Category Archives: book ideas

Part of the road to Noah

This fine morning a friend asked me about a link on Facebook about Mansplaining.  It lead to an interesting conversation about whether men or women (sexist language abounds.  I’m going to do an aside to say that there is a really odd mixture of statistics on whether rape is a female problem or a problem that is closer to equal than anyone can handle admitting.  I am defaulting to standard sexist language because that is my experience base.  I do not mean to say that my experiences are universal–they are not.  Carry on.) bear responsibility for rape.

I’m going to call myself out for being an asshole, because I was, but I was a persuasive asshole.  I said, more or less, “Oh reeeeeeeeeeeeeeally?  How much responsibility do I bear for being raped?”  I then proceeded to go through a list of the times I have been arguably raped as an adult when I should be responsible for my ability to pick “safe” people.  I decided it was time to tell the story of Dan Morgan.  I haven’t before.  Not really.

On December 18th, 2005 I posted this in my livejournal:
I am about to climb out of my head with wanting sex. But I still don’t want casual sex. I feel kind of lame. It has been just over three weeks and I am already going batty? Damn the time is going to pass slow… This is longer than I have gone without sex in… oh god… uhhhhh… two years. For the record: I have really enjoyed how much sex I have had in the last two years. *sigh* Thank you to all the lovely people who have made the last two years so much fun. 🙂 I was asked on Friday if going back to casual sex would be better than waiting for more meaningful sex. I told the person that I am coming out of a relationship where I have had the best sex of my life and going back to more mediocre sex would be a serious let down and I am not quite ready to do that yet. I think a lot/most of what made that sex so awesome was I was more present for it than I usually am. I asked Puppy for what I wanted in ways that I have never been comfortable asking before. Other than the actual technical amount of time spent having sex I got exactly what I wanted pretty much when I wanted. There was also a variety that blew my mind. I kind of feel like I rediscovered vanilla sex. And it can be GOOD. 

I miss every part of sex. I miss having his body over mine. I miss the scary intensity of having him slide into my ass. I miss feeling a cock in my throat. I miss feeling his tongue on my clit. I really miss having a cock in my pussy. The discerning reader will notice the change in possessive pronouns in the previous statements. There are some sex acts that were very specific to him that I miss him for. There are some that I am just missing in general right now. He is the only sex partner I have ever received regular anal or oral from. 

I didn’t mention this part to the person who asked, but I actually don’t really want to go back to casual sex because I don’t want to go back to the fanaticism I have when I am being a slut. I don’t particularly like getting STD tested every three months. I don’t particularly like condoms. I really really really like unprotected sex–which is a scary and dangerous thing. I can’t have it casually because I am not willing to risk my life. I am still on the pill. The first time he tried to break up with me I asked him if I could maintain booty call rights. I think I have it in the back of my mind that waiting a couple of months until I am less emotionally attached is a good thing, but eventually having him as a booty call would be a good thing. Although this is just mental masturbation. I really think that in order to not hurt myself emotionally it would have to be 4-6 months before I would be able to have sex with him and not cry through the entire event. And yeah. I am well aware that I technically can wait that long to have sex but I really don’t have to and I won’t go back to unprotected sex with him if I sleep with someone else. Ethics are annoying.

Right now, all I know is that I have a stronger desire right now for being beaten, for being held down and fucked unmercilessly than I have had in a very long time. I want to be slapped and taunted with how very horny I am right now. I want to have someone revel in my lustiness and appreciate the fact that I can wear someone out right now. I want to have someone fuck me until I beg them to stop because I am so sore. I want to be restrained and hurt and threatened. I want… sex.

The person I had been talking to on Friday was Dan Morgan.  I don’t know how we started talking.  I’m sure we met through Dickens Fair.  No!  Tribe?  Was it Tribe?  I don’t remember for sure.  That sounds right, though.  We were having these really awesome long conversations over IM about fun kinky sex stuff we were interested in doing.  I was adamant about casual sex meaning condoms.  He didn’t like that bit.  He told me quite a bit about how condoms were annoying.  My response: tough.  No cover, no entry.

Our first date was on Christmas Day in Disneyland.  I uhhh kind of bought his ticket in.  He was really broke and said he couldn’t afford the trip if he had to pay for theme park tickets, though he had friends he could go crash with who would go with him to the park if I got him in.  I didn’t have a problem with this.

We had a really fun date.  Involving upsetting his friends when Dan fingered me in the Tiki Room.  We were shit-faced drunk from the bar in downtown Disney.  Disneyland as an adult is very different. Other people go and treat it very differently than I do.  Anyway.

He went off with his friends and I went off with mine.  On December 27th I posted:
Disneyland is still cool.
First dates… are interesting.
Still not up for sex even though I am crawling the walls.
I went to the gym and I am proud of myself.
I haven’t made one itty bitty movement towards cleaning my apartment.
I have food now.
Tomorrow I have three netflix movies to send back.
My cat is hella clingy.
My family sucks even more than usual.
I am really drunk.
I told Puppy that he is an elitist piece of shit tonight.
I am tired of planes.
I am really tired and uninterested in sleeping for some strange reason… I think I am going to lose that battle in the next 10 minutes though.
I missed country music.
Zzzzzzzzz
sleep. 
I love my friends.

And then on December 29th I posted:
Tiki Bar TV

London Fogcutter, episode 8. That is the reason for my hangover.

I didn’t bother to mention that the real reason for my hangover was because Dan came over.  We had a pleasant afternoon together.  We dealt with a motorcycle gear acquisition for him.  There was a good store near me.  We tried to get to know one another.  By evening he said we should start watching the show.  He started making drinks.  He made more and more.  Dan is a really serious alcoholic.  I don’t drink much and never have.  Alcohol makes my stomach hurt.  He kept topping up my glass.  “Oh come on.  You don’t want to get behind now, do you?”  He was very antagonistic towards me trying to get me to drink more.

I wanted him to like me.  I will freely say that.  I thought he was shiny.  I’m sure there was an element of star-fucking in it.  He seemed well-liked.  Maybe if I stood next to him I would feel like not-poison for a while.

I woke up at about 3am in my bed confused.  I couldn’t remember anything past Tiki Bar TV.  And I don’t know that I remember more than two episodes of it.  I reached down between my legs and felt a lot of wet.  I rolled out of bed (because I had no other way of getting to the floor) and crawled into the bathroom.  There I proceeded to vomit until I thought I would die.  It was awesome.  This was when I was living in San Jose by myself for the only time in my life.

Puppy dumped me on Thanksgiving day.  Noah asked me to marry him in March.  Dan was right in the middle.  Of-fucking-course I said yes to Noah.

Anyway.  When I stopped puking I looked for my phone.  I sent Dan a text message asking where he was, when he left, and uhm, did we have sex?  He said he was at home.  He had left at 2.  Yes, we had sex.  I sent back another message saying: …unprotected sex?  He said, “Well you are on the pill so it doesn’t matter, right?”

I said basically nothing about this event to anyone who knew me.  It wasn’t exactly rape, right?  Only legally it was.  Regardless of whether I intended to have sex or not, once I was passed out drunk it wasn’t ok.  I had text evidence that I wasn’t interested in unprotected sex.  And I bloody well thought about the fact that I could go in for a rape kit and it would be bloody obvious that we had unprotected sex.

I was afraid of people saying that I was having second thoughts.  I was afraid of people saying that I was stupid or that I deserved it.  I believe that unprotected sex is a disease vector.  At that point in my life I was still really focused on the fact that I wanted to have children.  I didn’t risk any more disease than I had to.  I already have herpes and I’ve already had an hpv outbreak.  That damage was done long before.  I did the best I could with the information that I had.

Do you know why I was so afraid of going to the police?  Well.  That’s another story.  I can’t give you a name because I honestly don’t remember it.  I don’t really want to.  I wouldn’t remember Dan’s if he wasn’t a trusted member of my extended community I thought was safe.

The summer I was 18 I was drunk with the sexual power of being a woman.  Finally, for the first time in my life what I was doing and mine to decide about.  I finally had the legal right to consent.  It did actually matter to me.  It has always bothered me that my early partners could have gone to jail for what we did.  It feels like an unfair balance of responsibility.  Anyway.

So when I was 18 I was on match.com.  Don’t judge.  I was hanging out in the chat rooms a lot.  I met up with several people.  The first was a guy who was in the Coast Guard.  He lived in Alameda.  Anna was housesitting for a family way the heck up Summit Road.  The other side, not the same side as Redwood Estates.  Way up in the fancy-pants part of the mountains.  The house was beautiful.  I can’t remember if there were three or four stories.  Elaborate wine cellar (like a huge vault that was about 1/3 the size of the bottom floor of the house), sauna, steam room, exercise room, pool, hot tub… everything.  The family was having a lot of work done on the house.  They gave Anna permission to have me stay up there with her.

I know they regretted that.  It was all my fault.  Anna had worked for them successfully for years at that point.  I ruined a very profitable relationship for her and I still feel bad about that.  That is part of what I mean when I say I am poison.  Anna bore a lot of the brunt of the backlash for this.  But I’m getting ahead of myself again.

We invited a couple of my theater friends and this random guy from match.com up to the house for a party.  It wasn’t that wild because my theater friends were young and sweet and inexperienced.  I think back on them with this really nostalgic color.  They were really awesome and I didn’t know how to stay one of them.

Of course there was drinking.  Unless I snuck off behind Anna’s back she said I had three shots of tequila and then I begged off because my stomach hurt.  Everyone else kept drinking.  I don’t remember much after the second shot.  I woke up in the morning feeling fierce and disgusting.  I couldn’t remember any sex and I was kind of sad.  I was confused though because I couldn’t remember much of anything, really.  But I had to hurry up and get moving.  I was working at Pride in San Francisco.  I was working a booth for the Same Sex Marriage organization.  It was awesome.  I met people and did things I’m really glad I did.  In between doing all of them I had to run to Port-A-Potties to vomit.  I did that all day long.  When I went back up to the house in the mountains I took another shower and curled up on the bed.  I happened to lean over and look in the trash can.  There were three used condoms.

Funny.  I didn’t remember having sex.  I asked Anna what happened.  She told me about the party and said that eventually I stumbled back up to the room with the help of this guy.  I asked her how I looked and she said, “You looked really out of it.”  I nodded.  I told her that I think that what happened technically qualifies as rape.  I called the Sheriff.  She was dubious.  She was right.

The particular officer who showed up is one I have met before.  When I was 11 Al Smith, my next door neighbor at the time, asked me if I would have sex with him.  Our other neighbor overheard the whole exchange and reported it.  That’s why the officer came to my house when I was 11.  When I was 11 he told my family I was crazy and that I needed help.  He wouldn’t prosecute Al.

When I was 18 he told me, “What did you expect when you bring a boy up to a house to drink?”  He took the (outrageously expensive) sheets as “evidence” and then told me he was not going to fuck up the life of some nice Coast Guard boy for a girl like me who gets cold feet after the fact.

The fall out was really bad.  The family had to be told why we disappeared their sheets.  We would have been better off lying.  Given the response of the sheriff it looked really bad and hysterical.  It was even worse because I had gone skinny dipping in the pool and flirted with the guy painting the house. I was obviously horrible.  The family was really angry with Anna for bringing someone like me into their house.  They told her if she wanted to know people like me they didn’t want to know her.

Years later I was behind their car on the freeway.  The license plate has their last name on it.  I felt such a sickening wave of shame.

Why didn’t I call the police after Dan fucked me without a condom?  Uhm…. good pattern recognition skills?  Every time someone tells me that women bear some of the responsibility for being raped I want to scream.  I HAVEN’T EVEN BEEN ALLOWED TO GIVE CONSENT WHEN I WANTED TO SO SHUT THE FUCK UP.  Rape is an abuse of power.  Rape is putting a body part into someone else when they have not consented.  That is not something that is about mutual responsibility.

That asshole when I was 18 raped me.  I could not consent by the time he had sex with me, but at least he used condoms.  When I was 24 I was raped because having unprotected sex with me after I had it in writing many times that I don’t do that is illegal.  And I was too chicken shit to say anything because I am well aware that no one in power gives a shit what happens to white trash whores like me.

And then Noah showed up.  I would have been manifestly stupid and crazy to continue the life path I was on without him.

Time for the next step on the book.

Well this is a banner morning.  I sat here trying to come up with something I was angry about.  I went through a few of my pet topics in my head.  I’m not sure if I feel resignation or sadness or rather I just feel resolute.  I think I am at a place where I have satisfied enough Whys for now.

I left stuff out of the book.  I left people out of the book.  It was an accident.  On one hand I feel the need to go back and add those people in.  On the other hand, no I need to edit what is there, not add material.  I can add a forward and that’s it.  I can’t stay mired in that part of my life.  If something comes up in a conversation I can say it or I can add stuff to the blog but that book is done.  I need to stop thinking about that part of my life so much.  It is over.  It’s time to close that book.

