In a former life I worked in theatre. I loved it. I loved the excitement, I loved the energy. Ultimately I didn’t love the long night hours and I had to go find a different dream. Coincidentally that shift happened right alongside a romantic shift. Basically I jettisoned my whole life and started over. That’s a big pattern for me. But anyway. The romantic relationship I had at that time was with a boy named Steve. He was in a band called Faith in Grey. I may be the only person who still listens to the album. Kind of semi-grunge rock but with a lot of blues/jazz feeling mixed in. I actually really liked their music. I’ve been thinking about them rather more than usual lately. I’m thinking about them because I’m thinking about the name.
You see, in my mind there is kind of a schtick to the name. Nothing is black or white, not really. Every important thing in the world is neither completely good nor completely bad. Everything is in the gray area in between. I have noticed that there is a rapidly decreasing amount of room in my life for black and white thinking. Everything exists in the shades of gray and to me that is becoming what I am holding on to in terms of faith in humanity. I seem to be endeavoring to turn this concept into my obsession, if not my religion. Bear with me, I’ll explain.
This has been coming up for me a lot because I’m doing a lot of abuse processing lately. That isn’t actually new. I go in phases. What is new for me is that I now have to parent at the same time. I parent pretty much every hour that my children are awake. I have somewhere between 2 and 7 hours of truly non-parenting time during the course of a week. Back in the good old days pre-children during this kind of phase I would crawl into a dark cave for most of the hours of the day and not come out for weeks at a time. It’s rather difficult to compress the same amount of processing into 2-7 hours/week. Essentially I am incapable of doing the same amount of processing. This means I am having to keep my shit together under suboptimal conditions basically at all times. But no pressure. If I am honest in my reflection of that time period, I didn’t even make that much progress. I wasn’t really processing. I was going round and round in circles trying to decide what kind of person I wanted to be. I have to re-decide every few years because all of my coping mechanisms are broken. Life is stressful. When you hit periods of intense stress you revert back to your early childhood training.
Conditions in my life are suboptimal for this experience right now because Shanna, my oldest daughter, is in one of those periods that can best be described as ‘disequilibrium’. Thanks to this ultra-modern (1976) parenting book I no longer feel like her behavior is all my fault. She is off having her experience of the world. Right now she is falling down a lot. She is clumsy. She is having sudden bursts of super intense emotion. She is aggressive. She sometimes hits. This is very challenging. Here I want to pay homage to Arwyn of Raising My Boychick and call her triggering. Shanna yells at me.
However, thanks to aforementioned book, I have renewed patience with this stage! I am doing my best to just let her have her experience of the world quietly at home with great order and predictability for a while. At home I can cater her daily experience to her emotional levels and we can get a lot done and have fun together. It’s good. Going out can be very difficult sometimes. At this point she is large enough and heavy enough that if she doesn’t want to go somewhere… Well, it’s hard to just carry her. And besides, if I just carry her and demand that she go I know the whole experience will be hard for her. She really is thriving on our quiet routine at home. She likes having people come visit us for a few hours a day but it becomes disruptive to her behavior if they are here longer than about three hours. That’s a good pattern to observe.
I have trouble teasing apart where I am hiding and where I am letting Shanna have space. Of course I feel like I don’t have the right to hide so I had better hurry up and get over my shit and hurry back into the world and start doing things and start being very loudly me again. But right now I feel vulnerable. Traditionally speaking when I am weak and vulnerable I was grievously hurt. It makes sense that I learned to go to ground when I feel this way. I wish I could give myself permission to just do this. That is what people are talking about when they talk about mindfulness and being in the moment. The thing is, what most people are trying to forget is fairly petty stuff. I am trying to forget that my father held a gun to my head and raped me. I am trying to forget multi-generational incest in my family. Telling me to just “stay present in the moment” totally ignores the fact that I do not have healthy behaviors to fall back on. What do I do in moments of stress? I revert to my childhood training.
I often wonder if I have the “right” to have chosen to have children, given how many issues I have. Then I continue editing my writing and read these long rambly bits dissecting how little tweaks in my daughter’s environment effect her mental health. I don’t really think I could be accused of being a neglectful mother. So what do I mean by “right”? I constantly question whether I am a good enough parent. Which is an important distinction. I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that I am a good parent. However, I am not satisfied by being a good parent. I want to be a good enough parent. I want to be good enough for my kids. To me this is such a complex issue. I feel like I need to hurry up and get better so I can be good enough for my kids. So far my kid is pretty over the top wonderful and I have kept her safe and secure and happy for three years. That’s better than my parents did. Wow. Every day for the rest of Shanna’s life, as long as I avoid the Big Obvious Mistakes, I will have given her a substantially better chance at lifelong happiness. I’m already there. That’s a way to suddenly lower the bar in a really fabulous way.
