Category Archives: telling the story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fear isn’t always irrational

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            I was institutionalized half my lifetime ago.  I tried to kill myself.  Specifically I went and found all the sleeping pills in the house (we had lots because my family bought them at Costco).  We were living in Redwood Estates up in the mountains.  It was a weird old house.  Long and narrow—it looked a lot like a giant barn.  At just under 2700 square feet the house seems like it should be perfectly adequate to the needs of any family.  Five bedrooms and two baths.  That’s a lot!  We must have been rich.  Only we had 12 people living in that house.  When I was 15 and I overdosed I had my own room.  No one liked me enough to share a room with me.  They would rather have every other room in the house be 3-4 people rather than anyone have to be near me.  I wonder why I was suicidal.
            They don’t understand how they set me up.  I lived in this weird world.  I went to school with these rich kids—they had freedom and security I couldn’t even dream about.  They broke huge rules without consequence.  There was always a way to fix any problem.  And my family left me alone all the time.  They alternated between telling me how wrong my behavior was, I was bad., bad, bad; and telling  me that I was so smart I could handle anything.  Then they sent me to my room to be alone.  I talked on the phone with boys and men because I didn’t feel secure enough to call girls.  Girls didn’t like me.  Boys and men did though.
            I used to call the dj at the radio station in the middle of the night for company because I was lonely.  He became my friend.  Then he became my lover.  I was 12 and he was 25.  That’s not part of the overdose story, but that’s the kind of thing I was doing when my family told me to go be by myself. 
            I don’t remember what set me off that night.  It doesn’t really even matter.  I’m sure it would be possible to spin it as sounding idiotic and small and I’m sure it would be possible to spin it so that it is the inevitable step in my decent into madness.  Cutting wasn’t doing much for me any more because I was afraid to hurt myself more.  I’ve always been kind of a coward.  That’s why I don’t think my cutting is actually such a big deal.  It is not the most damage I inflict on myself and I don’t understand why it is the one people freak out about.  Avoiding.  I’m avoiding.  I’m trying to remember where the pills were stored.  It’s evading me. I’ve lived in a lot of houses.  The details get fuzzy.  I know I came back upstairs with a glass of water.  That was foolish.  You see, the sleeping pills were the uncoated chalky blue kind.  They tasted awful.
            It was hard to continue swallowing pills.  I started off trying to take them by the handful, but it made them dissolve too much in my mouth.  I think those tricksy bastards in the manufacturing company had a plan.  They don’t want to feel bad about the deaths of stupid ninny white girls like me.  The kind who take many boxes of sleeping pills because they are so afraid of waking up the next day and having to inhabit this body and this brain for another day.  During that time far more so than now, it hurt to be me.  I gagged my way through that box.  By the end the simple act of trying to swallow the pills was pushing me to nearly vomit and I didn’t want to puke.  I knew that would force me to live.  I swallowed around 90 pills.  Three boxes of 30. 
            Then I sat on my bed and I waited to die.  It was one of the longest nights of my life.  There was this big part of me that wanted to know what it felt like.  I didn’t want to fall into death from unconsciousness—that sounds comfortable.  I wanted to be ripped in agony from life because that was the only real way to get away from the agony of pain I was in.  It sounds so emo.  It sounds so trite and common and standard.  Doesn’t every stupid teenager do the same thing?  I was a goth, of course I was suicidal.  I was conforming to non-conformity.
            Only that’s not how it was.  My father started molesting me when I was a baby. He put a gun to my head when I was nine years old and asked me if I deserved to live while I was sucking his cock.  I was raped over and over starting when I was seven.  I’m not emo.  There is nothing emo about me.  If anything my reactions to my life show a gross underestimation of how severe the trauma I went through was.  My brother was hit by a car when I was eight and was in a coma for five months.  I moved every 3-18 months until I was an adult.  I was not emo.  It’s a miracle I survived with any shred of sanity.
            When we visited Los Gatos I was expected to fall into the role of a happy well adjusted teenager.  All these people were living the same old same old lives and they couldn’t understand my constant disruptions.  What was my problem?  My mother acted like I had been standing nearby while other people were abused but I was just a whiner because my life wasn’t that bad.  I was told constantly how everyone around me had it worse than me and I needed to just shut up.
            As I lay there in bed waiting to find a true cessation of my pain in death instead I found out that if this was death I didn’t want it.  It was far worse than the mushroom trip gone bad a few years ago.  Far far worse.  That night still haunts my dreams.  You remember the scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom when he has to stick his hand into the wall of bugs?  That was what my bedroom walls looked like.  My bedroom had those awful super dark brown faux wood paneling you see in ugly trailer homes.  There is nothing good about the experience of those panels.  It was already a horrible cave of a room.  And my heat came from the candles I burned, so I always had a dozen or more candles going, otherwise it was too cold. 
            I watched the walls stream with bugs and I lay there and cried.  It was all a lie.  There was no peace in death.  Death was just more hell, and an even more terrifying level at that.  I had to cry silently because I didn’t want to wake anyone else up.  I wandered the halls some.  I chased lizards up and down the hallway as they darted from shadowy area to shadowy area.  I know I vomited at some point, in the bath tub.  I did my best to clean it up.  I don’t know how successful I was.
            At some point as I lay there in a sniveling ball of disgusting mess I noticed that it was time to start getting ready for school.  I tried to.  But I was erratic and crying.  I begged my mother to help me get the kittens out from under her bed because otherwise they were going to poop.  That scared her.  I don’t remember anything about the ambulance ride.  I remember waking up briefly in the ER as they shoved a tube down my throat and forced me to vomit up charcoal.  It was painful and invasive.  It felt like my body was being raped in a new and exciting way.  Death truly holds no promise of cessation from pain.  I am not sure I believe it happens any more.
            I was fairly immediately put on 72 hour hold.  5150’ed as they say out here in California.  I was a danger to myself.  I think I just now right this minute got to the point where I understand voluntary commitment.  You see, I didn’t tell anyone I was raped or molested or assaulted or abused.  They all thought I was a spoiled Los Gatos kid.  Sure, people knew I moved around a lot and my brother was hit by a car.  But none of that was treated like it was traumatic in and of itself.  I was told I hadn’t been traumatized therefore I was just crazy.
            Not very many people came to visit me.  Strangely, my brother Jimmy made an appearance.  He told me that he loved me and he hoped I could find a way to deal with my problems.  Because I am the one with problems.  It’s not like anything happened to me that kind of explains or justifies my choices.  I was just freaking out, right?
            To this day if I am in a group of people and the group is told to “draw their feelings” I feel completely irrational rage and I struggle with not committing serious violence.  I want to break someone’s fucking nose for saying that to me.  I tried with the art therapy leader.  That was when I was dragged kicking and screaming and flailing down a hallway. 
            Don’t picture long and narrow and white like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or anything.  This was the 1990’s in the bay area in a child/adolescent wing of a hospital.  It was pleasant neutral colors.  That doesn’t actually humanize the experience of being forced through a doorway and on to a table.  The padding on the table does not prevent injury to your soul.  The straps don’t prevent you from hurting yourself.  All it does is show you that you are a non-person.  A thing to be controlled at all costs.  It doesn’t matter why you have these feelings inside of you.  It doesn’t matter how badly you have been harmed.  You have to keep fucking control over yourself or we will god damn control you.  No veneer of civility over it makes a difference.
            There is a humiliation to being overpowered that most people never really understand.  People get this intense feeling of scared, overwhelmed, maybe angry when they are held against their will.  Truly being overpowered when you feel like you are fighting for your life is not something you ever forget.  My body was compromised.
My father may have raped me.  But the institution convinced me that the whole fucking world believes I am just a thing and I do not deserve normal human consideration.  The institution made me into an animal.  When I feel unstable, which is honestly fairly frequently, I spend a lot of time looking around me and gasping in fear if someone moves towards me too suddenly.  Now I know that the people around me don’t always have respect for me as an autonomous person.  When are they going to violate me again?  When am I going to lose the right to make decisions for myself, again?
Can anyone really call my fears irrational with a straight face?  Ok fine, the kind of abuse I went through is a statistical blip.  It’s only because of kind and intensity.  The smaller incursions on my humanity happen all the time and I am expected to ignore them.  I am supposed to ignore people stepping all over my right to body autonomy.  Because I don’t actually have a right to body autonomy.
All I have to say is it’s a good thing that my life is trending better.  Maybe some day I will truly believe it is irrational for me to feel fear about people hurting.  Maybe some day it will be irrelevant and unlikely and all those other things other people get to experience.  My children will not understand. 
It has to be enough.

Scenes

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

Suppression has limited usefulness.

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It’s interesting.  People keep asking me how I am doing, that’s predictable (and appreciated!).  I’m not sure what to say a lot of the time.  “Well, I’m behaving as if I feel more cheerful.  I am less explosive.  I am not nearly as angry.  I also feel completely dead sexually.  When people touch me I feel my skin crawl.  But I’m way more calm with way less time in time out!”  Is that a win?

A number of people have expressed how impressed they are that I can simply suppress these memories.  I can stop having flashbacks.  I can black the body memories.  But it comes with a price.  I don’t get to really be me when I’m doing this.  I’m just a shell.  You see, my therapist is on vacation till August 1st.  Perfect timing.  I don’t really feel up to seeing a new person right now.  I’m… yeah.  I’m just not up for that.  I miss people and I miss going out but I am so happy to be home that I’m kind of afraid to leave.  I haven’t even been up to Oakland yet to see the friend I normally see at least once a week because leaving the house is insurmountable.

Why is leaving the house insurmountable?  Because I only have so much patience right now and at home I can ask Shanna to do a very limited number of things so we have a limited number of fights.  Once we leave the house all bets are off.  We might have a great experience; we might have a horrible time.  By “horrible time” I mean that she will pick a fight in front of other people and I will feel intense shame and humiliation that my child is such a brat.  And I will end up yelling at her with far more intensity than the situation warrants because I am feeling shame and humiliation.  So I would rather not take her out.  It’s not that I never yell at her at home, but it’s far less.  And when I can tell that I am starting to internally escalate things that don’t need to escalate I can safely separate us until I calm down more and can talk.  It’s seamless and non-dramatic at home.  Well, three year olds are dramatic.