But what do I do about all the damage?  There are often unintended consequences to actions and they can last a lifetime.  Who do I want my children to remember?  It’s time to stop feeling angry all the time.  Not because I have to, because I have actually given that run of my life a good long serious look.  I don’t feel like I left anything unsaid I need to feel bad about not saying.  It’s ok that people can’t really and truly get the accurate body count number of my sexual partners in the book.  It’s really embarrassing how many people I left out of the book.  I wasn’t talking about the parts of my life that included them.  There was so much to tell.  The threads just fell out of the story.

I’m mostly through Bastard Out of Carolina.  I read Trash about a week ago.  I’m really grateful a friend handed them to me right now.  I can stop fretting about this book.  No Shame, No Secrets, No Silence is done.  I’m thinking about emailing it to my editor right now, in fact.  Done.

I finished

I finished around 2pm.  58,048 words.  That means it’s not epic.  Good.  It’s too intense to be epic.  It’s too long as it is.  It’s hard to read.  I read through the whole thing yesterday and it is really brutal and nasty.  My life was shit.  It’s going to be interesting to hear peoples reactions.  I let Noah have it already because I couldn’t not let Noah have it.  I need him to know this story.  He got up to the beginning of 1988.  He has a long way to go yet.

I spent most of yesterday angry.  Reading the book through in a day reminds me that I have very good reasons to be angry.  So angry that flames come out the top of my head.  But I don’t want to be angry.  Being angry doesn’t feel good.  That book is closed now.  Those chapters are over.  Noah will finish reading the book by this weekend.  Probably Sarah, too.  They are quick like that.

Then I’m going to wait till next year to do anything else.  But I want them to know.  I’m not writing this book because I want to make money on the story.  I’m writing this because I cannot continue to live with people not knowing this story.  I can’t even handle waiting until I get a final draft before showing it to the people who claim they want to build a life with me.  They claim they want to know me.  Well here the fuck I am.  It hurts my soul that this is my story.  This should be fiction.  No one should have a life like that.  But I did.

And I’m pretty awesome.  No, I’m not always tactful.  That’s a small sin in the scheme of things.  Really. It is.

I have this weird feeling in my chest.  I feel empty and hollow.  I did my very best to bring up all the major threads that wove through my childhood.  I didn’t give any of them a lot of individual face time.  There were too many.  I don’t think people could handle a book that explicated all of them intensely.  It’s too sad and painful.  Yes, yes, a few people could.  But I’m not trying to write a book that is only for the biggest bad asses.  I’m just trying to be seen.

I wrote this as simply and directly as I could.  I tried to do it without excessive anger.  I tried to present people in a balanced way.  I tried to just tell the truth.  As simply and plainly as I can.  I used simple words and simple sentences.  I used almost no dialogue.  This is something I had to just say and get off my chest.  And now it’s off my chest and on my hard drive.  I have emailed copies to two people.  I am saving it on Google Docs.  I might put it in Noah’s Drop Box just so that I don’t lose it.  I want back ups.  I’m half tempted to sit here and print it right now just so that I have it.  So that I can see what this looks like on a page.

I want to be seen.  And that means I have to deal with the fact that people are going to have very different reactions.  Be sure that you’re right, then go ahead.  I’m just telling the truth.  This is my story.  I didn’t embellish it.  I didn’t make it more melodramatic than it is.  It is a hard story to read.  I don’t think that certain people understand what they meant to me.  What their place was in my life.

In three months I am going to publish it as an e-book.  Noah is going to help me figure that out.  I’m not going to deal with shopping around for a publisher right now.  That’s not the point.  The point is to get it out.  I’m not doing this because I want to make money off this story.  I just want to be seen.

I don’t want anyone to try to edit it before Christmas because this is already an emotionally intense time of year.  Old trauma can sit on a shelf and wait for a bit.

It’s time to shift gears.  I have to get my house ready.  I’m doing something really fun this weekend.

I had a lovely meet-up-for-coffee yesterday.  I like being able to sit down and talk with an attractive man about statistical analysis.  It means he thinks I can understand it.  It means he thinks I’m smart.  Oh that’s hot.  That made me want to sit on his lap.  I didn’t.  But I thought about it and smiled.  I really like intelligent men.

Email to middle school core teacher.

Dear Mr. S-,

Hi, my name was Krissy Archer.  I’ve been married for five years at this point and that doesn’t even feel like who I am any more.  I’m Krissy Gibbs.  I’m a much happier person than I was.  This year for NaNoWriMo I am finally getting around to writing about my childhood.  I’m a survivor of incest and rape.  Some of that was happening while I was your student.  Right now I’m writing about when I was in Fisher and I was looking through the year book.  You signed it: Krissy– Hope you enjoyed my class a little.  Your hard work is appreciated.  Keep it up.  Have fun.
I’m sure that was a fairly standard thing for you to write.  I think I was in your first year of teaching.  You were a good teacher.  You let me spend a lot of time in your room.  Teachers like you gave me a haven from a pretty horrifying life.  I taught high school for three years before I had kids.  Reading your inscription in the yearbook made me think of all the times I wrote similar things on the yearbooks of students when I had other things I wanted to say.  The professional boundary is an interesting one.
I’m curious if you remember anything about me.  I no longer have any contact with anyone in my biological family.  I am trying to write down everything I possibly can about my life.  I feel horrified by the idea that if I died there is no one in the world who can tell my children anything about my life before I met their dad.  So I’m trying to write it all down.  But my memories are all bad.  It’s hard for me to remember anything positive.  I was wondering if you did.
Krissy Gibbs


I’m a big fan of people wanting something different.

I love planning

I’m in the middle of 1993.  I hope to finish through high school today (class of ’99).  I haven’t done pre 1988 yet.  The early stuff is slightly speculative because my memories are hazy.  I feel guilt writing something down as true when I have a less than crystal clear memory.  I will do it.  But I’m going to do the first pass through the older stuff first.  I think I should reserve next Monday for the early bits.  It will need to be done in a big burst.

Ok, that’s a good timeline for me.  I want to get up to 2010 this week.  Then I can do the earliest bits on Monday of next week.  That means I will have the first pass of the whole story done by the 15th.  I’m already feeling frustrated with myself for the bits I have missed.  I’ll need the whole last half of the month to reread and add stories in here and there.

The first pass is just giving the skeleton.  Where did I live.  What kinds of schools.  I haven’t gotten into too many awful bits.  I’m saving them.  I don’t want this story to be, “Krissy’s shitty life”.  So much happened and a lot of it was amazing.  It feels important to be true to the scope of the story and not overemphasis the trauma.

We’ll see.

Seasons changing.  So much changing.  Uncertainty.  Mood shifts.

It’s getting closer but not fast enough.  I never think things have happened fast enough.  It will be ok.

I have been talking to a lot of people about writing.  It’s astounding to me to wander around to my friends and have them tell me resoundingly that they think I have several books in me, and they want to read them.  I feel this impending sense of doom.  Of course I will fail everyone.  I don’t have anything to say.

I do.  I have things to say.  I have a story to tell.  It’s just as worthy of a story as any other.

If I started writing the book today it would be the story of why I divorced my family.  I don’t know if that is what it will be by November.  It’s morphed a lot over time.  I don’t think that is the right book though.  That’s a mood.

Do you know what will last?  I will write the story of me for my mirrors.  My husband, my Sarah, my kids.  Friends who love me.  I tell this story because if I died tomorrow my story would be gone.  My children would know very little about me.  There aren’t very many people who would or could step up to tell them about me.  The only two people I am still close to from childhood, Jenny and B, they didn’t see almost any of my life.  They can’t tell anything about me.

I only talk about the abuse.  Like that is all that made me.  It’s not though.  No one is that simple.  Everyone is more complicated than that.  But other people grow up with people who see them and help make them for decades.  I didn’t.  No one remembers pithy little stories about what I did in school.  No one remembers that great mission project in fifth grade.  We made it out of cookies and used frosting for glue.  The inside was supported with Lego’s.  It was epic.  No one knows that I spent six weeks doing a mini lesson on aeronautics and could never make a paper airplane fly.  I’m pretty sure I have still never done it successfully.

Do you know what keeps me up at night?  The fear that I don’t exist without my family.  Without the people who do have positive memories of me.  They know every good thing I did as a child and they loved me.  I miss my mommy.  I miss my mommy so much.  I was always a mama’s girl.  I was so clingy.  I begged for her.

I can’t let her do to my children what she did to me.  And I need to explain exactly what that was.  Not really for anyone else, for me.  I need to forgive myself for my choices.  I need to explain them.  I want to.  I want to know that at any point in time my children will have access to all the stories I can give them about myself.  They will never have to deal with the loss I am dealing with.

I know very little about my mom.  I know basically nothing about my father.  I know absolutely nothing about anyone further back in my family.

I am alone.  My brother hates me.  I should not be telling these stories.  He wants them to die.  I don’t think he’d mourn much if I died too.  He would probably think I deserve it.

I don’t.  I want to explain why.  I shouldn’t be dead.  It’s demeaning to me to say I should be dead when you hear about my life.  I’m tired of being told to kill myself.  I’m tired of being told that someone like me should fucking give up.

I don’t want to.  I want to watch my babies turn into children.  I want my daughters to invite me to their fucking weddings.  I don’t want them to run away from me.  That means I want to examine what my mom did that drove me away.  It was there.  It was there from very early on.  Conform or leave.  It’s always been clear.  And I don’t conform much.

I’m scared to really do this and I’m terrified of not doing it.  I want to create the space and do it right.  I am going to tell this.  It will be a book.  I don’t know if it will be worth reading.  I don’t know why anyone will care.

This week a former coworker told me I should write the book.  He will read it.  He thinks lots of people will want to read it.  Why do people write?  Because they have something to say?  Because they have such an overweening ego that they neeeeeeeed to have strokes from random people?  Because I just want to be loved.  I want to feel like, whether anyone agrees with me or not, I explained my side.  It’s not really a debate.  Only it is.  I’m not having a debate with anyone else.  I’m debating with myself.  I’m deciding whether or not I want to forgive me.

I want forgiveness more than just about anything else in the world.  I need it from me.

I asked my favorite student what I taught him.  He smiled at me.  That quirky, gorgeous smile.  I think he had a crush on me.  He told me elaborate stories about sleeping with his 35 year old boss when he was 18.  Ahem.  He told me that I taught him that it’s ok to be yourself.  And to like himself.

I want to teach me, too.  Maybe that is the book.  Why I should like me.  I don’t know.  I am kind of afraid that I am going to write out thirty years of anecdotes and not know how to make it a story.  A story needs a point.  Well, Stephen King tells me otherwise.  I’ll figure it out as I go.  I am so going to need a good editor.

It’s weird to be present with this project.  There are different sorts of things to think about.  There are the later mechanics of dealing with a book looming.  I’m scared.  I’m trying to mostly not worry about that till  February or March.  Mostly.  Periodically I read short things and freak out.  I’ll have to think about that later.

When do I write?  How do I create space to do that reliably?  Ack.  Complicated.

I’m also going to run a 5k with a friend at the end of November.  Oh this fall will feel different from the summer.  I feel like I have to tell the stories all in one big go.  Then I can stop this frantic refrain of hiding in the garage and crying because no one knows them.  Of course I will leave things out.  Life is like that.  I can’t remember everything.  Many of the stories of me are gone.  I don’t really know much about what I was like as a baby.  I know that when I was 14 months old I toddled into the bathroom and said, “Kissy go pee pee” and like that I was potty trained.  I know that my mother told me that.

Given that Shanna was in diapers till she was thirty-twoish months.. holy moly.  And I think of Shanna as being advanced.  Psh.

That was my funny voice.

I don’t want to spend my life dealing with overwhelming flashbacks of abuse as Shanna grows up.  I’m kind of hoping to circumscribe that by doing it at speed in November.  God help me.  No, I’m not going to do a lot of drugs.  That’s hard to control.  I’ll have to be soul achingly bare.  Ew.  I’m worried about being stable the rest of the time.

I’m getting really bitchy and picky.  I feel like I am.  I need… something.  I need to break a rule.  I need to do something I’m not supposed to do.  I am holding too many balls in the air.  Something has to give and give hard.  Right now I’m doing that in the wrong direction.  Too much of it comes out in snippy stupid comments to Sarah.  I need to find an outlet.  Soon.  That’s a really dangerous line of thought right now…  wait.. a very pleasant thought just went through my head.  I’ll be in my bunk.

Being other

I’m going to do NaNoWriMo this year.  I’ve never done it before.  I’ve always been too intimidated.  I want to write honest to goodness fiction.  But because I’m me it will be creative non-fiction instead. 😛  I want to rewrite my life.  I want to take the time to play in my head with some of the “might have beens” in my life. Stephen King says that if you want to write a book you have to do it in private, so the blog will see very little traffic in November.  I sort of feel like October is necessarily my time to do more of a run through of what happened for real and all.  Mmmm writers block.  I remember your sweet smell.  You always bring cookies.

