Unfold Me: Unfold Layers of Your Wounded Heart and Begin Living Your Dream Life

Unfold Me

Deirdre Maloney

Unfold Me © 2020 by Deirdre Maloney.

All rights reserved.

Published by Unfolding Press

All rights reserved. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without express written permission from the author.

Identifiers:

ISBN: 978 1 7773700 0 8 (paperback)

ISBN: 978 1 7773700 1 5 (hardback)

ISBN: 978 1 7773700 2 2 (ebook)

Available in paperback, hardback, e-book, and audiobook

Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

Dedication

Dedicated to my family:

Jon, your love, guidance, and vision have offered me unwavering strength and support. You are the love of my life.

Monika, Charlize, Jonathan, and Kayden, I write this book to set the example of true self-acceptance. No matter what happens in life, you can always try one more time.

Contents

Part 1: Fear

Chapter 1 The Beginning

Chapter 2 Scarborough

Chapter 3 Addicted

Chapter 4 Escorting

Chapter 5 What Is Love?

Chapter 6 The Breakup

Chapter 7 Prison Sentence

Chapter 8 Criminal University

Chapter 9 Catch and Release

Part 2: Shame

Chapter 10 Fall from My Throne

Chapter 11 The Secret

Chapter 12 A New Life

Chapter 13 The Struggle Is Real

Chapter 14 Fall Apart

Part 3: Wholehearted

Chapter 15 Collective Healing

Chapter 16 Courage

Chapter 17 A Wholehearted Life

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Part One

Fear

The first women’s Healing Circle I attended in 2017 was the catalyst to my healing journey. The group was led into a meditative state and asked to imagine ourselves as young girls, tuning into our emotions as we walked through a forest. I was six years old, and it was a beautiful day. The sun shone through the leaves of the trees around me, and they glittered from the movement created by the breeze. I felt very sad and lonely. Nobody cared about me, and I felt unprotected and vulnerable. I looked up at the magnificent beauty surrounding me, and I felt so small. A profound question lingered in my mind; why didn’t anyone love me? I sobbed as I left the guided meditation that had split my heart wide open. The time to revisit the beginning had arrived.

1

The Beginning

I was born in 1980 in rural New Brunswick in New Castle. My parents each had a son from a previous relationship, and both boys were eleven years older than myself. I also had a brother who was one year older than me, my parents’ first child together. With the hope of creating a better life, my father left when I was a year old and went to Toronto to find work. Within six months, my father found decent employment, and my mother brought the three of us with her on the train to Toronto, leaving the home my father had built for us. Her son lived with us, and my dad’s son lived in British Columbia with his mother. We didn’t see him very often. My mother found work after we arrived in Toronto, and I was sent with my siblings to an in-home daycare. I was shuffled through a few daycares in my younger years, and I don’t have any good memories from those experiences. We walked and took the bus when we were really small with my Mom hurrying us along so she could get to work.

On the rainy days, I remember being terrified of the worms that would swarm the sidewalks, forcing my mother to carry me because I held my ground and screamed relentlessly, terrified I would step on one if I moved. Eventually, she got a little wagon, and she pulled me around in it on those gloomy days to keep me safe from the wicked worms.

My mother’s biological father died in a car accident after a night of drinking when Mom was ten, no money to his name except the $40 in his wallet. My grandmother was now a young widow and had four mouths to feed. With Mom being the oldest, she looked after all of her siblings while her mother went to work.

Extremely shy as a young girl, I always hid behind my mother, hoping it would render me invisible. I hid from everyone: even Grandpa, Mother’s stepfather, though most kids would. He was loud and rude, and to this day, I believe he enjoyed scaring me. He was in the Navy and had thick skin and a quick tongue. Compassion and empathy lived beneath his boot and never saw the light of day. I always wondered what my grandmother had seen in him. She must have been in desperate need of help and companionship to take him in.

When I was young, my mother allowed me to use her as a shield, and I tucked myself safely behind her. Now, I suppose she was only extending her own protection. At the time, however, I didn’t understand it in this way. In my eyes, my mom was a queen: beautiful, brave, desirable, and a brilliant hostess who held down the house, which was always in order, all while working a full-time job. She had dark, luscious brown hair, olive skin, slim legs that seemed to go on for miles, and deep brown eyes. Any time I hear the song Brown-Eyed Girl by Van Morrison, I think of how she must have been as a teenager when the song was released in the late sixties, free-spirited and wildly mystical. Of course, this was my imagination and probably far from reality, knowing she got pregnant with my oldest brother at seventeen. I saw the way men looked at her, including my grandfather. This became my first introduction to sex appeal.

As a child, I desperately wanted my mother’s love and attention. I don’t have many memories of tender moments shared with her. Whenever I came to her for a random affectionate hug or wanted to run my fingers through her hair, I was greeted with a flutter of hands pushing me away. Shooing me, not like you would a bee or spider, more like you would to a cobweb: quick, irritated, and with a hint of silly. The silly part, I believe, was added to soften the blow. She had no idea she was thickening the walls of my cocoon.

My dad adored me on occasion. I drank it up obviously. Babykins was what he called me—with a big smile and warm blue eyes. I called him Daddy-too. Dad really wasn’t around much, and when he was, he tended to be a bit of a lone wolf. He preferred puttering around in his workshop or reading the newspaper over games and books with the kids. He and my mother often fought about money and expenses. She couldn’t abide by a budget and felt entitled to her shopping expenditures regardless of how much money they had in the bank. This was one terrible quality I would later bring into my own marriage. However, there were great attributes she passed along, like cooking, baking, and interior decorating. She was my first role model in leading a healthy lifestyle, exercising with me in the form of walks and Jane Fonda videotapes. Yes, we wore the pastel spandex gymnast outfits.