I’m experiencing a lot more sympathy for why other people give in to their kids to stop the freaking constant whining.  I still won’t, but my alternative is to send her to her room until she can talk in a tone of voice that doesn’t sound like nails on a chalk board.  I don’t have that when we are out.  Oh it feels like pressure.  It feels like overwhelming-I’m-drowning-where-is-the-air pressure.  It’s not a rational reaction.  It is, in fact, completely irrational.  I am comforted by books that tell me that three is just like this.  Get through the year and it improves.  Please G-d.

At home we do ok!  Really!  We have have far more good days than bad.  Even our bad days at home aren’t that bad because I am way more liberal with “room time” than any “real” crunchy parent would be.  What the hell is gentle discipline anyway?  I don’t hit her.  I do my best not to yell.  But oh man I need space and the only way I know to get it is to tell her that she has two options: she can be civilized and polite, or she can be in her room.  It’s not that all expressions of emotion are uncivilized or impolite.  However, if you have to reach volumes that are harming my ear drums in order to express yourself you can do that outside the main room, sorry.  No, I don’t think that children deserve to terrorize everyone around them as they develop emotions.  And I cannot sit down and patiently let her do everything she wants to do.  Sometimes things have to get done.  I’m almost sorry.  But mostly because it means that not only do I have to do an avalanche of work, I have to argue with her all day about whether or not she will let me do it without being a whiny brat because she wants me to do nothing but pay attention to her. Ugh.

I swear to G-d I do things with her.  I play games.  I teach her gardening stuff.  We play on the swing.  I read to them.  I bake with her.  Et cetera.  Nothing is enough so I need to just say that I’ve had enough.  My needs matter too.  And she needs to deal with that disappointment because life is going to hold a whole lot more disappointments in it.

I think that is what the current rash of articles on over attentive parenting is saying.  I feel like I am trying (and failing) to meet all of her needs because my needs were so extensively ignored and unmet.  But there is a happy medium.  My family didn’t know how to meet my basic needs and Shanna is not in that position.  Shanna never has to wonder if she will have a place to live, food to eat (that is palatable), if she will see her mother or father or sister, or if she will get several hours of positive attention every day, or if she will be abused.  Shanna is safe.  Shanna really and truly is getting the basics that I didn’t have.

It impacts the whole rest of your life to not have those things as a child.  That is why I still identify as white trash even though I feel guilty given the extensive privilege I enjoy now.  I still feel like I’m not sure I will have a place to live or palatable food (this is a serious issue at this point in my life).  Noah went to great lengths to create a family trust and he put all of his separate property I was previously not entitled to, all the inheritance stuff, into community property.  No really, all stay at home moms are not created equal.  I am not taking the risk that other people take.  He truly can’t screw me, no matter what.  I will never be destitute again.  But I still go through periods where I am afraid to do things in the house because I think I will get in trouble.  I angst and dither over doing things because I fear that everyone will be mad at me and make me go.  This is not rational.  This is in my bone marrow.  This is why I feel like white trash.  I feel like a dirty little imposteur and at any moment I will be made to go away from decent people.  I’ve been told I wasn’t welcome before.

I was asked to leave the Seventh Day Adventist church when I was a kid.  As an adult I would say that a small minded bully with no actual authority told me that she didn’t like me… but that’s not how it felt at 12.  I was pushing to do a lock-in with the youth group.  I had been to one at my friend Yvette’s church and I really wanted to do it again.  A woman in an authority like position in the group took me aside and told me how offensive and inappropriate that was.  It was disgustingly sexual and then she told me that I would feel more comfortable in a place that was less Godly.

So I went and fucked Sean.  That’s pretty much the timeline on that.  Super Bowl Sunday was a few weeks after that.  I went and visited family friends who were not making great life choices.  Lots of drugs.  Lots of risky behavior.  My family thought it was great for me to go stay with them!  They were also hosting a different family friend for the weekend.  He also happened to be their drug dealer.  On Superbowl Sunday I told him that I wanted him to do something to me.  He asked what.  I said I was too shy to say the word.  He asked me what letter it started with.  I said “F”.  He started saying the predictable ones: fondle, feel, finger… then he got to fuck.  I said yes.

He turned all the lights off.  He did basically no foreplay.  He didn’t use a condom.  I lay there and physically did all the things I “knew” I was supposed to do.  All the things I had learned from years and years of reading porn romance novels, and stealing my uncle’s pornography.  But I cried while I did it.  I kind of thought that was just how it was supposed to go.

Apparently I unsuppressed some memories.  I don’t want to be dead inside.  I don’t want to feel like I am buried under the weight of all of the bad things.  If I suppress them I say that they are unimportant.  Not worth looking at.  But it is important that these things happened to me.  Maybe it is only important given the whole scope of my life, but that’s ok.  Maybe it wouldn’t be the end of the world story for someone else to say that the cried through losing their virginity.  It’s kind of a different story for me.  I was told over and over from when I was a baby that my only value was in having sex.  At 12 I felt like my attempts to be good and I really and truly was trying, resulted in being kicked out and told that God didn’t love me.  So I turned around and fucked a 25 year old drug dealer–without a condom.  That’s why mental health professionals think I should be dead.  If I started off making choices like this when I was 12?  12!  Oh my fucking god.  I always thought I was so adult.  That I was so mature.  Everyone agreed that I was precocious, advanced, remarkably adult… No.  I was heinously abused.  It’s different.

When I kick myself over and over for sending my daughter to her room because screaming when you dislike something is not an option… I feel like I am crushing her spirit.  I feel like I am abusing her.  I feel like I am not just on a slippery slope, but rather everything I do is inherently abusive because I am an abuser.  No matter what you do as a parent you can find someone to flog you and tell you that you are ruining your children.  I insist that she not yell at me, not use a volume that causes me physical pain, and that she not hit or kick anyone.  Ok, let’s tack on pestering.  I really don’t allow pestering.  Pestering is given warnings.  If you cross these lines, that means you need some time to see if you like being alone more than you like being polite to me.  No no no no.  I AM NOT ABUSIVE BECAUSE I HAVE BOUNDARIES.  I’m not.  I’m not.  I’m not.  I feel like me asserting myself is bad.  Like I don’t deserve to do it.  Like when I inconvenience the people around me for my own comfort, “Shanna you don’t get to play the screeching game inside” I am doing something terrible.  If I have to physically carry Shanna outside or to her room because she has decided to grab onto furniture and get louder?  Well… I still don’t think I have crossed the line of abusive at that point either.  I’m not going to be chased from room to room in my house by a screaming child.  Just no.

Let me break to say that I don’t think she is being malicious.  She’s enjoying the feeling and trying to get a rise out of me.  I still don’t have to like it or tolerate it.  But I worry about my reactions when we are out.  Like on the train when she wants to get to me the easiest way is to start getting loud.  She knows that it is a huge hot button.  So I picked her up and carried her to the vestibule area.  So far still ok.  But then she wouldn’t stop screaming and I wouldn’t stop yelling either. So I made her stand in the corner.  Which she didn’t want to do and she fought me.  Thankfully Noah interceded because it wouldn’t have been pleasant for either of us if he hadn’t.  I got my back up over something stupid.  That was not the hill to die on because I had no method of enforcement that was appropriate and safe for all concerned.  So I was going to lose no matter what.  But the real problem was that we hadn’t given her proper breakfast and she was hungry.  And that’s all our fault.  And the real solution was to be more patient with her when we had inappropriately taxed her physically.  But instead I hissed unpleasantly at her “You are in public and you need to be quiet.  No.  You don’t get to make the people around you miserable.  That’s not ok.”  Over and over. That’s not an acceptable reaction.  That reaction is coming from my own intense fears about being looked at.  That is me being told that I was never allowed to talk about the abuse or unpleasant things in a way that would make people look at me.  I’m passing on that abused feeling.

I think that “abuse” makes you feel smaller, weaker, and less than.  Abuse is being told in some way that you are a less than person.  I feel like I don’t deserve to take up space in the world.  That’s a lot of my suicidal feelings.  I feel like I am a toxic force.  Like I am a toxic waste dump that should be eradicated for the good of the herd.  That’s how I feel about myself.  No, I don’t have the expectation that I will be “nice” when I meet new people.  I expect that I will feel awkward and uncomfortable and I will act out in some way because I am just that kind of stupid fucked up loser and I always make bad first impressions because I am just bad bad bad bad.

I don’t know that I’m going to have a good day.  Who knows.  Maybe I will purge my bile on the internet and then go on with my day.  It could happen.  I’m hoping that purging my bile works.  Noah is home and my no-t-twin is having a house warming.  Maybe we could have a good day and go after nap time.  That would be really nice.  I can do two things at once when I am out in public.  I can watch one child and interact with an adult or I can watch two children.  That means that socializing in public is hard.  But life is hard and this is really a first world problem.  Just because it’s hard doesn’t mean you stop doing it.

I’m watching the sky.  I’m torn between disappointment and elation.  Lately the mornings have been feeling like a beach summer.  It’s slightly humid but very chilly.  It’s uncomfortable to move around the house in summer clothes.  But it’s summer, damnit!  And I keep wearing my summer clothes with layers because I am so eager to strip down to as little as possible.  I miss warmth.  I want it on my skin and I almost never feel this way.  It’s really bothering me this year in a way it never has before.  So the thing is, I want it to be warm in the morning so that I feel comfortable moving around and doing my work and then I can have the afternoon sloth to lie on the couch or play with the kids.  I do most of my big chore jobs in the mornings because the children have more patience and I’m tired of having freezing cold toes.  It’s freaking July.  What the heck.  Right now it is 57 degrees.  That’s pitiful!  (I’m working on the distracting part of suppressing.  The kids will wake up soon.)

I spend a lot of time thinking about why I feel the need to process what I went through the way I do.  It’s not exactly the most pleasant thing to do.  At this stage of my life I feel like I am not in a position to take up a spiritual leader because I would need an intense cult… and yeah.  Like that’s a good solution.  I don’t want a religion to give meaning to my life.  I am not a glory to anyone else.  I can’t come up with any way in the whole fucking world to talk any kind of good about a spiritual practice that does not tell me to pick up a big stick any time someone from my family comes near me.  No, I don’t need to turn the other cheek.  And I’m not in a place where there is enough value there for me to deal with my current issues with organized religion.  Really.  In the cost benefit analysis, I lose.  Just no.

But there has to be some fucking meaning in this story.  Something.  Some reason I did this and survived.  I have to find something worth knowing in the mess.  I have to find a way to believe that being me and existing is a right and good thing.  That I am the right kind of me.  Because being a mother is not going to cut it forever.  I have to be alive and living in my body for me.  And I don’t know a way to be me other than to tell my stories.