I feel really weirdly conflicted about what I am trying to do, what I am trying to say.  Why does it have value?  Why does it have worth?  Why do I need to justify my life choices?  What am I doing?  Why am I important enough to talk about?  At this point I have to do it and get it over with because I have several hundred friends on facebook and even if only ten of them actually read the announcement, come hell or high water at the end of November I will have a book done.  I have been talking about doing this all my life.  Some day I will write down my life story.  It will be a terrible book.  I want to get past the terrible parts of my life so I can enjoy the parts that are really pretty wonderful.

I believe in the pit of my stomach that there is a story in me waiting to get out that many people will want to read.  Millions.  I’m afraid that I am too afraid to write it.  I am afraid that I am going to look for evasions.  I’m afraid I am going to instead write 3 million blog posts full of unuseful and misleading digressions.  I have something to say.  It will take a lot of words to do it.  But there is something useful in it.  It matters.  I tell myself that when I have insomnia at 5 am at least.  It’s hubris.  But I want there to be an awful lot of people who will cry when I die.  That will give me a reason to keep fighting.  And I’m too fucked up to have that as something I can deal with much in my day to day life.  So I have to keep people far away from me.

Viktor Frankl says that people can survive anything, anything, if they just have something they are living for.  People survived Auswitch because they wanted to find their mates, children, etc.  I didn’t survive torture.  But I did survive a pretty ridiculous amount of trauma.  When I talk to people about my life they react with horror, pity, disgust, sadness, and unfortunately sometimes empathy.  The degree of their reaction usually depends on how much detail I offer.  When I say, “I was abused” I get a lot of “Me too” from other people.  Then I keep talking.  There have only been a few women in my life who have met me head on and looked me full in the face while I have related anything like details.  I think Noah and Chris are the only men.  My story is too disgusting to tell.

That means that all the people who spout platitudes about how abuse sufferers shouldn’t compare trauma because people process things differently are actively damaging me.  I can not figure out how to go about living my fucking life because I’m told over and over again that abuse is abuse it is all the same and people tell me to just meditate and all my troubles will be over but the worst thing that happened to them is that their daddy touched them once through the sheet when they were 13.  I’m sorry.  My brain doesn’t work like yours.

I’m not coherent enough to delve into medical research, but I know that the research is there.  Trauma rewires your brain.  I am different from most people.  I think differently.  Throughout my entire life I have had issues in just about every place I go because my opinions are always off from the majority of the group no matter what group I am in.  I am discordant.  I don’t do it on purpose.  People tend to strongly dislike the discordant energy I bring.  Some of this is my imagination, some of it is true.  Being this kind of person is what allowed me to get away from my family.  It is why I am not wallowing in poverty with the rest of them continuing the abuse on to future generations.  Why the fuck should I have to feel bad because I think things other people don’t?

I survived.  I survived being raped over and over.  I survived being raised in a family with rampant drug addiction and alcoholism and my big problem is that my one year old and three year old trigger flashbacks so I anesthetize myself with pot so my time doesn’t wander.  I barely drink and it can’t be a bigger factor in my life because it hurts me physically too much.  Harder drugs just aren’t appealing because I don’t have the recovery time.  I’m turning to marathon running, which will require not smoking and dear god I don’t know what I will do.

This is what an honest to god healthy life looks like.  This is what the 95% have.  This is what normal people experience.  People like me don’t get here.  And I’m only kind of here.  I can’t be part of the 5%.  Because any time I chat with my neighbors I have to be very careful not to mention my sex life or my childhood.  Because even with our weird ass house… we are probably still normal, right?

If I write a book as good as my hubris tells me I can, my neighbors will figure something out.  Seriously. And that means that when people walk by my house they will whisper about me.  Oh bullshit.  They will talk loudly so I can hear it.  There will be people who think I am disgusting.  My children will have to face that.  Right now in this minute my friends who love me tell me that isn’t true.  I tell you it depends how many people read the book.  It depends if I actually get published.  If the book is published, I think it will sell.  If fucking lame ass Elizabeth Wurtzel can publish Prozac Nation…  Good God.  At least something actually happened to me that vaguely justifies my whining.  *ahem*

Who would I be if my life had taken different paths.  I don’t think that most people have as many wildly diverging options as I have had.  I can even imagine a fun, less self-destructive, path that would still lead to Noah.  I should write that tangent down.  Done.  That’s if I want to play with the idea of my One Twue Love.  He is pretty spiffy and all.  I don’t think I could do better no matter which rabbit hole I wander down.

As I’m thinking about how to write this book I realize how much my choices are influenced by the people who are standing closest to me.  I’m trying to think about what kind of people could have come into my life to lead it in a very different direction.  Like that girl I was friends with in Whittier.  When I lived in Whittier that was one of the darkest periods of my life, to use a Shamus Young phrase, and there was a girl who was my friend.  I can’t even remember her name.  She was the daughter of missionaries.  Her family was staying in a shitty house the church organization rented for them in between over seas placements.  She is the one who introduced me to books like A Wrinkle in Time; Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry; The Secret Garden; The Island of the Blue Dolphins; Sideways Stories From Wayside School and biographies like Anne Frank and Helen Keller.  I was in 4th grade and I was in a serious rut.  I read nearly exclusively The Babysitters Club and I could read a new book in 20 minutes.  The other options in my house were pornographic romance novels.  I moved around so much that libraries weren’t really an option.  If you only stay in one place for three months as a young kid you don’t get around enough to go to libraries.  My mother didn’t consider such activities necessary.  That makes me think I should add the library to our weekly activities schedule.  Anyway.

So this one little girl, who happened to be the only other white kid in my class, talked to me.  She introduced me to classic childrens literature without knowing what she was doing.  She was just being near me.  I didn’t know many kids like her.  She was quiet and introspective.  Because of her upbringing she was unfailingly cheerful and big on advocating for Jesus, but that was worth the price of admission.

The first time I was invited over to her house after school was the last.  She stopped talking to me at school after that.  I went back to sitting on the edge of the playground alone.  I lived in that house for 18 months.  That was one of the shittiest periods of my life.  Third and fourth grades.  Tommy lived at home with us after he was released from the hospital.  He spent a lot of time trying to either kill me or rape me, he would probably have been happy to do either or both.  I bet he would have kept fucking my corpse.

The other kids at school taunted me about my “retarded” brother.  He would do things like run down the street naked.  He tried to attack kids.  Oh man.  I haven’t explained what Tommy was like after the accident.  Tommy was hit by a car May…something…1989.  He was in a coma for five months.  I was brought back to California by family friends (we had been living in Texas) because my mother flew out in advance to sit by Tommy’s bedside.  Because that is what you do when you are destitute and you have other kids to provide for, right?  You sit distraught next to one off-springs bedside and you completely abandon the rest of your obligations.

We lived with a lot of different people taking whatever hand outs were available.  When we got back to California it was a while before we found the house in Whittier and Tommy moved in with us.  I don’t know how much my dad paid but my mother eventually found a job.  I’m not sure how long we were homeless between Texas and Whittier.  My mom would try to claim we weren’t homeless, but we were couch surfing with friends and family.  I was watching my mom fuck a series of men to earn the shelter over our head.  I’m pretty sure she doesn’t want me to admit that out loud.  But that was my role model.  My mom went from guy to guy in between periods where she tried to feebly provide for herself and her kids and invariably things went badly.  She couldn’t earn enough money to make ends meet.  Only a couple of the people we stayed with were guys she was sleeping with (one was an old childhood sweetie and come on if you can’t leave your abusive second husband and run away to your old childhood sweetie, who can you run to?)  but the other one I remember distinctly is my uncle–my father’s brother.  So it wasn’t incest.  But it was awkward.  My fathers family appeared to me to have a pretty strict code that if a man was present it was the responsibility of whatever woman is present to fuck them.  My brothers expected it of me.  My father expected of me, my sister, and my mother even after they divorced.  My uncle traded sex for a roof for my mother and I.

These things are more complicated than they sound.  “My brother was in a horrendous accident so we stayed with my uncle for a while because his house was closest to the hospital.”  That sounds fine.  It doesn’t sound like we didn’t have anywhere to live.  Our stuff wasn’t with us.  I didn’t have my belongings and I was living out of a suitcase.  My mom was fucking my uncle and they weren’t quiet.  There was a lot of drinking.  My uncle kept his screwdrivers premixed in the fridge and that is the first place I got drunk.  When I was seven or eight.  No one noticed or cared.  For every age and stage of my life there is this easily apparent level of fucked up, and then there is all the stuff that happened in private.

I’m not doing that though.  For all that I am obsessed with transgressive sex… my kids sure don’t know anything about it.  Our conversations about all things sexual have so far been limited to things like, “Don’t put your finger in your anus or your vagina if it is dirty.  Go wash your hands first.  You don’t want to stick dirt inside your body because it will get itchy and painful.  And wash your hands afterwards because bodies have germs in different places that are supposed to stay in that place and not get spread around to other body parts.”  That’s ok, Jack.

How did I learn to be this?  I’m weird, to be sure.  But despite the incessant words in my brain, I’m not bad.  Not really.  I like to play at being bad.  I like doing things that are bad for some people or are bad in some ways.  But I always skirt a line.  I flagellate myself horribly if I feel I have gone too far over the line.  I kind of feel like hypervigilance is kind of the antithesis of being comfortable with your choices and uhm… I’d like to stop feeling it.  I want to be just comfortable in my skin.  That means accepting that some people are always going to dislike me.  I honestly feel like a lot of it is just because I smell funny.  I smell like not-them.  It’s not an actual odor, mind.  It’s a feeling that I am not part of their tribe.  That is the best way I can explain it.

I spend a lot of time feeling vaguely upset with myself for being so self-obsessed that I am utterly incapable of writing fiction.  But I just had an idea.  What would I be like if I had not been abused.  It would be interesting to try to write two chapters in parallel going through an imaginary life I could have had while comparing it to what did happen.

===================================
You never know the full impact of your life until you are dead.  I don’t want to die yet.  I figure I have at least fifty more years.  Given that I am thirty that means I have a long way to go before I hit halfway through my lifetime.  I hope I am grown up by then.

I was born the fourth child in an established relationship.  My mother was a stay-at-home mom who excelled at cooking, baking, sewing, and being involved in all aspects of her children’s school.  She often babysat for half the neighborhood because she was just good at managing children.  My father was a printer.  It was the family business.  He tended to work graveyard shifts because it earned a lot more money.  My father was also kind of the suburban ideal dad.  He coached many sports teams.  He was heavily towards boys, that’s normal.  He only wanted to teach things like sports, heavy Sci-Fi novels, and appreciating alcohol.  He figured that was his role in the family.

The first few years of my life were just a continuation of the same-ole-same-old my family had been doing for years before me.  My father was apt to say “no” to things so my mother learned how to work around that.  My mom thought that her little boys should have linoleum in their room because all they wanted to do was play cars and the carpet was terrible.  So she put the boys to sleep in her bed, took speed, and ripped the carpet out in the middle of the night and had the linoleum 3/4 installed before he came home from work.  She never did tell me what he said when he got home.  Now I can never ask.

I have to admit that most of the same-old-same-old in my family was pretty darn good.  My mom said that my father was bringing home $900/week in the 1970’s.  That’s a fair bit of money.  They were able to do things like install a pool in the back yard.  That was my sister’s 16th birthday present.  My father asked her if she wanted a horse or a pool.  She wanted to be popular in the neighborhood so she said pool.

My brothers were both born gifted athletes.  And they lived with a rather good coach who worked with them night and day.  Everyone did well enough in school to not bring shame on the family.  My brother Tommy had learning disabilities.  It was obvious he would never enjoy reading as a hobby.  Frankly it was already obvious he had a career as a professional athlete ahead of him if he wanted it, so who cares?  At least that seemed to be the feeling.  That is what the stories say.

My family lived in idyllic Southern California.  Far enough from Disneyland to be considered hick but close enough for annual passports.  We also lived biking distance from Magic Mountain.  I hear Canyon Country was a fun place to grow up in those days.  It was the kind of community you see in movies.  Tight knit.  Not the kind of place that produces monsters, right?  But actually that is the perfect place.  Most people are good kind people.  They mean well and all.  It’s easy to understand why they want to believe the nice family down the road is ok.

My father gave my sister the pool to buy her silence and consent.  I don’t know exactly what her sexual abuse was, she was never willing to tell me.  Years later she told me I never asked and I had to laugh.  I used to pester her like crazy.  I wanted to know what he did to her because I had been told he molested her.  I didn’t know what that meant.  I didn’t know how to match that up with my experiences.  I didn’t know if I was being molested or not.

