Julie A. Munos

When I wrote this story, I was well on my path to healing. When the actual story took place, I had been repressing many memories. Now that I look back, to me, it's like living in a dream world. I had made this "dream world" for my self at a very early age. The abuse took place when I was five or six, but the protective world I had created was there much earlier. There was some domestic violence in my blended family as well as alcoholism, so the dream world protected me from all that.

When I started to face my abuse, it was very scary as well as liberating. It was like waking up from a very long dream. All the years of distrust, shame, anger, and fear started to crumble. Writing "Forgotten Summer" was a way for me to retell my experience without opening my mouth. It was a way to share my story without making myself as vulnerable as when I would "tell" the story. My daughter found a copy of it on my desk when she went to do some homework. She read it and began to cry and came to me with it and asked, "Is this really true? Did this really happen to you?" When I answered her she began to tell me of an incident with an older neighbor boy that happened when she was about seven. We talked and cried together and I reassured her that it was not her fault, and that she could come to me with anything. This was a major turning point in our relationship. She was fifteen at the time and we had our problems as mothers and daughters do, but this experience caused us to become closer and we have had an unbelievably close relationship ever since. If my story goes no further than that, I feel it has accomplished so much already, but I would love to see more.