Category Archives: mother trouble
Hiding
Today was one of the most intense therapy sessions I’ve had in many years. I don’t cry at therapy much. Ok, a few tears will flow while I talk. But I don’t break down sobbing. I have too much control for that. Today I sobbed and rocked and felt pain that scared the ever loving shit out of me. My father raped me from when I was a baby. He harshly rejected me if I was anything other than an eager whore. How can any person absorb that? My father molested me constantly in public and I was not allowed to show signs of it. I was trained.
I don’t know how to feel that inside me as true and let my daughters touch me. I feel so disgusting.I feel so soiled and degraded. So insulted. My therapist asked if there was anything that would make me feel whole. I told her I have a broken compass. I can never save myself. There is no saving me. I have to live with that. My three year old self is gone. Never to be loved. Not by anyone. It hurts so much. So many years of my life. My mother and my sister were too far gone by then to really love anyone. They loved more companionship in shame and misery so they didn’t feel so alone.
It is hard to shake off the shame that was fed into me with the very air I breathed. It is hard to believe that I could possibly do good. For anyone. I feel small and mean and disgusting. I don’t want to hurt my babies with this evil inside me. How do I find patience to not pass on cycles of silencing. How do I show them who I am without making them know things that are wrong for them to know?
I miss my mother. And I can’t stop crying.
Why I want to be a stay at home mom
So I was watching the Steve Jobs speech at Stanford and it occurred to me that I should spend some serious time thinking about why I am a stay at home mom. I’ve been having internal pushback towards my decision making process lately and I think I need more clarity.
I view parenting as accompanying your child through an apprenticeship to adulthood. One that my mother failed at. My mother gave me adult responsibilities when I was very young. I had to be responsible for myself in a way that was not appropriate or fair. And I failed often. The result was that I got hurt often. I don’t instinctively know what skills a child would have to avoid problematic people. I don’t want to teach my children to be just like me.
I don’t think my aggression is an ideal life attitude. And I want my kids to be allowed to be them. I don’t know how to do that without looking at them all day long. I don’t know how to bond in a shorter time span than that. I believe that working mothers love their children just as much as I do. I don’t know how they find time in the day to deal with that much emotion. I can’t. It overloads me. Having to be patient and interactive with them is incredibly difficult. If I had other things adding stress to my life (like a job) I would be nasty and mean and vicious pretty much all the time. It is hard for me to be nice and I find that embarrassing.
I only know how to get through the bad days by having a lot of control over every single solitary thing I say and do all day. You can’t do that and have a job. So really, I just don’t want to have a job. No. That’s not true. I do not believe I am capable of managing the stress of a job and the stress of children. I would not be pleasant, ever. Dealing with my mental health takes up too much time, honestly.
And I am getting to discover what it is like to unfold in a safe, gradually expanding environment. I am watching how Shanna changes. It’s amazing to me to look at her in all of her grumpy glory and think, “That is in absence of any external stress whatsoever. Hunh. How does that jive with what I remember doing/being/saying?” I’m learning what it means that someone else can’t “make” you feel something. My children get on my nerves. That is kind of their job. When I lose my temper and start yelling at them I have this huge hammer in my brain hitting me as hard as possible saying, “She’s a fucking three year old! She doesn’t know this is an annoying thing to do! You are supposed to be helping her learn not berating her for her inadequacies!!” I feel like my anger is not supposed to be part of the equation.
Do you know why I feel that way? Because in my family you weren’t allowed to address small injustices or issues. You were required to stay silent through small problems and big problems alike. I was supposed to just smile and “be pleasant”. “Why is your tone of voice so nasty all the time” was the favored thing to tell me. I learned that I was simply an unpleasant person because I wanted them to stop “playing” with me in ways that hurt me. I was a whiner. At least according to them. And looking at Shanna… I can understand why people around me didn’t notice that anything wrong was happening.
If I put my hand around Shanna’s hand to hold it when she’s not in the mood it doesn’t matter if I am holding her with so little pressure I barely encircle her hand. “It huuuuuuuuuuuurts.” I feel like I’m going to lose my mind. She is constantly whining about how much I am hurting her, when I am not even touching her body. When I am walking towards her with the hair brush she starts crying and clutching her head and rolling around the floor sobbing because I have hurt her. When I haven’t touched her yet. I did that too.
Do you know what my mom did? She probably thought she was just trying to get it over with as fast as possible. Oh how I screamed. I have done the same thing to Shanna. You pull them over to the couch, hold them between your knees, and as fast as possible you get the knots out no matter how they squirm. But my would start with a fine tooth comb at the top of my head and yank. I have a baby brush with soft bristles and I start at the ends and I pull knots apart with my fingers. I don’t think Shanna is reacting to what I am doing less than I reacted to my mother. I sincerely believe that Shanna experiences actual physical pain for less than 10% of the time I am brushing her hair. My mother could be gentle but when she was in a hurry… well… that was that. And she was in a hurry a lot. I was the youngest of four. She worked most of my life.
If I had to hurry and get Shanna ready for daycare before I got ready for work we would not have a pleasant relationship. She wakes up slow. We generally sit in a chair for half an hour cuddling before we do anything at the beginning of each day. Calli is joining us now. Then Noah makes breakfast and the kids go back and forth between us. If I also had to get ready for work then, that would be the end of my writing and relaxing. That is when I have that time. The other tasks would get managed somehow by someone else. I would just lose writing.
It’s hard for me to actually admit that I need this writing. It feels so banal, so unimportant. Why would anyone ever care about anything I have to say? Who the fuck am I? Because if I’m telling you the truth I want people to read this. I want people to give a shit what I say. But I’m not sure anyone should. Have I thought anything useful? Have I taught anything? I don’t know. Not enough, I’m sure. What is teaching anyway? When I worked as a high school teacher my goal was to have the kids be able to argue with me more by the end of the year. I want them to be ever increasingly sure of their own opinions. I want them to be able to talk in finer and finer detail about what they believe. Because only once they can talk about it can they really be a fully integrated person and deal with their little hypocrisies.
I actively want to avoid being a hypocrite. That means being very sure what my priorities are and changing my behavior when it’s not in alignment. It’s hard. It means I don’t get to coast for long. What are my priorities.
Me.
Noah, Shanna, Calli, Sarah. Not necessarily in that order. Spending time with them.
Writing
Learning/Reading
Socializing with other people
Gardening
Housecleaning
Cooking
It’s a short and broad list to start with. That means that when I sit down to read a book to Shanna I am not evading my housekeeping duties. I’m following my priority list. I want to stick my tongue out at an imaginary person now. I feel like there is some judge and jury out there who is going to tell me I am a bad mother because I want to sit in the garage and smoke pot instead of clean my house. Seriously. Who the fuck wouldn’t agree with me? I’m writing, damnit. Why am I writing. Why does writing matter.
Writing lets me get out the stupid shit I am thinking about into a format where I can see it, understand it, and recognize that it is idiotic. If it is just running around and around and around in my brain… I don’t know how to get off the train. The writing changes it from a train on a circular trap to a traffic loop. Yes, it is possible to get caught in the center if you are being dumb, but there are exits all fucking over the place. Just pick one. Are any of them really worthwhile? I don’t know. I don’t know if anyone will read my writing one day and feel like I made their life better. I gave them an idea they didn’t have before and it made their life just a little easier. I feel like it is so hard for me to “act normal” that certainly some other people are also just acting and they might like a trick.
I loathe when people say, “Be yourself!” Yourself is a bizarre construct of all the different influences you’ve had in your life + personal taste. It’s pretty vague. And let me tell you, when you do things you genuinely like (like making your hair increasingly AWESOME) people are quick to remind you that you are stepping out of the herd and you should stop that. I think I dyed my hair because it makes me visually a freak but it doesn’t cause any more pain to my body. I think that is a god damn excellent direction of progress.
I want to be a stay at home mom because some accident of fate handed me a partner with sufficient money to support me all my life in a manner to which I would like to become accustomed. We’ve been married for five years. Until now I have contributed enough to pay for my truly unnecessary stuff. I was self-sufficient enough. Now I have no form of income. Now I am completely dependent on someone else for the first time since I was 15.
Of course I’m secretly having a fucking heart attack and hoping that I do a good enough job in November that I can sell the book. I don’t want to be a god damn dependent. But I don’t want to do anything that requires me to deal with other people. Err, well, that kind of limits the options. And honestly I wouldn’t take a random retail job right now. For one thing it would be hard to get someone to hire me because I am so overqualified. I think I could overcome that though. It’s called lying. But I would feel guilty for taking that job away from someone who needs it more. I don’t want an office job. I don’t want anything where I have to be doing additional work. Ha. I feel like being the housefrau maid for my family is enough fucking work this lifetime, thanks. And I want to write. And my husband wants me to write.
I have such intense feelings about Noah’s perception of my writing. He takes it more seriously and gives it more respect than I do. I think that Noah is the one who convinced me that I am a writer. That anyone who compulsively feels the need to write 10-20 pages a day is a fucking writer. That’s just not normal. Normal. Normal. Normal. I hate that word so much and I use it constantly. I think it goes a long way towards wrecking the meaning I am going for.
Why am I so god damn compelled to be just like everyone else? When I stand near people too long I start acting like them. I conform. I do it in subtle ways at first, then loud, then I explode and yell at them and make it seem like I was being oppressed by the ways I was conforming. Even if the other person was unaware of the whole situation. They are just standing there confused. In my family the constant chatter is about telling you what to think, when to think it, how to think it. So someone sitting there and telling you something about how they handled a situation is fairly explicitly giving you directions on how you are expected to handle it in the future. You know that whole, “Childhood as apprenticeship for adulthood” thing I have?
Until fairly recently my aunt and uncle were supporting their three adult disabled children. And a bunch of grandkids and SOs. Because they reinforce one another’s behaviors. They will rise or fall as a unit. They are all so ridiculously similar it isn’t funny. Like obsessions with collecting useless things. Everyone has a different animal. For every holiday under the sun people compete to find you something with that animal on it. But they are all dirt poor. So all the stuff is cheap, ugly, and really pointless. And they have LOTS of it. That’s one small point, but they do the same thing with everything.
When I walk into a middle class persons house I instantly put on my ‘acting’ face. I start to imagine, “How would people who live here behave?” Do you want to know why I paint my house really dark colors? Because I grew up in houses with dark wood paneling. They were caves. I don’t know how to cope with relentlessly white walls. We had relentlessly white walls in a series of depressing, horrible rental places. Or ugly paneling that turned the house into a dark cave.
So I painted my house purple and cornflower blue and green and raspberry and navy blue…. among other colors. They are dark enough to make me feel calm and settled. Aunt Vonnie’s houses were the home base. That was as much of a home as I knew. That feeling is in a dark house… even though it bugs me. I don’t want to be the kind of person who has a uniformly dark house. It feels oppressive to me. But I like darker, more saturated colors. Who says a house has to look like the materials came that color direct from nature? I never got that memo. I guess I ditched that day at school.
This constant attempt to conform to whomever I am standing near creates problems. Because then I get angry at the person for “making” me feel like I have to conform and be like them. I have had this problem in particular with a couple of female friends. We will be having an intense conversation about something and they are giving advice and all of a sudden I go ballistic and start screaming because I don’t want to be like them.
I don’t know how to handle those feelings very well. That sudden explosion of fear that they are trying to wipe me off the planet. I know that it was that fear that got me out of my family. I respect that fear. I respect the fact that my individuality comes with a rock solid fist to defend it. But I really wish I wouldn’t hit my friends. They haven’t done anything. This is my fuck up.