My family went camping a lot.  My parents were on adult soft ball teams.  They were very active in the community.  Everyone knew them.  Why would anyone think he was raping his teenage daughter?  After all, he was so nice for adopting her anyway.  You see, my sister was a bastard.  My mother slept with someone in high school and he wasn’t ready to admit being a daddy.  He accused my mom of sleeping around.  Folks believed him.  My father’s brother married my mother’s best friend.  My parents eloped a week or so later.  I think my sister was around a year old, but I’m not sure.  Hey!  I have the family bible!  My parents got married on January 13th, 1969.  Holy shit.  My sister isn’t a bastard.  My sister was born on January 21, 1969.  Oh wow.  My father married her when she was 9 months pregnant.  I don’t know how I got that detail wrong my entire life.  Holy shit.  I thought he adopted her.  That’s actually an intense clue for me.

===============================

Holy shit.  I’m Russian.  Now I’m distracted by the family bible.  I had no idea that whole branch of the family was Russian.  I was always told German.  Maybe I should reread the Mennonite books.  If I want to tell this story right, I need all the background.

Scenes

Do as I say, not as I do.  There’s an old trope.  I hear it going through my mind as she screams.  Mostly the words don’t really appear.  I stopped listening a long time ago.  Bitch.  Stupid.  Nasty tone of voice.  I am supposed to be all sweetness and light.  While she is… what exactly?  I don’t think I am going to follow that trope.  I snap back to attention when her hand impacts my face.
            “Kristine Lenora I am talking to you!”
This is it.  I get to decide now.  Am I done or not.  I feel the pressure erupting from the pit of my stomach.  No.  I am not going to do what you tell me to do.
I notice all of a sudden that her hand is holding her cheek.  She looks shocked.  I can’t even remember hitting her.  I turn around and flee back to my room.  My hiding spot away from them.
She never hit me again.
Which isn’t to say that I stopped the violence in my life, far from it.  But it changed in quality.  I had acknowledged her as the enemy and struck a blow for my own defense.  I declared that I was now an adversary instead of a subject.  That’s an important distinction when you are a terrorized child.  Every burst of self defense is symbolic.  I have often thought that if I were to get to teach classes to young children on how to survive being abused the first thing I would tell them is the most important thing they have learned is that they have to take care of themselves in this life.  It’s a hard and a sad truth, but it is part of life.  If you have to take care of yourself you need to figure out how to go about doing that.  Really taking care of yourself involves a lot of long-term planning.
Do as I say, not as I do.  In my family advance planning is a joke.  Everything is done late, at the last minute, there is never enough money to meet all of their obligations.  But they sure know how to party and relax.  Is it any wonder that I believe I must have a long laundry list of work I have recently accomplished at all times?  My alternative is to be a loser.  I will not be like them.  I have gotten out.  My life is different.
The thing they never tell you when you are signing up for “healing from childhood trauma” is there is no guarantee that life afterwards will really be better.  Partially because life is unpredictable but, honestly, it is mostly because people who go through trauma are not as good at the long-term planning thing.  I think that my ability to plan is a lot of why I got out.  I held phrases in my mind from key moments and they were my magical talismans.  The man who evaluated me for the GATE program told my mother, in front of me, that I was probably the brightest child he had ever met and it was a good thing or I would be incapable of learning given what was happening in my life.  My mother was a bewildering mix of angry and proud and I didn’t understand why.  I knew that this man had just said truly wonderful things about me, why did my mom get so nasty?  Now I understand that she felt judged because my life was so messed up.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my mother.  I am grieving more for her than for Uncle Bob and that feels disrespectful.  He’s the one who is actually dead and all.  But she is dead to me in spirit.  It is hard to realize that for me unconditional love doesn’t exist.  I feel like that makes me defective.  I want to cry and scream and beg people to please understand—it is just that I can not forgive.  I suppose that’s the hard part.  I do love her.  But I cannot forgive.  There is no forgiveness for what she permitted in my life.  The scope of trauma I endured goes beyond neglect. 
When I close my eyes and think about the day Michael raped me I can’t remember if I tried to explain to my mother why I was screaming curse words at him.  Every time I hear my daughter sass me with, “You don’t get to say that to me”, normally after I have enforced some odious and draconian rule like “Don’t hit your sister,” I feel this burst of pride.  My daughter will not be 30 years old and hiding in the garage to cry.  My daughter knows that she is good and wonderful.  My job is to not beat her down the way I was beaten down.  Aside from the issues with my father, my mother was ridiculous.  I was chased home by neighborhood bullies and my mother’s response was to beat me.  She didn’t ever stop to think that I was not the kind of kid who really did terrible things.  There was no question—I was bad.
There was no point in defending myself.  There was no point in explaining.  There was no point in telling the truth—not in any part of my life.  The best thing for me to do was to build up this part of me that was separate from them and defend it with all force.  My relatives often use physical intimidation as a way of enforcing control and they resent that I refuse to buckle.  I really am a spiteful little shit.  I mean, my sister threatened to beat me up at my baby shower and I wouldn’t even acknowledge her superiority. 
That was another lovely tense moment.  I could feel my adrenaline rushing.  I wasn’t sure how far she would push it and if my friends would be sufficient buffer.  At the pressure moment I decided that I didn’t want to get into it.  I fled the room.  Of course I was just over reacting.  I always am.

Where is my fight?

I’m watching The Color of Freedom.  It’s interesting for me to watch this.  I’m sitting here with enormous privilege.  Oh dear God I am privileged.  I am rich, secure, safe.  I have basically nothing that I want or need that anyone can take away from me.  I am really a sanctimonious bitch whining about my suffering.  No part of this is rational.  Sort of.  My brother Tommy was hit by a car in May of 1989.  In my head I was 8 already, so in my stories I am 8.  I remember how old I am based on what birthday I’ll have that year, but my birthday isn’t till September.

That birthday was horrible.  My mom sent me to Aunt Vonnie’s house.  So I was in Los Gatos.  I had a slumber party with all the girls from Lakeside.  Aunt Vonnie bought me a cake.  It really should have been a great party, you know?  But this was less than six months after Michael raped me.  Tommy had been hit by a car and I didn’t understand what that meant–he was still in a coma.  I was supposed to put all that aside and act like a normal kid.  I wasn’t allowed to speak about any of that.

So do you know how the party went?  I spent a lot of it crying in the bathroom.  I said awkward things.  I was weird.  The other little eight year old girls had in-jokes and long-standing friendships.  They didn’t much like me.  I was this strange child.  I didn’t know what was true and what was lies.  I didn’t know what input from my body was real and what was imagined.  When I came home from being raped my mother beat me.  I felt like I was being punished.  I don’t remember what I said to her at the time.  I’m very certain that I vomited at that birthday party.  My family was angry with me for acting out.  I was so ungrateful.  Every human being wants to be free from suffering and pain.

When I think of myself as a grown up, you know… some day I will grow up… there is a dignity to people who know in their soul that they are working to reduce the suffering of other people.  A peace.  At this point my suffering is only in my head.  I am trying to lance the wound so the poison can seep out, but I need to go do something to help it heal.  I don’t know what yet.

I know that most of the things that are argued about on the internet really don’t matter.  Is circumcision an injustice?  Yes.  Should people stop doing it to their sons?  Yes.  But they should stop because there really isn’t medical benefit to doing it.  They shouldn’t stop because they will be joining a monolithic evil cabal.  It’s a shitty part of our culture and it should change.  It already is.  Rates of it are dropping like dramatically.  I think it is ridiculous to try to push through legislation banning it.  It’s a waste of time and effort.  By making it illegal there springs up potential for an underground, illegal network.  People would still do it.  It is cultural.  You can’t do away with culture by making a law.  Instead you will have people become intensely devoted to Their Right To Circumcise!!!  Yeah, like we need anyone jumping on *that* bandwagon.

Pretty much everything about attachment parenting.  I’m feeling very bitter.  I’m not able to do the super attached thing this time.  I feel bad about it.  I’m going to have a different relationship with Calli than I have with Shanna and a lot of it is that I literally haven’t spent as much time with Calli.  I did not ignore Shanna the way I ignore Calli.  Calli has had to learn to get her needs met by people other than me.  I have mixed feelings about that.  On one hand, I feel like I have let her down.  On the other hand… she’s happy and thriving and really loves the people she hangs out with.  She gets really excited to see people in a way Shanna didn’t.  Shanna was a limpet.  She didn’t warm up to anyone, not even Noah early on.  I’m so glad to not go through that again.  I feel freaked out even thinking about how much touch I endured then.  Right now I’m not sure how I managed.  But the reality is, right now I can’t do that.  I loved it.  I mean, I did get overwhelmed.  But I thought Shanna was doing everything exactly right and I was happy to meet her needs.  Even though I got overwhelmed and cried.  Now I hand Calli off to Noah to soothe when she doesn’t want to nurse and I hide and write.

I must say, when I go back into the house it’s nice to notice how much they missed me.  Sometimes I have to fight the urge to burst into tears as I realize how much my kids love me.  Because I love them just as much.  It’s actually hard to take the time to write.  I feel guilty for doing it.  I feel like I am abdicating my responsibility as their mother.  I feel like I am a stay at home mom so I should be available to my children 24 hours a day.  This is the job I picked.  And I want this job, kind of.

I have a compulsion to be more than this.  It sounds horrible to me for no logical reason.  Because I was told I was small and petty and mean and vindictive and angry and evil and a bitch and a whore and that I would die alone and bitter.

But I’m not.  I’m not mean.  I’m not petty.  I’m not vindictive.  I’m not evil.  I’m not a bitch.  I’m not a whore.  I am not alone.

I am angry.  I don’t know if I’m bitter or not.  What does that mean exactly?  I am sad.  I am very sad that my family is not able to acknowledge what happened to me.  I am sad that they are still destroying one another.  I’m sad that Jimmy and I cannot heal together because he is not ok with me telling my story.  As I watch these movies about social injustice something I’m noticing is that, people don’t go looking for a fight.  The truly great leaders are not people who went looking for a cause.  They can be helpful, think of things like union organizers.  Union organizers bring matches.  They light a fire where there is already a huge powder keg.

I need to stop looking away from my life for my reason for living.  I’m complicated.  A lot of things have already touched my life.  I moved away from all of those communities because they weren’t my fight.  I need a fight.  That is how I will learn to be not bitter.  That is how I will grow past this.  I can’t do anything about what has already happened to me.  But I need a fight for someone else.  I have to believe that I picked this life for a reason.  No one goes through what I did for nothing.  I can’t let this be senseless.  If this is senseless, if there really is no reason behind my father raping me over and over from when I was a toddler until I forcibly stopped him at 16 then I really should kill myself because that is not something I can bear for no reason.  I just can’t.

Thing is, I don’t really believe in God.  Not really.  I kind of do.  I think there is something.  But I’m not sure if it is anything beyond plain old animal instinct.  I don’t want to die.  I feel like a wolf caught in a trap.  I am flailing around blindly at a pain I cannot get away from.  It’s like my life blood is leaking out.  I am trying to contain my pain in too small of a space.  Pain has to be transformative or else it has to kill you.  You might die very very slowly in inches.  Mostly your spirit will die.  People who are in pain are not pleasant.  It hurts and they are rarely all that nice about it.  (Caveat here: I do not have any real disabilities.  I speak here with the hubris of someone who is not actively hindered by my body in any way.  Well, I have inflexible shoulders.  But yeah, that’s my limitation.  Someone else will have a different story here.)

So then there is the conflict.  A big part of what I’m trying to do right now is just figure out the parenting thing.  And I need to stop listening to experts.  I am sitting here in weird isolation because I read and read about norms and averages and obsess over whether I am doing things right.  When the truth is that my kids need me to hang out with them and not lose my shit.  Yeah, we should learn some manners eventually but if they fuck up at three… who gives a shit?  I need to find a way to balance the fact that I like being home and I like spending so much time with my kids but I really need to be part of a fight.

I can’t just sit here and be the kind gentle mommy all the time.  I really can’t do that.  I don’t want to be that.  I have to do something bigger than this.  So I’m looking at my life.  The thing is, an awful lot of fights were brought to my door.  It depends on how intellectually masturbatory you want to be about it.  But I know that my sister is really not a healthy person.  I know what she has been part of in the past.  I know what she is capable of.  If I have this much rage and anger and fury inside of me… I don’t think you can safely say that I am just projecting.  My sister lived with my father until she was 16.  He gave her a swimming pool for her 16th birthday.  He offered me a computer.  I wonder what she had to do to get the pool.  I wonder what he would have expected for the computer.

That’s my mother’s story.  She tells people I prosecuted my father because he wouldn’t buy me a computer.  My dear Aunt Vonnie told me that.  Years later in a conversation.  She thought that I was lying about being molested and I prosecuted my father because I was petty and mean and I wanted revenge because he wouldn’t buy me a computer.  I shit you not.  That is what my family thinks of me.  They are all MAD AT ME for prosecuting because I disrupted their lives and created drama.

This is my fight.  I am petty or vindictive in telling my story.  This is righteous anger.  I am really tired of being told I should just get over it and move on with my life.  No.  I shouldn’t.  Because that is what allows me to move on and “be free” while my sister rapes another generation.  Do I know for a fact that she is doing that?  No.  I will, most likely, never know.  Because even if she swears up and down that she never did that she will say the same thing about raping my brother Jimmy.  And according to him, it was rape.

