The Gemmens decided they would always be honest with their daughter even when the truth was painful. So Rachael knows that she was conceived through rape, and that rape is an act of violence. “I didn’t tell her at first, because while she was little it wasn’t an issue,” says Heather. “But when she was about five she started to notice colour and was asking me: ‘Mum, why am I not white like you?’ ”
In what must have been an excruciatingly tough series of conversations, Rachael has been told by her mother that “another man put you in my tummy but your daddy is your real dad and you are beautiful”.
How has she responded to such a revelation? “It makes her sad sometimes,” says Heather. “She will say: ‘I’m so sad about what that man did to you’ and I say ‘Yes, it’s sad but I’m so, so glad I have you.’ I make her understand that while I’m sad about what happened, I’m glad (she) is here.
“I wanted to tell her the truth. It’s the best thing to do. I went to counselling for a year after I was raped. I had a wonderful counsellor who prepared me for what I had to do.”
Some parents, of course, might have been tempted to lie to the child, telling her that she was adopted to spare her feelings. Heather, a writer and editor with a US publishing firm, says that wasn’t an option for her and, in any case, lies tend to be found out. “I have a passion for authenticity”, she says. “If you lie (to your children) they will never trust you and come to you for answers.”
She is careful to reiterate to Rachael how proud she is of how she looks. “I tell her I curl my hair to have curls like hers and lie out in the sun to have beautiful olive skin like hers,” she says. “I want her to embrace her heritage. She has asked some pretty difficult questions over the years. Once she said: ‘What will happen when I grow up. Will I marry a black man or a white man?’ ”
But does Heather ever look at her daughter and see the man who attacked her? “That was something I worried about when I was pregnant but not since she was born. She has never reminded me of the rape. Not even once. I never look at her and think ‘Oh, I hate what he did to me’. I see my sister in her, I see myself in her. Perhaps it helps that I never saw the face of the man who raped me.”
The man has never been caught, although police are confident that one day he will be tracked down because they have his DNA. Most people who meet Heather wonder how she feels about him now. Does she hate him or feel sorry for him because he hasn’t got what she got, which is a wonderful daughter?
“I don’t think I feel either of those things,” she says. “My feeling about him changes. Sometimes I really want him to be changed, at other times I just want him behind bars and off the streets. I don’t think of him often. He’s not a presence in my life.
“But I have been able to forgive him. Otherwise I would be held captive to him. What he did was wrong, I realise that, but I’m not going to try to avenge that in any way. It’s not my problem, it’s his.”
There are many surprising twists to Heather’s life story. One is that after having Rachael the couple adopted a black boy, Deshawn, now 15, who was the severely neglected child of a former neighbour. Heather says she loves him as deeply as her own children, and his presence in the family has helped Rachael.
Another twist which Heather reveals with great sadness is that very recently Steve left her. It seems a cruel hand for fate to play that after all they have been through together over the past decade they should part now. Heather is clearly still in shock about it and hopes that the split is only temporary. She wonders if part of the reason is that Steve, an intensely private person, found it hard to deal with the public exposure that came with the new book, though he was supportive of her writing it. In fact it is dedicated to him.
“Steve is a really, really good man. He stood by me through all those years like no one could have,” she says. “It has been quite devastating.”
She is emphatic that he loves Rachael deeply and continues to see her, Deshawn and their two sons, Chad, 14, and Simon, 10, all the time. She is also emphatic that their separation has nothing to do with the rape. “It’s certainly not because of that. If anything it kept us leaning on each other,” she says.
Over the years the clumsy and cruel reactions of others have sometimes been breathtaking. When it became public knowledge among the local community in Michigan (the rape happened when the family were living there before they moved to Colorado) that Heather had been raped and was keeping the baby, someone warned her that if it was a boy he would grow up to be a black man and it was a black man who had raped her. After the publication of her book this year a white supremacy group attacked her for “celebrating rape”.
“That is really sad because they just don’t get that what I’m celebrating is life after rape,” she says. It took until now to write the book because she didn’t feel ready to relive the rape and make herself vulnerable again. But she wants the world to know how proud she is of Rachael and wants her message to help others who had been raped.
“I meet people who have been raped who haven’t been able to find joy again. I’m saying: ‘Look, this is what I’ve gone through and I’m OK. I’m happy’.
So much of my anguish was in deciding what to do with the pregnancy. Now I know that going through with it brings healing. I see so many people who are captives to their pain and it breaks my heart because I’ve been there.”
Does she think that had she not fallen pregnant in the rape in some ways it would have been harder to get over it and feel happiness again? “That’s an interesting question. Rachael is the epitome of joy. But even if I hadn’t been pregnant I think I would have been able to feel joy again. I didn’t want to be stuck in despair.”
Heather says more than once during the interview that her faith has sustained her through her darkest hours. But surely she must feel some anger at God? “I’m angry and grateful at the same time,” she says. “I sometimes shout at Him: ‘Couldn’t you have given me this daughter another way?’ But I’m lucky. I have so many more good things in my life than bad things.”
Indeed, as she says, she has gained infinitely more than the rapist took from her that day.
Startling Beauty: My Journey From Rape to Restoration, Kingsway Communications, £6.99.
