She’s a free and gentle flower growing wild…
Washington, D.C. was my first world. It was a place alive with monuments, marble steps, and streets humming with energy. Even at five, I could feel the weight of history, the sense that this city was greater than time itself. I loved it without knowing why, as if it loved me back just for being a part of it.
We lived in the northwestern part of the city, near Kalorama and the National Zoo, in a place that was a part of history in its own right, Tregaron. It had its very own name. It was twenty-seven acres of natural forest set off from the world by tall iron fencing and stone gates. There was a little creek winding around the edge of the property, which rose in terraces to a high hill. It was private and peaceful, a parkland set apart just for us. I could wander the property on my own, chasing the stream through the forest, running across the open fields, sliding down the hills.
On one end of the property there was an ancient stone bridge that arched high above the creek with the entry drive set upon it. Short walls on either side of the road were just high enough to keep cars from falling into the ravine below. They proved their usefulness during the year my mother learned to drive.
At the center of everything stood the mansion, with its four wide columns and a gabled roof, singing the echoes of old money, of symbolism and power.
It had once been owned by Alexander Graham Bell, and before the Revolutionary War it was part of a larger parcel owned by Ninian Beall, the founder of Georgetown. Joseph Davies and Marjorie Merriweather Post had lived there during the years surrounding World War II until their divorce.
When my family stayed in the little apartment in the carriage house, Senator Joe Tydings, a grandson of Joe Davies, lived in the dacha near the big house. There was also a stable, a farmhouse, a greenhouse and a little gardener’s cottage. Tregaron was its own special world. The embassy of Taiwan was next door at Twin Oaks, a property once owned by Gardiner Greene Hubbard, the founder of the National Geographic Society.
A decade before, Tregaron had been the original site of COMSAT, the fledgling satellite program that started in the early 1960s, though that facility had moved by the time we arrived to live there. My father, was freshly discharged from the Navy, where he had worked in radar systems, when stepped in as caretaker of the estate.
Inside the apartment, my father’s presence was a low hum beneath everything, a constant assertion of authority. He measured my mother against his standard of control. His temper simmered like coals hidden under ash, and his drinking lent an edge to ordinary moments. My mother was physically present but emotionally distant, absorbed in the baby or her own concerns. My older sister stayed inside most of the time, quiet and somewhat sicky at the time. I was left to navigate the world largely alone, and I spent hours exploring outside whenever the weather was good.
The apartment where we lived was framed into the horseshoe squared carriage house. There were two bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen and a living room. All the rooms were huge, mostly empty of furniture and dark. It seemed always to be dark in there.
I could walk through it today as if 50-some-odd years hadn’t passed since then. The memories are cut into my mind. I remember the floors, the color of the tiles, the places where there were cracks and chips.
“Mommy!” I screamed from the bathroom, my voice trembling and small, almost swallowed by the walls. I cried for her again. But it was my father who came running in.
“Where’s Mommy?” I sobbed. “There’s a bug on me!”
“She’s busy. Where is it?” he asked.
“It crawled on my belly and my back.” I whimpered, frozen where I sat, my hands pressed to my chest. My stomach was tight. The room spun around me as I held onto myself. The fear was real, urgent, alive. The bug wasn’t just a tiny creature. It was a threat, an invasion of my body. I imagined it biting, stinging, multiplying.
“Stupid girl.”
He knocked me on the top of my head with a single pointed knuckle. “This is why you will always need a man around.“
I felt helpless. My body went rigid. My mind grasped, I desperately needed someone to help me. My father was there. My need for him hit like that punch in the head. I had nowhere else to reach.
He knelt beside me, lifting my nightgown, patting my belly, my back, all around. I stayed still, paralyzed. I was shaking, but I couldn’t move. I felt the difference in power between us. He was in control. I was small, exposed, and utterly powerless.
And yet I needed him. I wanted him to fix it, to make me safe, to take away the threat. I reached out and clung to him.
He was patting here and checking there. He had put his hands on me before, in a burned-in memory from an even younger time, he had done this before and I hated it. That first time, before I was four, I hadn’t had words for what was happening, only the sharp awareness that something was wrong. My father had said he was teaching me, giving me a lesson about boys and girls, but it was no lesson. It was him using me, his hand where it should never have been. I remember the way he framed it, like I was supposed to accept it, absorb it as knowledge. But it wasn’t knowledge, it was a theft. A betrayal.
My small body had no escape then, just as it had no escape now. The same paralysis. I stayed like that, tense, alert, and trembling, observing him, the bug, myself. That moment was my first real lesson in how fear could be used, how it could manipulate, how it could shape a child, warp a person. And it would echo for decades. I have never forgotten it. I could step into that memory like walking into a room.
I didn’t like what he did. I wanted my mother to come in, not him. I wanted my mother, not him. But she was too busy with something or another, one sister or the other, a shadow in the other room. I stopped needing her.
And then I needed him. He was the one who responded when I cried. He was there. I was a kid, and I needed someone there. So I loved him because he was there. I stopped calling for Mommy. The tantrums I would throw were screaming, thrashing scenes of me crying, “I want my Daddy!”
I’m still haunted by my need for him when he was doing what he did.
My father’s authority shaped every corner of our lives, subtly undermining each of us. His temper was a shadow over quiet moments. I retreated inward, learning early that the spaces I could control—wooded paths, a classroom, my own imagination—were where I could find safety. I learned to go deep inside my mind, to observe, to imagine, to grow, even when the world around me sought to confine me.
