I was reminded yesterday that I make a lot of references to my background that I don’t explain at the time. Part of the lack of explanation is that I have written about a lot of it in some detail over the years but I suppose it is complete narcissism to assume that people will go back and read my whole archives (not a small task) in order to find out more about me. 🙂 (I actually do that sometimes. Depends on how busy I am when I pick up a new journal.) I’m also spoiled because Noah has read my whole archive two or three times and since I seem to be the center of his universe, of course I must be for other people as well… right? 🙂 So if you have spent years reading me and you don’t want to see this again, or if you just don’t care, feel free to skip the rest of this post.

I’m not going to go into every detail cause that would take too long, let me sum up. 🙂 I had what is stereotypically referred to as a “bad childhood.” Yes, scare quotes are necessary around that. I still have trouble telling about my childhood partially because in my mind I should somehow tell the story chronologically, but my brain works more like wikipedia and things aren’t a narrative–you pick one random thing to look up and then you see what all it is connected to.

I’ve learned that even though my first impulse is to generally talk about the sexual abuse/assault that I was probably mostly effected by the poverty. As I have changed more in my adult life I am noticing that I am far more impacted by the significance of my class issues and my hostility towards people I perceive as “rich” because they seem to have some magic bubble of safety that I don’t have. I’m working on this. It’s important that I work on this given that Noah already does and my kids will fit into this category. What I mean when I say that I grew up in poverty is that there were many times in my childhood where I stole food to eat. I was sent to stay with people for weeks or months at a time regularly because my mom couldn’t afford a place to live. I went to twenty-five schools before leaving high school in my junior year. I got a job when I was fourteen because I needed to have enough money to pay rent because I was tired of having to move all the time.

My mother is somewhat notoriously bad with money so from when I was about 8 years old I started making budgets and trying to force my mom to follow them. She wouldn’t though. She always “needed” to go buy clothes, or go out to lunch or whatever frivolous thing that ruined our ability to buy groceries or pay rent. Honestly the money issues are a lot of what ripped my childhood away from me. The money issues are certainly why I am so obsessive about how money is handled in my adult life. (Shout out to Noah for his patience in letting me be the biggest fucking control freak ever with the bank account. Thank you honey.) I have major panic attacks about the idea of money being used inappropriately, meaning in a way I didn’t plan for in advance, and sometimes I break down crying and get hysterical about this. I do my best to hide this from people because I know it is nuts. As a result of this background I am freakishly good at following budgets and saving money and paying off debt–all of which are good skills. I’m still trying to work on not deciding that Noah is an evil person if he wants to spend more money than I think he should on something. We can afford it. He isn’t hurting me. But I still have this gut level response that he is trying to hurt me if he uses money in a way that I wouldn’t. This may be one of the most impactful/difficult things for him to deal with about me because I have spent less time in therapy trying to get over it because I never noticed how much of a problem it was until we got married.

Along with my spazztastic attitudes about money I also have major attitude issues because I assume that anyone who grew up with more money/privilege/whatever must look down on me and I tend to be hostile first because then they can’t hurt me when they look down on me. This causes problems. This causes me to not even try to make friends if I feel intimidated because I assume that people won’t like me. I have some pretty broken coping mechanisms around this one because I found early on that sex is one of the great unifiers across class so if I was afraid that someone would look down on me for being poor/uneducated/low-class then I would instantly try to make everything all about sex. Even if they ended up being put off because I was too sex focused I felt more ok being rejected for being overly sexual. At this point I am not in a position to make things all about sex anymore so most of the people I connected with using that as a coping mechanism I now don’t know how to talk to. It’s part of the reason I don’t go to parties anymore. I used to go to parties and spend the whole time flirting and going from lap to lap and I feel like if I don’t do that then I am not really worth talking to. So I stay home. I would blame this on my broken sex-stuff background, but that isn’t really it. This does come from class. This comes from the fact that I move in circles (primarily) where I think everyone is smarter than me so I have nothing to contribute if I am not being sexual.

I have talked occasionally about how uncomfortable I am when conversations are almost entirely about tech stuff but it’s only been recently that I realized exactly how alienating it is for me and why. If the conversation is about stuff that feels over my head I feel like my class issues are reinforced and that I am just too stupid to belong. I feel like I obviously have nothing to contribute, other than sex, so I am useless and I don’t belong. So I generally just stop talking and sit in a corner and feel like “See! All of them are smarter/better/whatever than me and I should disappear.” So I hold off on crying until I am in the car or until I get home. Then I cry because I feel like I have no place. I believe this all comes from classist stuff because this all started manifesting hard when I stopped flirting.

