Local Weather Forecast
Today: Current:82	Sunday: 92/70	Monday: 91/71
Complete Forecast for  Sep 06 2008

TOP JOBS

By LAUREN KEATON
Staff Writer

Thousands of children are sexually abused in America every year.

The National Resource Council estimates the percent of the U.S. population which has been sexually abused to ranges from 54-62 percent.

Beth Fehlbaum was one of them.

“Almost four years ago, I went into recovery for sexual abuse,” she said.

Ms. Fehlbaum is a teacher in Athens Independent School District and author of a debut novel “Courage in Patience.”

Although she said she was abused in her adolescence, she has only been dealing with the pain for a short time.

“I just pushed it back,” she said. “I tried to deal with it in my early 20s. I weighed 100 pounds more than I do now. I was trying to hide behind my weight. I just stuffed myself and constantly had a feeling of anxiety and didn’t know why. I just went from one thing to another.”

For years, after being abused by her stepfather, she maintained a relationship with her parents.

“She didn’t believe me,” Ms. Fehlbaum said about her mother, who confronted her husband after the initial accusation.

After his expected denial, her mother also denied the incident, deciding it must have all been a night-terror — one that, horrifyingly, went on for years.

Finally, in her 40s, she began therapy.

“The most important thing to me was to know that I wasn’t alone,” she said, looking back. “When I was a kid, there is no way to describe the shame that covered every inch of (me).”

Ms. Fehlbaum said to deal with her emotions, she frequently wrote.

“I had written poems and things about my mom, trying to process,” she said. “I showed the poems to my therapist and he said ‘Hey, why don’t you write a novel?’— so I did.”

Journey Through Pain

That is when she, who had once been a victim, began taking her life back.

“I imagined what it would be like if I had escaped when I was 15, instead of when I was 18 and got married. I imagined if my mother had believed me,” she said.

So, her journey began through “Courage in Patience,” a fiction novel inspired by her own pain and the pain of children she teaches.

“I tend to really connect with quirky children because I was one,” she said. “I taught in Desoto and a student there had been abused by her father. She had been pistol-whipped as a child. I also had a student who was horse-whipped with an electrical cord and beaten with high-heel shoes.”

Many don’t realize that violence and abuse like this are in many homes.

But the teacher hopes to be a light in her students lives.

“I’m a real mama teacher. I am one of those teachers that say ‘I love you’ after I have gotten to know a student,” she said. “When kids act out in school, the first thing I ask them is ‘is everything alright at home?’”

Ms. Fehlbaum said characters in her novel are modeled after students, while others are versions of herself.

“The African American girl is a composite of two kids I taught in Mesquite,” she said. “The stepmother in the book is an English teacher. The stepmother is like the adult me and the person I aspire to be, except, the stepmother is a lot braver than me still. The child is who I was as a child.”

Ms. Fehlbaum said the novel has dramatically helped her recovery, and subsequently, those of others.

“I have gotten e-mails from literally all over the world,’ she said. “A 50-year-old woman wrote me and said that every time she tells her story she still feels bad about telling on (her abuser). Today, I like to think that children are more listened to than they used to be. My therapist describes recovering from sexual abuse as a journey on foot from Texas to Alaska with all the weather.”

Hopefully, this author’s voyage will be worth the pain, as it inspires courage in others.

“Courage in Patience” will be available in bookstores Sept. 1.

The first chapter is available online at http://courageinpatience.blogspot.com.