I am struggling with the fact that my self control runs out. I have too many things I am trying to control. I don’t know how to relax and let go of the anger in the moment very well. It cycles so fast out of no where. When I am at home I take a time out. It’s not perfect because I’m doing too much stomping away/slamming doors.
The only normal I care about is the one where my kids aren’t afraid of me. I don’t want my kids to quake with fear from my voice. That is not a relationship I want. But I want to be effective. Three sucks.
I want to be a stay at home mom so that my kids and I can learn how to be nice to each other without outside pressure. We can learn how to be a family together. Because really I don’t know much more than them. Luckily Shanna is an excellent teacher. She’s having an emotional period, but mostly she can talk about her preferences and make requests and follow directions. She is in a rough phase (the book told me to expect it! I love that book) and that’s ok. Hormones are rough. I try to be gentle and understanding. For her, this is just a phase because nothing bad has ever really happened to her. Minor injuries and scrapes. Losing her friend Rowan was the biggest loss she’s been aware of. If I am patient and loving, she will come through this and on the other side she will hopefully understand that three year olds are assholes and I was really nice to her. This is part of the circle of life. I wish I could apologize to my mother for some pieces of it.
But that is when we jump on the merry go round again. I don’t think my mother abused me as a small child. I think she neglected me to such a degree that it becomes criminal. I think she tried to enculturate with the only thing she knew… and it worked. I am indeed, white trash. Even that didn’t go how she planned. One of the strongest and most defining things about white trash as I understand the concept is the fierce loyalty. Blood is everything. How do you think they get away with incest? If you are related to someone you are obligated to do anything they want… forever.
Excuse me while I pause to vomit on the floor. I respond to feeling like I should conform with hostility and aggression because it was a very useful tool at one point. My friends aren’t trying to convert me though. Gah.
I should stop writing. It’s already too long. But I don’t want to. This is the problem with trying to do shorter entries. I don’t always see a clear stopping/starting/dividing line. How do I talk about things in separate posts when it is all one big concept in my head? But then I ask and people tell me, yes they would prefer shorter posts. And then I feel like I am failing to deliver something that people want. I wish I didn’t do this to myself. Shit. This is over twelve pages long. Ok, I’ll stop. And it took me just over an hour. That’s actually kind of hot.
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.
Sex is complicated
The super frank way I handle my sexuality is not appropriate for children. The way I talk about it. The way I pursue it. Not. For. Children. The way I handle my sexuality makes a fair number of adults extremely uncomfortable. How do I raise kids who can have a more “normal” view of sexuality? I don’t have a normal view of it. Growing up it was pretty clear that my options were celibacy (my mom and mostly Aunt Vonnie–it was a running joke that she didn’t put out) or being the kind of whore who ruins my life regularly with toxic men (go Denise).
The idea of not knowing what sex is till 10 or so really weirds me out. I don’t know what it will be like to grow up with children who are ignorant so long. I taught my niece and nephew how to use condoms way before then because it was necessary information in our family. And no one else would talk about diseases or contraception at all. I have books on what age appropriate sexuality is, but it’s still a weird concept.
You see, because I’m the kind of person who wants to host sex parties. Let me just take a moment to say that hosting a sex party is very complicated. There are a few other layers of things going on that make everything way way way more complicated. Because really what I want to do is have a woo woo sex magic ritual and that’s an even more specific kind of event. That kind of event requires rather a lot of thinking, planning, discussion, etc. But I have these little kids around. At this point in time I’m aware that some day soon Shanna is going to turn around and ask me point blank what a sex magic ritual is. As I sit and think about it right now I think my answer should be, “Sex is something you do once your body is physically mature and you want to. Magic is a way of thinking about what you want really hard. And a ritual is where you think really hard about something you want with other people helping you focus more on what you want so that you think about it harder than you can alone.” That’s an ok answer, right? Because I don’t believe there is any chance we will just stop talking about it at all.
And holy shit. How do I feel about my child growing up knowing that her parents are into sex magic rituals? No, she doesn’t have a clue what it is about now. We aren’t graphic in the slightest. We talk about people and emotions. We don’t talk about sex acts. Shanna is going to grow up hearing a very odd therapy sort of talk. I mean, we sit around and talk about the people who are involved in the ritual and what their various potential levels of involvement could be (nothing graphic) and try to get a sense of what to expect. A lot of what is going on here is that I can’t be in control of everything in the world. But I can be in control of this very small setting on this one day. I can be in control of who comes. And that has been a rather fraught process. I may have lost a friend over it and that makes me sad. I have had to deal with the overwhelming guilt and shame that I went from in-my-head having a fairly ordinary party to these increasingly complicated layers of intention and want and overlapping needs.
I didn’t realize up front that I was doing a sex magic ritual. It wasn’t until I did extensive negotiations with most of the people coming that I realized I was trying to set the stage for that. I have only done sex magic explicitly with one person. I think of him as my personal shaman. Our relationship has gotten very complicated over the more than 10 years he has been in my life. Some day I should send a thank you message to the woman who connected us. Ok, done. I kind of like reflecting when and where I walk away from writing in the blog to do other things. I don’t know if it is ADD or what but I really can’t finish something in one go. I just can’t. I peck at everything. I don’t think it is perfectionism because it’s not that I’m trying to be perfect. I just have to think about the next step before I can have it.
I’m going to be a big judgy bastard. I think there is a big difference between people who are sex positive and people who actively hunt a lot for new partners. I know people who hunt. I don’t like how they parent. There. I said it. I like the children of monogamous households. Which really this is selection bias. I don’t know very many children who have grown up in poly households. Very very few. I know a few adults who were children in poly households. They are neat. But uhm… I like the children of monogamous parents because I feel more comfortable with the kinds of acting out they do. Which is to say that in the far less than 500 hours I have been around “children of poly households” in aggregate over my entire life I had feelings of discomfort and I blamed them on the kids.
And that is the kind of judgy bastard I am. Ok, fine I’ll deconstruct this again. Why do I have a problem with poly parents? Because I think my sexuality is something that should always be on the side of a closed door from my children. I do not flirt in front of my kids. I cannot be a sexual person in front of my kids. I cannot hunt. I do not want my extra “partners” around my kids because I am uncomfortable having that energy around children. I have felt really uncomfortable when I am dating someone and they want me to hang out around their children. In almost every case (with one huge exception and I really respect him) there was more hand holding and hugging and PDA type behavior than I found appropriate.
Where is the line of what is ok to do in front of your kids? Or even where in my house? When I am interested in sex I want to have a lot of very heavy groping in my life. It’s awesome and fun. I am very uncomfortable with the prospect of trying to be secretive about it around my kids. That’s not a good feeling for me. I have been secretive about my sex life since I was two years old and I shouldn’t have had a sex life to be secretive about.
When I am otherwise doing well emotionally I get off on every part of being sneaky about sex. I fucking love that I am the chick who sneaks off at parties. And yet that is clearly acting out behavior and there are places I am not welcome because of it. Awkward. Shouldn’t I have to give up on that kind of acting out now that I have kids? Large swaths of society thinks I am inappropriate for doing that. I could even link to a very old blog post with a poll about it. Fully 1/4 of my friends thinks that is not an ok thing to do. And these are the people who are open minded enough to be friends with me in the first place. Let’s not ignore that incredibly high bar here.
25% of my friends (who responded to that poll) disapprove of a very consistent part of my behavior. That’s absolutely a high enough percentage to make me go into convulsions of shame. Because that (to me) means if that was more of a general humanity sort of poll it means more like 80% of people will think I am disgusting. Cue bad self talk tape I don’t want to play today.
Why do I feel I have to be celibate because I am a parent? Oh let me see. Maybe because the parts of my sexuality I enjoy the most are the parts that push the boundaries of what society considers acceptable. Silent quickies on the couch are really shitty. I’m fucking tired of them. If that is all my god damn sex life is supposed to have for the rest of my life you can take this job and shove it. Cue running away and engaging in acting out behavior.
But how did I act out? I went to an adult only party. Where people were already naked. And heavily indicating that they like extra marital sex. And I went to a former partner (who has loudly stated he is still interested) and I suggested running off because I hardly ever get to be in an environment where there are no children so I never enjoy sex.
I feel like a dirty disgusting whore. And sometimes that is really hot and sometimes it makes me cry. I feel so much shame for wanting sex the way I do. I feel like I am obviously dirty. I am contaminated. I must be sick for wanting this the way I do. And then I won’t let anyone touch me in any way because I feel like they will be made dirty by touching someone who wants sex the way I do.
So I kind of want to have a sex magic ritual. I kind of feel like there might be some worthwhile emotional work to be done in this area. Kinda. And on one hand I feel like I should only be saying this to the very short list of people I feel comfortable engaging in this kind of party with. But on the other hand, continuing to believe that I should be ashamed of talking about this part of my sex life is a lot of the point. Let me restate: I have already lost a friend over this party.
Why do I feel like I have to be celibate to be a good mother? Oh man. Because being queer and kinky and poly means not only that I have sex with my husband (I feel ashamed of almost any touching around my kids so our marital sex is rather limited right now) and I occasionally sneak out in a way that I can completely hide from my kids and keep secret (limited primarily to heteronormative behavior because casual sex with women is way more complicated than I have time for, men can get it up on demand if you select carefully) but I am being flagrant to the world about things that I feel I have to hide.
The closet sucks. I do talk about being queer, kind of, in front of my kids. It really doesn’t come up. I have friends who are queer, so obviously my children see examples of it. But I don’t engage in any behavior that would look queer to them. Kinky is something that I have put on hold 100% until my kids are older and can be left alone longer. I don’t feel ok having that in my house and I get very little time off. Poly? Dating feels like the same thing. I don’t want to take that much time away from my family.
It’s not that I don’t want these things in my life. But I have massive issues around my kids seeing any of it because I feel ashamed. It feels like I am supposed to. When I make the decision to take people off the guest list because they do not feel safe enough to have a sex magic ritual in front of I lose friends. It really really feels like I should be ashamed of having these things in my life. If I am doing something at all, ever that some people won’t like then I am bad.
Why do I think I have to be celibate to be a mother? Oh I don’t know. Maybe because I can’t be satisfied with the limited shitty sex other people want me to have so it is easier to just shut the whole system off. And just not be me.
I need more me in my life.
Part of the reason I am not posting more is because my computer isn’t working properly. I now live with a Sys Admin and it has been confirmed that I have a hardware issue and I need to take it in to be fixed. So when I get an idea that I want to explore in writing I sit here getting more and more frustrated and angry and I forget the idea and then I am angry when I go back into the house because I feel stifled and silenced by fate. I’ve started to notice that my sentences are getting a bit long. Interesting. Ok. What was that idea again… (I’m now on Noah’s computer.)
The thing about running away is, it doesn’t actually get you out of your life. The problem is that you take your life with you. You just change where you are standing. The only “out” available in life is death. And I believe that when I had my children I gave up my right to choose death as an option for a minimum of 20 years and probably ever. I went through that with a non-custodial parent. There is no way I could slash their souls. I can not ever be that selfish. Especially in the next few years, I am the whole center of their universe right now. I won’t abandon them.
