulders too," he mumbled, edging closer and peering down sheepishly. Slipping behind my chair, he whispered, "I need to move your collar to see the contours."
He slid my blue-flowered blouse fabric slightly aside and stood against me, breathing huskily. Blank and dumb, I held my breath while his sexual static enveloped me.
The second trip to his home went like the first. But the third time, with his torso close and his dense breath consuming me, Mr. Brown shyly asked, "Can you undo your top two buttons?"
I despised him and could barely move but somehow managed to do what he wanted.
He reached his hand down and touched my breast. Then he pulled it away and stood behind me, while I turned to stone.
*****
I never again went back to model for him. I don’t know why. The aftermath is erased – quite telling, given my usually-acute memory. It just floated somewhere up in the penumbras.
The 1960s Bryn Athyn culture of religious shame and sexual repression had trained me to blame myself. A central doctrine, “Man is born into evils of every kind,” taught me to assume I’d sinned against the Lord, filling my soul with guilt. An insular religious community obsessed with "protecting the innocence of children" meant we never had any realistic conversations about sex, which endangered us more.
The only discussions about sexuality came late in high school. I heard that on the boys’ side of the dividing wall, the junior class teacher solemnly opened a Snickers bar, bit it, and passed it to the first of three students clued into the lesson beforehand. The next two took bites and handed it on, but the rest of the boys, not wanting germs and squishy caramel said, "Gross! No way!" When the used candy landed back in the teacher's hand, he ended the demonstration with, "If you have sex with your girlfriend, that's what you'll be doing to her future husband."
Over on the girls’ side, an older, unmarried Norwegian woman from one of our far-flung church families taught anatomy class. Every year she said, "Girls, you shouldn't use tampons, because you might catch allurement from inserting them." And she tried to inspire us to save our virginity by saying she knew church couples married for decades, who still found “the slightest touch of each other” to feel “heavenly.”
But more formative for me were the stern or limited responses to sexuality at home. When I was nine, my five-year-old sister was forced to sit in the closet after Mom caught her touching her genitals.
When I was 11, I too started touching myself, knowing I shouldn’t, but still getting sucked into the evil of my turn-on.
That year Mom drove me to the school after hours to see “Growing Up and Liking it: Now That You’re a Woman,” a menstruation film for sixth-grade girls. On the way back in our Chevy Impala, we sat in charged silence.
After glancing over at me, Mom asked in a strangled voice, “Do you know about the role of the father?”
“Yes!” I snapped, and nothing more. I knew enough about it to know I wasn’t open to discussing it with her. That was the end of the conversation.
In puberty, fears about my body peaked, and emotional alienation from my parents vaulted them to the sky. When my first period came, I walked home from school feeling like a beast. The stuff coming out of me was gross and embarrassing. I made myself whisper to Mom, “There’s blood down there.”
“Oh, that’s great! You’re a woman now,” she chirped, her vibe like a kid’s playing house. She supplied me with sanitary pads and an elastic strap with pointy clips to hold them against my crotch. Her feigned enthusiasm comforted me as much as a paper hospital gown does during gynecological procedures. Mom was trying her best, but the cheeriness didn’t relieve my dire feelings.
Masturbation increased. I surreptitiously read an article in Mom’s Ladies Home Journal magazine, which said that pleasure for “sexually experienced” women transferred itself from the place where I found it, to the vagina.
I stood in our locked bathroom, with its sixties cone-shaped chrome track lights staring down at me, looking in the mirror. I sincerely believed I had pleasured myself enough to qualify as sexually experienced.
If so, I was evil. And then I wondered, why wasn’t I touching where I should? I felt beyond hope.
By the time I encountered Mr. Brown, wanting to be wanted was my specialty. Mr. Brown wanted me, but I didn’t understand his specialty.
Even if I’d known how to articulate what happened and how it made me feel, there wasn't a person on earth I trusted enough to tell about the abuse.
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In 1974, when I was 20, an acquaintance took me to her employer’s ostentatious home. I walked into the entry hall and came face-to-face with my seventh-grade self, cast in bronze, on a pedestal, wearing an off-the-shoulder toga. I was stunned to learn Mr. Brown had finished his work and made money from abusing me. Rage spiked up from my depths, but I suppressed it. How the hell could my likeness be in someone else’s foyer, owned by them?
