This may get long and it is entirely personal. I am dumping my stuff here partially as a way of getting it out of my head for me to look at and partially because I see on here people regularly saying “There is no excuse” or “I can’t imagine why people don’t just ____”. I’m not trying to attack anyone for feeling that way. I’m just at a place right now, right this minute where I can, hopefully, explain. Feel free to stop reading at any point. 🙂

So a couple of days ago I got a piece of news that has pretty much destroyed me. It was a long time in coming though so I shouldn’t be surprised. I’m being all cryptic. How silly. So I have the kind of background people write books and mini-series about. Horrific abuse. The kind you read a book about and think, “Oh my god, how did you survive?” Well, at least that is how my therapists always talk to me. Or anyone trained in working in trauma. Or anyone with a medical background. Or really, anyone who hears the full story who has any empathy in them at all. It was really bad. Mostly I do ok. I am basically an optimistic person through my loud and aggressive cynicism.

But when my daughter was in the 18-24 month range I realized that she was approaching the age I was when the sexual abuse started. I didn’t consciously think about this for a long time, I just started getting twitchy. (It didn’t help that I was pregnant and on a hormonal roller coaster anyway.) I believed that the abuse started that early because I clearly remember offering neighborhood boys blowjobs at 3. It had to start earlier than that. So I’ve been on edge and increasingly brittle since then. My daughter is 2.75 years old at this point. Soon she will be the age I was when I deliberately went after sexual contact with other people. Looking at her, at her perfection and beauty and innocence makes me feel so much horror and shame and disgust because someone looked at me when I was her age and felt I was a good fit for a sexual partner. Ok, so my dad didn’t really think of it like that. That’s a rather kind description of him. He wasn’t that kind.

I have been getting more and more panic attacks. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_attack) When I have a panic attack I have the physiological feeling of dying. At this point I am probably also having PTSD flashbacks as well during them though it is honestly very hard to parse out the difference between them. Many many many things trigger me. This is a sad and depressing fact of life for me. To be fair, I can go years without having them. Then I hit a bad part in my ‘cycle’ and they start up again. My daughter being the age I was when sexual assault started has been a real humdinger. I have been cycling badly because I don’t actually remember that assault. I thought I knew it must have started then just by looking at other evidence.

So a couple of days ago my oldest friend in the world came to visit. She brought her mom over to meet my kids. Her mother changed my diapers. My friend and I are 4.5 months apart in age and we were born across the street from one another. We played daily from as soon as we could handle the separation from our mothers because we traded houses. I love this woman a lot. She took care of me and even let me live with her family when my mother and I were living in a car when I was a child. I owe a lot to this woman. I don’t vilify her. But when she came over I asked her point blank, “Do you know what was happening to me when I was a little girl Shanna’s age?” She said yes. She knew because all of the bedroom doors had locks on them–even mine and she asked my mom about it. My mom said she put the locks on the doors to try to stop my dad from molesting us. But it didn’t seem to be working.

I have always managed to live with my mother’s ‘part’ in my abuse by believing she didn’t know. Believing that she was negligent and stupid was how I coped. But no. That’s not what happened at all. She knew. The fucking neighbors knew. I was also told that I was NEVER EVER EVER supposed to have visitation with my father unsupervised. My mother sent me alone to him all my life. Essentially my mother sent me to him *to be* molested. She knew. I know that he blackmailed her into having sex with him for money. I guess sometimes she didn’t want to so she sent me.

Mostly I don’t ping as ‘normal’ for most people. I’m weird. I’m off. I’m overly intense. I am too quick to voice what I’m thinking. I’m very quick to try to use NVC (non-violent communication, that stuff that someone in another thread called talking like a lunatic) to work out issues large and small. I tend to think, at this stage of my life, that any secrets at all are bad secrets. If I’m having even slightly uncomfortable feelings about something I need to talk about it. I was hospitalized multiple times in my teens for suicide (they had to find me and pump my stomach, these were not ‘cries for help’–I barely lived) and in therapy afterwards I figured out that I was drowning under the weight of secrets. I can’t keep secrets any more, not large or small. So I make people uncomfortable. Ok.

Right now while I am cycling down so hard I’m alternating between cleaning my house compulsively “I don’t want people to walk into my house and see mess because then they will know I am a bad person. I’m already bad enough because I talk about my feelings too much and make people uncomfortable. Only bad people have dirty houses.” Most of this isn’t conscious but when I sit down and try to tease apart the anxiety and compulsion this is what I find. Then there is the rest of the time when I am dealing with the fact that I feel like I was punched in the stomach by a 300 lb man. I can barely breathe even when I am not having a panic attack. I am shaking. I am not able to multi-task at all right now. I have a hard enough time concentrating on one thing. So all of a sudden my house looks like a bomb went off. Many many many people experience that kind of anxiety/shame about housecleaning and have no experience teasing apart the strands in their brains so they never look at it closely. They just can’t manage to clean. Mine is a pretty extreme case, but it’s different as a matter of degree, not kind. I feel physical pain right now if I think about more things I am supposed to be doing.

