I asked for some idea of the interview questions so I could get my thoughts in order. Here is what I got back: “your earliest memories of abuse, did you get to experience the justice system/think of it/attempt to get help, did you tell anyone, when did it end and how, how the following years were for you and when you decided to start writing, the reaction you got etc.”

My earliest memories of abuse were of sitting on my father’s lap. He would put his fingers under my dress and penetrate my body. We were often in public places or in large groups of people and I had to be as still as possible. I had to smile or I was punished. If I didn’t smile and act happy I was being “ungrateful”. It progressed on from there. My parents divorced when I was three because a neighbor came forward about my sister being raped by my father.

You would think that getting divorced over incest would mean that he wasn’t left alone with the other children. You would think wrong. I was put in court ordered therapy and still required to visit my father. The abuse continued and escalated.

The most extreme incident was when I was nine or ten years old, my memory always jumps around on this topic. It culminated with my father holding a gun to my head and asking me if I deserved to live after I gave him a blow job.

I prosecuted my father when I was sixteen. I did so when he upped the ante and wanted me to go further than I had gone before. Specifically I needed a computer for school and he told me I would have to come spend a weekend with him alone and earn it.

After a lifetime of hearing my mother talk about how she didn’t want to have sex with him in exchange for child support so we went hungry… I understood the trade.

I hung up the phone and called the police and said, “I need to find out how to report my father for molesting me” and I burst into tears.

The San Bernadino County Sheriffs I worked with earned their pay and treated me quite respectfully. They interviewed me before my mother got home from work, which was important because my mother would have derailed and interrupted. Denial and secrecy were the standard in my family. I knew I would pay for opening my mouth.

My father was arrested and interrogated for 72 hours. It took him a long time to come down from all the drugs in his system. He confessed to everything; he added detail upon detail to my stories so was placed on suicide watch. The sheriffs needed to talk to all the women in my family. My father’s sisters. My sister. There was a long list of crimes he could no longer be prosecuted for due to statute of limitations.

He killed himself the first day of his trial. He sat in his garage with the motor running and wrote note after note about how I was a liar and he was innocent.

It didn’t help that in the lead up between me starting the prosecution process and the court date my brother killed himself. Specifically he lit himself on fire. He had a severe traumatic brain injury and he needed a lot of care and he could not perceive a life past my father going to jail.

My family blames me for both deaths and we have no contact.

That all happened right around when I was turning seventeen. My birthday happened after my brother’s suicide and before my father’s. It wasn’t a happy event.

The best thing I can say about it happening then was I only had a year left to be with my family and endure their anger with me. I had broken all the rules about silence.

I moved almost 50 times as a child and I went to 25 schools. I dropped out of high school at 16 more or less concurrently with prosecuting my father–he stalked me during the run up to the trial and I stopped leaving my house. I entered into an alternative education program at 17 and I have a high school diploma I earned mostly through community college classes.

I have a bachelor’s degree. I have an expired teaching credential–I let it lapse when I stopped working to home school my kids. I spent 7 years in a masters program for English and I don’t have a degree because the entire thing rested on my ability to hand write quickly in a short period of time. I wish they had given classes on that skill instead of on writing research papers. I had a high GPA. I can type a great research paper.

I learned hand writing in a school that thought the best way to teach me was to hit me. Daily. I don’t hand write much and what I do is torturous and slow. I think very quickly and my normal typing speed ranges between 50 and 100 words/minute depending on how excited I am with a given topic. That my degree rested on handwriting is pretty much what living with PTSD means for my life. I was beaten a lot as a child and I will be punished for my learned aversions for the rest of my life. (This is going to feel off-topic.)

I’ve been blogging for about eleven years. I would intermittently journal before that. For me, part of the draw of writing is getting to exist in front of people. So much of my life has been kept secret that I needed to have a public way of acknowledging who I am and what I go through to counter the fact that I can’t talk about most of my issues with most people.

It is a hard fact that when you grow up with incest there are a lot of topics that you have to walk away from when “normal” people get to have a friendly conversation. It sucks knowing that you can traumatize people just be letting them know that you really exist.

Writing allows me to step outside of myself and outside of the current moment by moment experience I am having of the world. If I record what I am feeling, thinking about, processing, and how I am processing things then I am capable of determining when I am stuck in a rut. “Day #63 of sitting here watching The West Wing. This isn’t good.”

I hold myself accountable. Also it means that I give myself credit where credit is due. That’s an important part of the process most people overlook. If you don’t give yourself credit for what you do right, you are less likely to maintain it.

I have come a long way in my life. I was more or less a feral child.  Despite the fact that I will probably be in therapy for the rest of my life (30 years so far–many of them paid by the state of California because I was a victim of violent crime. Prosecuting does have benefits beyond the obvious ones.) I am reasonably happy at this stage.

I have a husband. Two precocious, delightful children who are growing up with a kind of safety and love I could not have imagined. I spent ten years researching child development and training as a teacher so that I could be a parent without doing it badly. Not everyone is as lucky as me when it comes to healing and resources post-incest.

 

Ok, around 1100 words. I have to go eat breakfast now.