I won’t abandon them. That phrase keeps me trapped. That phrase keeps me feeling like I am not allowed to have hobbies or separate interests. That phrase keeps me from doing things I want to do. I don’t feel like there is a way to meet my needs as well as their needs. This is changing, slowly. Having a nursling is hard. I haven’t been away from Calli for more than about four hours. No… I’ve probably pushed six hours a couple of times. But not more than five times. In her life. She will be a year old in 16 days (!). That’s a lot of fucking contact. That doesn’t leave a lot of time to do the things I like to do.
The problem is, the things I like to do all involve intense socializing. And running. Running needs to start any day now in order to give me time to train for the marathon in a way that is reasonable for my body. I have a plan in place for how I want to approach that. I should talk to Sarah today about how to get that on the schedule. Maybe that is what I should be doing during quiet time? The point being, I don’t have any hobbies I am interested in pursuing at home by myself. That means large blocks of time out socializing in some way. That really is the approach I have to filling those needs in myself. I want a community.
It’s getting better with Sarah here. The kind of “therapy talk” that bothers some of my friends is totally ok in my house all the time now. If we have an interaction and I start having a weird irrational reaction I talk about it. I don’t blame. I say, “Ok I think it is an irrational reaction, but right after you said that I started feeling really scared. I feel like you saying that means… and I need to ask you to clarify a bit more about that statement.” I’m allowed to do it all day long and no one thinks I’m weird. No one tells me that I should stop processing and start living. No one tells me that what I am doing and therefore that part of me is wrong. I’m scared because Sarah is inviting people over to socialize. People coming over is pressure to conform to social rules in my space that I don’t agree with. I’m never sure how much pressure is only from me and how much actually exists in other peoples minds.
I miss me. I miss being confident and strong. I miss feeling like a force to be reckoned with. Someone from MDC described me that way on the trolls site and it absolutely made my year. My presentation of self is fucking working. That is who and what I want to be. I don’t feel like that right now. I feel weak. I feel thin. I feel like my skin is very thin and I don’t know how to keep other people out and me in. I constantly feel this free floating miasma to conform to being more like the people around me. This feels ok in my house because here I have one identity that is firmly separate. Mom is not thin. I do not conform to my children. And that means I feel ok in that role and I don’t know how to even think like the other parts of me any more.
Does that make sense? This is the part that feels like being slightly “multiple”. Right now I do not feel like an integrated person. My memories of things I did at other times in my life largely depends on how close I am to the emotional state I was in when I had the experiences. If I am not feeling joy I cannot remember joy. It is like joy has never existed. If I do not feel lust I feel like I have never wanted sex and all of my partners have actually been rapists because I never truly wanted it. But that’s a lie. I know it is a lie. That is a part of me attacking another part of me and trying to destroy it. I seem to feel like if I am the mom then the part of me that is sexual needs to die. It’s not really surprising that I feel that way. My mother gave up sex and dating when I was 10 because she believed she had a bad picker (I agree) and she wasn’t going to keep fucking up her kids with bad men. That was a good decision. My sister has gone through a string of men so bad I don’t think I could make up stories that would be worse than reality. The last one was decent though. She dumped him for nagging her about cleaning. Excellent choices.
It makes sense that I have this association between sex and unfit parenting. Wanting sex means taking focus away from your children and if you take your focus away from your children then you are neglecting them. I have a hard time with my constant internal pressure to pay more attention to my children. Honestly at this point I have the (I hope more) rational belief that paying attention to my children 24/7 is not actually good for any of us and we all need space to grow. I have work to do to support our family’s life. I have to do the dishes. I have to clean. No really, these things are mandatory parts of life and the children need to learn to accomodate the fact that the whole bleeping world does not revolve around them. Most families wait on that lesson and let school teach their children that lesson. I don’t have that light at the end of the tunnel. There is no school coming.
What does that mean about the patterns of our days? As a stay at home, future home schooling parent I have to integrate my identities in my life while not having outside help to monitor them for most of the day. That kind of sucks. But I really have no interest in the more common approach so I have to make this work. I believe there should be a 100% separation of church and state. I also believe there should be a brick wall between the sex lives of parents and their children. My sex life in particular is simply not fodder for my children’s imaginations. Ew. But I don’t want them to grow up thinking we are celibate either. There is a happy medium in here somewhere that will allow us all to be healthy.
Right now I feel like I need to find a way to start interacting with people more. Baby steps. I am socially awkward and uncomfortable and I have a lot of work to do in the house. It’s hard to pry myself out. Even when I am with someone I have known for almost a decade I feel like they secretly don’t like me. It is an act of will to act like I think we are friends instead of acting like they secretly think I am a loser. It’s awesome. And stressful. Mostly I’m not up for the stress. Slowly it is improving though.
I’m trying to be all the parts of me that I like without judging some of them as bad. No matter what there will be people who disapprove of me being queer or kinky or nonmonogamous. These are unconventional life paths. They are part of my path. How can I figure out how to be a queer, kinky, nonmonogamous parent without fucking up my kids. Hm.
Whiner be thy name. Or mine. Whatever.
Tonight I went to one of those kind of events. If you don’t know what that means then you probably don’t want to. Err, how to discuss this in a global way. Uhh. Hm. Oh I don’t give a shit. So I went to a party hoping to do some kind of sex play with someone but then I acted like a hostile bitter wallflower and I left feeling depressed. There. That is tonight’s stupid. I’m not mad that Noah had some chutzpah and went and found play. Go him. He’s a fun sexy guy and I’m glad someone is noticing. Because I’m not. I don’t flirt with Noah and he doesn’t flirt with me. He’s afraid to approach me because I am broken. Because when I don’t want to have sex I say yes anyway and he feels like a rapist. So he doesn’t ask very often. And we only have sex when I initiate. And it often feels kind of uncomfortably perfunctory. I’m sad that this is who I am right now.
I’m sad that I feel no desire. I’m sad that I exude disinterest because I honestly feel no interest. And it’s not because of anyone else. It’s just in me. On the way back from the party Noah told me that I had this problem until about 18 months postpartum the first time. So like 7 months to go. I hope. This is not my happy face.
I’m also experiencing some noticeable grief about my family. Not only did Uncle Bob die but I actively took steps to kill off any chance of reconciliation. I am now dead to them. I feel like a big part of me died. I love my family.I feel very loyal to my family. I feel like a traitor. I feel like I should be shot for treason Ok, that thought made the waterworks flood. Yeah. I hurt my mommy. You aren’t supposed to do that. Even the bible says to honor your mother and father. I effectively killed my father and I just yelled about as loud as I could that my mother is a child abuser. I don’t want to think that about my mommy. I truly don’t. Do you want to know what is making it feel real? When I say things to Shanna in that tone of voice and I see her cringe. I know that voice. That’s my mom’s voice. My mom didn’t hit me. She didn’t have to. She could make me feel like I was 3″ tall. I feel that I am teetering on a precarious edge because at this point Shanna turns around and yells at me that it’s not ok to talk to her in that tone of voice so uhm, yeah. She’s pretty clear that she’s not 3″ tall. And go fucking her.
I feel like I’m 3″ tall. I’ve been sniping at people lately. I have no patience and I really want to hurt people who are close to me. I’m doing it to absolutely everyone. And I’m having an explosion of guilt and anxiety. I feel tremendous social anxiety and I’m able to make the most positive situations seem like a tacit rejection of me. That’s pretty ridiculous. I’m really not rational. I’m struggling with body issues. My little sprint on wikipedia called it Eating disorder not otherwise specified which, to be fair I’m not actually looking for a label because I want one. I was actually looking for a word and I never did find it. So I have the self image of being a fat person. I think it is one that I actively want to have. I think I want it for a myriad of reasons. I don’t think it is actually all that good for *me* to be fat because I have to be fairly sedentary to do it. When I exercise I get smaller. It’s usually pretty dramatic and given that exercise is good for everyone, blah blah blah… No really, if I’m currently heavy that means I am extremely sedentary. And that’s not a healthy choice for me. Not saying this is the truth for every body out there.
So uhm I’ve been binge eating since I noticed that I was getting “too thin”. I have been feeling like I am eating a lot and my clothes are getting tighter. I feel like I have some weird subconscious thing going on that I associate fat with happy and maybe if I’m eating pleasure signal inducing foods constantly I will like myself more. Hasn’t worked yet but I keep trying. Maybe I just haven’t done it right yet. Anyway. The part that I get hung up enough on to avoid talking about my mother at all costs (see how I did that; I’m good) is: I weighed myself tonight at my friend’s house. I am lighter than I’ve been since I got married. I am certainly at what I consider a perfectly reasonable size. But it’s freaking me out and I’m binge eating to try and not stay in these clothes. It’s complicated.
But back to that mother thing. Because yeah I’m going to have to figure out a healthy relationship with food and stop alternating between treating it like a punishment (through lack of it) and a reward (through excessive amounts of it). Jesus I’m broken. But I’ll deal with that bit another day. Maybe.
Years ago I wrote a story for a writing class that detailed some of the biggest sexual assaults I experienced from non-family members. Some. I had my sister read it and her first response was that I couldn’t tell mom. Mom wouldn’t be able to handle this. It wasn’t fair for me to burden mom. I went against orders (because I promise you that my sister considered them on that level) and I had my mom read it. My mom was strangely sanguine. Like, this definition: Anticipating the best; optimistic; not despondent; confident; full of hope. By which I mean she apologized for not being there for me. She cried about her weaknesses as a mother. Then she went on to fairly casually talk about how we can move on now because the past is behind us. WTF?! (And I do actually say W- T- F.) Yo! Bitch! It’s not that easy. I don’t believe there is any reparation she could do for what her negligence did to me. I really don’t. That’s not about my overwhelming bitterness. That’s about the fact that there is nothing in the world she could do to earn my trust. And if I think you are a rattlesnake, well… you really aren’t someone I want near my home or my kids. I don’t know what you might do. That tears it and buries it. (Where the heck do I get these expressions?) Yeah. No. Which means I have to deal with the results of that on my end. I have to deal with the loss of my mom.
It really sucks. Just sayin’. There is no way for her to be a person I can have a healthy relationship. Ok, how can I go about the business of just being healthy instead of being fucked up now that I am removing the fucked up influences? I’m not really sure.
Areas That Could Use Improvement:
-my overall disposition. I act like everything and everyone is an inconvenience.
-my relationship with food and my body. Making choices other people disagree with is ok. Making choices I don’t agree with because I am so uncomfortable in my skin… not so good.
-liking sex again. That would be kind of nice.
-my tremendous social anxiety that is creating a brick wall between me and people who like me.
-my willingness to see myself as having worth.
And you know, could I start providing my children with a more stimulating mental situation so that they can be properly socialized… right. Not that I’m under. any. pressure. I’m sure I’ll make a fabulous first impression with the local homeschooling community. Ah shit. I’m really afraid to get involved with the local homeschooling community right now because I’m afraid that people won’t want their children to socialize with my kids because I am broken and bad. Like, this is seriously keeping me up at night. Shanna asks about R a lot. She asks when she can see him again. She asks why she can’t see him any more. I feel pretty shitty that the answer is I made R’s mom so uncomfortable that she won’t let him be friends with you. I don’t want to fuck things up for my kids this early in life. I want to wait until they are a little older. I already had a best friend by Shanna’s age. I feel like I am denying her some crucial life experience and isolating her unreasonably. But she’s 3. I haven’t ruined her life yet, right?