Of course this is all tied somewhat into the sexual abuse history because it was installed in me rather young that if nothing else, I was sexually interesting. Readers digest on that history because I’ve written about it a lot and I don’t need to torture the people who have already seen it and feel pretty burnt on it:
I don’t actually remember the earliest abuse, but I make some assumptions about when it started based on the age at which I started initiating sexual contact with other kids. So things had to have started before I was four. I was raped for the first time at seven by a kid from the neighborhood. There was ongoing molestation with my dad starting from some of my earliest memories of him going until I was twelve. There were other rapes and other molestations throughout my childhood and early teen years. I was date raped a few times later in my teens once by someone who I met through my group of high school friends and once by someone I found online who spiked my drink. I have been blissfully sexual assault free for almost eight years now. Sometimes things still happen that trigger me and I will freak out and sex becomes really hard for me for a while. I have had really good therapy and support from friends and partners around this topic though so I’m doing remarkably well.

People notice that I am really not ok with being touched most of the time and that comes back to the sexual assault background. The degree to which I am ok with being touched waxes and wanes depending on where I am in cycles of “being ok” with stuff. I have found that during pregnancy I need to be touched a lot less than usual which is hard for people to handle because when I don’t really want to hug people hello/good-bye it feels like I am rejecting them or saying that I don’t like them anymore. That’s not what it is about. I have a ridiculously high need for control over my body and right now I have much less control in general and that is quite hard for me. I still touch other people, because I do have need for human contact, but all of the contact has to be at my initiation or I start to panic or get angry. This gets complicated.

Other parts of my background are complicated in that I sometimes feel like I have a fractured identity in that when I talk about “where I’m from” the story changes regularly. I’m not making anything up, it’s more that at different times I identify more or less strongly with different pieces of my story. I spent more time in the Los Gatos mountains than anywhere else; I spent more time living with my Auntie and Uncle Bob than anywhere else. That’s a huge part of my identity. Yet I moved more than 30 times before I was 18. I have lived in the projects in SoCal. I lived in neighborhoods where drive-by shootings were not uncommon. I have been the only white kid in my school. I lived amongst the drug dealers and crack houses. I have lived in the desert and I have lived in the forest. I have lived in the suburbs and I have lived in the middle of the city. I have lived on land so flat you could see the horizon stretching on into what felt like infinity and I have lived in the mountains. Depending on what is being discussed in terms of living environments I probably have an experience I can share and sometimes it sounds schizophrenic.

It follows that moving that often and going to so many schools means that I have been in really really good schools and really really bad schools. This has formed a lot of my attitudes about school because I believe I have seen most of the range that exists. (Granted, I haven’t been to any of the fancy-pants private schools but those take money.) It’s why I loathe the public school system and won’t allow my children to be part of it. Even the so-called good schools were rotten to the core. It’s why I wanted to teach at a public school and do what I could to help out the kids who are being forgotten and ignored. I still feel like I didn’t do enough, but I did what I could. There will always be more to do because there will always be more kids and I can’t save them all. 🙁

Really I can only save me and my kids. A lot of what I am doing to save me and my kids is to look at my family and our interactions and see what is ok to allow into my children’s lives. My family has a long history of alcoholism and drug abuse. Even when we aren’t actively dealing with an addict who is using our family relationships are severely colored by the fact all of our relationship patterns were formed around those addict patterns. I’m trying to change that in myself and in my life but it’s hard. It’s harder that my family is still in remarkable denial about how we interact.

I also have a lot of anger towards my mom and my sister and they are the main ones left in my family. My mom isn’t real good at taking responsibility for her actions and neither is my sister. Right now I am trying to get past all of the anger I have about things that happened a long long time ago so that I can try to interact with who and what they are now. Both of them (my sister was often my primary caregiver as I grew up because she is thirteen years older than me) were subtly abusive and usually more neglectful than anything else in my direction. Neither of them tried to protect me and that’s really hard for me. Getting older has actually helped a lot with developing perspective on what it is that I expected from my sister and seeing how it is not entirely unreasonable that she didn’t do better because she wasn’t much of a grown up either. It’s hard to get over the feelings of bitterness anyway. I’m working on it.

One of the single most influential events of my young life was prosecuting my father when I was sixteen. I initiated the process without telling anyone in my family. It came about because when I was sixteen and going to a relatively decent school I was enrolled in AP classes (I’m not actually dumb despite my massive inferiority complex) and I needed a computer to complete a lot of the assignments. I called my (rich) father and told him I needed a computer for school. He told me I could have one if I came to visit him for a weekend. I hadn’t visited him in about four years at that point. I told him I would see if mom could get a weekend off work to chaperone. He said no, that he wanted me to come by myself. At that point I was aware that when my sister was 16 he installed a pool in the backyard as her birthday present–to get her to keep her mouth shut about being abused. I don’t remember if I actually said anything, I probably said ‘fuck you’ knowing me. I know I hung up on him and called the Sheriff’s department. When my mom came home from work I was finishing up my statement. She wasn’t happy with me.