I am tired of being told I am bitter because I want to blow my family to hell and back.  I am not bitter.  I am angry.  I am not vindictive.  I am not mean.  I don’t want to hurt my family because of what they did to me.  I want to do anything I can to prevent them harming another generation.  I stopped my father.  Prosecuting him was the right thing to do.  No one in my family is going to be willing to step up and prosecute my sister, even though she is a multiple repeat offender.  She participated in the sexual assault of her children.  Did she do all of it completely directly?  No.  She didn’t rape her own son.  Quite frankly given how they stand near each other I’d be fucking shocked if they aren’t having sex.  Or if they won’t get to it some day.  When you live hard and do a lot of drugs you get uglier and uglier.  Soon you can’t go out and find people any more.  When you can’t find people to fuck and you have those urges, well… you know…

Do I know my family is doing this?  No.  But let’s just say that I have seen enough that I wouldn’t be shocked in the slightest.  And that’s a problem.  If almost anyone says “I wouldn’t be surprised if my sister fucks her son or if my mom and my sister fuck sometimes” that would be horrifying, right?  But I know what I grew up with.  I know what kinds of books I read and I know how graphically they portrayed incest.  I know that I learned to read those books because I was borrowing them from my mother and sister.  I know that my father raped me more times than I can count.  More times than I remember.  I know that he did the same to my sister.  I know I liked it sometimes.

So.  Maybe I’m not bitter.  Maybe I’m fucking terrified and angry.  I know how stressed out I feel in my life sometimes.  I know how very close to the edge of doing terrible things I have been in my life.  I know exactly what kind of monster I could become.  I don’t walk down that road right now because I have resources.  I have people and money.  I have time.  I have the glorious luxury of time.  I do not have to earn money.  I can write because I feel compelled to tell my story from the depths of my soul.  Maybe some day I will get past rambling and find some truth.  Something that will alleviate someone else’s suffering.

I’m a weird creepy shut in who cannot handle being touched by other human beings.  How can I go out and join the world?  There is a time honored tradition of people writing inflammatory things while isolated off in a weird bubble.  Maybe that is the only fight I need to be looking for.

Because you see, I’m trying to learn how to do the marathon thing.  The thing is, I want my children.  I have a lot to give children.  I have a lot of love and ability to keep people safe.  And I need to know that some day there will be two people walking this earth who grew up in absolute safety while being taught to care about other peoples pain.  Shanna is deeply empathetic.  She gets other people.  I want to know what her spirit will look like if she is allowed to chase every dream she has.  She will be educated to within an inch of her life.  It won’t be (much) in a brick and mortar building, but I promise you she will be well educated.  The act of learning will be what we do.  I believe that other people can do this with their children in a traditional school setting.

But we’ve all learned that I’m special, right?  Special little snowflake, that’s me.  But I am.  My needs and dreams are different.  Not better, not worse.  If you spend much time looking at actual human history you will see that as long as people are given love and the basics, they can turn out ok.  I mean hey–look at me.  I’m “ok”.  I lead a more functional life than an awful lot of people.  But I don’t think my life can look like other peoples lives.  I don’t have the same rhythms.  I wasn’t raised in that culture, not really.  When I read about other peoples lives/causes/whatever I feel like I am being sold a product.  I feel like I am supposed to conform to being like them.  If you look back on my family life, you can see why I have a lot of issues with conforming.  If I am told that something is a rule, the first thing I want to do is break it to see what happens.  I shit you not.  I don’t do it (mostly) because I have a highly developed superego.  I should really read some psychology people other than Freud.  It might be good for me.  I like Logotherapy a lot.  It seems to be my approach to life.

And I’m looking for my meaning.  I’m trying to figure out what I have to say that might actually help someone else.  I have no idea.  It’s 5:45 and I just noticed that the birds are chirping like mad.  I can see the sky getting lighter.  It’s not going to really get bright today because of the clouds.  But morning is pretty clearly here.  Today I need to patch the drywall in the garage and paint Sarah’s room.  Those are the things that I can’t do here alone with the kids without a big fight.  And we leave for Europe in 6 days.  I think I should cancel the second therapy appointment on Thursday because it will wipe out most of the day for me in terms of productivity (trips to Oakland do that) and child care would be tough.  I like this lady, but she’ll be here when I get back.  For me to prioritize therapy over getting ready for this trip is for me to derail my life right now.  I will have a ridiculous amount of anxiety over losing a day of prep time. Things are already slipping in the schedule because Noah really needed a day of rest yesterday.  We all need rest.

Noah is nervous about the trip.  He’s worried about how stressful it will be.  He has (only half-joking) asked about rerouting and spending part of the trip in Amsterdam so I won’t be so stressed.  It wouldn’t honestly make the trip much more expensive.  Ha.  And that’s the kind of thing we can talk about, casually.  That is what I mean by privilege.  I feel guilty that I have such enormous privilege at this point in my life.  I feel guilty because I feel like I don’t deserve it.  Just like Aunt Vonnie.  Aunt Vonnie is going to die penniless and stepped on because she supports the whole lot.  Although, I don’t know.  If Auntie is lucky she will take her kids and move out of state to a place where they can be more secure financially.  That will only be lucky if she leaves my mother and sister behind.  Otherwise they will follow and be a barnacle on her until she dies.  Then they will find someone else to leech on.  I married a rich guy, who in the hell am I to judge?  Right?

I don’t know.  I don’t know if I should judge or not.  But I know that whether or not I judge them, their actions are not honorable.  My sister and mother both “borrow” money as often as people will let them.  I know that part of the problem is that my mother spends money she doesn’t have spare on frivolities because she wants to.  And then I talk about doing the same thing.  But spending the money that way isn’t going to hurt my life.  The only debt we have is mortgage and that will be paid off by the time I am 40.  At that point I don’t know what we will do.  I know that I am in this position because I live in a small house and I fix a lot of things myself.  We lived with one car for years.  I am not rich because Noah makes such an obscene amount of money, though he does make plenty.  I am rich because I look at our income and I make choices that look like they belong to a lower tax bracket.  That is a lot of why I have the freedom I have.  I know my limits.  I don’t know where or why I learned that sense.

But my family thinks that I have money in the bank because of dumb luck and that I don’t really deserve it so I should “loan” it to them.  They feel entitled because they “supported” me when I was growing up, don’t I owe them?  My impulse now is to promise publicly that I will send them money some day to prove that I’m not bitter.  I’ve started and deleted a lot of text going in that direction.  Fuck ’em.  I don’t have to prove I’m not bitter by doing what they want me to do.  Down that road lies madness.  So what do I do instead?  I go to Europe for a month.  I want to say I saved up for it, but that’s only sort of true.  I keep a lot of cash in reserves.  but on my birthday in September I’m being given a check for $35,000.  That is the final check on my annuities.  I am going to pay off the Disney Vacation Club mortgage (at 12%… ouch) and contribute some towards the college fund.  But I’m mostly going to rebuild the buffer because I have brought it frightening low (at one point we only had ~$3,000 in cash in bank accounts.  I almost had a heart attack from fear that month.) and it’s only back to about $16,000.  That’s not high enough you see.  If the buffer drops below $20,000 I feel like something terrible could happen and I would be screwed.  Yes, we actively invest.  If we were in any kind of trouble we could access lots of money.  But it never feels like enough.  So once in a while I blow a bunch of money on something like a big vacation and the rest of the time I control my emotional spending.

Maybe that’s why I judge.  Because when it is my family saying to me that I have no right to judge them, yes I do.  Because it’s not like I was brought up in some magical mythical land where money sense exists.  I grew up among them and I’m not like them.  I’m really tired of people ranting against the idea of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” because from where I’m sitting that sounds like the lazy cry of people who don’t want to work hard enough.  But I have so so so so much privilege.  I am white.  I grew up in places where I learned what it was like to not be white.  I learned what it was like being white in poverty stricken Hispanic and black neighborhoods.  I was treated like a dog.  People chased me home from school throwing rocks at me because I was a freak.  I moved back and forth from Los Gatos to the slums.  I was expected to learn how to go back and forth between fighting kids off of me as they beat me up as the representative white kid they could take out their institutional rage on and the rich, sheltered white kids in Los Gatos.  I was sexually assaulted over and over and no one ever said anything to me about it.  I believed no one knew.

I had help in unexpected places.  I am alive because I have had subtle advantages.  When I was five I was attacked by a pit bull.  There were 117 stitches in my face.  At the time there was a lot of doubt as to whether I would ever speak normally and there was some damage to my jaw and teeth were knocked out.  Kind of harrowing, don’t you think?  I don’t even think the dog bite story made it to my list of big life events.  Ha.  That’s telling.  It’s ironic that it didn’t appear in the timeline because it is such a huge part of my adulthood.

I have lived on the annuities from that settlement since I turned 18.  It has been almost the entirety of my income since I was 18.  I get $1200 every month like clock work.  Just think about what you could do with $1200 every month of tax free money.  Kind of nice, eh?  And I’m ashamed to talk about it.  My mother told me I musn’t ever speak of it because then people will want to steal it.  Kind of ironic how often she asks me for money.

There are things here worth telling.  It matters to me that I tell this story and make sense of it.  It matters to me that this story become something that people talk about.  It matters to me that my family come under intense public scrutiny because I believe that is the only way to curb the sexual violence in my family.  It’s time to clean out some closets.  I don’t get any dirty little secrets and neither do they.  Maybe the fight will find me.

I had a day in the world

Today a friend came over and I stayed out all day. She watched the kids while I dealt with the plumbing permit situation at the city. I have to say, Randy at the Fremont Building Department is one hell of a nice guy. I think he is just a shining soul and I’m glad I met him today. He answered a lot of questions and he took a personal interest in me. He gave me his email address and told me to feel free to contact him any time I need to. He told me that he believes that as a civil servant it is his job to do anything in his power to help people. I think that’s magnificent.

And because we had fussy children we came home and made tea sandwiches and cookies and tea and Shanna had a scone. We played in the sand. We painted. I made a nice little dent of progress in the garage moving stuff around.

My friend and I talked about my stuff a little. But mostly we talked about other things. I was ok. Shanna is interested in pushing my buttons so of course I was frustrated a few times but it felt normal. When I act like I have been acting for the last few days I feel like I am in my mother’s body. I move more like her. I process this as experiencing the emotions she had when she did those movements but of course I don’t really know. I’m not sure if it is true or not, but I suspect that I feel so alone in the world because I am incest survivor. Because I was raised in a house that was broken so deeply and so completely that other people really can’t imagine my perceptions of events. I have a big issue with transference. I constantly try to work through my family relationships in other arenas in my life. That means that if people respond in ways that I perceive as the potential sign of abuse I run away from the whole group immediately. I don’t know how to be part of a group. I cannot figure out group dynamics. It really doesn’t help that one of my default methods of getting to know men is to be sexually aggressive. I’ll tell you, I’m popular. Well, with men. Women often dislike me intensely. Or they love me. Women don’t tend to have neutral reactions to me. I cannot count how many times people have told me long intricate stories about how much they hated me when they met me. I usually blink and wonder why they are telling me this. Eventually they get to the part where they tell me how much they respect me and I am so god damn honest and Holy Shit! It’s remarkable how consistent the story is from different people. Do you know what I get out of that exchange?

People hate me as soon as they meet me. Pretty much every time I get one of those stories I hightail it away from the group and never talk to the woman again. I’m awesome. Or something. It’s really weird that people grow to respect that I have strong opinions and I am intense… but I make people uncomfortable. They don’t really want to be around me. This is my story about this. I can come up with a long list of reasons why I think I am disliked by most everyone from every community I have ever been in. Sure, I make a few friends in each group and I hold on to those people tightly. Mostly though, I’m convinced people think I’m a piece of shit.

That’s what I was told over and over. If I was having a good day and I started singing along with the radio my brother Jimmy turned around and sneered, “What did you do with the money?”

“What money?”

“The money for singing lessons.”

Badump. If I complained I couldn’t take a joke and I was a whining baby. I was sent to my room. My family viciously disliked me. I have never been willing to be the person they want me to be. They have a few roles they would like to offer me and I can have my pick, but I have to pick one. To be fair, they do like to pass the roles around. I could do my time as the pathetic weakling coming back from my fall from grace (my sister in AA after she let her partner rape her son) then after a few years of being “clean” I could start slipping up again. I could start just letting things slide. Hey! I’m only human! We all mistakes, right. I’m just trying to live a little. Sober people are so boring. (Depends on which sober people. To be fair, the sober people in my family tend to be really fucking boring.) So then after a while you start going down hill again. You have some “bad luck” due to the fact that you haven’t held a job in years because you’ve been too busy at home doing drugs. (ouch. That’s close to home.) Normally the drug usage starts to escalate a lot at that point. Then everything else starts to escalate. Then you rape a little kid behind closed doors. Then… for some reason you end up in AA. For some reason. Like when you arrested and do time for being a drug dealer. And you are required to go to rehab as a condition of parole. So then you start your cycle as a pathetic weakling…

That’s my sister’s path. I could do that with her. Sort of. Not really. Because you see… I’m not the one who does that. If I disagree with what anyone else says then I’m crazy and mean. If I go along with stuff and I am passive and invisible and accept all of the abuse then I will be tolerated. I’m at the bottom of the heap. I’m the baby of the family and I just need to accept that I will get shit on for the rest of my life because I am just not competent. Even though I am the one who should go work and support everyone. Right. And I should never question their repeated “loans” which WILL BE PAID BACK!!! Only they won’t be. If you say, “Dude. Tell me this is a gift and I will give you the money and never say a word. If you tell me this is a loan you god damn better pay it back.” Then I am a terrible mean hateful person for bringing up the money later. After all, I’m rich and she’s poor and she deserves a little luxury.