Dear Mom
Dear Mom,
I hate you. I hate you with a fury unseen since God wiped out Sodom and Gomorrah. You are a worthless piece of shit and I hope you die slowly in a lot of pain. Do you know what you did to me? You beat me after I was raped. You refused to help me when I was being raped. YOU HUNG UP ON ME AND TOLD ME THAT I MADE MY BED NOW I HAD TO LIE IN IT. You fucking stupid bitch. How could you do that to your child? Oh, of course. You didn’t know. You.aren’t.responsible.
Well guess what? You are. You are god damn responsible and I hope you rot in hell. The thing is, you are already in hell. You are pathetic. You are a loser. You are nonfunctioning because you know that you do not deserve to breathe. You let your husband rape your children. You continue to turn a blind eye to your daughter molesting her children. You call me and tell me that I was not sexually assaulted as a little kid and I had better get my story straight.
Oh I have my story straight. And you fucking know it. You are fucking terrified of me. And you should be. Do you know why you should be afraid of me? Because I know all of your dirty, shameful secrets. I know all of the despicable things you have done. It may take me the rest of my life but I will tell all of them. You have no right to privacy any more. You horribly abused me. You are a monster.
You are just as bad as my father. You spent my entire childhood ranting about how my father was evil. AND THEN YOU SENT ME TO HIM SO HE COULD RAPE ME. It’s not like you can claim you were surprised! I don’t understand how you can stand to look in the mirror.
Do you know what he did to me, Mom? Do you know? Do you know that he used to finger me at any chance he could get? Mom, he held a gun to my head and asked me if I deserved to live. You know, because of how fucking badly you treated me I couldn’t even say yes. I didn’t believe it. You made me feel like I was worthless. Less than worthless. You made me feel like I deserved to be raped over and over and over. You made me feel like I was a horrible person just by existing. You are my mother. Why did you do your best to destroy me?
You haven’t won. And you never will. I am stronger than you. I am smarter than you. And by golly, I’m meaner than you. You taught me well you fucking cunt. I know exactly how to get under your skin. And I’m going to. Oh man I’m going to. I may even send you all your own autographed copies of the book.
No love,
your last born.
anxiety
I don’t think I need to state out loud that I’m a stress monkey right now. That’s probably obvious. I have better days and worse days. I’m not doing great but I’m not hiding in the garage all day. I’m getting productive stuff done. I’m mostly doing ok with the kids. Except when I’m not.
And I’m really not doing very well with Noah. This is one of the things that it’s hardest to talk about. I’m not being very nice to my husband. I mean, I do things for him. I mostly don’t take everything out on him. Except that sometimes I do. And he doesn’t like it. I suppose it is probably reasonable and all that he gets sick of me being nasty. The thing is, I’m not sure what to do about this situation right now. We are both under a fair bit of stress (young children will do that to you anyway) and we both have an enormous amount of work we have to do that we don’t want to do. And I’ve had Big Life Events again this month compounding my lifetime of them that I’m not doing very well at suppressing lately.
Because the thing is, in order to be with my kids I really do have to suppress memories. It is a conscious act of will to do it. And given how I feel right this minute about being silenced, you know… this really sucks. It is very hard not to feel resentful of my children just because they deserve the right to grow up in complete ignorance of even the word incest. But they do deserve it. It’s my job to provide that world to them.
I wonder if that is (at least part of) why my mom refused to talk about it. I wonder if she believed that children shouldn’t have those concepts so we’ll just sweep it under the rug and it will be all better. Naw, I doubt she thought about it that much. But I think about it all the time. I think about the fact that I don’t want to be a bitter, harping shrew like my mother. I think about my vicious ex-boyfriend who threw it in my face that it was inevitable that I would be a nasty, bitter alcoholic who dies alone.
When I have days like today, when my anxiety is running high and I’m not medicated, these are the days that make me afraid. I don’t want to lose my life. I don’t want to lose my husband. I don’t want to lose my precious baby girls. I don’t want to lose me. I don’t know how to get a handle on my anxiety sometimes. And I am so very mean. 🙁
I’m not mean to Noah and the kids all day. But I go pick fights on the internet and rant and rave about them. I try very hard to manufacture a place for me to pour all of my unhappy feelings and stir them up. I don’t really have any place in my life where I can do that. My options right now are to bottle up my feelings or scream at my family. It’s not appropriate for me to talk about my shit in front of my kids. It’s not appropriate for me to ditch my kids all the time so that I can go somewhere else and talk about it. And really, I already feel like no one gives a shit. They are done listening. I need to stop whining because I am such a pathetic baby.
All I can do is write on the internet. And hope no asshole comes along and tells me what I should do to deal with my anxiety. Which isn’t to say that everyone who wants to help me is an asshole. But there are assholes out there, let me tell you. The thing is, even when it’s nice people. They want to help. They want so badly to help. And when I say, no that won’t work then they say, “Well how do you know unless you try!” My internal dialogue to that is FUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOU Until you live with the monsters in my head don’t fucking tell me what I should do. Because when you tell me what I should do you are telling me to be different from who I am.
It’s hard to explain why I have a hard time with advice without offending people. So I feel like I shouldn’t bother trying to explain. No one actually gives a shit why I don’t want advice. I’m supposed to sit and smile and nod and say thank you. That’s what polite people do, right?
Being polite hasn’t historically gone well for me. When I am polite I have muddy boundaries. I don’t know how to do polite and firm at the same time. I know how to have firm boundaries or muddy boundaries. When I am trying to be nice–they’re muddy. And that doesn’t go well. Because I ignore small incursions into my space and then there are more and more and then I blow up.
“Just be present in the moment.” I don’t have anxiety because I am worried about paying my mortgage. I have anxiety because I have had a shitty life and some times that is shittier than others. I’m cussing a lot because I’m frustrated. But I’ve been cussing way too much and way too close to my kids. So I feel like once again I’m a bad person.
If someone tells me to be present in the moment in my life I feel like they are telling me that what I have been doing so far isn’t being present. It doesn’t count. I am present in the moment, motherfucker. I’m talking. I’m interacting. I’m working. I’m getting shit done in the moment. I just also have a horrid stomach ache because somewhere in the corner of my brain I’m saying, “My mother didn’t love me enough to try to prevent me being raped and she didn’t love me enough to let me talk about it once it happened. My mother doesn’t love me.”
I don’t think I’m grieving Uncle Bob. I’m grieving my mother. I kind of wish she would die already so this could just be at an end. Hell, I’ll even take another suicide with a nasty suicide note. It would at least be peace from this constant feeling of wanting to go find her and beg for her forgiveness. I want her to forgive me for speaking. I want to promise I will never every speak of it again. I’m sorry. Yes, I lied.
I want my mommy. But I don’t get to have a mommy. Not really. Not this lifetime. It’s too late. I lean heavily on some of the women in my life, but it isn’t the same. They are peers. They are friends. I kind of feel like forever, for the rest of my life, I just don’t get to have anyone I love and respect in that kind of role. And that’s hard. I’m not ready to be the female head of household. I’m too young. I’m too fucked up. I’m not good at being the stable one for everyone to depend on. Today I feel like a complete failure at my life. What I am supposed to be as the mom here is the one people lean on. But I’m not. Because if you lean on me, I fall down. And my daughter already knows that.
And that right there, that is the thing that is making it hard to stay at 50% interest in surviving. Because I have already failed at the most important thing in my life.
Sexual abuse
Right now my extended family is closing ranks against me. I am the problem. Right. I shouldn’t have said anything because I have hurt people who didn’t need to be hurt. Wow. Because it’s totally my fault that I was raped as a kid. But they think it is my fault. And I can explain!
I have been a sexual aggressor since I was a small child. I was taught to give blow jobs and to be obsessed with sex. When I say that my mother and my sister participated in my sexual abuse, sometimes my violent sexual abuse I don’t think people are picturing the right thing. English is kind of useless that way. I am not claiming that my mother or my sister ever touched my cunt. There. That’s been said. But when my mother violates court orders to send me to my father over and over, and when she ignored frantic phone calls to pick me up… she is just as much to blame as my father. She chose over and over to leave me in situations that were very dangerous. She refused to accept parental responsibility.
Most of the people who know me now probably think of me as being sexually adventurous in an at least mostly healthy way. Some people have their doubts, but I think that overall people think I’m not still acting out constantly. Seeing as I’ve mostly been vanilla and monogamous except for a few very brief, very safe forays for almost five years means that I feel like I am probably past the dangerous choices.
I don’t even know how to tell this story. I want to show what it was like to grow up being brain washed that I was supposed to have sex any time any one else wanted. I wasn’t supposed to consider my needs. But part of it overlaps with Tom and I feel kind of bad combining those stories. Ok Krissy, just start.
From when I was an infant I was constantly exposed to people having sex. I have independent verification that I was shown a lot of porn and many adults flagrantly had sex in front of me as a toddler. After the intense conversations with my brother I think that my father was already touching me, but it was the least of my problems. I remember my father touching me from my earliest memories. He wasn’t extreme early on, but he liked to uhm, make sure things were developing ok. This would be why I can barely handle wiping my daughters when they have a poopy diaper. When they pee mostly I change without looking or touching because I don’t know what an appropriate level of touching is. I’m afraid to keep tabs on what is happening with their labia.
Anyway. I grew up in an atmosphere that breathed sex. Adults (who were on drugs) would have sex on the couch while watching porn. While the kids played in the living room. That is what my baby/toddler experience was like. Why did I start giving blow jobs at 3? Because 3 year olds mimic what they are shown and I was constantly shown that girls are supposed to go down on boys. It was talked about in front of me like, Oh of course! That is what you do. And when I said things that were considered less than acceptable, like if I said I didn’t want to… I was hit or sent to my room. My mom isn’t going to remember it that way. Because my mom was the adult and my mom exerted no control. My mom refused to set the boundaries. She numbed her pain (because there is no fucking way she thought this was ok) and checked out mentally so that she wouldn’t have to be responsible for anything.
I’m not real interested in granting her that grace. My mother has spent her whole life trying to evade responsibility. And so I tried desperately to pick up responsibility as a child. My mother would do the same shit I am doing. She would get locked in her memories and start blurting out inappropriate things. My mom would tell me intense scary stories about my father raping her. My mother told me from when I was very little that I was the product of rape and if she hadn’t been Catholic she would have aborted me. That wasn’t a common thing. She didn’t say that a lot. And to be honest she usually had to be pushed to say it. When I was fishing around to figure out what the fuck happened in my parents marriage, because nothing was talked about in a straight forward way, she would drop in little bits about how horrifying things were. And he is a monster. And he did all these terrible things to her. Then she would cry.
Then I had to be the adult and comfort her. I listened to her stories. They became my stories. When my Aunt Vonnie tried to outlaw Sweet Valley High books for being too graphic my mother turned around and let me read graphic historical romance novels that talked explicitly about pony play, sodomy, rape, harems, incest… My mom thought those were perfectly appropriate reading for me at 7/8. And she didn’t talk to me about what I read. She just had the books all over the house and she ignored me reading them.
That wasn’t ok. That was my mother abdicating responsibility for me. I was a child. I should not have been reading pornography. My children will not be allowed to read books that are primarily pornography before they hit puberty. I just don’t fucking think so. But she feels like she did nothing wrong. I was a reader and that was all we had in the house. It wasn’t her fault.