Dad was the soft one, leaving the discipline to my mother. She scolded, yelled, and was after us constantly, especially if she was cleaning. She paddled us the odd time as small children, though she mostly resorted to pinching, which, in public, gave her immediate control and prevented anyone noticing the interaction that left me scared, angry, and retreating further into myself.

I was a loner in school. We moved a lot. Mom always wanting bigger, better, more. Changing schools every one to two years and being forced to try fitting in all over again was something I was terrible at as a child. I absolutely dreaded going to school, feared recess and lunch, and often found refuge in the girls’ bathroom until my lonely walk home to the kitchen for a Twinkie or grilled cheese sandwich. This was the start of a mild eating disorder that would follow me into my thirties. Drowning out the discomfort of the day with food was easy and satisfying. Stuff it in, satiate the senses, and numb the pain.

What a dark cycle it is to overeat in place of communication and connection. The feelings of self-loathing and disgust are strong once the stuffed belly begins to ache. Later on, I set a special day aside for my binge-eating and starved myself all week in anticipation of the big feed.

Alongside my obsession with food, I also had precocious puberty. This condition gave me the pubic hair and bone structure of a twelve-year-old at the age of six, which is what led my mother to look into it. I occasionally went to Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto for tests, pokes, and prods to see what they could do to slow down my growth. She feared I would grow so fast and then stop before I had reached five feet. Every night, I took an intramuscular shot of some concoction meant to slow my growth. The nightly injections lasted about a year before my mother couldn’t bear to give one more as I cried and begged not to do them. We let nature take its course, and here I am at 5’3, the average height of a woman. The condition brought me a lot of attention. Of course, this also left me feeling fat. As a young girl, I held a thick figure, and I called myself fat, along with my brothers, but looking back, I don’t see that I was at all. From grades four to six, I was a full foot taller than the other girls and had the breasts and hips of a sixteen-year-old next to flat and straight. Because I was the first to hit puberty, by nine years old I’d started my period.

I remember being in Florida for my tenth birthday. We were at a water park; god, I was excited to be there. Unfortunately, I got my period, and my mother tried to teach me how to insert a tampon from the opposite side of the bathroom door in the hotel room. She asked me to stick it in the hole between my legs. It’s easy, she said. Get one foot up on the toilet seat and relax. I wondered what this hole looked like and where it was.

Nobody had ever spoken of this hole before. I tried to figure it out, but without a diagram, I didn’t have a clue what I was looking for! Mom, this is not happening! I just don’t know what to do, I said, defeated.

Just stay in the water; you won’t bleed if you’re in the water, she advised. Thank the high heavens it was true, at least on that day.

Back at school, the boys were very curious, and I got grabbed, poked, and prodded once again. I wasn’t sure what to think of all the attention. Part of me was flattered, but another part didn’t like to be set apart from the other girls. It was like I was a bit of a freak show out for others’ entertainment, and it left an emptiness in my soul. Again, I didn’t fit in. Would I ever?

At nine years old, my childhood ended when I was molested. It is a memory etched in my mind with perfect clarity and something that sent me on a downward spiral. He was a grown man, and I had never felt afraid or uncomfortable around him. He called me into a bedroom at home, and I came bumbling along, curious to see what he wanted.

He said, Come on in—have a seat and gestured toward the bed. The next thing I knew, he was on top of me.

I giggled at first, thinking he was horsing around, and I said, You’re going to squish me flat like a pancake. Suddenly, he started to feel very heavy. As soon as the words had left my mouth, panic struck through me like lightning, and my thoughts raced. What is happening? Why is he dry-humping my leg? Holy shit, I can feel his erection. This is bad. My next words were no, please get off me. I struggled to breathe, both from his weight and the panic at what I couldn’t stop from happening. I’m just a little girl. How did I get myself into this situation?

He seemed to snap out of it and rolled off, allowing me to get up. I scurried to the front of the bed, extremely embarrassed, head hung, and utterly unsure of what to do or where to look. I didn’t rush out of the bedroom because I was already frightened of hurting someone’s feelings. So, I sat still and waited for dismissal or, better yet, for him to leave the room. He came to sit next to me instead. Shit. His hand went to my lap and made its way between my legs and started rubbing what I now know to be my clitoris. Feelings arose that I had never felt before, something inside me was being woken, and I knew this was very bad. I wanted to leave my body and escape my skin. The fear of everything I’d ever known to be true was ripped away from me.

I heard him speak, and I froze with fear. He asked, Does this feel good? How can he ask me this question? I felt so small and weak but managed to summon the simple word no, and he stopped. It was over.

He got up and left the room. Relief, shame, and sadness rushed over me in unbearable waves. I don’t remember what I did next, but I have a feeling it was the beginning of many long hours I would spend alone in my room, completely disconnected from my family. I subconsciously decided to turn my inner self off because I could not handle the pain.

This was the biggest betrayal of my life. I felt I had been tossed aside, an old sweater that didn’t fit right anymore. I was now an outcast in the family, and I played the role well. This marked the end of my childhood and the beginning of a sinister new decade.

This dirty little secret was kept for two years. I tucked it away as deep as I could, swearing to myself I would never speak of it. The incident disgusted me and made me feel vile. I couldn’t relive that kind of shame. I often wondered how my mom never noticed me go into darkness, withdrawn and sombre, forever hiding in my room. My love for books ignited during this time; I loved