The part of me that I like the most is the part of me that looks at my behaviors that I dislike and I try to figure out why I do them so that I can either figure out how to stop doing them –and for real stop doing them, with accountability–or change my opinion of doing the behavior.  In some way it is kind of awful.  I’m developing situational ethics.  But I am trying to reframe it as, “I want to do this, but it is at priority level 9 and right now 3 conflicts with it.  Ok.  Well… shit.”  Because then I have reason to examine my options more carefully on how I am doing 3.  Sometimes I am going to feel like a terrible person and feel a lot of guilt because… 9 is still a priority and I’m failing.  I’m bad.  I’m terrible.  I deserve all manner of evil and badness rained on my head.  That my friends, that is the crunchy guilt for me.  If I do something in a less-than-crunchy way… say only use a plastic bag once and then throw it away.  I have horrible anxiety and terrible self thoughts.  If I only cared more… Ugh.  There isn’t enough time in the day for me to handle my mental health shit and my crunchy guilt.  Ha.

Talking about these things in the ways that I do is part of being me.  I need to stop feeling like I should be silent in public; it’s not like I ever really followed that rule anyway.  Rather I need to stop feeling guilty for taking up space.  Other people are just going to have to deal with their own feelings of shame when I talk about their actions.  That’s not my responsibility.  If you feel ashamed of the things you did to me when I was a child it is right and just.  I get to be that judge and jury.  I’m the only one who experienced it.  There will be people who agree with me and there will be people who disagree with me. That’s life.  And in order to be me and find my own reason for living, I have to learn how to live with that.  I have to stop feeling terrified of the fact that people will disagree with me and dislike me.  I hide at home because I am white trash.  Because I am dirty.  Because I am low class in public.  I explode and yell.  I never can make my children look clean and put together.  I can’t look clean and put together without professional help.  The less said about my husband the better.  *ahem*  (I’m kidding!  I like my husband!  It’s just kind of rare for him to shave.)  We all fit in well together.  We are all similarly messy looking.

That was anxiety producing for me in the UK.  The only time I saw a family that kind of resembled my mental picture of mine in terms of being messily put together they were… very attention grabbing in obviously low class ways.  I had to stop and breathe for a moment as I realized that I shush my children in public and try to talk very quietly when I’m out because I don’t want to be that any more.  I experience so much shame when I feel like people are looking at me the way I look at that woman.  That was my experience of growing up.  My sister was the loud “mother figure” bossing everyone around in this over the top domineering voice so that she could “sound like the boss”.  She’s got a complex.  Oh wait!  She is probably acting like my dad.  I was never really around him so I actually don’t know.  I don’t know what my dad sounded or acted like around people.  I don’t think I saw it more than a few times.  I can’t remember living with him.  So yeah.

My journey is really about finding balance between sharing the stories and working on my behavior while still having control when I need to have control.  Which is pretty much all the time right now.  Rats.

Where is my fight?

3 Replies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do I help?

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I was asked: “I do wonder, what would be the appropriate action to take if I see similiar signals in dc or their friends as they get older? If I suspect something is happening do I go to the teacher? That didn’t work for your friend’s mom. Principal? CPS?”


I think that question is my life’s quest.  I feel absolutely entitled to rail at my family for not protecting me.  I was raped over and over again as a small child.  No part of that is my fault.  It is the fault of the people who sent me into life threatening situations and abandoned me.  I am an extreme case, and I’m aware of that.  Now.  I wasn’t aware of that before.  Whenever I hinted at my story people would say, “Oh me too!”  They don’t say that any more.  Now I’m hearing, “I had stuff happen… but nothing like yours.”  It’s isolating.  I feel increasingly like a freak.  My paranoia is (hopefully almost done) peaking.

What do I wish people had done?  I wish that me telling this story now was so far outside of everyone’s lives that it felt like science fiction.  And it kind of does.  It kind of does because of how many different things went wrong–the intensity is the issue.  Everyone has bad things happen.  If I had one story to tell about this one thing this one time… most of my stories are not actually that severe.

It’s that I’m not done telling them.  It’s that I have memories in my head that I have never spoken of.  I do not have words for them yet.  They are feelings in my body.  Violations that just about severed my body from my soul.  And that doesn’t mean they were more violent or physical.  They are the scars I have emotionally from being made to believe from the time I was born that I deserve to have my father hold a gun to my head and rape me.  That is what people like me deserve.  I am an extreme case because of the degree to which I believed that was true.  But I got out.

What do I wish people had done?  I wish that all of the individual people who knew I was being molested would have done anything possible to bring attention to my life.  If the teacher refuses to intervene, call the principal.  If the principal refuses to intervene, call the police.  Make. Some. Fucking. Noise.

And for god’s sake, if someone has a bad day and says, “I want to kill my kids” do not call the police “just in case” because what you are doing is abdicating responsibility.  You are saying, “I think what you said is bad, but I don’t know if you will actually do anything bad or not so I’m going to threaten you with this Big Scary force and make you shut up.  That way if you do something bad I won’t have to feel responsible for not acting.”  It’s a cop out and a waste of resources.  Just about every parent has times when they feel rage, overwhelming frustration, and has violent ideation.  I’m not glorying in this.  I don’t think it is a good thing.  I think it is a serious problem that has to be addressed.

If you see someone acting out like that, I believe that communities should get involved.  It should not be shrugged off.  Do not start gossiping.  Fuck gossip.  If you are genuinely worried, get involved with the kids and/or the parent.  It may mean you have to make space in your life by giving up things you would rather do.  I really don’t care.  There is no way that the police can adequately protect all of the children who are being harmed.  Do you know what helps?  Not being isolated.  Not be stuck in that house with the crazy all day and all night.  Offer to babysit.  Yes, babysitting that child will be a nightmare.

You are going to have to be careful because your first responsibility in life is your own children.  At this point one of my life goals is to add on to this house in a few years and once my girls are well into their teen years we will start fostering.  I have wanted to foster since I was in the system.

Do.Not.Risk.Your.Children.  I’m not saying that.  But there are ways to integrate abused children that does not put them at risk of aggressing and does not put your children at risk of being a victim.  It’s complicated though.  I’m asking people to learn how to speak honestly about very hard things.  And you have to learn how to do it without shaming or silencing people who have been hurt pretty badly.  Little kids who have been abused can act like wild animals if challenged.

Educate yourself on what danger signs actually are.  Get to know the kids who go to school with your children.  Learn their personalities so that if something changes, you can say to the teacher, “Have you noticed a change in Betsy?”  Ask the teacher if she knows what is going on.  Be pushy.  No really.  Get over this idea that you don’t interfere in other peoples lives.  I’m not saying be an asshole.  But be persistent.

But don’t over react either.  It’s a balancing act.  It’s very hard.  Ok.  I’m not saying that anyone has to feel like they are required to troll the neighborhood looking for children.  But if your friends have kids?  Don’t let them fall of your radar.  Include those kids in gatherings.  Even if you think you know your friends and you love them and trust them.  Act like the kids are real people who are worthy of attention.  Every child will benefit.  If you know that someone you like, or even love is hurting their child?  Speak up.  I’m serious.  Don’t dither.  Don’t be an asshole, but do it.

I’m not saying micromanage everyone else’s parenting.  You don’t have to like everyone on the planet.  Some personality types clash.  That’s not what I’m talking about.  Let me knock that strawman off the pole.  I’m talking about actual abuse.

Everyone has bad days and people shouldn’t be crucified for them.  But even good people can slip.  Even good people can become monsters.  I have monsters in my head.  I could very very easily be an abuser.  And no one would ever know.  Because if I did that, I would listen to all of the advice that is thrown at me from everywhere in the world and I would shut up.  As long as I am holding myself publicly accountable I know I won’t slip.  Too many people would catch me.  I need that safety net.  I need to *know* that people give a shit about my kids.  Because let’s be clear here, it’s not about me.  I was brought up and trained to hurt people.  That is what the grown ups do in my family.  Even if we don’t actively abuse our children sexually ourselves, we are supposed to think of ourselves as weak and powerless.  We are supposed to believe that we have no power or control over our lives.  We are supposed to think that things just happen to us.  We are not supposed to examine our own choices.

Fuck that noise.  I don’t really care if the things I admit here are embarrassing to me.  I don’t care if it worries people and makes them wonder about calling the police.  What I care about is keeping my children safe.  And yes, I have to write on the internet to do that.  I don’t know any other way of building that safety net for my children.  I grew up alone and isolated.  I am weird and touchy.  I’m quirky.  I don’t do very well with a wide variety of personality types.  I’m just not comfortable around them and I get angry instinctively.  I don’t want to teach my daughter that.  So I invite people back to my house instead.

I invite people who are very different.  We have friends who are very different from me but they all have one thing in common.  They love me and they love my kids.  They are choosing to be invested in watching my children grow.  They are ensuring that my children are safe.  They watch me.  They watch my kids.  And the only reason they continue to know that it is important to do so is because I write about how very hard this is for me.  If I stop writing, people will no longer know how hard this is for me.  They will stop making the extra effort to come see my kids.  My kids will have to depend on *just me* to monitor my behavior.  I wouldn’t have had kids if I believed I lacked the self control to raise them.  But man I like backup plans.

I have contingency plans for everything in my life.  What do I want people to do?  I want people to learn how to look at their lives in a more objective way and evaluate how they are creating the same situations over and over again.  I’m not saying that everything is their fault.  But lack of planning creates a lot of problems.  If you recognize your patterns you can make plans well in advance for how to change them.  It’s pretty much impossible for me to improvise how to change my patterns.  I can’t.  I have to preplan or I’m screwed.

Right now I am a weird creepy shut in because until I had children I believed that being sexually assaulted as a small child was my fault.  I don’t think I understood that I wasn’t responsible.  I didn’t see how weak and powerless I was.  And right there, I had to go back and capitalize all of those I’s in this paragraph.  I always capitalize I.  It’s absolutely ingrained in my touch typing.  Maybe.

Right now I am parenting three kids all day every day.  Two are perfect, wonderful, shining examples of a healthy childhood.  The other was horrifyingly abused and she wants to lash out at everyone else because it is just not fair that she hurts so much.  Why do I always have to be the one who hurts?  Why me?  I don’t want to be the vessel for this pain.  It is too much.   And I’m angry.  Oh my god I’m angry.  My mother knew he was a monster and she violated court documents to send me to him.