My sister brought men to our house. Basically all of those men propositioned me in some way. Many of them explicitly. My sister would say it is my fault! Because when those men came over and my sister had sex with them with the bedroom door open… I watched. My sister talked to my about anal sex when I was really little. She would talk about how awesome it was when he was fucking you really slow and gentle and he pulls all the way out and pushes back quickly and oops it switches holes and it hurts but it feels so good that you don’t mind that he’s hurting you. That conversation happened in the downstairs bathroom of my Aunt’s current house. My sister lived in that apartment when I was in the 11-15 range. That was a sick thing for her to tell me. I mean, it’s true. But she should not have told me that when I was a child. She gave me extensive stories about her sex life and the drugs she took. My sister was thrilled that her tubes were tied because she had no interest in using birth control.
This was the environment I grew up in. I acted out. In kindergarden I took a little boy behind the book cart and I gave him a blow job. When I came back to that school in sixth grade I found out that little boy told people I raped him. I called his mother and told her that he was a disgusting liar. I am a sexual predator too. I was raised to be. I was taught to push everyone near me’s sexual limits. I was the aggressor with my high school boyfriends, most of whom were virgins when I met them. Pretty much all of them quickly backed away from me because I was too intense and scary. I wasn’t having sex because exploring sex was fun and exciting and new. I was having sex because otherwise I was invisible and I felt like no one in the world loved me.
Which is to say, an awful lot of my youthful encounters can be read as sexual assault. Either me doing it to other people or them assaulting me and me not saying no. I feel sad and scared. For my first 20 year I acted out the programming my family gave me because I didn’t have much choice. How much responsibility should I hold for what I did? Well, I tracked down the guy I went down on in kindergarden. I told him that what I did to him was wrong and I was a very messed up kid and I desperately hope he has found someone to talk to about it. I am so sorry I hurt him when I was flailing around from being hurt.
I am a monster too. And I have to live with that. Apparently my brother’s wife has been begging to adopt a daughter for years but he doesn’t want to have a girl in his house. His plan is to wait a few generations and then the taint will be gone. But it doesn’t work that way. I have to look at myself in the mirror every day. I did these things. This legacy is not over by me not molesting my kids. It’s deeper than that. I have to learn where I end and other people begin. I have to learn how to hold the right boundaries for my kids. The right answer isn’t locking them in their rooms till they are 18 so they are safe. The right answer isn’t even sheltering them completely so they are safe. The right answer is asking questions and not volunteering information that is too adult and inappropriate. The right answer is exposing them to many many kinds of people and talking to them about what they see so they learn how to evaluate people. My daughter’s will not know how to spot a sexual predator when they see one.
But I do. And I need to teach them how to be safe without teaching them to be afraid or teaching them to go looking for danger. That’s hard and scary. That is the last hurdle preventing me from emailing my friends and saying not to come today or tomorrow because the crisis is over. I do not yet feel like I have control over my mouth. I had more than one day where I was terrified I would hit my kids. Right after seeing my mother and my sister and having them do the “We are such a great family” act I freaked out and wanted to come home and beat the shit out of my children. That is why I freaked out so badly this time and went to such a deep, horrifying place. My family is that toxic to me. So the pain of staying broken, of keeping contact with my family became much much harder than blowing everything sky high and saying, “Ok mother fucker! You want to start cycles with me! All right! Let’s talk about some cycles!” I am not going to step blindly into what they are doing any more because I am able to step out.
But right this minute that used all of my reserves and I don’t know how to maintain boundaries with my babies. Because my boundaries with my babies are different than my boundaries with my family. And never the twain shall meet. With my family I have to be loud, aggressive, angry, and borderline abusive in order to prevent them from hurting me. I’m sure people will think I should find a better way. But I survived being raped, beaten, molested, and thrown into houses alone with sexual predators. I needed every ounce of righteous fury in the world to know that what they did to me was wrong and I should not have gone through it. My family would love it if I killed myself so they could point to me as a victim of my father’s abuse and canonize how I went down in the struggle but look! They are so much better off than me. Fuck them.
Instead I will take a couple more days to blurt things out inappropriately. Then I will get around to scrubbing my bath tub (it’s pretty gross) and I will take a long bath. And I will recite my memories to myself because I don’t want to forget them. As weird as that sounds to everyone else, they are part of me too. If I try to forget them or act like they aren’t important I am negating most of what shaped me. I am not a strong vibrant person in spite of what happened to me. I am a strong vibrant person because I went through just about the most horror a white person in America can go through as a child. And my response was to say, “Fuck all of you. I’m going to go do better.” And my family is rotting on a mountain top.
And I am free. Now I just need to stop talking about my hurt in front of my kids. And I will. But not today. That sounds like I am talking about my stuff in front of my kids now! Oh man. That’s the wrong impression. I sort of am. I come out and I talk to my friends about things in chunks. But my friends are watching me and listening and I am watching me and listening. When I start to get intense I just walk away. Because that is what I can do when memories are hitting me this strong. Suppressing them really isn’t a good idea at this stage. It’s rare for me to have this much. But I’ve had a bad week, you know? And this week will end. And next week is Shanna’s birthday week.
I can’t be broken on Shanna’s birthday week. That would be placing my needs above hers and I’m not going to be like my mother. My children deserve better than that.
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.
The difference
I should have been removed from my family of origin because I was not safe. No one protected me. That is a failure on the part of my entire extended family and the system. The difference between what happened to me and what is happening to my daughters is I know I am in a place right now where I am not competent to care for them as they need so I asked for help. I went out and I admitted out loud that right now I need other people to care for my children so that they can come out of childhood unscathed. I may be fighting demons but they don’t need to get hit in the cross fire.
That is what my family doesn’t understand. My sister and my mother have gone through these periods. I’ve seen this from the kid side. But what my mother and my sister did was scream at me, bring people home and have sex in front of me, basically they did anything to prove that they were bad. But they didn’t start out bad people. They started out good people who were making mistakes. They became evil because they kept doing it. Because they shame their victims and require silence about what they did. I have that potential in me.
I feel the urge to harm them. I visualize how I should do it. I have detailed pictures in my head of what I should be doing to them. And that is why I am freaking the fuck out. The images are getting more intense. I am fucking terrified of hurting my children and I don’t feel in control right now. This is the cycle. That is what is going on. This is what my mother and sister were to weak to do. They were too weak and to stupidly prideful to say, “I am weak and broken and I need help.” So they perpetuated the abuse on to the next generation after me. In the approximately 6 years since my brother broke contact with the family I have had conversations with my niece and nephew where they detailed their own sexual abuse history. My nephew was raped. That’s not my story to tell but I’m not keeping silent any more. I was told I have no right to reveal his pain. But I do. Because he was abused by the same people who abused me and I have the right to stand up and say that my sister is a disgusting monster and she should be shunned. She should be in jail. She is not a good person who makes mistakes. She is a child molester. She is filth. She deserves every bad thing in the world.
And my family is siding with her. And I sit here and freak out with these pictures in my head. I want to abuse my children the way I was abused. And I pray that my friend drives very very fast on her way to care for my children today because I am very close to the edge. I am not going to fall over it. I can hold out long enough.
Because that is how you stop this.
And I’m glad I didn’t hit send. Because I went in there and I dressed my baby more warmly because she was slightly chilly and I nursed her and I put her to bed and my older daughter asked me a bunch of questions and I answered them and then she told me to go away again because she likes watching her movies in private.
Why do I believe I am a monster who is going to harm them any second?
Last night I went to my support group. It was more or less “my turn” to share my story but that was not given support or space. I was expected to give short sound bites in ways that didn’t scare the horses. But I don’t have that kind of story. It’s hard when the act of speaking my story traumatizes people around me.
This is more of that “what to say” thing. When I get up the nerve to say these things out loud, with my voice, it is a big deal. I don’t do that. As loudly as I trumpet Radical Honest Damnit! I don’t actually describe these things out loud very well. And I need to. Ok, maybe not every incest survivor needs to, but I need to be able to speak about what happened to me. It is not fair that I have to continue bearing this in silence. Silencing me means telling me that I am wrong for talking about myself. Silencing me means that I am invisible. Silencing me means I deserve it.
When I finally get to the point of sharing my story I need people to look right back at me like I am still clean. Like I am still worth seeing. That’s why I want people to talk to me about my story. I leave details out every time. Often on accident. But when people ask me questions I realize what pieces I am conveniently telling and what pieces I am conveniently leaving out. I figure out a lot more of what scares me. But people have a limited capacity for that. I can only ask the same people to listen to the same stories so many times. But I have to tell them. I can’t be quiet and nice about it. I can’t keep my voice silent so that other people can ignore that horror exists.
The family members who are upset with me? The ones who sent me long and impassioned, or angry and defensive messages? Yeah. They don’t get me and they can’t. My niece sent me a message saying she hopes I can get over my father some day and return to the family and she doesn’t understand why I am hurting her so much because of things that happened before she was born. My cousin is saying, “All of that shit happened before I was born and now you are being mean to me so fuck you.”
I am not allowed to have my feelings and processes. It’s not ok that I view my mother and my sister as culpable. I am supposed to “let it go” which means forgive and forget and move on with the victimization stuff. How do I tell my niece that I have to cut her off because of the ways her mother sexually assaulted her and her brother. Because I need to ensure that people like my niece, who have been pretty badly sexually abused, are not an influence.
I just did a nasty thing. I sent my niece a response and I shouldn’t have. I told her that this, right now, actually has very little to do with my dad. This is about my mother and my sister sent me off to be raped and my sister participated in the rape and molestation of her own children. As long as people continue to talk to my mother and sister like they are normal people I can’t stand near any of them. Because they are acting like my mom and my sister ate good people who made a mistake. I’m sorry but systematically sending your daughter off to be raped means you are not a good person. You lose the chance at good person status for this lifetime.
And I told my niece that as long as she wants to continue to act like her own abuse didn’t happen and she can go about her normal day to day life with her mother and my mother acting like they are ok reasonable people… I can’t know her. Because she obviously feels like that kind of abuse is ok and she continues to take whatever people dish out. And therefore I don’t want her interacting with my daughter because she will pass on the feeling that girls deserve that treatment and you should keep your mouth shut when it happens. Not my fucking babies you pieces of shit.
I am frantic, scared, and angry. And I feel like it’s not ok to say what happened to me. I feel very unsafe. I feel very attacked. Even here, within my family in my home. In my sanctuary I still feel like someone will show up at any second and do horrible things to me. Want to know why I feel that way?
Because I am in a place where emotionally I am a small child. But I have small children. And they have needs. And small children don’t give a shit about anyone but themselves. Small children want to be protected and to sit and stare and dream and become. I can’t be the grown up right now. Thank god I don’t have to.
As I sit here and spin my wheels getting more and more upset with that group and my niece and my cousin and… I realize that I am trying to look around me for unsafe people and then getting mad when they are unsafe. My niece isn’t even close to going through recovery. She’s too close. And I need to leave her alone because sharing my story in the way I am is kicking her. Maybe she doesn’t deserve to have me take on the abuser role too. I do think I’ll be able to long term live with myself though. I didn’t say that Tyra was bad in and of herself. I said that as long as she associates with them she will accept their reality and it is broken. She doesn’t get to pretend that they are not monsters with me. With everyone else, fine. Not with me.