I’ve always been slightly over weight. Enough that thin people think I’m fat and people in the size acceptance movement kind of snort and say, “If you are fat what does that make me?” So I’m like a size 16. Certainly not small, but I don’t have trouble in airline seats. My weight goes up and down. Mostly this is where I hang out when I am eating well and getting in good exercise (like walking 12+ miles/week or dancing many nights a week). I’m not built to be thin. Why am I bringing this up? When I have anxiety like this my stomach hurts all the time. Hurts enough to be distracting to me. So at a time when I can’t handle much multi-tasking my stomach is constantly demanding that I pay attention to it. One of the best things I can do to calm the stomach pain is eat. I’ve never been able to understand it. But this is, for me, what emotional/comfort eating looks like. I am trying to stop actual pain. I probably will gain 5-10 lbs, not a lot. But other people will see my increased eating. It’s kind of hard to not notice. I go from a fairly normal ‘three meals a day with smallish portions’ to eating almost non-stop. All of a sudden people who barely know me have discovered the secret! They know why I am fat! I just need to start making better eating choices and exercising more! And they always come out when I am at a bad place in the cycle and I already am drowning in guilt and shame and self-loathing. No. I’m fat because this is how my body wants to be. I am this heavy if I eat more than 1500 calories a day. Given how much I move and exercise 1500 calories is a starvation diet. Even when I lived on that starvation diet (while going to the gym 5 days a week for two hours each time and doing Irish and ballroom and English country dancing–all particularly vigorous dancing styles–4-6 days a week) I was still ‘overweight’ according to the BMI. I did that for over a year. I felt like shit and I looked haggard and sick. But I can be fat and happy.

These things are all so very complicated. I know that most people just don’t have experiences like mine so they can’t imagine that all these things are entwined. I don’t think most people have the kind of shame/guilt/self-loathing I experience. These things make every single level of my life harder than life is for other people. I am carrying 200 lbs of weight of psychological trauma every single day. That slows me down.

And now I am parenting through this. It means that my children see panic attacks sometimes. The fact that my daughter has seen this is the worst part for me. That makes all the other issues and pain and disgust and self-blame 3,000 times worse. When I feel them coming and we are at home I can tell my daughter I need time out and I go hide in the office for a few minutes. I am very very good at crying silently. But when we are out the pressure is enormous. I think that being around people we know but who don’t know the full extent of my psych history is the absolute worst circumstance. Out at a store isn’t that bad. If I start freaking out at a store I just walk away from whatever we were there to buy and we go sit in the van until I can be rational. Often we just go home. I don’t share my mental state with my daughter in any kind of detail. I tell her, “I’m sorry I’m being impatient today. I’m thinking about stuff that makes me sad and it’s hard to be patient then.” Mostly I’m just lucky that she is a very patient, empathetic, obedient kid. We just don’t have issues 95% of the time. I don’t hit her. That’s absolutely over the line. I do yell more than I think is optimal but given my background I can tell you that I don’t actually yell that much compared to a great many people in the world. I’m working on it. There are only so many things I can ‘work on’ at one time though.

I often wonder if someone like me had any right having children. This is a lot harder for me than for other people and my kids won’t have the smoothest road on the planet. I am constantly checking in with people in my life about my behavior towards my kids. I have a very wide, extensive friends group. They all monitor my behavior to ensure I am not being abusive. It is very important to me and to my entire chosen family that we end the cycle of abuse. It means that I am really rigid about behavior stuff because if I let my daughter slide and push boundaries we get into dangerous territory for me. I do a lot of closing my eyes and counting as high as I have to in order to be able to speak calmly. I can do that at home, alone, under no external pressure.

So when you see people having a hard time in public, can we stop with the “Oh my god if someone did that in public how bad is it at home?” Sometimes things are worse at home. Sometimes things are so so so so much worse in public. If we are having a day when we are butting heads at home I can say, “Oh man! We are having trouble today! Let’s cuddle and watch a movie so we can both get out of these behavior patterns.” I’m very self-aware of my crazy.

I don’t even know why I am writing this. I know that there will be a lot of people who read this and think terrible things about me. It’s ok, you’re not alone. There have always and will always be people who think that I should have a lot of the blame for my behavior/things that have happened to me. There is a very small grain of truth in that. No matter what, at the end of the day I and I alone are responsible for my behavior with my daughter. Thus I am in intensive therapy. There will be times when I do things I’m not proud of. But I acknowledge them. I tell my daughter, “Oh man. I over reacted. That wasn’t about you. I am really sorry. I will try harder.” Maybe that won’t be enough. But right this minute I have to believe that if I can go through decades of severe sexual, physical, and emotional abuse and come out of it at all, let alone as a basically functioning usually happy person… my daughter will be fine. I don’t have to be perfect. We will all be ok.