See, I’ve been told all my life “We keep our dirty laundry in the closet” meaning that we just don’t talk about all the shit that goes on in our family. I broke silence. (And look! I’m doing it again!!) Basically my whole family went into shock. They couldn’t believe I had done it. People blamed my mother for not stopping me and the ripples from that have extended for years. My brother Tommy killed himself midway through the prep for trial process. He did it by covering himself in gasoline and lighting himself on fire. Pretty fucking dramatic. My father killed himself the morning his trial was to start. It’s worth pointing out that under police interrogation that my father confessed to everything and gave the police more details on all of the stories I brought up and told them about things I don’t remember. The police were actually really awesome about letting me know that I had every right to be prosecuting and that it was a good thing for me to do. The main detective on the case was pretty horrified by the extent of things my father confessed. (I presume he told them about stuff he did to other people as well based on the level of horror the detective seemed to demonstrate.) As a result of the suicides my extended family closed ranks against me. I am shunned. Their deaths are my fault and I am a terrible person. At this point Auntie and Uncle Bob, my mom, my sister, and my sisters kids are the only family I have left who will acknowledge me in any way. I have some issues as a result of this.

My brother Tommy’s suicide was honestly not that big of a shocker. He had been trying to kill himself for years. See, he was in a car accident when he was twelve and I was eight. He had a severe traumatic brain injury. When I start rambling about neurological disorders and brain injuries and treatments and how to handle hospitals and… That all came from Tommy’s accident. Tommy was in hospitals then later in group care facilities. He had one disastrous eighteen month period where he lived at home fairly early on. I refer to it as disastrous because he was not able to function well and my life was hell. See–he remembered being “normal” and resented the shit out of his massive physical disabilities post-accident. He couldn’t talk right, he couldn’t walk right, he couldn’t stop shaking (a condition called ataxia) and all of this after Tommy had been a prodigy athlete. Tommy spent a lot of time trying to hurt or kill me. He would come into my bedroom in the middle of the night and try to stab me. I was good at scrambling out the window (we left the screen off on purpose) and running away. I would always go hide in the tree in our front yard. That is where the tattoo on my back comes from. Tommy had a miserable miserable life until he was twenty-one and decided that our father going to prison was the straw that broke the camel’s back and he just wasn’t going to survive anything else. I don’t feel like it is my fault given that Tommy tried to kill himself more times than I can count in the almost nine years after the accident. He went through periods where he had to have a helmet and boxing gloves on all the time because he liked to hurt himself.

My family’s response to Tommy’s accident was to mostly forget that I existed. For a number of years I was the invisible child. I adapted to all the changes that were thrown at me. I kept quiet and out of the way. I did my school work (mostly) and I didn’t draw attention to myself. Most of how I dealt with the depression and terribleness was to cut. I’m very lucky that my skin is incredibly scar resistant because otherwise my legs would be quite the sight. I only have a few scars left.

I cut a lot until I was fifteen. Then I hit a wall and for no reason that I can point at I was just done. I was done hiding things I was done pretending things were fine. But I didn’t know what else to do, so I tried to kill myself. I believe that I imploded under the weight of secrets I was carrying. I spent a few weeks in a psych ward. I believe that if you aren’t crazy a psych ward can make you crazy. That period haunts my dreams. My therapist and Noah both know that no matter how crazy I get, no matter how depressed, no matter what–I will never go back to a psych ward. If I believe that if I am aware that someone is going to try and put me in a hospital again I will ensure that I am never found again. This is one of the most certain beliefs I have in life.

Luckily, I believe that suicide is pretty fucking selfish. In general I am ok with selfish behavior but I made the decision to get pregnant. I made the decision that there is a cap on how selfish I get to be anymore. I have a lot of willpower and determination–no matter how badly I ever want to go away I won’t do it because I won’t do to my children what was done to me. I take my responsibilities very seriously.

So uhm… I think that covers most of the euphemistic references I make. Sorry it got so long. I probably could make it shorter, but that requires leaving out stuff that is important to me. It’s worth pointing out that if there is a section of the story you feel like you don’t understand or that you would like more details about it’s ok to ask me to explain more about something. Processing this stuff is good for me. When I get to the point where I feel like I should be “getting over things already” it actually helps me a lot to stop and think about the depth and breadth of the story because then I laugh at myself and know that people don’t just “get over” things like my life.

Caveat: asking questions is good and fine. Telling me what I “should do” even if you manage to avoid those words… not so good. This is not the time to tell me that how I cope isn’t good enough. There are other days where that is more ok in small doses. 🙂