Now I’m drifting off into thinking about my kids. I need to have chats with my friends. As much as I am a raging pervert, I’m also the victim of incest, rape, and molestation. I need to not have sex stuff around my kids. I need that to not be part of their existence in any way. And people think Shanna isn’t listening. It’s not ok. I have been interrupting people for a while, but I need to take a more proactive stance. I need to talk to people before the conversation gets going about what is ok in my house. Because that is how you break cycles. My daughters will not learn what a blowjob is at this age range. That will not be part of their world. And when my daughters do learn about blowjobs it will be because we are having an age appropriate discussion about sex with our clothes on and there will be no porn to demonstrate. I am not going to lock up my books about being a survivor of sexual abuse but I want to get through this awful period of recovery so that I can stop talking about it around them.
My children cannot support me. It does not matter that I feel like a small child right now, I’m not. And my children should not have to support me in any way. That is not the role of a child. I’m hurting but they cannot fix me, nor should I in any way ask them to try. I’m not going to an extreme so don’t get paranoid. I’m not going to be able to help the fact that I cry randomly sometimes. But what I say is, “I’m thinking about stuff that happened a long time ago. I should probably start thinking about you though because you are awesome.” Then we run off and play. But I can’t do that today.
Today I am too small.
I’m on vacation.
That’s what I call it when I go behind closed doors and don’t really respond to requests. I’ve already done once since becoming a parent and I kind of expect it to continue. I’ve been through these kinds of super intense freak outs before. I did a few while I was dating Tom. And I wrote about them then. I need to go read my archive again.
Everything is all jumbled up right now. I’m sad about my uncle dying. I’m sad that I didn’t know it was time to say goodbye because no one thought to tell me. I’m sad that my mother used his death as a chance to ambush me so that she could try to get her own needs met. I’m proud that when my mother called me I told her she needs to go to therapy and say out loud many times that she sent me to my father so he could rape me. She did that. She has to say out loud, “I sent my daughter to her father so that her father could rape her.” She has to say that. If she doesn’t say that, there is nothing. Ever again. I cannot acknowledge that she is alive. Until the day my mother can say, “I allowed my daughter to be raped” I have nothing to say to her. It is her fucking fault.
I called my mother in the middle of a horrific sexual assault and begged her to come get me and she told me no. She bears the burden of that guilt. I want to punch her in the face. I want to run her over with my car. That fucking horrible disgusting repulsive excuse for a mother. I think she should be dead. I hate her so much. My mother sent me to my father over and over. The custody agreement said he should NEVER BE ALONE WITH ME. And I was. Repeatedly.
My brother told me that our father didn’t explicitly say it but he made it very clear it was perfectly ok for my brothers to have sex with me if they wanted regardless of whether I wanted it or not. Let me say that another way. My father told my brothers that it was ok to rape me. My brother told me that it was very understood in the household that if my mother wasn’t up for sex my dad would fuck my sister. If my sister wasn’t up for sex… guess who that leaves. Me. I was three years old when my parents divorced.
What the fuck happened to me. I can’t remember it very clearly. I was too little. There is court documentation of my fathers confession. The detective on my case told me that my father confessed to far more than I remember and he was horrified by what my father said. Let me say that again, a professional police detective who works on many many many abuse cases. That is his job. He was horrified by what happened to me. But I don’t remember it. It scares the shit out of me. What the hell other memories are lurking in my body and in my brain. When I am 75 years old will I wake up and say, “72 years ago my father raped me and I’m not over it.”
I am so fucking pissed off at my mother. She wants to deny that it happened. She doesn’t want to admit her guilt. It is her fault. She was my mother. Her whole job was to ensure that I reached adulthood in relative safety and she failed.failed.failed. I get to be angry about that. I get to take her to task for that and no one gets to intervene. No one, including my co-dependent, enabler, abusive sister, get to tell me that I have to change how I feel about my piece of shit mother.
Abusive. My mother told me that if she hadn’t been Catholic she would have aborted me. My sister told me that my mother was packed and ready to leave my father when my mom turned up pregnant with me. There was always the very clear implication that it is therefore my fault that my sister was raped for three more years.
Maybe that is why that stupid, worthless piece of shit never said anything about my mom sending me off to my father’s for the weekend. Maybe she just thought it was my turn.
My father raped me
Edited to add: this post is about to hit 6,000 views. If you are looking for pornography, please keep looking. Heck, you can even look around this blog. I write pornography sometimes. This post is not about pornography. This is my life. I was a brutalized child. Please don’t beat off thinking about my father raping me. I don’t mind in the slightest if you kind of imagine that kind of thing in abstract, please have enough respect not to use my actual trauma.
If you are a rape survivor there are much better posts here for you than this one. This one just makes you sad.
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Oh fuck. I remember. I remember how it happened. After he gave me the milkshake that tasted funny, I’m sure it was spiked, and after he took me to bed and made me sleep naked and fingered me and after I got up to throw up in the bathroom…
I remember and I wish I didn’t. He came to get me. He asked me why I was sniveling in the bathroom. I told him I had been sick. He made me clean up. Then he told me I needed to apologize for making a mess. He walked over and sat down on the couch. He sat down and then I noticed a gun in his hand. He set it down pretty obviously on the seat next to him. He told me to crawl to him. I did. He told me to apologize while I was sucking his cock. And I did.
And I’m not allowed to feel anything about this memory right now.
But now I am because it is 2:30 am and I just sent Noah to bed. I forced him to hammer out with me what memory was surfacing right now, why is it triggering me so hard, and how can I get through it a bit faster, damnit. I am now re-reading The Courage to Heal and mocking myself for how very classic my pattern is. Yes this is a spiral, and yes I am in recovery, Chris. I am the survivor of incest. Tonight I said out loud to my husband that my father raped me. I am pretty sure that is the very first time in my life I have ever said that out loud. And oh my fucking god now I feel about it.
This feels overwhelming and horrifying and awful. I am drowning. This hurts so much. My father held a gun to my head and told me to suck his cock. And I was supposed to get up the next day and go to the amusement park with him. I asked him to take me home instead because I was sick from the alcohol poisoning he had given me. I couldn’t tell him that. And that is why my stomach hurts so bad if I have much alcohol. The sensation scares the ever loving shit out of me. When I was 18 years old I was given a date rape drug by someone I was out to have a one night stand with. I intended to have sex with him anyway but I doubt he knew that. I sincerely doubt he knew I was a sure thing. I’m pretty sure he thought I was the normal sort of stupid 18 year old who invites a guy up to a drinking party in a secluded mountain house and intends to say no. You know, one of those stupid women who have never been repeatedly raped from toddlerhood.
Right. You can see the problem there. And you can see how I can get away from this feeling. There are a lot of fucking valid reasons I want to derail from going where my head is heading right now. That’s a god damn terrifying place to be. I am trying to talk myself into releasing into the horrible body memories of my father raping me. And maybe I will have to pause and I will have to tell Puff about it. Maybe if I quiet my fingers I can find my voice.
Oh my fucking god. My mother told me that she breastfed me longer than any of her other children because, “It was the only way to keep them off of me.” I think she means my father. I think my father started actually raping my sister after I was born and that is why she resents me so much. But that’s a story I’m making up and I have no reason to think it is true. That’s trying to explain her actions with motives that make her actions justified. No. No. No. I am not to blame for my father molesting my sister. It is not my fault that my mother stayed as long as she did. Women in domestic violence situations often have to try leaving several times before they manage to get out. Even once they get out there is a ridiculous legacy of guilt and shame to deal with around allowing your FUCKING HUSBAND TO RAPE YOUR DAUGHTERS YOU PIECE OF SHIT CUNT. I don’t have to be diplomatic here about my mother. I don’t need to find a way to excuse the fact that she is the most disgusting, pathetic, worthless example of mothering I have ever fucking seen and I think that if she dies in a lot of pain it is exactly what she fucking deserves.
I called her on the fucking phone and begged her to come pick me up. She told me that I made my bed so now I have to lie in it. That was a consistent theme, sadly. I was often left with my father in a way that was phrased as me deserving him because I was a little kid and I asked to see my daddy. When I asked to see him she dropped me on his lap and said, “Fine! You want the bastard! Fuck you then you little bitch!” No really. My mother said that to me, verbatim. That was how she sent me to my father’s house. And then he molested me. And I called her and asked her to intervene because I was a god damn outrageously precocious child and I knew that what was happening to me was wrong and my mother told me that I made my bed now I have to lie in it.
Then my father raped me. And then he wanted me to get in the car the next day and go to the amusement park with him so he could show the world what a good dad he was. I’ve told the story about him insisting on me wearing short dresses with zippers so he could molest me in public, right? Yeah. And on the car ride home he screamed at me for being an ungrateful, pathetic, useless bitch because he already had the theme park tickets and he fucking wanted to go and now I’ve ruined everything and it is all my fault for being such a horrible, selfish, stupid bitch.
That is my story. That is the tape I hear in my head. I want to start listing off when… but I’ll only list the times that make my story seem better. But it’s totally fucking random. Sometimes it’s at times when it’s convenient and sometimes it is a nightmare. To continue setting the stage, it is now 3:00am. I took ~5 minutes off to visit the restroom, find carrots for mindless eating that will allow me to focus without contributing to my negative self esteem issues, lots of water, and I’m now out of excuses for not going down the rabbit hole. I’m sitting in my little corner under the cave next to the flowers. It’s not ready yet… but I’ll post a picture tomorrow. I hadn’t even realized what I was building until I typed it in this paragraph right now. I have a pretty sledgehammer like subconscious, don’t you think?
Oh my god. Why is that the first thing I say when I think of my father raping me. Why do I cry out to god to save me? Am I searching for that higher power? My therapist clearly thinks so and she’s pushing me loudly towards Wicca. (I saw what you did there, Sharon.) Which is a very clear choice. I was systematically told throughout my childhood that I was evil and bad by every one around me and I didn’t realize how blatant it was until Noah listed it off tonight. I don’t realize it until people express shock and horror that I don’t just know that my childhood was off the charts brutal.
My father gave me an alcoholic milkshake then penetrated me vaginally while rubbing himself vigorously against me. And right now I have the most overwhelming urge to masturbate it isn’t funny. I feel like I cannot continue telling this story because I have to go masturbate because it is so fucking hot that he did that to me.
That is why I am a disgusting piece of shit. That is why Femme Car does her stuff. Ha. Enh, Or maybe that’s me projecting my story onto other people I don’t know. That’s the annoying part of this introspection stuff. I am realizing that I don’t even know my friends. Most of the people I have been bonding with lately are big, physically intimidating men who were themselves hurt as children. I am solely interacting with people who identify as survivors. I am testing people out, slowly, one by one, seeing if they understand my language. Because only other survivors know what I’m talking about. And I’m text book. And that bothers me.
I feel offended by the fact that I am a text book incest survivor. God damnit don’t I think I am more special than that? Oh shit now I’m trying to get nasty with myself rather than feel this. See how this goes?
I’m going round and round in circles because I don’t know if I am actually breaking cycles or if I just moved them somewhere else. I’m desperately looking for proof that I am not like my family. I have to trot out these long list of examples of horrible exchanges. They aren’t horrible (uhm, mostly) in and of themselves if any of them had been one thing in my entire childhood. But it’s kind of a … wait. What the fuck am I saying. No. They were god damn horrible. I was heinously abused. I was horrifically, over the top, ridiculously abused. I was blamed for events that happened before my fucking birth. I have confirmation of this from my brother. He said it once, I can never ask him for that validation again. Now I have to just go on with my life believing my side of the story.
