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"Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to m . . .”

Sheila’s voice cracked as she sang the verse, and a tear rolled down her soft, pink cheek.

Birthdays were supposed to be a happy time for little girls, but she felt no joy. She was alone in her room, seated on a soft cushion to ease the pain of the welts on her behind and the stiffness in her joints. In front of her, on a small table, was a pretend birthday cake made from a child’s cooking set. Propped up near the table were a couple of her favorite dolls. They were the only guests at her eighth birthday party. From outside, the setting sun filtered through her window. Her special day was waning, and no one in her family had noticed. It seemed like all of her birthdays were that way.

Sheila tried hard to recall the few good times she had with her family, those rare moments when she experienced the joy of growing up. Instead, all that came to mind were images of terror and confusion—the familiar, heavy male footsteps cracking on the floor; the paddle looming overhead, her mother being knocked backwards, her brother being hauled off to the woods; her own sobs of “Daddy, please don’t.” The feelings of shame and violation followed her everywhere, especially in the solitary moments in her bed when her only comfort was a semen-stained pillow. Her home and her life seemed incredibly empty.

Sheila shook her head to make the bad memories go away. She didn’t want to think ahead either.

“What was there to look forward to but more of the same?” she thought. “Please,” she begged to no one in particular, “Isn’t there some kind of magic that can make things better?”

“Happy birthday, dear Sheila.”

Singing always seemed to help her release the hurt, so she struggled to finish the verse:

“Ha- aappy birthday to m-me.”

Wiping away the tears, she leaned over and blew out an imaginary candle on the make-believe cake.

Sheila never really had a childhood. It was taken from her violently in the apparent calm of a quiet, rural Midwestern town. Her father’s physical, sexual, and emotional abuse began when she was three or four years old and didn’t let up as she grew. When she wasn’t getting whipped or chided for never being “good enough,” she had to watch as her dad took her brother to the woods and beat him up. Sometimes her dad would leave for weeks on end and then come home full of the drink and rage that turned him into a monster. When he was home, he would conceal his drinking. Young Sheila didn’t readily make the connection between the alcohol and the abuse. She did know that his violence was random; that his anger could erupt at any time, that she could never know what was okay to him. It made her constantly tremble in his presence.

Sheila’s mother, a teacher, was a silent partner to the abuse. Caught up in her own survival, she couldn’t comprehend what was happening to her children. One time, as the family was about to leave on an outing, her dad and mom had an argument. He hit her a few times then pushed her down, breaking her ribs, as Sheila and her brother looked on. Scared out of their wits, the two kids grabbed their dog and fled to a friend’s house a half-mile away, staying there until their parents called them back home. They told the friends what happened. Their response was, “It’s your business. We’re not going to get involved.”

From the time Sheila was seven-years-old until about ten years ago, her father was in and out of prison for sexual misconduct, although he was never prosecuted for violations against her. On occasion, the family would visit him in the small, local jail where his furnishings were only a cot and a toilet. For Sheila, it was a time of mixed emotions: “My thought was, ‘that’s where he belongs,’ and I was glad that he wasn’t around me. I hated what he did. But there was always that fact that I was his daughter.”

Sheila may have been most hurt by the subtle, yet insidious neglect. Birthdays were brushed aside as unimportant, forcing the children to celebrate by themselves. Her parents would only take their kids to the doctor for periodic checkups, never for complaints—not even when Sheila pleaded to be treated for painful childhood arthritis (that could have resulted in a permanent deformity).

As she grew up, Sheila was conditioned to keep “daddy’s little secret.” She and her brother were largely confined to their house, and kept from friends in whom they might confide. The family put on an impressive facade. They attended church and were active in it. They always got along in public. They seemed, for all appearances, like a stable family. It was painful for Sheila to keep the hurt inside and have no one with whom she could talk.

With her real world often unbearable, Sheila found herself in a frantic search for a different reality. “I sheltered myself from constant fear by reading a lot, losing myself in books, playing house, and pretending things were okay in an imaginary family,” she says. “I had a big imagination where I lived. I had my own world inside that was good. Imagining a better reality is what pulled me through.

“I stayed away from home as much as I could and often thought of running away. I found opportunities to spend time with other adults I trusted instead of being at home. I threw myself into singing in the choir and working at church. I would go to church to meditate on how I was going to change things and how life could be different, trying not to think of what was bad, but of good things.”

At times, Sheila tried to cry for help. Once, while on a youth retreat, she told a fellow student about her family abuse. But then she said what she had been programmed to say: “Don’t tell anybody.” She didn’t really mean it. She wanted her friend to tell someone who might help. But her friend kept the secret.

