Of Water and Wings
Kim's note: My daughter disclosed her abuse at her brother's (my son's) hands when she was 35 years old. It was not easy for her to tell me, and I applaud her courage to risk such vulnerability and unmask such deep trauma. This was perhaps the most devastating news I have ever heard. As a survivor of
childhood sexual assault by my father, it was the one thing I prayed would never happen to her. As
someone who worked at my local rape crisis center, I had missed it in my own home. For as much
shock, shame, sadness, regret and guilt as there was as a mother, hearing the truth also made many
dynamics regarding our relationship and pieces of our family history more understandable.
Everything was seen through a different lens.
As a mother and a daughter, we moved forward in our individual healing, and we began the process
of adjusting to a relationship whose underpinnings had shifted. We are still unearthing the effects. A
creative response to the pain, to sharing how it felt for each of us, began to unfold, and it felt right.
We are both writers, and rather organically we began to write poems about what had happened.
We came up with a title or a topic—the disclosure, the aftermath of the disclosure, forgiveness, what
we carry, our bodies, etc.— and we each wrote on our own. We only shared our work with each
other when we had finished our poems on a specific topic. They arrived as if invited. Within the
span of six to eight weeks, we each had a pile of 50 poems.
The poems shared here speak to the time following her disclosure. We share them with all blessings
for peace in your heart and with the hope that they resonate with you, whether as a survivor, family
member, friend or a parent of a child who has experienced SSA.
Aftershock
by Stephanie Schilling, daughter
Morning came hollow,
the ground still humming beneath my ribs.
Confession had been an earthquake—
now dust hung in the air like judgment,
light cutting through it in trembling lines.
Silence was everywhere,
but it wasn’t peace—
it was the stunned quiet of fallen things.
Tables tilted on their legs,
family portraits stared sideways,
and my mother’s voice
picked through debris, searching for him,
not me.
She lifted the wreckage carefully—
his childhood, his wounds, his reasons—
as if empathy were mortar
to patch the ruin he’d made.
And I, still shaking,
stood amid the fault lines,
wanting only to be seen,
not studied.
I felt the divide opening—
love shifting on its axis,
a chasm widening beneath the word daughter.
The air reeked of plaster and grief.
Everything breakable was already broken.
I did not want his history.
But she was already sifting through the rubble,
asking the earth what shaped the monster,
while I bled dust and memory into the light.
Now, even when the shaking stops,
my bones remember.
They hum beneath the calm,
a soft seismic warning
that nothing rebuilt
is ever the same.
Yesterday's Midnight
by Kim Birdsong, mother
absorbed yesterday's news and folded
it all into herself, like time, until she spit it out,
shards ripping crimson into dawn
where the words hang like meat,
raw, grotesque, bloody
on the butcher's hook
unbearable to look at
impossible not to see
this story that will never be
the headline, though its ink
leaves the darkest marks:
her daughter's abuse
her son's predation
their mother's blindness,
thicker than the thousands
of shadows stacked in corners
of silent generations.
Nerve endings scream NO!
as damning truth insists
Look! Listen! and loudest of all,
Feel!
Their hearts, raw as they will ever be,
seek seeds of direction
only the birds can see, searching for a map
leading God only knows where.
How far must we carry a burden
before it becomes something else?
The full set of Stephanie's and Kim's poems is published in Of Water and Wings: poems of truth and healing between mother and daughter
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