But first I have to hate my mother for a while and that’s hard. I love my mother a lot. I desperately wish that I got to be in a relationship with her right now. I want support desperately. No, let me rephrase this. Right now I am in a period of intense stress. Culturally I was brought up to believe that when you are in periods of intense stress and you need to ask for help you should first ask your family. Only my family would respond to my response for help by bringing the Titanic over and dropping it around my neck. And saying it that way makes it sound like I don’t care about their suffering, and I do. But nothing I do can fix their suffering and standing near them will allow them to hurt my children. So they can fuck off and die.
Earlier this week I was losing it with the kids. I was not in control of my emotions anymore. As the book calls it, I was in the emergency phase and I needed to call in as much help and childcare as I could. And I did. Before I picked up the book even, go me. And by losing it with the kids I mean that I got a bit ranty when Shanna was standing in the door way screaming at me because she wanted me to stop working but I was trying to paint. You can see how the conflict of needs here could feel intense. Maybe. Or maybe you think I am fucking nuts. But you are going to be in one of three camps. Either you will understand because you have also seen something hard and you have that monster somewhere inside of you and you are afraid of it, or you do not understand and you think that having that kind of monster inside of me makes *me* a monster, or you are a fairly empathetic person and you extrapolate from your own childhood (which was whatever it was) and you then react to how extreme my life was compared to your own life. I think most people are in the third category.
And that means that no matter what, forever, my discussion of my abuse has to be a private journey. Because it doesn’t matter where someone is in that trifecta of approaches, they can’t help me. Only I can. And my mom and my sister have to help themselves. And this is the 12 step talk stuff that I pick up in the water living in California. It’s just here. People talk about them as if they are things that everybody just knows. What does it say about me and my friends and my life that absolutely all of them know the 12 step language? All of us are in abuse cycles.
And I’m getting off topic and I’m getting tired. But this is something. This is a start. My father raped me. I don’t seem to be ready to feel it yet, but I will get there. And I feel in this moment like I have no choice but to recover the body memory of that. Why do I feel like I must go through intense personal discomfort (I was planning to stay up ALL NIGHT) in order to force myself into a weak enough physical state where I could no longer fight off the terror of feeling abused. My throat closed while I was typing.
And I had to pause right there to go check facebook and see for myself that the person who said he would come back and help me paint tomorrow responded and yes he really will be coming back. And the friend whose birthday party I am skipping said she understands. And I believe her. I don’t think she is lying and secretly fuming. I think she is probably sad for me that I am in a place where I am hurting like this. Why do I want to think she is mad at me? Because I want to start the cycle where I am begging people for reassurance. I feel like it is ok for me to ask for small amounts of reassurance constantly from the people I live with (We say “I love you!” multiple times a day and that counts), but not big displays. I need to keep that to a minimum. I seem to feel like it is ok for me to ask for help from the community in a big open way where anyone who wants to come shows up and does whatever kind of help they kind of halfheartedly get done because I feel bad directing them. I feel like I shouldn’t be bossy.
I get to the point of having panic attacks when I think about directing people right now. Dude. I taught high school. If anyone can direct large groups of people it’s me. Only I can’t. And I’m not sure how I feel about that.
I am sitting at home feeling upset that my friends are out at a dance event, or rather just getting home, and I’m sitting here obsessively writing on the internet about how broken I am. My father raped me. Not saying that out loud is ruining my life. I guess I need to start saying it then. After I go to sleep.
Being bad
I’ve always had a thing about being called a bad girl. There is no quicker way to get me to modify my behavior. If someone even strongly hints that what I am doing is bad I disintegrate. I am instantly ready to appease that person pretty much no matter what they require of me. A lot of the anger people see in me is because I have no other way of defending myself from the overwhelming pressure of feeling I am bad all the time. I am not bad. I am not mean. I am not a terrible person.
These thoughts haunt me. And the thing is… mostly I’m just upset at myself for my thoughts. I guess that Catholic baptism really took. I imagine doing bad, violent things. I imagine starving my baby because I hate her so much for wanting to come near my nipple. What I actually do is go to my baby and nurse her. I might delay for a minute or two as I try to gain physical control over myself so that I can sit through the painful experience without lashing out at her.
But from Calli’s point of view I am a slightly dotty but affectionate and thoroughly adequate mother. But I still feel like I am bad because I have thoughts towards her that I consider inappropriate. I shouldn’t ever feel that way about my beautiful, wonderful baby. I am a monster.
I even went out and bought formula. But she didn’t like it. So I grit my teeth and I went back to nursing. I need to be careful about that gritting my teeth thing. I’ve cracked two teeth and my dentist is rather upset with me.
I am doing it. I am doing exactly what I am supposed to be doing. I am providing not quite instant, but fairly rapid care around the clock. I even mostly smile while I am doing it. I cuddle her. I wear her on my back for hours every day. I kiss her. I hug her. Why do I feel like my very existence is a terrible horrible thing and will hurt her. Post partum depression, blah blah blah. No. Because it isn’t just Calli. And it isn’t just right now. This isn’t all the time, but it’s a lot of the time. And it is far less true now than at any other point in my life. (Except the first year of Shanna’s life. That was the longest period I have ever gone without a depressive episode and it was still brutal.)
I’m telling stories about my father. That’s wrong. I know that is part of it. But why do I like to have my lovers do obscene things to me while telling me I am a good girl and I thank them and call them Daddy? (Uhm, not every lover. Just some special ones.) And then there is that eternal quest for Daddy. I want to name them all. I want to point out that two of the most important ones have the same name as my father/brothers. In retrospect that has been interesting.
I had to break there because Calli woke up crying again and again last night. I have now had a relatively full night of sleep despite her having a lot of wake ups. I had to sit in here and cry hysterically for a few minutes while Noah rocked the baby. And then as her cries got increasingly distressed I realized that this is one of those chop wood, carry water moments. My baby needed me last night pretty desperately. She is just hitting a bunch of new milestones. She is teething. She is hitting separation anxiety like a brick wall. So I got my crying under control and I started chanting, nurse baby, cuddle husband. And I did. And I didn’t sleep well but I got through the night and Calli got to nurse as much as she needed (which was a lot) and Noah got to have the kind of cuddling that makes him feel better.
And I still feel bad. I did everything I was supposed to do. I’m beginning to feel like there isn’t a way for me to truly be right. At least on my bad days. Good days are fine. I suspect today will be another bad day. But my friend is coming over so I will hold it together. Enh, I would mostly be fine whether she is here or not. But I will fake cheerful better with her here.
It’s weird to be deliberately faking my emotions. I do a lot of it with the kids. They don’t need to know what I’m really feeling most of the time. So of course there is this big part of me which feels like I am a terrible awful liar. Is it lying if I never tell my children about my self-loathing? Or is that just good boundaries? Does that fall into the category of not telling the cashier in the grocery store? I’m really struggling with understanding appropriate disclosure right now. I’m really struggling with the idea that most of the time I shouldn’t disclose because other people will be made to feel uncomfortable. I shouldn’t even be allowed to talk about being assaulted because other people feel bad. I am making people feel bad. It’s all my fault. If I could keep my stupid, pathetic mouth shut I wouldn’t be hurting other people.
There. That’s why I’ve never been able to get deeper into my shit than this. I hit this brick wall. I feel like I should shut up. I feel like what I am doing, even if I am doing it just on my journal on the internet, makes me a terrible person because people feel bad when I do it. The logical part of my brain understands that people an opt out of reading this and the logical part of my bran understands that people aren’t feeling bad because of my actions. They are feeling bad because horrible things happened to me and they are sorry. But that doesn’t seem to matter. It’s not really about other people. It’s about me. It’s about my family telling me that I should keep my dirty laundry in the closet. It’s about being told that it is embarrassing for me to tell anyone what happened. How’s that. My mom doesn’t want me to talk about this stuff because she thinks I should be ashamed of it and she doesn’t want people to know about my shame.
I am ashamed. I do feel like it was my fault. There is some part of my brain that decided that the stuff with my father had to be my fault. And as a result I have spent 17 years fucking men I shouldn’t and often calling them Daddy. I want my Daddys to hurt me. No, I don’t want it. I need it. I require it. If they do not violently abuse me I don’t want to call them Daddy. That is one of the biggest triggers for me. If someone scares me just right during a relationship they instantly feel like Daddy. This is so Electra Complex. So standard. But it is standard. I have been trying like hell to find a Daddy to fuck since my father killed himself.
I started dating a man when I was 18. He was 30. He had ten years experience in the bdsm scene when I met him. He was my first Daddy. He absolutely followed the campsite rule, so don’t start jumping to awful conclusions about him. He left me much better than he found me. I dated him for four years and lived with him for three years and I was in a 24/7 Owner/slave relationship with him for two of those years. We engaged in some really intense play in that period. I will say that for all we played absolutely to the edge of safety, he was very serious about safety. He let me play with fire (literally) and do terrible self-destructive things and he kept me safe. He let me grow up in a safe, secure environment where I was very loved. He was very anti drugs and he didn’t drink while I was under 21. I cannot stress enough that despite there being all the hallmarks of it being a terrible situation to outside vanilla folk, that was a very stable healthy relationship. He taught me how to ask for what I wanted in very detailed and specific ways. He taught me what communication looked like and didn’t look like. (Which is not to say that he was always perfect at communication.)
But because society in general isn’t so big on relationships like that I fear it was “bad”. I fear I am “bad” for having it and liking it. Am I bad because of the things I do and the things I like? I like to be beaten. I like to have friends and lovers take implements like a cane or a single tail whip (I hate floggers) and beat me until I cry and scream and struggle to get away but the pain just keeps happening. I feel very comforted by being completely overwhelmed with pain and having it stop. I feel like that is a way for me to have control over an unavoidable physical process. I cannot help the fact that I am in pain a lot or most of the time. I have lower back pain from one of the assaults when I was a child. I don’t even know if it is really physical pain from an injury at this point or if it is psychosomatic, but still hurting.
Specifically when I was a little girl there was a neighbor boy. We were living in Whittier and I was in 4th or 5th grade, so whatever accompanying age that is. He was 17. He was a high school football player. I talked to most of my neighbors because I was pretty desperately lonely. This was after Tommy’s accident and he was living with us at home. Tommy terrorized me. He repeatedly tried to kill me. He hurt me constantly in big and little ways. My sister was dating the drug addict loser who gave her her second child. She had no time for me because when there is a dick around she can’t think straight. She never knew that the loser drug addict asked me for sex too.
Tommy would come into my room at night with knives and try to stab me. I have never been able to get passed that in any way. My brother literally wanted me dead. He hated me that much. How in the hell could I have deserved that? Why did he feel that way? Why did he think I was so awful? It doesn’t really matter. He was a kid with a lot of problems. He was a boy with an evil father who was deliberately twisting him into a monster. Tommy hurt me early and often. And I had to get away from that. So I wandered the neighborhood. I left to get away from being physically hurt constantly.
And I wandered the neighborhood and I played sex games with adult or nearly adult men. There were the neighbors a few doors down. We played strip poker. Obviously I lost basically every time. They taught me a lot of sexual positions with my clothes on. They thought it was fucking hilarious that I was willing and interested in having them teach me how I was supposed to have sex. I’m pretty sure I’ve never told anyone in the world about them because I am so ashamed I did that. I was what, 8? 9? 10? Something like that. And I went to any man available to learn what I was supposed to be doing.
I have treated basically my entire life as an apprenticeship to be a good enough lay for my father. Before I had kids probably more than 75% of my masturbation involved thinking about my father fucking me. Thinking about me begging my father for forgiveness for hurting him while he hurt me and fucked me. While he did humiliating things to me. While he forced me to perform for his friends because he believed I was his whore to do what he wanted with.