And I’m doing it.  I’m parenting all three of these kids.  Sometimes that means that when the hurting child needs attention I arrange for help with the other two.  That’s how you balance everyones needs.  I can’t give up on this hurting child.  Everyone else already did.  I’m the last one standing.  If I give up on her too, there is no way through this.

Breakdown

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I had my first breakdown when I was 15.  At that point I was not able to speak about why I was trying to kill myself.  Well, I mean, I could make allusions.  I talked about sex all.the.fucking.time.  Including talking extensively about sex with people I shouldn’t be sleeping with.  That’s what I did.  I treated all of the assault as consensual and I talked about it as if I liked it.

So when I was 15 I went to Los Gatos High School for my sophomore year of high school.  The only year of high school I completed in one school.  Go me?  I had friends in the theater group.  I even still talk to some of them.  Most of them I have lost contact with on purpose.  You see, they all hang out with the guy who tried to rape me at the end of that school year.  He’s a great guy, right?  I will never find out.  I did send him a message on facebook telling him that he contributed to fucking up my life when he tried to rape me.  He didn’t respond at all. I think that is the best possible result of me doing that.

So yeah.  LGHS kind of sucked.  The folks around me were spoiled rich kids.  Most of them had issues because rich parents are often shitty parents.  They have better things to do than pay attention to their kids, yaknow?  I was taunted and bullied a lot.  A really really lot.  I no longer remember what kicked it off, exactly.  But I remember sitting in my room.  I had my own room because no one could stand being near me.  Every other room in our house has 2-4 people in it.  But they all agreed I should have space.  Because I was such a nasty bitch and no one wanted to be near me.  That is what I was told.  I was told that I got my own room because I was a nasty bitch and no one could stand being near me.  I spent most of my time in that room.

So one night, not sure why that was the one, I was just done.  I couldn’t get up one more time.  I just could not bear any more pain.  So I went and found some sleeping pills.  My family shopped at Costco!  We had three boxes with 30 each.  I figured if 1 should help you sleep through the night, 90 would be enough to let me sleep forever.

Taking those pills was awful.  They were chalky.  There was no coating on them.  They were blue.  I experimented with how many I could swallow at a time.  I only had water because I was afraid to go down to the kitchen and get something else to drink.  I can’t swallow pills with water now.  I gag and vomit the pill up.  At that point it was the worst thing I’d ever had in my mouth.  Not anymore!  But it was still really disgusting.

And then I sat and I waited.  I waited to find out what it was like to die.  It was fucking terrifying.  I hallucinated all night long.  I was tortured with the darkest recesses of my mind.  I vomited repeatedly.  (And cleaned it up because I didn’t want anyone else to be burdened with my mess.)  I spent most of that night sobbing hysterically because the itching skin feel made me think there were thousands of ants crawling on me and I couldn’t get them off.  For many years I got hysterical if I found ants in my house.  It became a phobia.  If I saw ants in my house I could feel them crawling on my skin and I started to shake and scream.

I remember watching huge spider nests in the corners of my room explode with teeming bugs, a la Indian a Jones.  Horrifying.  I saw lizards mating on the floor and if I stepped off my bed they would bite me.  I saw kittens running around.  The kittens are why I was found.  You see, I didn’t die fast enough.

When morning came around and everyone got up, my mom came and told me to get ready for school.  And I wasn’t dead yet.  So I did what I was told.  I started getting ready for school.  In the process I started freaking out (uhm, still hallucinating, yo) about the kittens I saw darting out from under my mother’s bed.  She got understandably freaked out.  The next bits are very fuzzy.  I vaguely remember splashes from the ambulance trip and I remember flashes of having my stomach pumped.  I don’t recommend it.  You shit charcoal for a week.

Obviously I was put in a psychiatric hospital.  In Belmont.  I started to shake every time I drove past that town for a lot of years.  The hospital was really horrible.  When my anxiety is at its worst (clinical language applied now, I had no words for this then) I cannot eat a lot of foods due to texture issues.  And when you are in a psychiatric hospital as a teenage girl, they force you to eat.  It doesn’t matter if you have food preferences, you are required to eat what they give you in the quantities they give you.  You are no longer treated like a human being.  I could not eat that shit.  So I got in trouble.  Lots of trouble.  I would not cooperate in group therapy with “drawing my feelings” so I got in trouble.  Lots of trouble.  I spent two weeks there.  Twice I wanted to go to my room when it was not “room time” (sometimes you were locked into your room and sometimes you were locked out, depended on the time of day) and I got into kicking, screaming brawls with orderlies.  I have been strapped to a table in a mental hospital while I screamed and fought and sobbed.

That was my reward for surviving a lifetime of sexual assault.  That is why no matter how bad it gets I will never enter a treatment center again.  If someone implies too strongly that they think I should enter a residential treatment program I’m not sure I will ever be found again.  I caution my therapists and my husband not to even talk about it.

I know there are humane programs out there.  But the thing is, once you are there you don’t have any power.  I will never let anyone take my power again.  I may be fucking crazy, but I’m the kind of crazy where I GET TO DECIDE WHAT HAPPENS TO MY BODY.  Motherfucker.  It’s kind of funny.  I have done a lot of being tied to tables as adults.  Once Tom tried to use “humane restraints” like they have in hospitals and I lost it.  He didn’t try that again.

I have been saying that this month I had a nervous breakdown.  I think that is an accurate assessment.  But it’s awfully nice to see how they are progressing over my lifetime.  My first real breakdown ended up traumatizing me more.  It compounded my problems in new and exciting ways.  The idea of having to ask to use a bathroom ever again fills me with so much rage I would like to commit murder.  No one gets to fucking control my body like that.

I will let people tell me I have to have sex with them.  But telling me that I can’t go to the bathroom?  Oh hell fucking no.  I guess you pick your battles?

I remember my family coming to see me in the hospital.  They all looked very confused and asked me why I did this.  They all acted like it was a total surprise. Group therapy was a fucking joke.  “I know Krissy hasn’t had an easy life, but I don’t see why she did this!”  What they meant was, her father hasn’t raped her for a few years.  Why is she bringing up old stuff?  They all got past it, why couldn’t I?  Why was *I* so dysfunctional?  My family actually believes they are stronger than me and I need to learn how to handle my shit more like them.

Right.

But there was good from that situation.  If you go into a psych hospital Kaiser requires that you go to group therapy for 8 weeks.  Because that’s an awesome way to solve your problems!  Let’s get all the families of the really fucked up teenagers together for a couple of months and pretend like the kids are crazy in a vacuum.  The kids are just fucked up out of no where.  None of the parents could understand why we were acting out.  It’s not like any of you abused us or anything.  But the nurse in charge was Tricia Perry.  I think she saved my life.

I saw Tricia as a therapist (jointly with my mother) on and off till I was thrown out of child and adolescent psychology for becoming an adult.  I never did tell her the big stuff.  We talked about my abandonment issues with my mom moving me around.  She did know I was molested, but she didn’t have any idea of the extent.  My mom made it sound like one thing happened one time, without details.  I never argued.  I just couldn’t describe it.  I didn’t have words for what happened to me.  Tricia taught me to draw spiderwebs and journal and read psychology books.  Tricia knew that if I got through my life it would be on my own.  I don’t remember if she ever said it or not, but now my sense is that she pretty much knew how bad my life was and she tried to give me tools to survive it.  She knew I wasn’t ready to talk.

While I was seeing Tricia I was raped three more times.  I don’t think the therapy was actually useful at getting me past my shit.  But I survived.  That’s what I do.

It’s kind of funny learning survivor language.  It feels so pedantic.  I mean, uhm, duh I survived.  Or I wouldn’t be writing this down, eh?  Being a survivor means I get up in the morning and I pay attention to my kids.  I am careful with my tone of voice.  If it sucks, I apologize for it.  I do my best to pay attention to the honest-to-god actual needs of my children.  I try to parent them with a respect I never had.

My bad days are days when I am incapable of being anything other than a self-obsessed, hurting, flailing child.  Sometimes I sit and I think about my needs in comparison to my children’s needs and I am able to triage without anger, blame, or feeling victimized.  I go through a lot of my life feeling like people are actively, deliberately trying to hurt me.  It’s not a fun feeling.  When people give me advice that would be flagrantly inappropriate if they knew my whole story… but they don’t… it feels like they are deliberately kicking me.

And the more I talk to people who knew me as a child the more that feeling grows.  It wasn’t really a secret.  I talked to a girl I went to elementary school with.  This school very rarely had more than 30 children in a grade so everyone knew everyone.  Apparently in second grade I told her that my father and brother went out at night to suck blood.  That was probably the closest I could come to saying that my father raped me.  Her mother went to the teacher and said she thought I wasn’t safe in my home.  The teacher said, “Those kind of people don’t exist in my world.”

I wasn’t invisible.  It wasn’t a secret.  But no one stopped it.  I was raped over and over and over.  No one stopped it.  No one ever gave a shit enough to stand up for me.  No wonder I feel worthless, useless, pathetic, dirty and bad.  My childhood was full of it and everyone acted as if it was right and proper that I be treated that way.  But I survived.  And now therapists want me to integrate my trauma so that I can heal.

Maybe I just don’t like that language.  Maybe it is valid and ok that I just can’t handle that language.  I don’t want a chakra cleansing because how can anyone think that something as simple as an “energy cleansing” will help me?  I am so very fucked up on so many levels.  And the vast majority of it was very important in my childhood.  I don’t want to give up my anger.  If I give up my anger then I am giving up this enormous source of Power.  No really.  I am incandescently angry that no one ever did anything to help me.  I consider that one of the greatest sins humanity has enacted.  I want to go find every person from my childhood who FUCKING KNEW and line them up in a row.  I want to tie them down into an all fours position and leave them in a prison shower.  I think they god damn deserve it.

Expanding on an Eventful Life

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3- Parents divorce, first memories of sexual behavior with other children
AJ… I think that was his name.  It was behind a couch in the living room.  It had wood slats behind it.  He didn’t orgasm.  He wasn’t sure what I was trying to do exactly.  But it did feel nice.  I was supposed to make him feel nice.  Right?