My refuge in solitude, learning and imagination was not just play; it was survival. I was growing a resilience in a home that demanded compliance, while the world outside was calling me to freedom.
Tregaron offered endless space to grow. Leaves that shimmered with rain, stones smoothed by time, the soft gurgle of the creek, the little stone footbridge over it, the patch of bamboo growing in the shaded forest. I cataloged them, traced the patterns, memorized their secrets. I spoke to them in my imagination, measured them, counted them. In this world, I was peaceful, joyful, and fully alive. I was a wildflower pushing through stone, determined to find a place to simply be. It was here that I learned that I had to grow for myself, to find my own light.
One winter day I followed the paths to the fishpond near the dacha, bundled up against the cold. The water was frozen over, a smooth, hard surface that looked empty and lifeless. My stomach twisted. There fish were trapped beneath, struggling, unable to get out! I pressed my hands to the edge of the concrete pond, leaning over.
Then I glimpsed tiny shapes, dark against the icy green, moving just beneath the surface. Their bodies shifted in slow, careful arcs. I gasped, frozen by both awe and fear. They were down there, trapped under ice, and I was powerless to help. My chest tightened. My mind imagined them struggling, trapped forever, and I shivered.
The panic was like the sensation I had when I was pulled under the water that summer, feeling of being small, trapped, at the mercy of forces larger than me. I pressed against the cold concrete edge, heart hammering, my mind desperate for the little fish to be saved.
I didn’t see the man standing there.
Senator Tydings knelt beside me, his presence calm and steady. “Look closely,” he whispered. “They are still swimming. They will be okay. It might be tough on them, but they’re tougher.”
I leaned a little closer, watching as he assured me. “We can all be tough when we need to be. The secret is to never give up. You see, they aren’t giving up. They’ll be okay.”
His calm steadied me. The fear was still there, my stomach still twisted, my hands still gripping the edge, but his voice anchored me. I could breathe again. I could watch without panicking. I stayed there for a while, watching the koi move beneath the frozen slab of water.
School became another refuge. The Montessori classroom was a room on the second floor of the mansion. Each morning, I would walk up the steps, through the door of the big house, up the curving stairs with the slatted banister, past paintings in gilt frames that stepped their way up to the second floor. It was a slice of times gone by set in grand furnishings and art.
I loved my desk, the sunlight pouring in from the windows over worksheets, beads, blocks, and clay. It was a preschool class for the children of elite Washington families, but because we lived on the estate and I was an early reader, I was allowed to attend. There had even been a story in a DC newspaper about the school with a picture of me, a little blond girl in a paisley dress, doing a math worksheet.
Our teacher, Miss Raines, with her long dark hair and quiet authority, guided us through lessons and outings. Her attention often lingered on me. She would look right at me, speak right to me. That was all I really wanted in my heart, to be heard. Sometimes she let me hold her hand as we wandered the garden or followed paths into the woods for a lesson, and I clung to that connection like a lifeline.
There were gentle times with my mother, too. She would hold my hand, sometimes, when we left Tregaron to walk down MacComb Street to the park or on trips to the zoo. My brightest memory is that October when she made our Halloween costumes and took us around the neighborhood, beaming with happiness. I was a box of Trix and my older sister was Peter Pan and she laughed as we shared our candy with her. She was like another kid joining us in all the fun.
But, sharing her attention with everyone and everything else made me jealous enough to act out sometimes. She got the worst of my tantrums. I suppose I became a difficult child just to be seen. So much of what I remember is blunt anger, frustration, and the sense of being alone in front of everyone.
Looking back now, I can see the structures that shaped my childhood. My father’s authority was an attempt at the absolute, his temper and control equally subtle and overt, and terribly relentless. His drinking was a shadow that marked ordinary moments, his desires perverse.
My mother, present yet distant, could not or would not protect me. I don’t know what she saw or felt, she herself being subjected to the worst of his tempers and dripping poison of his words. Women were measured, evaluated, and constrained. Children were taught to fear and obey.
Today, I can see exactly what that use of fear to force obedience was teaching me. I was experiencing my first lessons in power and control. A child’s body and mind can be hijacked by someone they need, someone who has authority over their life. My father enforced his twisted view of the world, both silently and violently, on everyone in the household.
The world as I first encountered it, was steeped in grasping patriarchy. My mother was raised in it. It was the only world she had known.
Early fear, early powerlessness, early glimpses of reassurance, the need to find my own strength… all of it shaped how I would navigate relationships, authority, and my own mind throughout my life.
Giftedness was a lifeline, yes, but also a shield: a way to understand and survive a world that demanded compliance, that measured me against a domineering standard of obedience. My curiosity, my imagination, my love of learning were early acts of rebellion, a way to stake a claim on a life.
It became a wildness that grew within me.
Wildflower by Skylark
This story is a deeply personal journey through the shadows of childhood sexual abuse and the lasting wounds it leaves. Miss American Pie is my way of breaking that silence, sharing what it’s like to grow up without the safety and protection every child deserves, and to survive the abuse and neglect that thrive in the gaps.
I invite you to join me as I continue to share this journey in future chapters. Subscribing means you’ll receive each new installment as it’s released and become part of a community committed to confronting this particular trauma and fostering resilience, healing, and justice.
Thank you for your courage in reading, your empathy in listening, and your willingness to walk this path with me. Together, we can bring light to places that have too long been kept in darkness.
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