That’s why I am bad. Because I’m fucking pissed off that he killed himself and I will never get to do it.
Food, Glorious Food
I’m pretty excited about the party today. I probably should be off starting to prep for it right now. The reason I am not doing so is because it is still pitch black outside. I think the first thing I do should be to hide the eggs so the girls aren’t woken up by me moving around in the house before then. Excellent. Time to think. One of the things that has been on my mind a lot lately is food. Seems normal, I think everyone focuses on food. Especially when they are about to host a party. But that isn’t really what I mean. I mean that I’m thinking about food in the abstract. I’m thinking about what it means to me. See, I’m doing that because I’m not really eating. Yesterday I had an egg mit from Noah’s Bagels and a 16 oz drink from Jamba Juice for breakfast. For the entire rest of the day I had a slice of cheese, a couple bites of sausage, half a bowl of ramen, and about 5 bites of meat at a Japanese restaurant. I am not a small chick. I am breastfeeding. That is simply not an adequate number of calories for a day. Right before going to bed I asked Noah to bring me food and he did and I ate a sandwich. I did that because I knew Calli would be up all night nursing (I was mostly right) and I didn’t want to deal with the level of stomach pain I get if I let her keep nursing when I’m over hungry.
Maybe that is part of why I hate nursing her so much. And that’s why my jeans are falling off. It’s this weird thing. I am so clearly punishing myself. Wait. I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m not telling the story right.
I’ve been thinking about food a lot. I’ve been thinking about food a lot because I’ve been playing games with denying myself food. This feels unsettling and weird to me because… it’s not October. I accept that I do things like this every so often, but it never crossed my mind until this morning when my wonderful online girlfriend asked me about it. My father committed suicide in the beginning of October. I think I have spent every October since his death not eating. This was actually an issue with Tom. He got very worried and upset the first two years of our relationship when I didn’t eat for a month. I mean, I do eat some. But I eat 25-50% of what I normally eat. And my weight tends to plummet rapidly during this time. I’ve always gotten a lot of positive feedback about that and uhm, that’s weird. It’s weird that I get so much overt societal approval for being that specific flavor of fucked up. Society as a whole would love for me to develop this kind of overwhelming shame at all times so that I could finally have the appropriate body size.
And yet I’m not real inclined to do that. I have very quiet anxiety that I don’t express to almost anyone about being “too fat” where I don’t know where the line is. And I don’t even know exactly why I feel so bad about this anxiety. Ok, here’s the thing: my actual shoulder bones are very narrow. And for whatever reason I don’t tend to put on much weight in the very upper arms/shoulder/upper back areas. So my upper body is always going to look funny in larger sized clothes because they hang wrong. And I feel like I can never look attractive in my clothes. And that really bothers me. It really and truly bothers me that when I am heavy it is literally impossible to find things that fit me in the shoulders. I’m starting to wear strapless dresses/shirts because then I can wear an open size medium sweater that doesn’t hang off my shoulders.
So obviously this is a complicated issue. Food is love for me. Very very much so. I love to feed people and I surround myself with people who think food is love. And then I do things like telling Noah last night that if he ever tries to get me to eat Japanese food again it will be proof that he is a terrible person who doesn’t love me because something in the flavor palate really bothers me. Ok, I didn’t use exactly those words but that was strongly the gist of it. And for the record I apologized as soon as my brain caught up with what my stupid mouth had just said. I was horrified. Oh man. For the record the Japanese food thing is almost certainly connected with my overall food issue right now. Nothing tastes good to me these days. It’s complicated.
And that’s a lot of why I feel so awkward right now. I’m really nervous about my ability to pull off being adequately social for the party today. I don’t know how to talk to people because I am leapfrogging from one yucky thought to another about food stuff. Why do I surround myself with feeders and then refuse to eat? Because I don’t deserve love. Because I’m saying bad things about my Daddy.
And that is why I don’t eat in October. I am paying penance for killing him. Without ever having considered if I should or shouldn’t, I am. That’s an awful thing to think about. I don’t think he deserves it in my big kid brain. I don’t know where to begin to find a road around this obstacle. Even if he doesn’t deserve it the little girl inside me is really upset about hurting her Daddy.
I’m kind of twitching about using that name for him. You see, I tend to refer to him as my father. Because he fathered me. He spawned me. That sort of thing. I have had multiple Daddys at this point and they’ve been good men. It’s kind of an odd story really. Even I am not slow enough to have missed the connection between me having multiple friends and lovers I call Daddy and thinking about my father molesting me. It’s kind of odd that the process has healed me in many ways.
Side note: I noticed that it was 5:30 and that I was kind of hungry. I made a conscious decision to get up and get something to eat because it is absolutely mandatory that my mood be stable today. I don’t want to eat it. It actually tastes disgusting enough that I am having difficulty chewing and I feel nearly unable to swallow. I’m eating a Vanilla Chip Chewy Granola Bar made by Cascadian Farms. Normally I think these things are just about heaven on earth. Right now my mouth feels coated and waxy and I feel repulsed and I am having minor gag reflex responses at the idea of taking a third bite. But I don’t want to be a nasty bitch to my friends today so I took my damn third bite and I will just try not to think about the taste. Because if I do this, if I allow myself to sit in this cycle today, I will cause a nasty big blow up fight in public and I will feel humiliated and proven right that I am an unstable bad person.
No thanks. I’ll eat the fucking granola bar. And every time someone tells me to eat today I will. Because even if my little girl thinks I deserve to lose all my friends and be punished because I am a terrible person for prosecuting my father my big girl says fuck that shit. I am not going to do this to myself any more. I have people in my life who are just itching to feed me and love me. I really should let them do both. Even if I can’t love me when I am breaking family taboos and talking about family or relationship secrets. But I don’t even know if that is it. I just know that I feel upset enough when I am processing abuse stuff that I begin to withhold food from myself.
Hmm. Interesting thought. I wonder if part of the reason I am so prone to attach strongly to people who show love with food because I know I do this to myself and I know that *for me* it is necessary for me to have a cushion of fat to deal with these times of punishing myself. Years ago I did Weight Watchers and I lost 50 pounds. It was rather dramatic. I was also doing a lot of intense exercise and I got into rather good shape. (I realize now as I mourn that vigorous body.) I’m trying to get back to feeling like I have that kind of energy. Though now it occurs to me that it will probably not happen as long as I am waking up at 4 in the morning to write about being sexually assaulted while I was little.
But I have to wake up at 4 and write about it or I will answer cashiers in grocery stores with, “Hi, I’m Krissy and I’m a sexual assault survivor. Specifically incest that primarily happened in the first ten years of my life, and multiple horrifying rapes when I was 7-10 years old, and a few date rapes and near misses as a teenager. And then I prosecuted my father and he killed himself and I’ve been a hot mess ever since. But thanks for asking how my day is! I hope you are having a good one!” That wouldn’t be ok, you know?
I hold that boundary. And I don’t talk about my abuse and trauma very much during the day. Even though this is an intense period of processing I don’t allow myself to talk about it during the day outside of therapy much because it isn’t appropriate for my kids to hear. That has to be a boundary. So instead I just punish myself.
And I grow to resent my children. Especially nursing. They are taking so much from me right now but I keep picturing this wonderful scene from a movie I recently watched. The movie was Mother and Child with Annette Bening. I sobbed my heart out through the whole story. But specifically towards the end a woman is successful in adopting a baby after great personal sacrifice trying to do so. She calls her mom in the middle of the night and throws a temper tantrum about how needy the baby is. The grandmother in question, S. Epatha Merkerson, pulls back into this stern dignified look. She then proceeds to tell her daughter off up one side and down the other for daring to have the gall to complain about a baby having needs. These days when I start to feel pissy with the girls I close my eyes and picture that stony face of disappointed fury telling me to get off my ass and take care of the god damn baby. And I plaster a smile on my face and get over myself. I am not always as fast in some of my responses as I would like because I have to stop and take deep breaths to deal with my frustration level sometimes. But everyone here is happy and healthy and growing and feeling really loved and supported as part of a whole unit. A big part of that is I have decided that the version of Attachment Parenting we want to practice does not involve all the extremism that some loud voices in the “Natural Family Living” community think it should. And that’s ok. I don’t have to think that everything in the mainstream is wrong just because it is a common thing to do. That is conforming to a specific kind of non-conformity and oh man it is killing me. So I’m not doing the perfectly available 24/7 thing anymore. And you know what? It’s helping a lot.
You can see why I feel that thinking about food is complicated? But the sun is stealing slowly over the horizon. I can now clearly see the outline of the tree in our yard. It is time for me to get up and go hide Easter eggs for a party. I have something like 12 kids coming on a hunt today. It will be super fun. Luckily 5 of those kids are too young and 1 is probably mostly too old because I only have 48 eggs. Always look on the bright side I say. The kids will all have a wonderful time and it will be a great party. I will eat every time someone mentions that I should. The awesome thing is, no one who loves to feed me will have a chance to read this journal entry before the party. But they will read it later. Then the game becomes, do I tell them this morning what stupid destructive game I am playing so they can help me break the cycle? Or do I act like a crazy person and create drama. Yeah. I think I’ll be talking to them as soon as possible. I wish I didn’t need as much support as I do but I’m really glad that I can get it since I need it. I am very lucky.
Nursing
This picture was taken the day Calli was born. I was so proud to be nursing both of them. I could do it. I didn’t really imagine then I would be looking for information on early weaning eight months later. I have been nursing for two years and eleven months straight. I want to blame tandem nursing being hard on just doing it too long, and that’s part of it. Mostly though Calli is rough with me and it hurts. She wants to be up and moving around and doing something more exciting. I get that, I feel the same way. But when she yanks my nipple a dozen times in a nursing session I don’t really want to pick her up the next time she starts signaling hunger. I’m raw. And it is getting to the point where I am angry with her over this.
I don’t want to wean before we go on the trip because that would be a hot mess. But I don’t think this baby will get much passed her first birthday with nursing. And I feel bad about that. Unfortunately I have already hit my lifetime capacity on accepting unwelcome painful touch. I love you, but no.
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.
A fairly major interruption
This morning as I was plugging along on my merry way I received a phone call from my mother. One might think was a positive event if you didn’t know me. However this was pretty heinous. My mother called me to tell me that I was not sexually molested as a young child and she wants me to get my story straight. Right. That’s why I have been nearly continually in therapy throughout my lifetime. Excellent. Thanks for clearing that up. By the end of that phone call I was very nearly hysterical. Thank all the stars in the heaven that a friend was due to arrive very soon after. Today was therapy day. Excellent timing, Mom. My friend helped me get through the day. When my beloved eldest child woke up before I was ready for her nap to be over I was decidedly unthrilled. I really need the alone time to think right now. Luckily I have the most delightfully manipulative child. As we cuddled together in the rocking chair she perked up a bit and tilted her head to the side ever so charmingly. A lovely lilt moved into her voice as she said, “I know how to make your life better!”
“Oh, really? And what would that involve?”
“I think it would involve watching your very favorite movie, Ponyo. I think you would be soooooo happy that you would be able to remember all of the rules for a while.”
So much for a non-screen kid. So much for not watching the same movie on repeat. Today I fail at crunchy. But, I win at being a parent because every single person in my house is physically safe, emotionally safe, and doing what they want to be doing. At least the day might end well.