4- Memories of father molesting me
The strangest things stay prominent in memory.  We went on an amusement park ride and all of the stuff fell out of his shirt pocket.  We sat and waited at a table near the ride.  His hand under my dress the whole time.  The boys thought I needed to rest because I was such a baby.  They mocked me for sitting.

5- 5 kindergardens, big acting out sexually behavior
I was the new kid again.  I wanted someone to like me.  I needed someone to see me.  He looked at me and tried to make friends.  That’s how you are nice to someone, right?


6- Moved to Oklahoma/Texas, Uncle Bob hurt Tommy
My uncle was actually trying to defend me.  Given how horrible Tommy was to me, it was a good instinct.  But that drove a permanent wedge through our family.  I don’t think Uncle Bob ever got over the guilt.  It felt like the whole world just went up in flames.  Hysteria.  Silenced.  Ripped away from everyone who might be able to track my story.


7- Tommy’s accident, Michael raped me
It’s kind of funny how trite pieces of it are.  Of course I started acting out.  But most people don’t start this kind of acting out until they are much older.  More proof that I was precocious?


8- Denny was born, come back to California, started cutting
These generational lines feel important and I don’t know why.  It’s like a ticking time bomb until something blows up.  I suspect that Tyra and Denny might opt out of having kids as a way of breaking the cycle.  Or maybe they will accidentally have kids because human beings are animals and we all want to pass on our genes.  And they will live in poverty, addiction, abuse… who knows.  I need to not notice any more.  The cutting is interesting.  There are different kinds of cutters.  I started out with serrated knives.  I don’t know how I avoided scarring.


9- Tommy moved in with us, my father raped me
Tommy chased Denny around the house with his wheelchair hurting the baby’s fingers.  That was Denny’s introduction to the world.  I was left alone, constantly in horribly unsafe conditions.  I found the strength of will to call my mother in the middle of my father raping me and she told me that I made my bed now I have to lie in it.  Oh man, but he didn’t put his penis in my vagina so it doesn’t count!  I should be more sensitive.


10- Jeremy raped me, Tommy tried to kill me
It’s rare that I get flashes of the sodomy.  There’s a fun word.  I think that has been the primary assault I have physically relived.  I get flashes of the stuff with my father, but for whatever reason the sodomy caused more damage.  Maybe because there was no mix of pleasure with the pain?  It was very difficult for me to learn to have anal sex, even with all the sex I’ve had.  I actually think that the way I have anal sex takes the place of cutting for me in terms of needed level of self-harm.
    
11- Tyra was born, tried drugs, escalating acting out behavior,
I toss in the “tried drugs” because I think it is kind of funny.  I took two hits of pot.  Once.  I had a coughing fit and puked into a cactus.  Some stupid kid near me talked me into snorting baby powder.  We thought white out was pretty awesome.  The “escalating acting out”.  I snuck out of the house pretty often.  The only time I went to an honest-to-goodness party I fell asleep on the couch about 30 minutes in.  I came home to my mother filing a police report and she acted like I had robbed a bank.


12- Moved to LG mostly permanently, asked a 25 year to fuck me, dated other 25 year old, grandfather died
This was when my mom made me the favored child for a little while.  She really was trying to save me.  She feels like she threw Tommy to the wolves, but she probably did save my life.  The sex was awful and painful and (combined with the boyfriend treating me like a hooker) it scared me straight.


13- tried to do the “normal person” thing
I tried to follow fashion.  I found out about trendy music and movies.  Of course this means I was a goth.  But whether people want to believe it or not, “counter culture” is mainstream culture too.  I was part of a social group. I got to enter into the flow of friendship formation.  It was weird.  I felt like I was coming home to Los Gatos, and everyone acted like they didn’t know me.  They were the only constant forces in my life but I was the only inconsistent part of their lives.


14- dated Airforce Michael
Picked him up at a gaming convention.  I helped him lose his virginity on his 21st birthday.  In Vasona Park in downtown Los Gatos.  Yup.  I’m that girl.  I have always loved dating geeks.  I’m a pretty girl and geek boys like that I am a pretty girl who wants to talk to them.  I’m also smart.  And not afraid of being smart.  So that’s double plus good.  


15- Patrick raped me, Justin tried to rape me, attempted suicide, psych hospital stay
This group was full of people who had serious entitlement issues.  A bunch of spoiled rich boys who really believed they were allowed to have and do anything they wanted.  It was bad.  And yet, that’s not the real story.  The real story is that I was very sexually aggressive and when guys responded it scared the shit out of me.  Not all guys are going to listen to “no” once they are lead on and they are easy to pick out of the crowd.  I didn’t tend to go home with the guys who wouldn’t have sex with me.  That’s a lot of the reason I have a lot of respect for the one guy I have kept from that crowd.  He had sex with me (even though he was 20 and knew he shouldn’t) but he followed the camp site rule.  So even in the midst of the trauma there were valuable life lessons.


16- dropped out of high school, Tommy killed himself, group home, 6 months in Bakersfield, speed experiment
I don’t even mention my father stalking me.  That is the prevailing feeling of the six months in Bakersfield.  No, that’s not true.  But that was true of the last couple of months.  I was terrified.  Then we came back to Los Gatos. I started working full time and my mom started stealing my paycheques.  I had to pay my share of the rent, you know.  My manager at Ross gave me speed.  He was probably fucking the other 16 year old employee I hung out with.  The company shut me up fast.


17- started West Valley, my father killed himself
I remember the night the night my brother Jimmy called me screaming about our father’s death.  I left the house and walked all over Redwood Estates.  I sobbed and screamed.  I ended up at Jenny’s house and she held me while I sobbed.  I didn’t know what it was like to grow up with a father.  But you never get over wanting your Daddy.


18- given date rape drug , found bdsm, started dating Tom,
Oh that whole date rape situation was awful.  I was acting out all over the place.  Lots of bad decisions.  And the response was across the line victim blaming.  It was all my fault.  Luckily when I found the creepy online guy who introduced me to bdsm I left before sleeping with him.  Thank god for some boundaries.  And I found Tom.


19- left W.V., lots of moving around and couch surfing, growing awareness of safe sex, trip to Australia
Really this period was characterized by my relationship with Tom.  I dated a lot of people for the first six months and I did a lot of things that were suboptimal, but I learned and improved rapidly.  Tom wasn’t real up for the kind of communication I needed, so we had problems.


20- pretty sure this is when I started blogging,
I’m upset about not having my g-blog archive anymore.  I wish I had started backing up my data years ago.  This was a happy, stable period of my life.  I think that is what bothered Tom so much.  He knew it was a calm before the storm.  We entered into a 24/7 M/s relationship.  


21- graduated college, started grad school, trip to London/Paris
It was becoming increasingly clear that Tom was not my forever partner.  We coped with this in ways that were mostly healthy and functional.  Better than anything I’d ever seen.  By this point we were moving more into the Daddy/daughter play than the Owner/slave.  Tom didn’t really want to hurt someone who was in as much pain as I was in all day every day.  Instead he took care of me.  It was interesting.


22- started dating Noah, broke up with Tom 
You aren’t supposed to talk about it, but Tom has a low libido.  It’s not a big deal.  I don’t.  So all of a sudden it was a big deal.  In the final year of our relationship we had sex 11 times.  Some people think that is fine but it isn’t for me.  Lots of sex with my partner keeps me from chasing self destructive sex.  I mention that I started dating Noah, but he isn’t actually the person I negotiated poly for.  Or the boy I developed a crush on.  He was unremarkable except that he was So.Fucking.Pushy.


23- broke up with Noah, did lots of drugs with James, started teaching, dated Puppy, trip to Ireland
Got sick of that pushy thing.  He wanted someone other than me.  He didn’t know who I was and I didn’t know how to let him find out.  Sort of.  Maybe.  Or maybe he wanted exactly me and I didn’t know how to be me and stand next to him.  So I dumped him and sobbed the whole way home.  Hanging out with the Burners was fun.  I feel like I happened along at a golden era of fun no-strings-attached-sex for a whole bunch of people.  It was responsible and very loving in a sleazy sort of way.  No really.  It was awesome.  The trip to Ireland was awkward but allowed me to start letting go of Tom.  Teaching was consuming most of my life.  Sprint! 

24- Puppy dumped me, married Noah (7 days before my birthday)
Puppy was probably telling me the truth when he said he never loved me.  He’s still an asshole.  Marrying Noah was the right call.  Eloping is still a mixed bag thing for me.  I feel like I didn’t have a wedding because I was afraid that people like me don’t get to have weddings.  People don’t come.  I don’t have a family to invite any way and weddings are for your family… right?  


25- rape scene with Noah
I’m glad we did this and it hurt like hell.  It lead to good therapy work and wonderful growth in my relationship with Noah.  It’s kind of comfortable being able to say with great confidence that I know exactly what kind of monster I married.
  
26- Had Shanna, failed out of grad school
Other women seem to enjoy pregnancy.  Not me.  It was horrible.  I lost almost 20 lbs in the first 5 months.  Then I had preterm labor and bedrest.  And with regards to the MA? I was told, “It’s obvious that you know the material… but you just didn’t quite write enough.”  I’m not even sure I’m bitter (today, right now) any more so much as I just feel sad.  What a horrible system.

27- Miscarriage, therapist overdosed, Francesca overdosed, trip to New Zealand
That first miscarriage was hard.  I found the fetus in my first postpartum cycle.  That’s not an experience I ever want again.  My beloved therapist overdosed on heroin.  She had been going down hill for a while.  It was really obvious.  Another close friend overdosed on heroin.  She was in a lot of pain and no one saw.  That’s hard to bear.  Traveling is so wonderful.  This trip was closer to what I like in travel.


28- Miscarriage, Had Calli
I started the miscarriage and got in my van to drive to Portland.  I was supposed to leave that day and didn’t see a point in stopping my plans for something like that.  If I stop my life for sad things I’ll never get up again.  I’m frankly surprised nothing bad happened given how I cried.  Then I had my Calli.  I had a nine day labor then I hemorrhaged after her birth and nearly died.  My response is to feel like it is ridiculous how I make everything sound so melodramatic.  That’s really not an exaggeration of what happened.  It’s pretty minimizing, really.  But I feel like I shouldn’t say it.


29- Uncle Bob died, outed my whole family, wrote ¼ of a book, remodeled my house
Uncle Bob was my savior and an abuser.  He was a bully and a flirt.  He was good people and he was a racist.  These things are complicated.  My family wants me to keep silent.  I want to take up space in the world.  I feel like if I don’t find a way to take up space in the world I am going to explode.




