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After the Darkness: A survivor's true story of childhood incest, rape, abuse, domestic violence, and her ability to overcome the negative impact these events had on her life.
After the Darkness: A survivor's true story of childhood incest, rape, abuse, domestic violence, and her ability to overcome the negative impact these events had on her life.
After the Darkness: A survivor's true story of childhood incest, rape, abuse, domestic violence, and her ability to overcome the negative impact these events had on her life.
Ebook137 pages1 hour

After the Darkness: A survivor's true story of childhood incest, rape, abuse, domestic violence, and her ability to overcome the negative impact these events had on her life.

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About this ebook

The author shares her struggles which began in childhood with her being abandoned by her mother and raped by her father. She takes the reader on her life journey and discusses her repeated encounters with abuse, childhood incest, rape and domestic violence. The author also shares how she managed to overcome these negative events and become a fully functional, inspirational, and successful woman with a beautiful family all of her own. Adult content.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherCandace Breen
Release dateJul 7, 2018
ISBN9780463932070
After the Darkness: A survivor's true story of childhood incest, rape, abuse, domestic violence, and her ability to overcome the negative impact these events had on her life.
Author

Candace Breen

Reverend Candace Nadine Breen is of West African (Benin, Cameroon and Nigeria), European (Ireland, Great Britain, Scandinavia) and Polynesian descent. She lives in Barrington, Rhode Island with her loving husband and two adorable children. She is an ordained Spiritualist Minister and also holds an ordination as a Healing Minister (under the Church of Spiritual Humanism). She continues to her practices as a Healer, Medium, Channel, published author and artist. In addition to her current licenses and certifications, she is a certified Usui Shiki Ryoho Reiki Master Teacher and Animal Reiki Master Teacher. She also does tarot readings. Before her ordinations, Rev. Breen spent two and a half years as a Real Estate Agent and eleven years as a highly-regarded and awarded English teacher for the Providence Public Schools. She is a certified Life Coach and a former certified Hatha Yoga instructor. She also appeared in the October 2009 issue of PEOPLE Magazine. Rev. Breen has a deep connection and love for nature and connects her spirituality and teachings to her garden. Since 2009, Rev. Breen has hosted the “Candidly Candace Radio Show” on Blogtalkradio, a show dedicated to giving women a voice and focusing on issues relevant to women and more recently "Awakened Path Radio", a metaphysical radio show on Podbean, Blogtalkradio and Youtube. In addition to her radio shows, Candace once owned and operated Breen Gardens & Gifts, a small family business which she has used to teach others about the interconnectedness of nature and spiritualism. In order to better serve others, Rev. Breen is also a URI School Master Gardener. Her other current projects include building an online Spiritualist community, finishing her Doctorate in Metaphysics and a second Masters in Library Media, writing, researching, and her art.

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The story stayed to the point and never drifted into grand descriptive verses. It was easy to read and kept me captivated. I wish she could write a small article on her mother’s and her relationship ending!

Book preview

After the Darkness - Candace Breen

PART ONE:

"Amazing grace! How sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me..."

Chapter One: Still Waters Run Deep

What a frigid day it was on February 27, 2001, the day of my father's wake. I choked back tears as I sang Amazing Grace in front of my father's coffin. How pale and non-threatening he looked. The fiery eyes were now closed and gone forever. I was suddenly lost in memories of childhood. I could see him ranting and raving, beating my little brother until he cried or was scarred. I recalled the many nights my father would creep into my bedroom and would force me to have sex with hm. I remember the time I slapped him because I was tired of being nasty. How I used to hate him. Yes, hate. Lying there in his coffin, he was helpless. Never again would he hurt anyone. NEVER. I didn't even know why I was shedding tears for the man who helped to mentally destroy my adulthood. It was because of him that I had low self-esteem and had trouble with men. It was because of him that I was filled with enough rage to cause five world wars. Why was I crying for that bastard? I was crying because I felt sorry for him, really. I felt sorry because he was a person who spent his entire life hurting other people because he had been hurt. I cried because he had hurt so many people who had to live with the pain and large therapy bills because of the pain and heartache he had inflicted. My tears were real. As a child, I used to fantasize rejoicing over his death but on this particular day that was not the case at all. Years later, I learned from reading a Joyce Meyer book that hurting people hurt other people. Never had it occurred to me that my father was a man who suffered numerous years of pain and was angry at the world for his situation. In order to discover that, I had to do a little researching of my own.

****************

My father was born on October 1, 1935 in Choctaw County, Alabama. From an early age, he was forced by his father to farm the land in order to help support the family cause. Since he was responsible for farming, he was not allowed to attend school and my father resented the fact that he was the only sibling who wasn't allowed to finish school. At one point, he mentioned that he was thirteen and still in the third grade. Third grade was the highest level of education my father had achieved and he was always bitter about it. Numerous times, he attempted to run away, using his bike as an escape method but he was always found by his father and was returned home. Still without an education, my father once tried to sign up for the military but, just as he was having his physical, his father found him and demanded that he return home so he could continue farming for the family.