By the time she reached high school, the pressure of keeping her secret became more than Sheila could bear. She stopped eating for two months and became anorexic. Her already small body grew slimmer until she weighed only 60 pounds. She was weak and bent on self-destruction. It was a desperate way to get attention. Certainly, she thought, someone would notice her bony frame and suspect that something was amiss. She finally grew tired of waiting for that to happen. “This isn’t working,” she thought. “I’m not getting anywhere, and it’s taking too long. Is everybody so busy with their own things that there is no room to notice anyone else?” She ate her way back to normal, but the hunger for attention continued to eat her up inside.

With no one to turn to, Sheila found companionship in two old friends from her childhood: her faith and her music. In times of distress, she would sneak off to her church to pray alone for a way out or a way to cope. But even there she wasn’t safe. She was sexually abused by both an adult church leader at a youth overnight and later, as an adult, by a priest she had gone to for guidance. Again, she kept the secrets from everyone. She almost left the church several times, but her faith made her stay.

Sheila’s music was a way to release her emotions. Often, when she felt bad, she would huddle over her guitar and squeeze out the hurt with soulful songs about her faith, her lost childhood, and her hope for better times.

I have got the power
To be set free
Listen to me now
Break through the memories

Sheila’s constant companions not only helped her survive, they bolstered her spirit and her independence. They gave her the power to break away from her past and her family. One day, soon after Sheila’s high school graduation, the moment of rebellion came. She decided to leave home and move to St. Paul: “I jumped up and down on the bed and told my parents I was moving out. I think it was the only temper tantrum I’d ever had. They said they couldn’t function without me—that I was the one who took care of the family. I said I didn’t care what happened to them. I was leaving. And I did.

“I moved in with a friend and her mom and started my own life. Eventually, I moved into my own apartment for $200 a month. All I had with me was a sleeping bag, a pillow, and my guitar in a bunch of empty rooms. My parents begged me to come back home, but I wouldn’t.

“I decided that I was going to live life and was going to make a difference—that if I made it out of this situation, I would work very hard to use my experiences to help others.”

In the early 1980s, Sheila began keeping that promise to herself. She went to work as an advocate for battered women and kids at the Domestic Abuse Project in Minneapolis. Then she became a school bus driver. She did more than just drive the kids to school. She established connections with them, talking about what they did at school and home. She taught them good values, how to be nice to each other, and ways to resolve conflict.

In 1997, at 32, Sheila became director of children’s and youth programs at St. Anne’s Episcopal Church, nestled amidst woodlands in a tranquil suburban community called Sunfish Lake. The church’s calming environs made it an ideal setting for her to heal others and be healed herself—to mend troubled young souls and nurse her own.

Working with kids within the confines of St. Anne’s and on larger retreats, Sheila found ways to reach those who seemed unreachable, youngsters whose childhood, like hers, had been stolen from them through abuse, social deprivation, or family dysfunction. She initiated, organized, and attended statewide church retreats for youth, some of whom were in crisis, and was one of the founders and primary movers of the Children’s Advocacy Network that operates through her affiliation with the Episcopal Church.

“We started out of a need to establish children as a church priority. We needed to set standards on how children would be treated and how to react to them, not just in the church but elsewhere.”

Sheila has rescued many a childhood in the small, square, St. Anne’s youth room. Inside the cozy space, several beanbag-cushion chairs lean against walls decorated with kids’ artwork about peace, cooperation, and self-esteem. Signs lining the walls say, “Stay sober,” “Discuss it,” “No inappropriate behavior of any sort,” “If you can’t save yourself, you can’t save others,” and “You are entering a sacred and holy place.” This is where troubled, confused or concerned youngsters come for help under Sheila’s guidance.

In recent years, Sheila has helped conduct a week-long day camp for homeless children from the People Serving People (PSP) shelter in downtown Minneapolis. In 1998, the camp was held at St. Anne’s as a form of retreat for the inner-city kids and their counselors.

The camp was designed as a youth outreach mission for senior high students in the state Episcopal Diocese. Its goal was to provide a camp experience for homeless children, ages five to ten years old, who attended a PSP learning center next to the shelter. It was also a way to help children stay busy for a week while their parents looked for housing or jobs.

She explains how the camp was set up: “We had a number of older youth, thirteen to fifteen years old, who came as counselors with their younger siblings. We made an extra tier of participation called ‘helpers.’ The counselors were mainly white suburban kids, fairly well-off, who had no familiarity or experience with anything like homelessness. But while the two groups seemed to be at either end of the continuum, they had a lot more in common than they knew. They both needed to have hope for a future that could be better.