14 days till I leave and I’m not sure what I’m packing.  We are going to be gone for a month and I’m packing for four people and extensive travel through multiple climates.  I want to sit here and keep writing. But that is derailing my life.  So really, I need to turn the computer off.

An eventful life.

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I think it is a good idea for me to give new therapists a time line. When I did this one I was kind of startled. Do most people have this much happen in their lives?

3- Parents divorce, first memories of sexual behavior with other children
4- Memories of father molesting me
5- 5 kindergardens, big acting out sexually behavior
6- Moved to Oklahoma/Texas, Uncle Bob hurt Tommy
7- Tommy’s accident, Michael raped me
8- Denny was born, come back to California, started cutting
9- Tommy moved in with us, my father raped me
10- Jeremy raped me, Tommy tried to kill me
11- Tyra was born, tried drugs, escalating acting out behavior,
12- Moved to LG mostly permanently, asked a 25 year to fuck me, dated other 25 year old, grandfather died
13- tried to do the “normal person” thing
14- dated Airforce Michael
15- Patrick raped me, Justin tried to rape me, attempted suicide, psych hospital stay
16- dropped out of high school, Tommy killed himself, group home, 6 months in Bakersfield, speed experiment
17- started West Valley, my father killed himself
18- given date rape drug , found bdsm, started dating Tom,
19- left W.V., lots of moving around and couch surfing, growing awareness of safe sex, trip to Australia
20- pretty sure this is when I started blogging,
21- graduated college, started grad school, trip to London/Paris
22- started dating Noah, broke up with Tom,
23- broke up with Noah, did lots of drugs with James, started teaching, dated Puppy, trip to Ireland
24- Puppy dumped me, married Noah (7 days before my birthday)
25- rape scene with Noah
26- Had Shanna, failed out of grad school
27- Miscarriage, therapist overdosed, Francesca overdosed, trip to New Zealand
28- Miscarriage, Had Calli
29- Uncle Bob died, outed my whole family, wrote ¼ of a book, remodeled my house

This list doesn’t convey how often I moved (more than 50 times), that I went to 25 schools before dropping out. I then went on to attend five colleges in the pursuit of higher education. I have very few consistent friends. I also don’t mention the extremity of my promiscuity here. I don’t know how many people I have had sex with. I had an Excel spreadsheet up into the 70’s then I had a hardwear crash. I know I am in the triple digits but I have no idea where. It is not possible for me to recreate the list because I don’t remember most of the people or their names. This also makes me sound like a heavy drug user and I’m not. Previous to my recent usage of pot for anxiety in the last couple of years I did things occasionally at parties. I didn’t consistently use or use daily, ever.

I had a day in the world

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

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

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

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

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

“What money?”

“The money for singing lessons.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guilt

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and

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

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

Being normal.

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I will always have periods where I freak out and can’t cope for a while because coping is an active choice at pretty much every minute. That is a lot of stress and work. I cannot sustain it permanently without relief.

And that is why I won’t shut up. Because I am not going to be the sacrificial lamb suffering in silence. Fuck that shit.

Endings and Everytown

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I think I just realized that I was upset about not getting there before Uncle Bob died and Tyra left because I wanted to see everyone in my family one last time before I set fire to them.  I wanted proof they were still broken and they immediately started in on me.  I had to be sure I was right before I could do it.  I have been pushing myself towards growth as hard and as fast as I could for a while now.  I have been growing more and more desperate to Accomplish Things!  I Have To Be Seen!  I think that my subconscious was pushing me towards this.  I was growing more and more obsessed with my mother.  I was talking to Noah about her a fair bit.  She was in my thoughts far more.  I was starting to try to negotiate in my head how I could have a relationship with her and keep boundaries.

But I can’t.  It simply isn’t possible.  I cannot be a sane person with her in the room.  Whether it is actually about her current behavior is completely irrelevant.
——-
I just had an important realization about my view of parenting.  My job as a mother is to prepare these two people for how to be healthy adults.  That’s my job, start to finish.  They will be children for a short period of time.  They will be adults for a long time.  I should neither shelter them to the point where they do not understand the world nor should I expose them to inappropriate danger.

My mother left me with rapists, molesters, and abusers and now she can’t figure out why I erupt with rage any time she makes a callow, negligent comment.  That callow self-serving behavior is why I was harmed so badly.  She just couldn’t be bothered to look past herself.  I feel terror that I am ditching my kids by being out here in the garage.  But Shanna asked to watch a movie.  She said she wanted to watch Ponyo again.  I said I was really sick of Ponyo, could we please watch something else?  She said, “Mom, it’s ok that you don’t want to watch Ponyo.  I want to watch Ponyo in privacy.  Will you please put Ponyo on?”

I am not my mother.  Calli is talking to the doll in between sucking on its head.  I can see her from where I sit.

I am not harming my children by thinking and that is the part that I am struggling with still.  I feel like me having thoughts about evil things in the same house as my children means I am irredeemably evil.  How dare I bring those thoughts into my children’s home!  But… I’m thinking them while teaching my children to have good boundaries and limits.  I don’t expect or allow my children to make decisions that are age inappropriate, but she’s allowed to ask to watch a movie in privacy.

————–

Someone just posted a video on facebook about Everytown.  I can’t watch all of it because I start crying so I hope the end is good.

I wrote about my Everytown experience and I dug that up and I’m going to put it next.  I don’t think I truly realized how completely different I was until that experience.  My coworkers obviously didn’t know what to do.  How do you handle one of the adult chaperones losing their shit?  I wrote this in August of 2007.

——————

I swear to god this was one of the most intense four days of my life, and I wish I could say that it was a good thing. It started on Wednesday with a too-early start time. I went down to the school and picked up a car full of kids. We drove down to the mountains to a camp site. We began doing the training. All I knew about this event before I drove down there was that it was about “Cultural and Diversity Awareness Training” in all capital letters and everything. I had been given a packing list that mentioned bringing stuff for cultural pride night, but I didn’t have a freakin clue what that was about–so I ignored it.

During the training we talked about the agenda for the next few days. It meant very little to me because they mentioned the names of exercises but didn’t actually say much about them. The one exercise we previewed (so that the different staff members could get to know one another a little more) was a cultural biography exercise. The questions for it were:
1. State your first and last name and their origin.
2. Identify yourself, racially, ethnically, culturally and religiously and say why.
3. Relate an experience of prejudice (i.e. race, religion, gender, size, etc.), or a time you felt different, and your feelings at the time.
4. Relate an experience when you were a perpetrator of prejudice and your feelings at the time.

It seemed so… easy. But then we got into it. Most people had some pretty basic stuff to mention and it was no big deal. I told them that the only cultural identity I have is white trash. I got a little more into it than that and I started feeling vulnerable, but that really wasn’t so bad. I did ok with it and I figured that I would be fine as long as stuff continued at that intensity level. But… it didn’t stay there.

Later that night we did the first big group exercise. [I have deleted this 5 times trying to figure out how to explain this. It may sound weird.] It was about racial stereotypes. They would send one racial group out of the room at a time and have the rest of the group come up with all of the horrible put downs and stereotypes they could. Then they had the group come back in and reflect on what was written on the paper. It was incredibly powerful. The children responded with extremely personal stories about the prejudice they have felt. Some told about parents being assaulted or humiliated or degraded in front of them and they cried. With each successive group the kids as a whole were more subdued and nervous. When the white group went outside I went with them. I figured I would be fine, because I’ve heard all the white stereotypes and I’ve never felt that upset by them. But then I walked back in and looked at that paper. There were two that really bothered me: spoiled, and have never worked a day in their lives. I started shaking. I raised my hand to respond and I told them in a very choked voice that I started working when I was 14 so I could have a roof over my head. I told them that I have gone hungry in my life because there was no money for food. I told them I was furious that anyone would ever say that I am spoiled and that I have never worked. Then the queer group came up. They treated it as a separate cultural group throughout the weekend and that was interesting for me. {More about the word ‘queer’ coming up…} The one I responded to from the queer poster was “Going to hell.” I told them that last I checked, the bible talks about a god of love. And I am disgusted and horrified a the idea that a god of love would say that I am going to hell for who I love. And I am even more offended by all the hate perpetrated in the name of that god of love. And I started crying. I don’t know why it was so emotionally intense, but it was. And this was the easy day.

Then one of my kidlets got sick. So I drove her home because she is one of my special pets all of the time. I didn’t get back to camp until 2am.

Thursday dawned way too fucking early. The big group did a Self Identity exercise. It was a silent stand-up/sit-down exercise. They asked a series of questions and everyone who answered yes stood up. Then you were supposed to look around and see who was like you. This was terrible for me. Questions about your home life and if you have ever had to move because you were being evicted. Questions about family and have you been beaten or lived with a single parent or have you ever been in foster care. There were a number of the questions where I was the only person to stand up. It was hard and embarrassing and humiliating. I stood back there and cried. Then we went off to small groups where I was only talking to seven kids instead of the usual 70-something kids. Then in the small group we went over the cultural bio thing we had done in the staff group the day before. I cried some more. I was with some really neat kids though and it went alright.

Then we got to the next big group exercise. It was about privilege. Everyone started out in a big long line. The event organizer then asked us questions about our level of privilege–things like: have you ever inherited property, have you missed meals, did your family own more than 50 books as you grew up, and I can’t even remember what all else. For the positive ones people took a step forward; for the negative ones people took a step backwards. I ended up at the very very very very back dead even with two latino boys, the latino staff member, and a black boy. The five of us were so far behind other people it was pretty pathetic. All of the guys put on a very tough face. I sobbed like a baby. When the organizer asked me how I felt about being so far back I told him that I have always known it was bad, but I didn’t know how bad. Various female staff came over and tried to hug me and I fairly screeched at them not to fucking touch me. I stood back there crying and shaking for quite a while. I felt humiliated and disgusting. I was miserable. Then I had to go back to my small group and process this exercise. I didn’t really talk about it, but hearing the kids talk was interesting. I was in a group with the black boy who was at the back with me and six kids who were all really far forward. It was interesting hearing the kids talk about how they didn’t want to pity us–but they didn’t really know what to feel about having things so good.

