I was given therapy homework. She asked for a timeline.

I was born the youngest of four. My parents had been married for 12 years. My sister is my half sister from my mother’s high school boy friend. My parents eloped after knowing one another for about a week because my father was trying to ‘save’ my mother. My sister Denise is 13 years older than me. My brother Jimmy is 8 years older than me. My brother Tommy was 4.5 years older than me.

3- My parents divorced due to my mother finding out my father was molesting my sister and had been for more than a decade. My father was a known alcoholic and drug addict. This was the first time I was put into court ordered therapy. My brothers chose to live with our father and my sister essentially moved out.
4.5ish- My mother remarried to escape living in her car. I was sent away for the first time to live with my aunt and uncle in Los Gatos. I was never with them for more than a few months at a stretch.
5- I was living with my mother again and I received a dog bite from a pit bull. It resulted in 117 stitches in my face and the settlement that gave me my freedom as an adult.
6ish- My mother ran away from her second husband. She took Tommy and me to live with my aunt and uncle. This went ok until there were problems with my uncle mistreating Tommy.
7-My mother’s reaction was to send Tommy back to our dad and take me to Oklahoma to live with old family friends. Some time before this, I can’t remember when exactly was my first memory of my father molesting me.
8- Things in Oklahoma didn’t go as well as my mom hoped (her boyfriend was absolutely crazy) so she moved me to Texas and we lived with my sister and her first husband. While we lived there my brother Tommy was hit by a car and suffered a severe traumatic brain injury. My mother came back to California leaving me with my sister. I was raped for the first time and molested by a few neighbors.
9- I was sent back to California with friends of friends. My mother and I lived with my paternal uncle near the hospital my brother was in. I had my first alcohol because my uncle kept it in the fridge premade. Eventually we moved into a house in Whittier. My brother moved in with us when he was discharged from the hospital. I was, again, raped by a neighbor.
10- My brother spent most of the 18 months we lived in Whittier trying to kill me. I began cutting seriously; luckily I managed to avoid scarring. I seem to heal unusually well. I was taunted at school about my ‘retarded’ brother who did things like walking down the street naked. I became very adept at running and hiding from the various people who wanted to do me serious harm. My father started to get a bit more serious about molesting me and did his best to make me believe I was crazy.
11- We moved to Apple Valley because my brother was put in a long term care facility there. I tried drugs, got beat up a lot, and learned how to fight dirty. This was when I started becoming seriously rebellious. My brother Jimmy moved in with us when he had problems with our father. My father again, repeatedly molested me during this period. I still had never told anyone about being molested or raped by anyone.
12- I hinted to my mother that something bad had happened with my father and she flipped out. She took him back to court and essentially gave up custody of my brothers so she could take me and run. We moved back in with my aunt and uncle.
13-14 These were relatively stable years for me. We moved around a fair bit because of conflict within the family but we stayed in Nor Cal and I had friends. This was the only period in my young life when I went to a single school for two full consecutive years. I had PiV sex voluntarily for the first time and it didn’t go well. I was still known as being overly sexually precocious and many people thought I was a ‘bad seed’. A few good teachers helped me during this period. I still have one good friend from this period.
15- High school did not go well for me. I was taunted a lot as teenagers are but I didn’t handle it very well. I had series of suicide attempts that put me in psychiatric wards. I finally admitted to being raped and molested. I entered serious counseling. I had a wonderful therapist who helped me find some self worth.
16- My mother and I decided that the only way we would ever be financially independent of my aunt and uncle was to move to a cheaper cost of living area so we moved to her father’s property in Bakersfield. This was a disaster. We were there for six horrible months. I didn’t fit in with the kids and my mother made so little money that we could barely afford food. I called my father and told him that I needed a computer for school because I was in AP/honors classes and I needed to be able to do research and type reports. He told me that I had to come visit him for a weekend without my mother. I hung up on him and called the Sheriff’s office. My mother came home from work to see me giving a statement to a Sheriff so that I could press charges. My family was extremely non supportive. In retrospect everyone claims that they supported me and thought I was right to do it but at the time no one spoke to me much for months. My family is still reeling from this.
17- My brother killed himself just before I turned 17. He didn’t want to deal with my father’s trial and inevitable imprisonment. My father fully confessed to everything—there was absolutely no chance of him escaping prison. My father killed himself the morning his trial was to begin leaving suicide notes declaring me to be an evil liar and proclaiming his innocence, despite the full police transcripts of him giving vivid details about molesting me. My father’s family hasn’t really acknowledged me since. They blame me for both deaths and want nothing to do with me. My mother’s family just thinks I’m crazy and kind of evil.
18- I moved out as soon as humanly possible (three weeks after turning 18). I moved in with my boyfriend Stephen because we both wanted to stop living with our families. We decided we should get married because that is what you should do when you shack up and you are the son of a minister. Luckily I realized it was not a good idea and broke up with him just before the wedding. I then very quickly found the bdsm community and met Tom.
19-23 I dated Tom and was immersed fully in the bdsm community. Tom was 12 years older than me and he gave me safety and security to really grow up. I lived in his house for the longest I had lived anywhere in my entire life. He was very good to me. He was not the most emotionally present guy ever but he really did his best. I graduated from college and started grad school while living with him. Eventually I broke up with him because I wanted to get married and have kids and he wasn’t sure he wanted to do those things. For the last six months of my relationship with him I was also dating Noah.
23-24 I went kind of nuts. I dumped Noah. I went out and dated and slept with a lot of people. I tried drugs. I partied. I had a nine month tumultuous relationship with someone I never should have dated because he wasn’t very good to me. The upside is that I started seeing Traci as my therapist. She helped me work through a huge pile of issues. I stopped feeling crazy and unstable and unlovable. I worked as a teacher and discovered the first thing I was good at where I earned a lot of respect in the process. I was a very good teacher and I loved my job. I did a lot of good and I helped a lot of kids.
25- Noah came back and asked me to marry him. I said yes. We had a number of bumps as we tried to figure out how this ‘relationship’ thing would look between us. There was a period where I was pretty much abusing Noah but we figured out how to make that stop and things became very good. We got married about five months after he asked me even though we hadn’t even been dating at that point. I continued therapy with Traci and got to the healthiest point in my life.
26- I got pregnant. I had a very difficult pregnancy and I quit my job mid-year because I was not physically capable of doing it anymore. Had Shanna. Started having multiple deaths in my close community.
27- More deaths. Failed out of the masters program I had been working on for seven years. Restarted polyamory after a multi-year break.

Of course all of this glosses over a bunch of things. Before I ‘graduated’ high school (I dropped out and went to junior college but was granted an eventual diploma) I went to 25 schools. I moved more than 50 times. I have been in and out of therapy probably close to 20 times. I have done extensive med rounds trying to control my psychological issues with meds. I have (like most Americans) had extensive battles with my weight and self-esteem around appearance. I skimmed over most of the relationship crap over the years. I’ve had lots of social issues due to my malformed social skills as a young child. My brother Jimmy will no longer speak to anyone in our family because he has decided that we are all evil terrible people who hurt his precious father. He has three kids—I’ve only seen the oldest two. My sister is a drug addict and alcohol and she is currently off the wagon. Her kids are 20 and 17 and very fucked up. My mom lives in southern California and she has a boat load of problems. Most of our interactions are awful and fucked up. She doesn’t know how to be a healthy person. I barely speak to anyone in my family. I don’t get along with Noah’s family but neither does he. I have an extensive ‘chosen’ family which sometimes works really well and sometimes means that I have even more people to be flaky and unsupportive.