I’m under a lot of pressure. As soon as I say that I feel like a 50 lb. weight just dropped on my chest. So much pressure. I feel terrified of being a bad parent. I am truly afraid sometimes that I am going to destroy my children the way I was destroyed because it is an absolute inevitability. I feel like I am choking to death under the weight of the pressure and it makes me edgy. Having that physical sensation while parenting is extremely difficult. I have had bad days where I see her move, physically, and I have this physical sensation in my body of being molested when I was very young. Having a child this age is actually traumatizing for me. I am recognizing where all of my deep, dark body memories came from. I feel enough physical urge to vomit that I have to keep a trash can near me while I write this. I have had this hanging over me for my entire life. I think this is a lot of what has been so bad, always. It really did start when I was this young. And that is monstrous. And this is the kind of stuff that will cause people to kindly reach out to me and suggest putting her in preschool or daycare so I can “get some time for myself”. They absolutely mean the best in the world. There is love in every word of what they are saying. The thing is, what I *do* right now is take care of my kids. That’s my job. They are telling me that I need to get outside help for taking care of my kids. Because I need to go fix myself. Because I’m not good enough at my job. Ouch.
That means I come back to this idea of my father being a monster. I was certainly told, over and over, when I was growing up that he was. Well, my mother and my sister told me he was a monster. I didn’t know anyone else I could talk to about him. There was literally no other point of contact in my world with people who knew my father. That’s actually quite amazing. That leads me to all kinds of fun possible derails. I want to call my brother. (No, I did call my brother. I called my brother a lot for a few days. Then he blew up at me again because I will not keep silent.) I want to try to contact my father’s family. (So I started to. And then I realized what I was doing. My father molested many people before me. They let him do it to me. So instead I wrote them all a hostile email and blocked them on the internet.) I want to dig into their history. I want to find myself! I want to learn what parts of me came from where. I want an explanation for all of it. But you know what? That would be a derail. That would be looking for excitement. I would be trying to distract myself from looking at my reality. My father is dead. Whatever he may have been is a book that is long closed and cannot be reopened. I doubt he was actually a monster. Most likely he was mostly an ok person who occasionally did horrifying things. I’m sure he was an addict. He probably had some serious mental health issues that he was not dealing with. But quite frankly, how the fuck would I know? He killed himself when I was 17. I had not seen him in person since my brother’s wedding when I was 13. My memories of him are few and far between and almost every single visit included him sexually molesting me in some way. It is a horrifying, awful thing for me to be present with. I am the victim of incest. My father sexually assaulted me. And most importantly, I don’t want to say the r word. I really don’t want to say that my father raped me. This is agonizingly hard to write. I want to take any derail in the whole wide world.
And that’s the point. I come back to the idea of my father being a monster because I want to derail my life. I want to run off and explore all of these things that have no relevance to my current life because I’m terrified that I am a monster and I am going to fuck up my life. I can’t bear to look too closely at what I am doing because I am convinced I am evil and bad. But I’m not. I’m a good mother. I have to deal with my memories though. I can’t avoid that. That’s the hard, scary monster in my head. I have to deal with how they impact my day to day life. And I have to do it in ways that are appropriate. I have to have boundaries around how I do this. That is how I will break the cycles of abuse. I god damn mother fucking refuse to blow up my life. And I cannot be forced to by anyone outside of me. Their actions are not my problem. I can only take responsibility for myself and my actions. I don’t know if my parents are or were monsters. I know what my perception and experience of them was. I was factually horrifically abused. That means that talking to people about my parents is unhelpful. There was plainly duplicity going on. No one outside knew the full story and no one can confirm or deny anything in a useful way. There was too much lying.
Dear God that hurts to write. I cannot hope to ever have confirmation for anything about my experience of my childhood. It cannot be had. The largest and most traumatizing part of my childhood was the experience of constantly lying and that is why I cannot rely on any version of the truth but my own. And that means I need to get back to talking about what I remember. (I really love the editing part of writing. I originally wrote this post not long before there was a death in my immediate family. It was a very complicated situation. I was also in the middle of remodeling my house because my best friend is moving in to help co-parent my kids. So I had this brief tempestuous thing where my brother gave me enormous confirmation about my abuse history and then told me to shut the fuck up about it because if I talk about it people get upset and I am a bad person for upsetting them. It’s been a bad month.)