Do you know I have serious issues around eating single serving foods? If I have yogurt in my fridge in individual servings it is a conscious act of talking myself into believing I am allowed to eat them. I cannot tell how much food I have thrown away because I wasn’t allowed to eat it. In my fridge. That I bought with my money. I was never allowed to eat those things as a kid because they were for my mom’s lunch. I’m quite certain that’s not how she remembers it. And there was other food. But I didn’t like the other food. So I didn’t eat. I went hungry as a kid fairly often. Sometimes it was because I refused the gross food I was offered (at this point I’m pretty sure I have sensory processing issues, I really have problems with food textures) and I wasn’t allowed to have anything else.

After I write that I feel kind of mixes. My story is that my mom was very tolerant of my limited list of foods. She was willing to let me eat only them at meals. But outside of Ramen she didn’t cook any of them much. Interesting. I don’t think I will come to the truth about that one. I don’t think I remember and I can’t ask her.

But I have some not so awesome food issues. Because it’s all about control. Incest is all about control. My father’s mind games continued running my family. My family claims they are out of those cycles. They have moved on. But my sister hasn’t worked in years and she sits at home doing drugs and babysitting the children of her children’s teenage-mom friends. My sister claims all of these children as her grandchildren. I wonder how many of them she will rape. That’s why I need to finish the book. That’s why I will eventually get the court records of my father’s testimony. I want to have them in my hands as a magic talisman as I go forth to do battle for the souls of children I will never know. My sister is a rapist and she should be in jail. At the very least her house of cards needs to come down before she rapes another child or allows another boyfriend to rape a child.

I think I just found my purpose in life. Well, one of them anyway. But that will motivate the book. The children she is raising are slightly older than my daughter. In my family abuse seriously escalates at about seven. I don’t have a lot of time.

Guilt

I just kind of realized what I need in a therapist. I need someone who will sit back and let me tell the story. The whole fucking story. Sit through years and years of me babbling till I can get through all the horrific under layers because it will take forever to sift through it. And I need a therapist who knows that me telling the story is how I talk myself through figuring out the solution. It isn’t until I tell these stories out loud to someone else with zero judgment that I can get to the end and say, “That wasn’t a good childhood, huh?” and have them respond, “Nope” without much emphasis. Just matter of fact. Yeah. That sucked. And I am a god damn mother fucking courageous person for getting through that. And no matter what, anything I did as I flailed around and tried to survive was ok. I was a child and they were trying to kill me.

And then I need the therapist to not give me suggestions as to how to get better. I need the therapist to learn when I am evading and call me on it. I need a Noah who is more objective. I need someone who can crawl inside my head and find out why I am doing the things I am doing because until I can deconstruct why I have no idea how to fix it. Other people do great and fine with other short term things with treating symptoms instead of problems, but that isn’t my story.

My story is that I have no idea what “normal” is and I don’t know how to find out. I need to explain every single fucking day of my horrifyingly twisted childhood and have someone go through with me why I did things right and where I did things that were maybe not the absolute best, and ok I can apologize for how my flail landed if it makes me feel better, but it’s still ok. I’m still ok. I am the right kind of me. I do not need to change who and what I am to make any one else happy.

I am a writer. I need to write about the things in my head. I need to express them. The noises and the voices are drowning me and when I get them out I find peace. I need to say that my childhood was not ok a few thousand times because I have to say it for every time I was raped, molested, abused, made to feel invisible, hit, called names, and told I was worthless.

I need to find out that it really isn’t normal for a 12 year old girl to ask one 25 year old man to fuck me then date another 25 year old and accept jewelry from him after going down on him the first time. I was well on my way to a bad life. My first chosen lover was a 25 year old drug dealer named Sean David Segura. He fucked me without a condom. He fucked me without foreplay. It hurt and it sucked. But I thought I just had to get used to it. I dated a DJ from KRTY. His real name was Rick Rood but he went by the name Glen Richards on the air. We only dated for like a month. But my mom seemed to think it was just fine that I was dating him. At least he was a nice guy? Who liked to have 12 year olds suck him off. He was also a singer. I went to watch him perform at the county fair. Uhm. He sang childrens music. Right.

And these are the things in my story that my family points at. These are the things that i have done that they use as evidence of why I am bad and dirty and crazy. The thing is… this is what happened when I was 12. It was really kicked off a few years before that.

I was 7 when Tommy was hit by the car. My whole world exploded. Everyone turned and looked at Tommy. I was very invisible. I started acting out really hard. To be fair, I was raped not long after his accident and before I saw him and it became real for me. So the accident tripped things off. Then Michael raped me and my mom beat me. Then my mom up and disappeared for months and left me with my sister. My sister was 20. A drug addict trying to abstain because she was pregnant (but she would not receive prenatal care because she was afraid of drug tests) so she was a nasty fucking bitch. Oh she was awful. She was horribly abusive a lot of the time. From my current point of view I feel like she was probably actually doing pretty well all things considered. But that wasn’t how it felt at the time. And then I was sent home with a family I only kind of knew. By home I mean I drove home with that family in their minivan from Texas to Southern California. It was a horrible trip and I was terribly traumatized and everyone expected me to just buck up.

We bounced around Southern California. I can’t tell you what happened then because I have nearly no memories. I know that eventually we were with my Uncle Larry for a while (my brother has since filled me in that my mom was fucking him for rent–nice, huh?) and Uncle Larry liked to premake his screwdrivers and just leave the pitcher in the fridge and I got very drunk. And my mom and I stayed up on New Years watching horror movies. It was really pretty awful. I was obsessed with horror movies and my mom let me watch them all the time. Some day I should stop and look at the movies I watched: The Gate, Poltergeist 1, 2, 3, and the Nightmare on Elm Street series again. I bet I could come up with recovered memories that way. Derail!

After that I’m unclear until we lived in Whittier. That part of my life was very bad. We lived there for 18 months. So many things happened then. I know that is the part of the story I need to get to right now but I am dissociating hard. It’s actually hard to maintain eye focus. This is scary. I keep being pissed off because people aren’t posting enough on facebook. Please god, isn’t there something in the universe that can distract me from this pain? I want to go play with my children to avoid this. Right this minute that would be a derail and I know it. Fuck.

My instinct is to call it the darkest part of my childhood. Because then I can go off on a digression about whether it really was or not. But that’s not the point. It was god awful horrible horrible horrible. We lived there with Tommy during the brief time they tried to have him live outside a facility. It wasn’t good. My mother and my sister were not prepared to deal with the kind of care that a brain damaged disabled kid needs. My sister was trying to get her life together. She was trying to go to college and she had a good GPA and she was smart. But her husband dumped her after my nephew was born because he wasn’t interested in being a dad. That man deserves to rot in hell for what he let happen to his son. I hope he has nightmares every night. Bobby is a selfish, self-centered son of a bitch. He was more interested in being a kept pretty boy than in caring for the son he made. My sister went off birth control without his permission but he didn’t want to bother with condoms. He helped make the baby, he deserves responsibility for how my nephew turned out.

Anyway. But my sister was dating Tom. Who was a drug addict, alcoholic loser. She claims she actually decided to get pregnant with my niece, which is really an interesting statement. Wow. You wanted to have a kid with that man? You wanted to ensure contact with that man forever? oooooook. You are baby mama number what? Ok, and now is when I look like a classist bitch.

And that’s ok. Because wanting to not be that, to be something different saved my life. Denise’s boyfriend Tom came on to me over the years. It was subtle and I encouraged it. I own that. I thought that was what I was supposed to do with him. After all that is what my sister was doing with him right in front of me. Closed doors are for prudes! Only prudes wear clothes! I strongly suspect she was drunk and/or on drugs through that whole period but I was totally unaware of the drugs.

You see, my mom and my sister thought that as long as they didn’t tell me what had happened to my sister and they didn’t do drugs *in front of me* that I would be ok. They would break the chain. They would free me from the cycles of abuse. And that is what my brother thinks will work too.

But the problem is that they continue to hold abusers to their bosom and permit them their “mistakes” because after all, everyone is human. We all make mistakes. Right? Look, I lay before all you anonymous people on the internet that just like the rest of my family I too am a rapist and a molester. I will tell you the atrocities I have committed and I do so because this is how I figure out where I end and they begin. This is where I explain that I feel like I am a rapist because I sexually aggressed when I was a very young child. I will explain the circumstances in which I crossed boundaries for people and I don’t want people to tell me it is ok and I am still a good person. That is a dark spot on my soul and I will carry it till I die. No one can absolve me of it and trying to do so minimizes my pain. I have to live with that guilt. I can learn to have compassion for myself as I do, because I was a child. And I was just flailing around like a trapped animal trying to survive.

But I still did it and I still need to hold me accountable.

Just like my sister and my mother need to hold themselves accountable for what they did to me. I am not interested in granting anyone mercy in this game of life. If you grant mercy then you allow poison to spread. I am not going to be part of the sickness. And god it sucks to see how I was when I was a child.

But I’m not going to turn around or find Wicca or go do Reiki and cleanse my chakra as a way of absolving myself of guilt. Fuck that. I think that’s the fucking easy way out. I’ll have my husband beat it out of me. It will be awesome.

Perceptions of reality. I feel like my mother made it very difficult for me to perceive reality. She told me over and over throughout my childhood that I was mean, unpleasant and no one liked me. That no one ever would. There is the strong implication that at least my family wouldn’t dessert me because family stays with you NO MATTER WHAT. Here, I’ll show you a message from my sister.

“So I keep preaching to my kids that the number one thing you HAVE to do in order to really be part of a family is to forgive, and the second thing is to tolerate all the crap you really don’t want to tolerate, because love means forgiveness and tolerance more than anything.

So, whatever it was, I don’t care. Whatever it may still be doesn’t matter half as much as the fact that I still miss my nephews enough to cry over it.

I know this; if you’re a hard ass all your life, you’re probably gonna die hard. I’ve learned a lot.

Relatives are people you put up with at Thanksgiving in order to make family happy. Family are people that will rescue you in the middle of the night even if they really don’t appreciate it, want to, or like you very much. I am blessed to have a very LARGE family, and I’m actually well thought of. I don’t NEED more family to have a full, busy life. But I do need to let go of all my anger. Unforgiveness is like a poisen you take expecting the other person to get sick. And frankly, if you were to get sick, I’d take it back anyway, so it’s a pointless endeavor on my part.

We may not have ever hung out, and you may not even like me, but you’re my mother’s son. I changed your diapers too (You were the only one with cloth diapers I remember). Me and mom did all the things you do for your boys, and the fact that you can’t speak to us really tears us up.

For me, I’d prefer you go talk to mom. Just you. Just talk to her Jimmy. She’s not getting younger, and you are not going to have forever to rethink your position. It has come to be my belief that life is hard, and every person that loves a child adds value to that child. If for no other reason, they have someone else they can call when they break down in the middle of the night. You won’t always be able to be there for them…. That’s life man. And there’s going to be at least one of your kids that you just don’t get. Are you going to end up not forgiving them too? I can’t do that. I can’t let my kids go, and you’re my baby brother. I know YOU don’t remember that shit, but I haven’t forgotten.

I wish you could remember more of what she said. Not the stuff that pisses you off – she’s good at that too, but the stuff she was always teaching every step of the way as we grew up. She spoiled 4 kids at once, and did it successfully. You of all people should know what kind of effort that requires.

So for what its worth, you’ve always had my love, even when you didn’t have my understanding. I don’t have to LIKE you to love you. Mom taught me that. But I forgive you – and I ask you to please grow the fuck up sometime before I die and forgive me back. Cuz you’re my brother, and like it or not, I’d still pick your sorry ass up if you got stuck somewhere in the middle of the night. *shrugz* I love you man. I love your kids. And even though I don’t know her really, I respect your wife.

So that’s it. I wish you and yours peace, love and prosperity.”