“I told them, ‘When you’re young, there is a desire for magical moments, when all the bad things that may be going on have magically disappeared. It is my hope that you will be able to help transform your days at the camp into magic.’

“But for many of the young children, hope was an elusive concept. We tried to pair kids up with a specific counselor, so they could feel involved in a safe way and go at their own pace. Some wanted to participate. Others didn’t want to do anything at all.

“Most of the children enjoyed the project and activities we planned, but there were some that weren’t ready for it. We had children with many behavioral needs—some were very violent. As one of the camp coordinators, it was my job to help them find peaceful solutions to their conflicts. Some got really out of control. They had to leave the group for a while, talk rather than yell and scream, and gain control of anger and frustration before they could come back.

“With one particular girl, nothing seemed effective. I pulled her aside and asked what she would like to do, and she ended up helping in the kitchen with lunch preparation. She also liked helping with my two-year-old child, Toby. She felt important and needed by me if not by anybody else. Before camp was over, she gave me a door hanger with the message written on it: ‘I love Toby’s mom.’

“Another time, I had a young boy of about nine who had been having difficulty getting along with other boys. Another boy had made a crack about his family, which upset him. He responded by punching the other boy in the head. He was filled with rage. I took him to the ‘quiet room.’ I could tell he wanted to punch me as well. I just kept asking him over and over again, ‘What did the other boy hurt? Did he hurt your body? What did he hurt?’ In a few minutes, the climate in the room changed and he yelled, ‘He hurt my feelings.’ I asked him to yell it again a couple of times, then all of a sudden he just became limp and looked at me and said in a calm voice, ‘I need to apologize.’ So he went to the other boy and apologized.

“In addition to games and other standard activities, the children did unusual things like a scavenger hunt to find nature’s beauty, Earth Dancing, and a magic pot activity. At the beginning of the week, we talked about magic and pretended to have a pot where they could put their (make-believe) piece of magic to offer to the group. When we closed the camp, a magician performed, reminding everyone to look for the magic within themselves and others. Then we passed the pot around again and the children said what magic they saw come out of the pot during the week and how that experience affected them. When the children told their stories, their faces lit up as they shared what a wonderful time they had had.

“Each counselor told a story of a different kid and drew out imaginary pieces of magic for each one. These previously downcast kids had the ability now to pretend and be playful. And the counselors benefited in enlarging their world—learning how other people live and recognizing that we all want the same things. They realized that if you take all the material things away, you’re left with feelings and relationships and the need to figure out what’s really important.

“When the camp ended, it was difficult for the kids to leave. There were lots of hugs from them as their message of appreciation. They kept saying they were coming back when they knew they weren’t.”

Live today and tomorrow
To heal yesterday . . .

Sheila Foster has finally found her childhood. After years of purposeful searching, it has come to her like magic, waving away the demons that had appeared up her sleeve all this time. This time it is not an illusion. It is as real as the smile of a child who has just discovered happiness.

She has reconciled with her family and her jaded past. “I met with my dad and a lot of healing happened,” she says. “He was ashamed and apologized. I told him, ‘You can never give me back what you took away, but I do forgive you.’”

She has helped her dad realize hope for a healthier future and has been trying to do the same for her brother who has spent time in jail for sexual abuse. She also confronted her mother with the realities she had previously denied. Sheila says, “My biggest personal accomplishment is that I helped my parents realize the healing that can happen when you peel off the cloak of secrecy.”

Sheila uses her healing to help the troubled children she works with find the magic in their lives through her church work and her music. She plays in a band called Some Assembly Required, entertaining families and children wherever she can. She also helps plan and implement the annual Stand for Children event in Minneapolis.

Sheila has become a dedicated community mom, raising her own three kids peacefully with her husband, while watching over and mentoring other children in her neighborhood, mediating conflicts, and helping to establish safe houses where youngsters can go when they feel threatened. “What empowers me to do what I do, is the desire to make a better world for the children.”

Finally, Sheila has broken through the walls of abuse by sharing her story. “I couldn’t tell it until recently,” she says. “Basically, I waited until my dad gave me permission. He said, ‘You have so many stories, you should share them.’ At first, I would try telling it in modified versions and would break down in tears. Then I discovered the magic in forgiveness. When I was able to forgive, I was able to tell my story. I hope telling it will help others find a way to their own healing.”

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