Then we had the next big group exercise. They separated the sexes and really went to town establishing stereotypes and gender messages. Then they brought the boys back and we went through both sets of posters. It was really offensive and difficult. Most of the girls sobbed through the whole thing. They felt awful that the boys described them that way and that the boys really wanted to treat them so horribly. The boys looked very ashamed when they saw the girls’ reactions. Then they had us do another stand-up/sit-down exercise. This time going through questions about: have you ever been hit, have you ever been told not to cry, have you ever been hit to make you stop crying, have you ever been assaulted, have you ever been afraid of your parents… it went on and on and on. The boys side went first. The girls cried as they watched our beautiful, precious boys admit to these disgusting horrors. But not one of the boys cried–they very much looked upset though. Then they did the girls side. The girls kept crying and the boys started looking truly horrified. I was the only woman to stand up for every single question. Once again I felt humiliated and publicly on display for my horrible life. Then he had people respond and the kids said some really profound things. My response was, “I’m angry at how many of the people in this room had to say yes to these questions and I am sad that the girls can cry out their pain and get relief and the boys aren’t willing to allow themselves that release.” Then a couple of boys started openly crying. It was heart wrenching to hear some of them talk about how devastated they are knowing that so many of the girls have suffered and they are thinking about their mothers and sisters and how they would answer. It was overwhelming and awful.

Friday dawned way too fucking early as usual. This day was far less noticeably intense. The big group exercise in the morning was about family cultures and I didn’t get terribly upset by it. Then we broke off into small groups and did “family sculptures”. In this exercise you move the people in the room around to show the relationships among people in your family with you as the center. Doing my family was hard. I set it up pretty quickly and then told the kids about how the two boys lying on the bed are representing my dead father and brother and they are between my remaining brother and the rest of our family. I told them that my remaining brother has flat told me that it is my fault that my father and my brother are dead. I talked about my sister and her kids and her drug problems and how she loudly proclaims, often, that our dead brother is the only one who actually cares about her. I showed my mom sitting in the middle of the three of us because she is our only link and yet she has no power. I was sobbing so hard I could barely talk. Then, being me, I stomped my feelings into the ground, wiped my nose, and sat down to listen to them talk about their families. My shit wasn’t allowed to matter anymore.

Then we did action planning on how to bring these changes in perceptions back to the world at large. It was pretty cheesy. Then the kids found out that two of the staff members were undercover cops, including the Latino man who had been at the back of the privilege exercise with me. They answered questions and generally dispelled a lot of the myths about cops. It was pretty neat. But by this point I was near my breaking point emotionally. There had been too many ups and downs in one day. So then we had to get together with our cultural groups to prepare for the skit thing that night and I was… fragile. I was part of the mixed European group and people weren’t sure what to say about any of it and they kept asking questions so I answered them. Eventually one of the staff members told me, “This is supposed to be about the kids’ experience–let them talk.” But they were asking me questions! Ok, guess I am supposed to shrug and say, “I don’t know.” I’m not good at that. It feels stupid to me. So I got pissy and was really glad when it was time for me to go off an work with the queer group. Only, it turns out the kids were offended by my usage of the word queer. Apparently I was supposed to say LGBT. They didn’t tell me this though, they went and told several other adults and had those other adults deal with me. I saw red. I stormed away. I went and called Noah and sobbed hysterically on the phone for a while. I was really thinking about just leaving the event. But I decided to just suck it up and go back and work with the group and try to play nice. Only, as I did it I told the two kids who had complained that if they have a problem with me or my words they should take it up with me and not talk about me behind my back–that is called gossip and it isn’t ok. The other staff member in the group told me to go find the event organizer and talk to him because it didn’t look like I was calm enough to really be part of the exercise. So I flipped.

I got up almost shaking and started saying, “Fine. Fine. Fine.” In that way I do when things are Not Fine. I went to go find the event organizer or the woman from my school who organizes the event to tell them I was just leaving. Instead I ran into another teacher, the other person who puts this together every year, and I walked straight into his hug crying and crying and crying. He started asking me questions and I told him everything that was going badly for me. I told him about being raped and forced to move and being molested and going hungry when I was a kid. I told him every bad thing I could think of for about 20 minutes. I told him that I am *still* a cutter and I feel suicidal pretty frequently. He, of course, told me that he had no idea–well no fucking shit. I don’t talk about this stuff at work. He told me to sit out the event that night, but try to stay till the end of the event. I did it by staying off in the corner for the skit exercise and not talking at all.

Then there was the candlelight ceremony where everyone sits in a dark room and pass around a single candle and talk about what they have learned or appreciated. I instead offered up two quotes and didn’t mention anything else.

Saturday morning I was still pretty raw. I felt, and still feel, like I was put through a meat grinder. In the morning–during breakfast–we did a segregation exercise. They divided up the races (and the LGBT not queer group) and put everyone at separate tables under strict orders no to associate with, talk to, or even make eye contact with anyone outside of their group. [Right before the exercise started I talked to the kid who had complained about my usage of the word queer. I told him what it means to me and to my friends and why I use it as a self-label. I told him that by the time he complained about my word usage I had already had a rather stressful couple of days and I wasn’t in a great place to be open minded about someone complaining about me in that way. I told him that if he had come and asked *me* I would have been happy to explain it and I wouldn’t have been bothered by his initial reaction to feel offended. I also told him that it is ok if he rejects the label for himself because I am not going to demand that anyone share my label.] The exercise lasted a long time before anyone rebelled. I was in the queer group [fuck that kid] and we spent the entire time in silence because we weren’t exactly friends. It felt very isolating and lonely. In the debriefing for the exercise and the whole event I finally told them that I hated being there and I just wanted to go home. I said I don’t like thinking about these things and I would give anything to be back in my house with my husband. I said that while crying and generally looking pathetic, so chalk up one more point for public humiliation.

Then we went back to our small groups and debriefed some stuff more intensely with the kids we had gotten to know a little better. Then we did an affirmations exercise. I was *floored* by the things the kids said to me. They described me as a rubber ball who can bounce back from any horrible thing and still have the strength to support other people. They told me that they feel like they can tell me anything in the whole world and I will never judge them. They told me that they think I am the strongest and most formidable person they have ever met and they have enormous respect for me. They told me that they know that when they have a problem I will probably be the first person they talk to about it because I will certainly give good advice. I had thought they were put off or even kind of offended by the things I was telling them. They were all so quiet and stand-offish… By the end of that I was crying, but in a good way. I was glad I stayed to the end. I felt like me putting all my shit out there publicly had some merit.

I have been a wreck since I got back. I’m crying and snapping and in general being difficult to put up with. My saint of a husband is of course being kind. I don’t know if I will go back. I’m pretty certain they will ask me to, because I am such an extreme example of overcoming adversity, but I’m not sure I have it in me to go through that again.


After rereading this I am compelled to add that actually I don’t think I will ever be welcome back. Other people don’t actually want to deal with the effects of people who are this far outside the bell curve.

So I sit at home.

Sexual abuse

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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.

I hate Texas

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I hate Texas.  I hate Texas with a burning, flaming passion.  Someday I should get over hating Texas; it is stupid to hate a whole state for what happened to me.  Bad things can happen anywhere, but for some reason a lot of horrible things happened in the six months I happened to be in Texas.

I was seven and my mom and I shared a trailer with my sister and her husband.  My mom spent most of her time on the phone with my dad trying to talk him into allowing my brothers to come join her in Texas.  My parents have always played against one another to get custody of my brothers.  Neither of them seemed to ever care where I was though.  The boys were the significant ones.  Even if my mom had managed to get my brothers that time, where would they have slept, on the living room floor?  We didn’t even have a couch; mom and I shared a bed.  I hated my life and I hated just about everyone in it.   

     The son of the trailer park manager was named Michael.  I had an enormous crush on him.  He was cute, in that skuzzy “The Outsiders” sort of way.  I was angry at the world and rebellious boys appealed to me.  He was mean to me; I think I wanted him to pay attention to me so much because he treated me so badly and everyone in my family that I wanted attention from treated me badly.  I wanted to make him like me; make him want to be nice to me.  Maybe if I could get some kid to like me I would be able to make my mother like me and be satisfied with having me and not want the boys so much.  I would go over to Michael’s house and spend the afternoon waiting on him and whatever buddy was with him.  I was willing to do just about anything for attention.

 One day he and his cousin were playing video games and they started talking about sex.  Michael was 11 and I’m pretty sure he was exaggerating his experience.  His cousin was 14 and probably did already have some experience.  The cousin turned and looked at me, he asked Michael if I was a decent lay.  Michael said he didn’t know.  The cousin asked if I at least gave good head.  Michael said he didn’t know.  The cousin started mocking Michael at this point.  He told Michael that the only reason to let me stick around was if I was any good.  I knew what they were talking about and I was scared.  I was afraid to leave though.  This was probably the most attention Michael had ever really paid to me.  Most of the time he just ordered me to get something for him as I sat quietly in the corner.  In some sick way it was almost nice having him know I was in the room.  The cousin called me over and told me to kneel in front of him.  He pulled his dick out and told me to suck on it.  He didn’t even stop playing the video game.  I felt dirty and humiliated and I started crying, but I did it.

     I cried the whole time and I felt disgusting.  I thought I would throw up when he came in my mouth.  The cousin told Michael that now I was ready to be fucked.  So Michael put the game on pause and pulled me over to the bed.  He pulled my dress up and took my underwear off.  He didn’t touch me anymore than he had to.  Before he penetrated me I started begging him to not do it.  I was still crying and I started crying harder.  He told me to stop crying because I looked like a disgusting snot-nosed kid and I should be grateful he was going to do me; I just kept crying and begging him not to.  The first thrust hurt so bad I screamed.  He reached over and grabbed a handful of the sheet and shoved it in my mouth.  His mom walked in at about this time.  She looked at what we were doing, shook her head, and walked out.  I couldn’t breathe because I was choking on the sheet and crying so hard I couldn’t catch my breath.  When he was done I rolled off the bed and stumbled out the door.  I cried as I walked home and the whole lower part of my body hurt so bad I thought it would never stop hurting again.