My sister sent that to my brother on January 28, 2010. There is no mention in there of, “I bet you aren’t talking to me because I raped you but you need to get over it.” Because that wouldn’t be kosher. WE DON’T BRING UP OLD STUFF IN THIS FAMILY. IT JUST HURTS PEOPLE NEEDLESSLY. Because it doesn’t hurt me at all that the people who claim that they will do anything in the whole wide world for me will do anything accept say out loud that they are rapists and child molesters. They will not say out loud that they are disgusting vile people who need some very serious help. No. they lie. They point the finger at me. I have distant relatives sending notes like:

“Ok this has gotten out of hand i belived you when u talked about your father but this is enough! my family is trying to get over a very important person dying and all u want to do is start shit and make shit up r u serious with the things u are saying. You go do ur recovery and leave me and my family alone. this really is enough from u!! I am blocking you from facebook and i dont ever have anything to say to you again. II mean do you really understand how you can hurt with that shit!!!!!!”

and

“You have serious mental problems. I really feel sorry for your children. Please, Please get professional help before you do damage to those poor babies that can not be reversed. OMG I can not believe the vile things that you make up. I really do feel sorry for you and hope that you get help. Do not write anymore of your vile lies to me or Nicole. You have hurt her enough as it is.”

Does anyone else feel like my family is acting a bit strongly if they have nothing to hide. I am not keeping this shit in private for any of you assholes. Fuck off and die. I hope that god damn mountain shakes you all straight to hell.

The first step.

I feel like I spend most of my life lately saying, “It’s complicated” because no matter what subject I am looking at there are many different things that could be combined/fixed/told.  And I don’t know how to begin.  Luckily I have the internet, and friends who are awake.  My friend Peter pointed me towards the class where I met him.  There is material there.  And he’s right.

My first semester of graduate school was in 2003, before I met Noah, right after Tom ended our M/s relationship.  Before Tom and I were poly I started grad school.  Naw, that’s not even true.  That’s when I applied to grad school.  I started spring semester so I started grad school in January of 2004.  I met Noah in late February.  So this story is going on concurrently to me starting to tell the story of my abuse out loud in the context of my relationship with Noah.

I went to a fiction writing class.  Honestly I picked it based on when I wanted to be on campus.  Always the best selection criterion, I tell you.  I did write some fiction for the class but all of the fiction I chose to wrote was borderline pornographic (or very explicitly pornographic depending on which story) or I wrote creative non-fiction.  I didn’t tell the class that I was writing about my own childhood abuse.  I did not explain that the horrific, gut clenching story about a 7 year old being raped was my story.  I kept distance there.  Most people in the class responded just fine and they gave me very valid feedback on my writing.

But there was this one woman.  Liz?  I think her name was Liz.  She didn’t like me much.  She didn’t like my stories.  She didn’t like my attitude.  She was one of those out and proud lesbians who acts like all heterosexual sex is rape.  I doubt she would have actually said that, but that’s pretty much the place she was in.  Now, like 7 years later, I can see why she was the way she was.  Then she just felt mean.  She picked on me when I shared my stories.

What do I mean by that?  I mean that when I was visibly upset when people were workshopping the story about my rape she was very hostile.  She specifically said, “This story is ridiculous because this kind of thing doesn’t really happen to people.”  Now I kind of wonder if she was denying her own abuse.  Her response was really hard for me.  I brought stuff that was too intense to class and I felt like I got screamed at for it.  To be perfectly clear, the professor was awesome.  I’m quite sure he had strong suspicions about me because he gave me great writing feedback and he gingerly patted me on the shoulder and told me I would make it.  Men like him have been the rock I have built my life upon. Women rarely manage that kind of support properly.

But oh man.  I’m not over Liz.  How dare she tell me that my story was unrealistic?  That’s not fucking writing feedback.  We had a guy in class writing stories about people who were kidnapped by aliens!  She chose to tell ME that my story was unrealistic!  Ok.  Fuck her.  I feel like she is part of the great evil cabal that wants me to kill myself instead of speaking because she doesn’t want to hear about my pain.

But I’m in a lot of pain.  And that’s a hard thing to talk about.  How do you express your pain properly without hurting anyone else?  I mean, the problem with Sharon and Liz is that they feel I am overstepping their (or someone elses) boundaries and I don’t have the right to do that.  Thing is, I don’t have any clue whatsoever where boundaries are supposed to go.  I flail and I fuck up.  Sometimes they are really far away from me and no one can get close enough to have a conversation and sometimes they are in so close that I can’t defend myself when someone rapes me.  I do not know what healthy boundaries feel like to naturally have them for ones own body.  I don’t.  I pretend.  I try to make it up. My boundaries shift depending on time of day, how many people are around, how recently I have thought about my family, what I’m eating, how often I sleep…

And that’s not cool for the people around me.  That’s messy and abusive.  Because then I go off on people for correcting my grammar.  I saw that I know it is a little thing, but it felt abusive.  It felt over the top.  It felt like you were trying to publicly humiliate me and make me look small and stupid and you look big and powerful.  Thats not what was happening, but that’s how muddy my boundaries are. I can KNOW things and not feel them.

I hate being sober.  I can’t tell the stories.  See how I am dancing here?  But Sharon made a crack about the marijuana and how I should stop using it and go on psych meds.  Despite the many many many years of problems I had trying to get psych meds to work.  Despite the fact that the people who are in my house with me monitoring my behavior tell me adamantly that marijuana is the right decision right now in this crisis point because it is clearly helping me and it does not have the miserable side effects.  But someone in authority, someone I feel “knows more than me” told me that I should stop.  So I am not smoking this morning.  Even though I am going round and round in circles and winding myself up.

I don’t know how to get past the anxiety and look at the stories without it.  My brain is too effective at shutting down those avenues of thought.  When I try to sit here and think about being raped when I was 7 years old my stomach starts to hurt, my neck hurts.  I feel tense.  I am breathing fast and rapid.  If I were trying to speak out loud I would be doing it so fast and so quiet that people probably wouldn’t really be able to hear me.  I’m scared.  I’m small.  And I have no real voice.  Even if I could start rattling off the facts, I was 7 years old when a neighbor raped me.  There was a witness in the room and another witness (his mother) came in and saw what was happening and then walked out leaving it to continue.

Many many people saw my story.  People were there watching it while it happened.  People actually physically saw me being raped and didn’t stop it.

Why shouldn’t I be angry again?  Why in the hell is it surprising that I have rage issues?  Why in the hell should I learn to tell my story in a small, inoffensive way so that other people don’t have to be hurt by my story?  Why is that my responsibility?  I didn’t do anything.  All I am doing is telling the truth.  All I am doing is saying, “Hey I was a little kid and people hurt me” and people then react to me as if I am a monster.  They want me to shut up.  They want me to be little and silenced.  They want me to make my story palatable.

Well fuck you, none of this is palatable.  This is disgusting and horrible and I had to live through it.  How fucking dare people tell me that I don’t have a right to speak.  How dare people tell me that I have to make my story palatable.  I had no choice.  I was raped.  I was raped over and over during my formative years.  I was programmed to think that my value was in sex and I should be silent the whole rest of the time.

But I am not that person.  I am loud.  I am here.  I have a voice.  And I’m not going to stop using it.

In May of 1989 my brother Tommy was hit by a car.  My entire childhood is told in relationship to that event because that is the Big Obvious Date that I can remember.  I turned 8 in September of 1989. Tommy was in a coma for five months so he woke up in October.  When he was hit by a car we were living in Texas.  I dreamed about the accident and woke up and told Mommy that I saw Tommy get hit by a car.  She told me it was just a dream but couldn’t get a hold of my dad for three days to find out how Tommy was.  I have no idea how long this lasted, but my mom was there for a bit before rushing back to California to sit at Tommy’s bedside.  She left me with Denise (my sister) who was pregnant and her then husband Bobby.  I was raped after my mom found out about the accident but before she left.  So I am pretty sure I was 7.

This is how it works with all of my memories.  I have to stop and think of all the collaborating details or I am afraid I am making it up.  I have to be able to list off long, extensive lists of things that happened the same day to prove that I was alive and I had that day and I saw those things and other people believe me about all the other things (often these details are verifiable) so therefore they will believe me about the abuse.  But people don’t.  People tell me that I am lying or exaggerating.  That my stories cannot be real.  But they are.  My stories are real.  I am real.  This was my experience of the world.  It is bad and scary and hard.  But it happened.  Dirty things were done to me but I am not dirty.  I am not bad.

His name was Michael and I had quite the crush on him.  I followed him around.  I was desperate for any sign of love and affection.  I was willing to do anything he wanted me to do.  I don’t think I told that part in the story in class.  This event wasn’t the first time Michael and I had sexual contact, it was just the last.  One day when we were in Michael’s room and he and his cousin were playing video games in between saying degrading things to and about me.  I can’t tell the whole story right now.  Not right.  Not the real thing.  I can’t.  I want to but I don’t feel safe.  I feel like if I tell the whole story again someone will be nasty, and they might and I can’t control that.

I feel like it is my fault Michael raped me because I put myself in the dangerous situation.  I went after him.  I pursued him.  I am in the phase of recovery where I can’t tell the story from the point of view of a victim.  I am the monster.  Right this minute I want to tell the story as a bragging story.  I want to talk about how I am so into sex that I knew when I was a little girl that I wanted it.  That I picked a boy I wanted and I went after him.  I didn’t let any obstacle get in my way.  And I fucked him.

That’s all I want to say.  I want to sound tough and bad ass and brave.  I want to sound like I had choice.  I want to sound like I was active player.  I wasn’t a victim.  I wasn’t abused.  I wasn’t raped.  I was just ready for sex earlier than other girls.  Do you know how many times I have told that story?  More times than I can count.  That is how I survived.  That right there.

I have been raped so many times in my life I’m not sure I can count them any more.  The vast majority of the sex I had was only consensual in the sense that I got into a situation where a guy wanted sex and I didn’t believe I was allowed to say no.  I wanted to be touched.  I wanted physical contact and I knew no other way to get it.  When I was a toddler and I sat on my fathers lap he would put his hands under my panties and slip his fingers into my vagina.  That was love.  They showed me porn.  My mother started giving me tips on blow jobs when I was 11.  It was my fault, of course.  I brought it up.  I asked.  She didn’t initiate that conversation so she feels like she is innocent.

But my mother gave me advice on better blowjob techniques when I was 11.  That’s not ok.  She needed to hold that boundary.  That is how she continued the cycle.  That is why I do not trust her.  My mother does not know what kind of boundaries other people have either.  But she is in her 60’s and she still doing things that are that kind of inappropriate and if you call her on it she goes into this long explanation of why she isn’t responsible for her behavior.  Bullshit!

I am responsible for my behavior.  Me.  Not God.  Not my father.  Not my mother.  Not my sister.  Not my therapist.  Not my husband.  Not my children.  Me.  Me.  Me.  At the beginning of the day, at the middle of the day, at the end of the day… I am with me.  I always have been.  I always will be.  I am not looking to be any one else’s ideal of the right person.  I’m afraid that right now I am at the point where I have to stop relying on anyone else.  Maybe I can find the right therapist if I keep looking but it will really and truly have to be the RIGHT therapist.  Sharon isn’t it.  Sharon wants to make me into her image of the perfect post-abuse mother.  No.

Why do I want to recover these memories.  Why am I doing this to myself.  This is horrible and I am beating myself over the head with it.  I am very good at forgetting.  I was told I have to forget.  I was told to be quiet about what I do remember.  But instead I am completely structuring my life right now so that all I can do is look at these memories.  But I’m letting the memories control me.  I am letting personal time become all the time.  Why.  That’s a big thing to do.

I’m afraid that if I let myself have these memories fully, if I really examine them I will become the people who hurt me.  When the people around me react with horror I feel silenced.  I feel like I am driving myself insane.  I have to say these stories.  I have to tell them in all their tear filled agony and I cannot bear to see peoples reactions.  I think that officially makes me a writer.  Right now Noah is making breakfast and my babies are playing and singing with him.  I am not allowing my rage to destroy my family.  My family is beautiful and strong as I am beautiful and strong.  Most of the time I bear my burdens lightly.  I do not feel weighed down by the weight of incest.  I know the right road for me and I am on it.  I don’t want to change who I am.  I really like me.

I want to feel like it is ok to be me.  I want to feel like who and what I am is right.  I want to feel like it is ok that I am different from everyone else.  I want to feel like it is ok that I am special.  That sometimes I need to say, “Hey can people use gentle voices with me even when I try to escalate things” and have the people around me understand that saying that is humiliating and embarrassing and I feel like a disgusting person for saying it.  I need it to be ok that I talk about my past.  I need to get to a place where I know in my heart what the right amount of information to give my children is.  I do not want my children twisted by my legacy of shame.  I want my children to continue to grow in the absolute safety I have provided.  My children are a strange mix.

So here’s my thing.  My daughter is verbal.  Astoundingly verbal.  Exceptionally verbal.  Who knows what that will mean in terms of her overall achievement in life.  That’s not the point.  It’s not about competition and I don’t know how to talk about it without it sounding like I am being an asshole.  So I don’t speak about this problem.  This is a problem.  I am having a very hard time with how verbal Shanna is.  Shanna asks me questions and she mentions things in off-hand ways that sound like they might maybe be questions and I don’t feel like I know what the appropriate amount of information to give her is.