My grasp of what happened to me, and what to call it, came in stages. Seven years later, when I had two young children, my Aunt Karen and some of her acquaintances started sharing their emotional healing and support skills with our church’s more “liberal” members. I was in. I learned to release distress within the comfort of safe listening, but didn’t think to share about Mr. Brown.
When my children were school-aged, I went to a PTA meeting where parents discussed a “good touch/bad touch” program Bryn Athyn was considering. They showed a brief film enactment of a sports coach coming on to an adolescent girl. Shocked, I got my first inkling that what had happened wasn’t because I was evil, but rather was an actual crime called “sexual abuse” that someone else did to me.
Gingerly, I told my husband the CliffsNotes version. It took years before I explored it in detail with a couple of counseling friends.
In 1996, when I had four growing children, Aunt Karen convened a private support group for people in our church who had been abused. I showed up early in her large counseling space, with light pouring through its contemporary windows.
Sitting with others in a hushed circle on the floor, I watched more and more women come in. I knew almost all of them, but not what they had suffered. The air felt holy and charged. Some spoke up, telling their story for the very first time. Everyone listened intently. Many cried.
I didn’t talk about my abuse that day, because the stories I heard were so much more horrifying than mine. By that time, I had a better support network than many, so I stepped back to leave space for others.
Abundant healing flowed from that prescient move to acknowledge what a scourge abuse is, in our church and in the whole world. A compassionate, experienced pastor-therapist helped to catalyze the awareness that came about in our community.
A year later, a small group of us abuse survivors from that first gathering at Aunt Karen’s founded a church-wide newsletter called Out of Silence. One woman said she would edit it but quickly got overwhelmed. I stepped up and loved being the editor for six years. On top of family and a full-time career, I met with those who were willing to tell their brave, heartbreaking stories for the publication, or relate the experiences to me so I could report for them.
We financed Out of Silence through subscriptions and donations, making clear from the outset that all decisions would come independently from our small editorial committee. Surprisingly, our Swedenborgian organization, unlike most churches, was exceptionally responsive to the need for telling hard truths about sexual abuse.
We invited the bishop to do a brief introductory message. He wrote, “Because of the courage of many survivors, an evil that flourishes on secrecy is being talked about openly in our church and being seen in the clear light of day.”
We printed articles not only by survivors but by support people, teachers, and family members. We included information from outside resources and beautiful poetry. Groups of survivors met with faculty from the elementary school, high school, college, and theological school, preparing lists of curriculum items, program suggestions, and policy drafts. We also helped plan a series of healing vesper services at the cathedral. And a church-sponsored “SAPHE” committee formed, for Sexual Abuse Prevention, Healing, and Education, with representatives from many corners of the church organization.
One editorial began, “It’s never been clearer than in working through this issue how damaging, far-reaching, and life-changing are the effects of sexual abuse. So many people you know have been abused, whether you’re aware of it or not. I’m grateful for each one who’s had the guts to speak up.”
Sometimes we got pushback. One conservative minister wrote me to “sound a note of caution on this dauntingly complex subject.” He said there are those who prefer to “suspend a final judgment on the facts, knowing there have been cases of false memory in which people were wrongly accused.” He also felt that “some of the language could be edited out if it serves no other purpose than to shock.”
I responded, “When the truth is clearly shared, violation begins to loosen its grip. Not only do other survivors see they aren’t alone, but readers become educated about the facts, and less likely to sweep them under the carpet of denial. If a powerless, confused, overwhelmed child can suffer abuse and still make a life for herself, can’t we as adults bear to hear the words of what happened?”
I also sent him an article on “False Memory Syndrome,” which we addressed in several issues, and has been debunked.
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By 1999, I knew it was my turn to speak my truth publicly. By then I’d been open with a number of people I trusted, so publishing it wasn’t a huge leap. Except a burst of dread exploded in me the minute I remembered our readership included my parents.