From this point on, the story about my father's life isn't clear until he reached Rhode Island. He spent years running from the law, being incarcerated and hurting other people. He had been married three times (to my knowledge) before his death in 2001. He met my mother while working at a medical institution in Rhode Island. Prior to his relationship with my mother, he had been married to a woman from Alabama and had two sons with her. He beat her, drove her into the woods and held a knife to her throat, threatening to kill her if he discovered she was messing around (but he always had plenty of women on the side). This woman dressed herself and her children in several layers of clothing, took the next bus out of town while my father was out of the house and, eventually, ended up in New York.

When my father met my mother, my mother was already married but she was somehow convinced by my father's lies that he had a lot of money and houses so she left her then husband and ran away to Alabama with my father. My mother had two daughters with her husband and had gotten pregnant with another girl, a pregnancy that had ended in a miscarriage due to physical violence from my father. Her second pregnancy in Alabama resulted in another girl and I am that girl. My mother somehow ended up back in Rhode Island and tried to convince everyone that I was her first husband's -- the father of her two other daughters -- child. Even though her husband knew I was not his, he moved back in with my mother and helped her raise me as if I were his. He was such a wonderful and caring man and he treated me so very well. I really believed that he was my father until, one day, my real father showed up at our doorstep. He had been in jail in Alabama and was somehow free. He told everyone that he escaped from prison and that no jail could hold him and that, for some time, he was wanted in Alabama. Great hostility existed between my father and my mother's first husband. My father did not move in but, instead, got an apartment on the other side of town. Soon afterwards, my mother and her first husband were divorced and my parents did not marry until it was time for the birth of my half-brother who is three years younger than I. When my father moved in, he was always moody, never home and always had negative things to say about women for some reason. I didn't understand nor did I like this stranger who had taken the place of my mother's husband, whom I thought was my real father.

My father was a truck driver and later he became a crane operator for a local ship building company. He stayed away days at a time and, when he'd come home, he'd stink of alcohol and would argue with and beat my mother. My half-sisters lived with us and they, too, were subjected to my father's violent rages. Much of his anger and resentment stemmed from his own childhood experiences, things he had never dealt with properly.

 *****************

I was told that as a child, my father was molested and raped by his own mother. When her husband wasn't around, she would force my father to have sex with her, performing various sexual favors for her. He hardly ever spoke of his mother but would tell us that his grandmother was beautiful with long, black hair that cascaded down her back. He would tell us how tall, beautiful and thin she was. I used to try to imagine what she looked like and how soft her hair may have felt.

My father bragged of his Choctaw Indian heritage when, in fact, he was not one ounce of Native American. I suppose claiming to be Native American was his way of ignoring his West African ancestry of remembering that our his people were aboard The Clotilde, the last known illegal slave ship from West Africa that landed in Mobile Bay. Historical records tell the story of how Timothy Meager, the captain, bet his friends that he could bring a slave ship into Mobile Bay right under the noses of the law because the slave trade had been made illegal. For the most part, he succeeded but he disappeared when the West Africans who were to be his slaves were brought to his property. Meager went into hiding because word had spread that he was in trouble for his bold action. The West Africans who were basically abandoned on his property eventually ended up forming their own community called Africatown which still exists on a lesser scale today in Alabama.

It was during those storytelling times, even though the stories of Native American ancestry were false, that my father appeared to be happy. Gone would be the bitterness in his voice that resulted from years of suppressed anger. From those talks I learned a lot, most of it misinformation, but a lot about the mindset of my father's people when it came to slavery. Slavery, to him, was negative. He would talk of his hatred towards white people. He blamed white people for him having to farm and miss school. He was angry. He began to tell stories that proved his point that white people couldn't be trusted and that I should avoid them as much as possible and that I would never be accepted by them, and that white people would call me 'nigger' to my face and that white people would never really be friends with me, a black child. Having a good education to him meant that I was trying to be white and that I, a black female, was only meant to cook and clean and that women were too stupid to go to school. The confusing and often contradicting messages my father sent my way often made me sad. When I grew older and was surpassing my father's third grade education, the good-yet-untrue stories stopped and my father's anger only increased.

***************

My mother divorced my father when I was still in the third grade. I remember reading the divorce papers to him because he couldn't read. At the sound of the word divorce, he hung his head. He was visibly sad. Although my parents were divorced, my father remained in my mother's house for about two more years.

During the years prior to the divorce, there were constant fights. My father would come home usually drunk and I would hear my parents yelling and screaming. One time my older half- sister Linda had a friend sleeping over when my father began yelling at my mother. I ran into the kitchen to find my mother sobbing at the kitchen table begging my father not to hurt her. He had pulled out the knife drawer and displayed a variety of knives on the table. He picked up one knife and flashed it before her throat, threatening her. My half-sisters and I began to cry. My half-sister's friend became angry and picked up our telephone to call the police. When the police came, most of the neighborhood was already listening to the cries that echoed from within our home. It was a hot summer day and many of our neighbors on Sumter Street on Providence's South Side were outside doing various hot weather activities. They could always count on a show from our house. This day

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