I remember, I must have been 8 or 9. No. Damnit. I’m doing it again. I wasn’t. We were living in Whittier. I must have been closer to 10. I spent a weekend at his house. He gave me a milkshake that ‘tasted funny’ he insisted I go to bed for the night in a shirt and no underwear. In his bed. He spooned me. I remember the feel of his body hair against me. He was naked. I remember him feeling all over my body. He put his fingers into my labia and vagina. And these are the memories I have talked about before. This is the kind of memory I can wrap my head around and put words to. But I have these intense body memories when I watch Shanna. I feel pain deep inside my vagina sometimes when I watch her. I feel like I am choking to death saying this. Admitting this. There is not a shadow of doubt in my mind that my father was sexually assaulting me when I was a toddler.
Part of why I am so convinced is one of my earliest memories is from when I was 3 years old. I know I was 3 because of a whole bunch of correlating information, but anyway. There was a little boy, I no longer remember his name. I think he was 4 or 5. I asked him to play behind the couch with me and he did. I then remember offering him a blow job. By name. I had to explain it to him. He said sure and then I proceeded to go right to it. I knew exactly what to do. My brother has since told me that the next door neighbors liked to watch porn in the living room and have sex on the couch while the kids were playing in the room. We played at their house. My mom wouldn’t go that far, but she allowed us to spend most of our time at a house where they did. My mother feels like she is the virtuous victim because she didn’t do anything wrong. But she refused to act. Sometimes refusing to act is the most wrong thing in the entire world and you deserve to be stoned to death for the crime.
What fucking 3 year old should have that kind of knowledge? None. No 3 year old should ever know those things. But the part that makes me shake and sob and despise myself–I am that boy’s monster. I don’t know what I did to him. People don’t understand quite what I mean when I say that. There was a different boy. When I was in kindergarden. I insisted on oral sex. He wasn’t all that interested, but I knew that I was supposed to be doing that. That I was supposed to do that with everyone. So I did. When I came back through that school in sixth grade I found out he had told everyone I raped him. I stormed and raged at him and I called his mother and told her that he was a terrible liar. And that. That is why I need to have faith in gray. Facebook is a funny thing. I looked up the boy I aggressed towards in kindergarden. It was a small school, often only a dozen kids in a grade. It’s easy to keep track of people from small communities and Facebook makes it easier. I sent him this message:
“When we were kids at Lakeside I acted out inappropriately towards you and years later you told people I raped you. I stormed and raged and called your mother.
I need to apologize to you. What I did to you when we were little kids wasn’t ok. I am really sorry I brought that into your life and I did. And when you talked about the fact that it had been a problem for you I lied and shamed you in public.
I am so sorry. I hope you have been able to find people to talk to about what I did to you. I am not excusing myself for what I did. I was a very messed up kid and it is only now that I am stopping to start to think about what I did and why.
You are one of the people I hurt and I am so sorry. I have been sorry for 20 years.”
He responded: “thank you for the appology and i forgive you. its something i really haven’t thought about in a long time and its water under the bridge.”
That is a wonderful and gracious way for him to respond. I’m deeply grateful that he responded that way. It lets me believe that intention and action can be measured, each independently on the same crime and sometimes there are justifiable reasons for it. Thing is, I’m an adult now. If I go sexually aggress towards someone or behave inappropriately… that isn’t something that should be considered justified because I was abused as a child. These topics are hard and scary because there are so much extreme emotions so all of the words about them have to be strong words. I believe that there are gray areas in these conversations. But are there things that are still unequivocally wrong? Are there things that are evil and the perpetrator deserves to be expelled? Some people say that people should be judged by their intentions and not by their actions. I have every intention of hurting my family. I am going to publicly expose all of their shameful secrets and they will feel great emotional pain. The thing is… I’m not actually doing anything to them beyond revealing their actions to anyone who will listen. I’m doing this because I am terrified. You see, my family is currently going through a period of intense stress. If I feel like this–so do they. And we are all reverting back to our childhood training. Because that is what you do when you are a family of incestuous people. Guess what our childhood training is?
I am not a monster. I probably hurt that boy, yes. But it wasn’t my fault. I was doing what children do. I was exploring the issues in my world through my play. That is what a child that age has to do. I wasn’t to blame. But those are adult words. The little kid inside me who is still exactly that age, she knows that what she did was bad. She knows that she is a monster. She doesn’t know how she became that monster, but everything is all her fault. That is my legacy as the victim of incest. That is my family role. I am the scapegoat. I am the monster. This is mostly true because of my exquisitely heightened sense of shame and guilt. I am to blame for all of the evils in the world–even the things I didn’t commit. And this is another derail.