The emotional alienation and sexual shaming in childhood that had made me a predator’s target in the first place still filled me with misgivings about telling intimate truths to either of them. I was fine with sending Out of Silence to Swedenborgians all over the country, provided I kept my story hidden from my original home.
I had ample contact with my parents; we lived a quarter mile apart, very much in each other’s lives—especially since Mom helped generously with our kids. But nothing of the friendliness we shared had to do with the open, self-aware, most real me, or with how I’d felt growing up.
When I pictured Mom reading my story, I could taste her childlike shock and distress, mixed with the squirmy flavor of her guilt and regret. Despite her insecurities, Mom loved me, and I appreciated that. But maternal love wasn’t enough to make me want to become the therapist she needed and never had.
I emailed my older sister Dee, who lived in Indiana, for support. I joked that when Out of Silence came out, I wanted to drop it in Mom’s lap and then leave town for six months, except I didn’t know where to go.
Dee wrote back, “How about the Solomon Islands for two years?”
My mouth dried out as I called Mom and asked if I could come and have a short, private chat with her. She said yes, in that all-too-familiar tone of consternation and puzzlement. Without delay, I rushed to their house, in their front door, down the thick oatmeal-carpeted steps, and into the family room where I found her on the couch in front of their lush begonias and philodendron.
Tightening my invisible armor, I made myself sit in the chair facing her. “I just want you to know I was abused in seventh grade by Mr. Brown. My story will be in the next Out of Silence. Please believe that I’m totally fine, and I don’t want to talk about it, and I don’t need sympathy. I have really good support. I’m guessing you’ll have feelings about this too, and I’m so sorry.”
I was fine, but if I hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have looked to Mom.
Eyes wide with surprise, she leaned forward, murmuring, “Oh Dearie, I didn’t know…” and a few more words I was too stiff to hear. I didn’t stay. I said a hearty goodbye, zipped up and through the entryway, and blew out huge breaths of relief.
I imagined Mom’s main feeling was grief for me and for herself—grief that would never be healthy for me to take care of. I’m sure she ran up and told Dad, and he too probably felt bad. My guess is he listened to her and soon went back to his to-do list. I know I went back to pretending around them that it hadn’t happened. Thankfully, it never came up with my parents again.
Two decades earlier, through healing skills, I’d connected with a sense of primal innocence. But profound realizations come in stages; I still held guilt for my “trespasses” against Mom, Dad, and God. I didn’t fully clock until my early sixties that some people have warm, vulnerable relationships with their parents.
A crucial part of early childhood is simple nurturing. Humans evolve well and securely when they’re held, carried, cherished, and touched – in all the right ways, and none of the wrong ones. If abuse or criticism rips that process to shreds, it can take a lifetime to reclaim the pieces and weave them together again.
It’s breathtaking to conceive how immensely our lives would thrive if each little person was allowed to be the way they are and grow strong in the ways they’re meant to.
In 2004, Out of Silence ended, but I hope the work we did continues to have ripple effects. No longer religious, I eventually moved away from the Bryn Athyn community and widened my focus on writing and sharing my insights.
For the past two decades, I’ve provided therapeutic support to help others bring courage and tender curiosity to the shame-filled parts of themselves.
It’s counterintuitive; becoming vulnerable enough to expose one’s “worst” aspects to a trusted other helps uncover deep layers of being beneath the ones that are easier to see and accept.
I’ve also traveled a challenging, fruitful road to repossession of my sexual self, a kind of growth not every abuse survivor has the chance for. Now, I’m free to be me, to embrace the whole self that longed to be seen and known as a child.
“Want” means both desire and lack. I've confirmed through years of healing that wanting to be wanted is fundamentally human, and there's nothing wrong with it.
Ultimately, the one I need to be wanted by is me. And at 71, I’m grateful to say that I am.
BIO: Karla Jynn is a 71-year-old emerging writer who left an insular religious community to discover an expansive world outside its confines. Formerly a self-taught mixed-media artist, she currently provides therapeutic support to clients and friends, and volunteers for Movement Voter Project. Her work is published or forthcoming in Bright Flash Literary Review, Emerge Journal, Behemoth, and LOL Comedy.