Shanna wants to know why I am sad.  Shanna is acting out being sad and I feel horrible about it.  So far I have told her that I am sad because bad things happened to me a long long time ago and I think about them sometimes and that’s hard for me.  I have described my anxiety as “I have a lot of work to do.  And you know how you feel when you are tired and really hungry?  I feel like that all the time when I am trying to do this much work.”  I have no idea if I am doing this right.  I honestly think that I am freaking out so much because I feel like I have to hurry up and get over feeling like this because otherwise my kids will grow up with someone like me who just checks out for a while.

And I have a lot of shame about that.  That is what my mother did.  My mother was on so many drugs to numb her pain it was absolutely ridiculous.  She popped so many pills it was unreal.  That was normal.  I grew up convinced that I wouldn’t do that.  And I have such an aversion to taking pills that prenatals were nightmareish for me and I have now stopped taking them because I simply cannot do it even though I should take them as long as I am nursing.

Instead I am smoking pot.  I’m not drinking.  I’m not taking pills (and I won’t), but I’m smoking pot.  I am having a hard time with that.  I am not a lifelong pot smoker.  I really don’t enjoy doing this.  I’m not enjoying how it feels.  But it keeps me level.  It keeps me from snapping while I can’t get the memories under control.  It is making me go flat line.  And while I am doing it during the day I have people here watching my kids for me.  That is the difference between me and my mother.

I cannot meet all of my children’s needs by myself right now.  I am having a crisis.  But I am dealing with it.  I am dealing it with it in a way that is safe for me, for my children, and for the people who are offering help.  I am not stepping on anyones toes.  I am not doing something bad by asking for help.  I am not imposing.  I am not hurting anyone.  I am weaker than normal and I cannot carry my load.  People with room to spare, people who love me are helping me.  I am doing the right thing for me.  I am.

Believing that is the first step to recovery for me.  That’s it.  Right now, for this moment of this crisis that is my step.  I have to believe it is ok for me to be weak and need help.  I have to believe that it is ok for me to ask for help.  I need to feel like I can allow other people to help me.  I need to actually accept the help.

Baby steps, people.  I see several of the offers and I love you and I want to respond and I can’t right now.  That is too big of a step.  I don’t yet believe I am allowed to take it.

Early morning demons

I am a Morning Person.  And becoming weirder about it as I get older and spend a lot of time alone at home.  I sit here nearly motionless and silent until the sun comes up.  Then I strap the baby on my back and start working as fast as I can.  It’s pretty neurotic.

I feel like it is cheating to cut’n’paste that from the other window and yet, I’ve already typed it into the frickin phone!  It counts!

I have to do both.  In the silence and still I wrestle with demons and I have to move quickly once the sun is up or the demons will catch me and wrestle me to the ground and then they have control of the day.  If I work fast enough and hard enough I can escape.  I can instead find my Zen.  I can get lost in the methodic beauty of gardening.  Playing with the dirt helps me stay in the here and now better than almost any other activity.  That is interesting to know about myself.  For most of my life I have lived in a place where plants just kind of grew.  You didn’t really do a lot to try to change what they were doing anyway other than beat them back a bit once in a while.  But you know what, that’s not even true.  Folks up there did plant things and they did follow the seasons.  I didn’t.  I moved so often that I have never before in my life felt the flow of the seasons before.

That’s kind of an intense realization.  I’ll tell you flat out that I’m looking for God in the flow of the earth.  Probably not God in the Judeo-Christian sense.  Maybe more of a Goddess.  Thing is, this shape in my head really doesn’t have a gender.  And saying Goddess requires a gender in my head whereas God is basically neutered.  Even if you do think of God as inspiring men, God inspired women too and there aren’t that many differences and it’s not like God is out there flipping people for who gets to top, you know what I mean?

But I digress.  Only, it’s only sort of the digression.  Maybe this is the point today.  Maybe this is why I haven’t thought about abuse stuff in a few days.  Maybe I am looking for God instead.  Maybe I am trying to focus on the here and now with such intensity because if I don’t I may not be here to have a future.  This is hard to say out loud.  Ha.  And I’m not even speaking.  As Alex said to me recently, “If I say it, I make it true.”  But I think the important point he was missing is: if it’s not true, you can’t deal with it as being true… but it’s still hanging over you thinking about being true.  Ok, so here’s the truth.  I am more honest-to-God suicidal right now than I have been  in over a decade.  My mother called me to tell me that I was not sexually abused as a toddler.  She wants me to get my story straight.

Then why is he in my head and my body like this?  Then why do I so clearly remember the stages?  Why can I now sit down with a textbook on grooming a child for sexual assault and tell stories about every single stage?  There is no doubt in my mind that when I prosecuted my father he intended to rape me.

So here’s the story on that.  When I was 16 I was living in Bakersfield and going all the way across town every day so that I could attend the best high school in the district.  Then our car broke down.  Of course it did.  Because that is what happens when you live in poverty and you do not properly maintain your possessions.  Which is to say, I don’t blame my mother in anyway.  Our lives were really shitty.  It took an hour and a half each way on the bus to get to school.  I was in AP classes: English, US History, Biology.  I finally, for the first time in my life, was actually in the classes for the smart kids instead of sitting on the waiting list behind people who had lived there all their lives and never made the cut.  I loved it.  I blossomed.  I hung out intensely with the kids in the AP classes and they were all religious and obedient but open minded.  They were very interested in ska music and silliness and Veggietales.  Good clean fun.  But I was getting in trouble at school because I didn’t have a computer for research or typing up my papers.  Given that I was spending 3 hours a day on the bus I didn’t really have a lot of time to sit in libraries.  And did I mention that the public water was so disgustingly chlorinated I couldn’t handle drinking the water?  So I spent hours a day making orange juice from the tree in our yard so that I could drink something that didn’t make me want to puke.  We had no money for bottled water.

Anyway.  Not that those layers of poverty really affect the story anyway, right?  It’s not like there are mitigating factors for your father sexually molesting you?  It’s not like he got away with it because I was poorly supervised by a mother who is completely incapable of getting her shit together.  And there’s a digression I’m not up for right now.

So I called my father and told him I needed a computer for school.  He wasn’t paying full child support anyway, right?  He told me that I could have a computer if I came to visit him for the weekend.  I told him I would check with my mom and ask her when she could get a weekend off work so she could come down and supervise.  He said no.  If I wanted a computer I would have to come down there and spend a weekend with him alone, unsupervised.  I felt gobsmacked.  I felt like I was standing on the edge of a precipice and in that fucking moment I got to make a choice.  I could lay down and take my fucking.  Or I could shoot him in the face.  So I hung up on him and called the Sheriff’s office to report my lifelong molestation.

The part of the story that is missing here is the part where I made that phone call to him in secret because I didn’t want my mother to know I was doing it.  And I made that follow up call to the Sheriff’s office before my mother came home.  When she got home the detective was in the living room asking me questions.  It was too late for her to do anything about it.  I think I knew I had to do it that way.  She would have talked me out of it.  She would have minimized what was going on.  She would have told me I was making things up or being melodramatic.  But I wasn’t.  Every single memory of my father in my lifetime involves him touching me in a sexual way.  Ok, not every minute of every visit or anything like that.  But he snuck something in every time I saw him.  He fingered me while I sat on his lap while eating snacks at an amusement park when I was 4 or 5.  When I lived with him and Trudy he would come into my room to “tell me stories” that were about sex and sometimes about evil and magic.  For years he told me stories about my maternal great grandmother.  He said she was a witch and I inherited her powers so I should do some research on black magic.

All this to say that I was absolutely being groomed for rape.  Or, rather, I was being groomed to think it was totally acceptable for me to be my father’s sexual partner.  He told me all about how incest taboos only exist because you don’t want the genetic material to get to close.  But it’s ok as long as the woman uses birth control.  He told me that when I was 12, not long before my brother got married when he came to visit us at our house in Apple Valley.  He came upstairs to my room and felt me up.  He told me that my breasts were going to be large because my chest felt like his older sister’s did when she was my age and she ended up with large breasts.  I do wear an E cup.

My father had every intention in the world of raping me.  I needed to prosecute him.  Oh, and my father was stalking me while we lived in Bakersfield.  He would show up random places and just look at me.  I wasn’t exactly hard to track.  He stood outside our house in the street sometimes.  If I didn’t prosecute him he was going to rape me.  It was ok for me to prosecute.  My father sexually molested me for a decade starting when I was a baby or toddler and it was right for me to prosecute.  And now I’m sobbing.  Because Alex honey, saying it doesn’t make it true.  I wish that saying it made it true.

And we come back to the faith in grey thing.  Was my father a monster for what he did to me?  What he had every intention of doing in the future?  I don’t know.  What I can know is that only a rabid dog attacks with no provocation and at that point you put the animal down.  And I mean seriously no provocation not, “What?  I only acted in this way that in dog-language is really aggressive but seems fine to me as a human.”  It wasn’t actually about me just never calling him again and writing him off because he wouldn’t buy me a computer.  And fuck you very much, Mom, for saying that to people.  He was going to rape me, and soon.  No matter what.  He had a history of molesting people going back decades before my birth.  If he was escalating to the point where he was stalking me?  Yeah.  I’m not even sure I would have survived.  I had to prosecute.  And I had to do it in secret because my mother wouldn’t have allowed me to.  Once the ball was rolling there was nothing she could do about it.

And that right there.  That is why I sit here in silence every morning in the still, quiet time of the day and I think.  I have these horrible, gut clenching thoughts about assault and I try to work them out.  I try to find my peace with these things.  Even being angry with my mother the way I am is just a stage.  I’m so angry because I feel freshly hurt and she is the only one alive who can be blamed.  Isn’t that what mothers do?  And the instant that thought goes through my head I realize that is part of breaking the cycle too.  I don’t want to be blamed for everything that goes wrong for my children.  And I need to stop blaming my mother.  And she needs to stop calling me and telling me to get my story straight.  I have my story straight.  It’s just not a story she can believe and maintain her thin hold on the world.  Even though it is complicated and I don’t want to see her, I want to know my mother is in this world.  I want to hope she is finding some shreds of happiness to lighten her load.  I love my mother.  So being angry with her is almost a derailment… only it isn’t.  I think it’s a different project though.

Today I’m talking about prosecuting my father.  Today I am talking about how complicated all the factors are.  We were poor.  We desperately needed the financial support he doled out in fits of pique.  Prosecuting him was a complicated decision that I had to make in one big temper tantrum.  And in many ways that is what it looked like to people on the outside who didn’t see how dense of a spider web I was standing in.  I had no where safe to step.  That was the moment that saved my life.  And it wasn’t important because I prosecuted my father, per se.  It was the moment when I irrevocably broke the patterns of my family and decided to ACT instead of react.  That moment could have been then or it could have been later.  With my mother and my sister the battle to act instead of react is constant in every single conversation and I feel like a very hostile person.  Ultimately I’m not sure how much of it is their fault.  They are still in patterns of abuse and reconciliation with one another.  They really can’t find a way out of that system.  I don’t know why.  But I can’t be part of it with them.  I feel like I am growing to understand Aunt Vonnie more.  I’m starting to understand that she was the one who stayed in one place and put down her roots in the community and she has a busy, involved life.  She was able to support so many people because she actually had very little involvement in the drama.  She just went about her business as the storms raged.  And she kept me afloat.  Well, her and a whole bunch of other random and semi-random people.  Whether I was in the cycles of abuse or not I was tolerated and supported and encouraged.  I feel I am lucky.  I was helped by more people than I can count.

And so now I wrestle with my demons until the sun comes up, and right now I see a faint hint of blue through the window instead of black.  It is time to go get dressed and start breakfast.  It’s time to smile and kiss my children and sing silly songs.  It is time to hug my husband and wish I had the ability to be the sexual partner he deserves, one who is not held back by monstrous figures in the dark.  Yeah folks, even the freaks lose the ability sometimes.  And I have to smile while doing it.  I have to be cheerful.  My family deserves to live with someone who is pleasant to be around.  And that is the pressure.  How do I live a dual life like this?  When I want to snap because I feel tension and anger at my mother… Let’s go use the rototiller for an hour.  My arms will hurt so bad I won’t have the energy to be cranky.  I love you both, my darling babies.  I will struggle to hold you tonight so I may end up wearing both of you because my arms are weak.  But even if it’s a cranky day.  I promise there will be snuggles.

Ideas

I’ve heard it’s a good idea to keep a file of neat ideas if you ever want to write a book.  I’m not sure how consistent I will be with that, but I said something to my dear lady love this morning and she told me it should be the beginning of a book.  So I’m transcribing it.

“I am a Morning Person.  And becoming weirder about it as I get older and spend a lot of time alone at home.  I sit here nearly motionless and silent until the sun comes up.  Then I strap the baby on my back and start working as fast as I can.  It’s pretty neurotic.”

I think she’s right.  Because I just found my words. 🙂