Making Waves. Chris Epting

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СКАЧАТЬ the disgusting monster that my father was. I was so afraid at night. I kept thinking that if anyone found out, I might have to go to a foster home, just like my brother had warned. So I went on, never knowing why it was happening to me.

      This is the hardest thing to talk about. But I couldn’t write this book without including it, knowing how many women and children he has hurt. To portray him as something else would be a lie.

      It went on for years. I asked my mom to put a lock on my door, but she accused me of trying to hide something. Yes, I was trying to hide something. She was right. I was trying to hide myself.

      It was so strange, because I would rarely see my father due to his work hours. He worked all the time. Not just at his job at the plant, but at a drive-in movie theater, too. Yet this was how he chose to spend our time together. He’d wait until the house was dark and quiet. When it would happen, I remember not allowing my mind to even try to process what was taking place. I would lose myself in some other world and imagine myself in some far-off, tranquil pool, by myself—away from the monster that was violating me. I had no other escape.

      My own father.

      Looking back on it today and analyzing my earliest years, I am fairly sure these horrors began taking place shortly after I was born. When I think about my parents’ behavior, it speaks to a very dark and haunting pattern in my life.

      I remember when I was in the first grade, there was a teacher who was concerned about me. Even though these were the days when society was far more oblivious about things like child molestation, this teacher of mine must have sensed that something was wrong with me. I’m sure there are certain telltale signs that a smart teacher can pick up on and begin to get suspicious about.

      She called my mother down to the school to have a little discussion about me and what might be happening at home. As I sat there, nervous and biting my nails (which was becoming a bad habit for me), my mother denied anything of the sort. “Mrs. Babashoff,” my teacher began, gently and diplomatically, “is everything okay at home? Shirley gets withdrawn at times, and distant. She’s a very bright young girl. We’re here to help if we can.”

      “There is nothing wrong in our home,” my mother insisted adamantly. “She’s just shy. And I don’t appreciate any suggestion that something is wrong in our household. We work very hard at raising our family, my husband and me.”

      On the way home, my mother just glared at me in the car, as if I’d had anything to do with setting up the meeting.

      I remember once in the fifth grade, I was in the school bathroom by myself when a friend came in. I decided to confide in her about what was happening at home, to see if this was something other people knew about. Stammering once or twice, I finally choked out the words: “My dad takes my underwear off. He tells me that’s what all dads do. And then he touches me. And other things. He says all dads do this. Does your dad do that?”

      Instantly, I was sorry that I had said anything at all. Understandably, my friend became very agitated and started yelling at me, “You can’t say that, shut up, that can’t be true, I don’t believe you!”

      I regretted telling her, but I was so confused. I just needed to reach out to someone, anyone, yet I was too scared to speak to adults about it. God only knows what my mother would have done to me, had she known I even brought it up to my friend in the bathroom.

      Somehow or another, I managed to get up and go to school each day and also keep swimming in a variety of clubs during those early years. As a child, I guess you just get sort of numb. The whole situation seemed so futile that I decided there really was no way out and the best course of action was simply to focus on things I could control. Again, this was long before the days when people looked for things like this or when kids had outlets they could go to and cry for help.

      Later on in life, when Sports Illustrated did a feature about me around the time of the 1976 Summer Olympics, the writer came and stayed with us for a couple of days and wrote the following:

       They are closer and stronger than the Waltons. They go to church on Sunday and visit their grandparents regularly. They say grace at meals and eschew spirits. The children do as they are told and use no bad language. The parents are self-sacrificing and, as is said nowadays, supportive. Everybody helps out and there are few complaints. Vera and Jack Babashoff are frugal, honest, industrious, and the source of the strength that helps set Shirley apart from her peers.

      There was more, about how hardworking and decent and wonderful my parents were. It was just another example of how different the world was at that point. A little research on the writer’s part might have revealed many compelling things.

      When I was thirteen years old, I’d had enough. When he came into my room, I decided to just keep kicking him until he left me alone. He never came into my room again. Later, my mom told me, he became a predator to my younger sister. She also told me that she had threatened him with divorce if he ever did it again. But she never followed up on it. Talk is cheap.

       CHAPTER TWO

       And So It Begins . . .

      When I was about eight years old, my mother started signing me up for private swimming lessons. It was all the way out in the San Fernando Valley, and the lessons were given by an old woman whom I would say was about eighty-five. She had a pool in her yard and, for tax purposes, she was not allowed to accept money for giving lessons. I remember that there was just this big old jar on a table that was full of cash, where people would put their “donations” for the lessons.

      The old woman was very focused on making me what she called a “pretty” swimmer; that is to say, she wanted me to have beautiful strokes and something called a “six-beat kick” which meant that you would kick your legs six times per stroke. But I was far from a pretty swimmer. In my head, swimming was all about speed. Whatever it took to swim faster, that’s what I was interested in. I had a two-beat kick, which worked better for me. It helped me keep the pace that I wanted, and I was comfortable with it. But it was not very pretty to look at.

      My lessons with the old woman didn’t last long. I bounced around from place to place, taking private classes at other pools in the area, including the local high school and at a diving school with a teacher named John Riley. Mr. Riley also wanted me to abide by the six-beat kick, but I was having none of it. Early in my life—at least, when it came to swimming—I became stubborn and didn’t do what everybody else wanted me to do. Little did I know what effect this personality trait would have later on.

      The chlorine used to kill my eyes, so I started wearing goggles, which were new in the 1960s. Mr. Riley didn’t like that and he let me know it, but I didn’t care. If I was going to be spending that much time in the water, then I was going to wear goggles.

      When I was a kid, it seemed like whenever I started swimming someplace new, there was always some other girl that everyone would say was the best. “She’s the one to beat!” “Nobody’s going to beat her!” In my head, those were always the ones I set out to beat. I think my brain was wired at an early age to always be thinking about winning.

      At one of our swim clubs, located in Bellflower, the one to beat was Sherry Duke. She was the golden child of the pool. Her father was also a local cop and my mother, in her ignorance, never wanted me to beat her for fear of getting a ticket. That was how my parents thought. Looking back, it’s almost amazing how clueless they were about life. But her concerns didn’t СКАЧАТЬ