I can never truly make reparations for what I did. But that’s not the point. The point is that almost 30 years later I feel guilt for what I did and that guilt is poisoning me. For the most part when people tell me that I need to ‘let things go’ I think they are being fucking assholes and telling me not to deal with my shit because my shit makes them uncomfortable. However, in this case, I think I do need to let this part go. I need to recognize when I am derailing my life. I need to look at the ways in which I am wasting my fucking time. I need to understand what a derail is. I need to recognize when I am doing it. I need to give myself time and space for doing it. And I need to recognize when I am out of time for doing it and I need to hurry up and stop paying attention to it. Right now I have to go pay attention to my life.
I need to let go of feeling responsible for the actions of a fucking insane 3 year old who had sexual assault issues she was working through. My 3 year old has never been traumatized, I can absolutely promise you. She still acts out in really fierce ways. Maybe I wasn’t such a monster. Maybe I was just 3 and some of the stuff I had to process was really awful.
So then I come back to my dad. He probably wasn’t actually a monster either. He was a person. He was a person who had a favorite song. And a favorite color. And a favorite flavor. And a favorite movie. He had good points and bad. He helped people and he hurt people. Yes, he hurt me in ways that were monstrous. But does that really make him a monster? I don’t know. I can’t know. There is no way for me to know. Even if he was alive I would never be able to really judge him accurately. Because when I see my perfect, beautiful little girl rolling around on the floor feeling in her body the joy of being alive I feel a large invisible body pressing down on me. I taste hot, bitter acidic semen in my mouth. I feel burning in my vagina.
And I have to parent through that. And my family has told me loud and clear for more than 20 years that me saying any of this out loud hurts them and hurting them makes me a bad person. Hey, they were victimized too. It’s not their fault. Why am I turning around and hurting them like this? That is when the rage explodes inside my chest. That is when I feel so much intense emotion that I want to grab my baby by the ankles and beat her head against the wall and I can clearly visualize all of the gore and blood and mess. I just.want.the.screaming.to.stop. And when I talk about these things, when I say them out loud people get a certain picture of me. If I say that my house is a disaster and I use marijuana for anxiety and blah blah blah. People get a certain picture in their head of me. They start to judge me. It makes it unsafe for me to continue telling my story because if I say those things I feel like I have to worry about CPS showing up at my house. I have had other incest/sexual assault survivors contact me and tell me to take my writing down before something bad happens to me and they share their own horror stories about being victimized by the police or the public or their jobs if they talked in public.
I can’t be silenced anymore. My name is Kristine Lenora Gibbs. My father put a gun to my head and raped me when I was 9 years old. My family silenced me. I will not be silent any more.
But how do I be that person and still be allowed to be all the other things that I want to be? You, whoever you are, now have an image of me in your head. I can never really understand who you see in your head. Who you see in your head has almost nothing to do with me because it is unique to your life experiences and perceptions. But I feel responsible for it. I feel like it is all.my.fault. I feel like if I ever get up the courage to hit submit I will be taking the first step in truly publicly outing my family. I’ve been writing on the internet about my abuse for years but it’s always been anonymous. I’ve always been unwilling to take the step that really severed the possibility of crawling back to them on their terms.
I don’t know about other people, but for me that is how I will break this cycle of abuse. I will decide what things I want to reveal and not reveal publicly based on my own moral compass. I will not let the internet become a focal point of my life, but I do like public accountability. I am not alone. I am tired of feeling like I am alone. It is ok for me to look around the internet for people who have a spare few minutes who want to give support. I am not intruding on anyone. And I am doing this with the goal of writing a book. My family is going through a period of intense stress.
My sister has already been a sexual aggressor in the past. And she’s under a lot of stress. And she’s not willing to talk about any of her subconscious urges. And she’s been unemployed for years. And she just had my mother move back in with her. And she just broke up with the boyfriend who was actually relatively sane. And she permitted her “husband” (long story) to rape her son. And she encouraged her kids to have oral sex with one another. And she forced her children to be naked long after they developed natural modesty. And now she is at home babysitting the kids of a bunch of drug using teenage mothers. You know, I don’t want to stereotype all teenage mothers because a lot of them are really wonderful mothers. But uhm. That’s not the kind I’m talking about. These are the things I know standing on the outside. I know she is using drugs. I don’t know how much or what kinds.
If you choose to be silent in the face of horror you are consenting to that horror happening. I will not be silenced.