     Michael and his cousin followed me home on their bikes.  They rode in circles around me taunting me.  They said I wasn’t a very good lay so they weren’t going to let me hang out with them anymore.  I didn’t know how to respond; I was so angry.  Finally I screamed, “Fuck you!  You fucking assholes!” and I ran the last way into my home.  My mother had been standing at the window and saw me scream at them.  She got really angry.  She yelled at me for swearing.  She picked up a flip-flop from the floor and started hitting me with it.  She yelled that she was not going to put up with that kind of language from me.  If I ever did it again I would get it even worse.  Her hitting me hurt, but not nearly as bad as the rape had hurt.  How could I tell her what had just happened though?  Was I supposed to tell her to please not beat me for swearing minutes after I had been raped?  Should I have told her that it was ok for me to cuss out those boys because they had just violated me?  I couldn’t say anything.  I lay there and took the beating.  She wouldn’t have understood, maybe she wouldn’t even have believed me.  I didn’t have the words yet to properly explain what had happened to me.

I felt like I was on complete meltdown for days afterwards.  I didn’t want to move around or do anything.  Between the beating and the rape my entire body hurt and ached.  My sister got angry with me and yelled at me for being so lazy.  I didn’t want to go to school because I would have to see Michael on the bus.  He told people that I asked him to fuck me.  He was patted on the back and told what a stud he was.  I was told that I was a complete whore and girls like me go to hell.  I didn’t know what to say.  How could I defend myself?  He was popular and I didn’t have any real friends. 

Not long after I started to recover from the rape I had a horrible dream.  I saw my brother in California get hit by a car in my dream.  I saw him go to the hospital.  I saw him lying in a bed for a long time with my mother sitting next to him in a chair reading.  I saw him in a wheel chair.  I saw him using a walker.  I heard him talking in this strange voice.  He sounded different than he ever had before.  His speech was slow and garbled and I could barely understand him.  People who are really drunk sometimes sound a little bit like he did—the really slow and careful speech.  When I woke up I felt really scared.  I told my mom about the dream.  She called my dad’s house and no one answered the phone.  For the next few days she couldn’t get a hold of anyone in California.  She finally managed to talk to my dad’s girlfriend and she found out that there had been an accident.  My brother was in a coma.  Things started happening very fast.  My mom got on a plane to go back to California.  She left me with my sister and her husband. 

My sister tried to explain to me what happened to my brother.  She said that everyone’s brain is like a tape recorder.  It records all the thoughts you have, all the experiences you have, and all the abilities you have and when you need these things your brain plays them back to you.  Our brother’s brain was erased.  He won’t remember things and he won’t be able to do anything—not even eat or go to the bathroom by himself.  I was really scared.  She said that it is like he is a baby again and has to start over doing everything from the very beginning.  Now I have a big brother who is like a little brother.  I didn’t want a little brother though; he was bad enough when he was older than me. 

Age appropriate behavior

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A friend emailed me this comment about the last post: “You have already decided that she is not the right therapist for you. In part because she was incapable of discerning the difference between you in a stable place and you in crisis. Why are you allowing someone with such poor observation skills who has no personal interest in helping you authority?  (I’m not looking for an answer, just trying to get you to think this through a bit.) All the people who genuinely care about you are telling you this is helping, but the one person who shouldnt matter makes an uninformed statement of opinion and thats the one you’re listening to because she’s an “authority figure”?? She’s feeding your inner demons, which is absolutely not what you need right now. You need to decide whether you want to trust and listen to her, in which case firing her was a bad idea… Or whether firing her was the right thing in which case you need to not lend weight to her opinions. HTH”

Yeah.  Yeah, that’s what I am fighting with.  I am fighting with who is allowed to set my boundaries for me.  I have traditionally (during childhood) let other people set my boundaries for me.  The periods of my adult life where I have gone through trying to set more boundaries have been dramatic and ridiculous and over the top.  A lot of the time I can’t let people touch me.  I have to have a ridiculous degree of control over how and when it happens if someone is going to touch me at all.  But that’s not the point right now, or is it.

I can’t be around Shanna because I do not trust myself to be age appropriate with her.  When other people hear that they freak out because of course if I am talking about all these horrible ideations I’m having, of course if I want to hurt my children so badly that I tremble, I must be shattering a lot of other boundaries, right?  But I’m not.  I am withdrawing.  That’s hard on Shanna.  Shanna is used to me being available 24/7 to do what she wants when she wants.  It has been that way for three years.  Right now I feel like what we are doing is cutting the cord finally.  Shanna can no longer be treated as part of me and I can’t have my whole life in front of her any more.

How do I properly segregate my life in ways that allow me to be a good, stable mother?  I have these memories.  I have these freak outs.  I have periods of time where I cannot be quiet.  I cannot be slow and measured.  I cannot go at the speed she needs.  Sharon is right that you have to be aware of the limits of your audience.  But I think she is wrong about where I need to care.

Maybe in a cosmic sense I should feel more responsibility for the lives and feelings of everyone I know and I should shut up or only tell stories in ways that are safe for the readers.  But that’s the crux right there.  I don’t have to be gentle with readers.  I can scream and shout and use as much profanity as I want and even if people are cowering… I don’t have to be responsible for it.  They can have their reaction to things away from me and then come back to me to talk about my experiences.  Because I have to have people respond to my experiences.  I feel like a liar.  I feel like there is no truth in my words because no one knows them.  At this point that isn’t even true anymore.  I have been telling stories for over a decade.

And I still have friends.  I have people who can sit in a room with me and listen to me talk about the sensation of my father raping me with compassion and love.  They do not flinch.  But they aren’t enough.  The extent of my pain is such that I cannot tell one or two people.  I can not go to a therapist and deal with my shit in privacy without inconveniencing other people.  I can not go to group and say enough for other people to not feel alone but not enough to traumatize them.  I am too traumatized right this moment.

That’s hard and scary.

I just broke for a long phone conversation.  She is the one who has been standing close to me the most lately (other than Noah or the kids).  I’ve been building to a really big freak out for a long time.  I have been having small things freak me out or I’ve been intensely needy… really since I got pregnant with Shanna.  Having needs that I cannot take care of for myself has been hard.  It has seriously eroded my sense of self.  I feel like I am a despicable drain on the system.  I feel like I should cease to exist.  But I’m having a bad minute.  I can’t even say morning and be honest and that’s progress.  I spent two hours this morning out interacting with my children and it was really great.  I did well.  They did well. They were thrilled to see me.  Now they are playing with friends because I’m not doing as well.  That’s the right choice.

I realized this morning that I am obsessed with my story to the point where I don’t even know my kids’ stories.  That bothers me.  Do you know what story Shanna is seeing right now?  “Sometimes my mom cries and goes into the garage.  Then friends come over to play!”  I am so convinced I am a bad mom and I’m not.  I phrase things in the most negative way possible.  I phrase things in the most dramatic way possible.  Because I feel like I am being abused.

When I became a mother I decided I was going to be the Best Mother Ever.  I was going to do everything Right.  I have driven myself insane researching things.  I read a lot of extremist points of views and talk about them fairly loudly.  So people think I am very extremist.  The problem is that I’m not extremist in a way that lines up with any clearly defined camps.  So I feel very alone.  I don’t have a family identity so group identity is ridiculously important to me.

I feel like I am doing everything wrong because no matter what I can find people who want to tell me I am doing everything wrong and when I was a child I was told I deserved whatever people said/did to me.  And everyone tells me I am wrong.  Over and over and over.  And I think this is what I am stuck on right now.  Maybe.  This second at least.  I’m tired of being wrong all the time.  I am so exhausted by the effort of standing up and saying THIS IS ME AND I DESERVE TO BE HERE TOO.  I am so tired.

Being the Best Mother Ever is hard.  Noah refers to it as the High Intensity version of parenting.  Other people call the sane version of it Attachment Parenting.  And the only people who are dictating my attempted behavior are strangers on the internet.  Who the fuck cares if I am or am not AP enough.  I do.  And it hurts my feelings that I am doing everything I am physically capable of doing for my children and it is killing my soul and I am told to suck it up.  Children should not leave their mothers at all for three years.  Shanna turns three in six days.  Am I waiting until she is three to have a life back?  What about Calli?  Did I sign on to “do” AP with one child and now I am throwing my second child to the wolves?

I can’t keep doing what I am doing.  I’m not going to.  I am changing things.  But they aren’t changing fast enough and this is so fucking hard.  We leave on the trip in three and a half weeks and Sarah moves in two weeks after we get back.  Yes, this is hard.

I have already compromised or thrown out most of the AP stuff I tried for with Shanna.  If Calli doesn’t want to take a nap on the schedule I try to keep her on she will be left in the pack and play to put herself to sleep, even if she cries.  I can’t be on a babies schedule anymore.  I am creating a space in my house where I get to have grown up things and not wade through toys.  It is glorious.  I am not going to be alone all the time any more.  I am not alone all the time.

Why the fuck am I so scared.

I am afraid that my mother isn’t a monster.  I am afraid my mother is just a woman who was acting out after she was heinously abused and when she had periods of intense recovery she couldn’t see me anymore so she stopped ensuring I was safe.  That’s not the true story either, but it’s probably close to the truth.  My mom sent me away a lot when I was little.  I would go stay with various people, often Aunt Vonnie…

And then I got derailed.  And my family blew up.  And I am no longer in contact with anyone at all because I told my brother he had a choice.  He can honor our dead father’s memory even though Jimmy knows our father raped his daughters or he can stand up for me.  He deleted me on facebook.  And my cousin sent me a hysterical nasty-gram telling me that I am terrible for hurting her family.

It made me laugh.  I guess I’m free.  They aren’t my family any more.  That is so awesome!

The first step.

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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.

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Right this minute I am stone cold sober.  I slept for more than 9 hours.  I am trying to get through some thinking before the kids get up.  An online friend mentioned that when you go through stuff like this you want to harm the people who hurt you.  Your body gets all of this energy so that you can fight off an attacker.  But no one is attacking me.  No one is hurting me.  But my body doesn’t know that.  My body feels like I am a tiny child and people are horribly abusing me.  It’s a weird kind of regression.  My children are major triggers right now because little kids are rough.  They crawl all over you heedless of sharp elbows and knees, they pinch and grab, and just generally they act like I shouldn’t have feelings.  Like I am invisible.  Kind of like my dad.  When he paid attention to me he brutalized me.  When my mom paid attention to me she complained that I wasn’t doing enough work.  Yeah, I have some anger.

I fired my therapist yesterday.  After an exchange that made it sound like very different approaches to healing I decided that I need to find someone who is more like me.  I don’t do well in the nice clean office in the nice part of town with the nice upper middle class woman who wears pearls.  I think I have a nasty attitude before I walk in.  That’s my shit and my baggage and stuff I can mostly deal with most of the time.  I don’t think I can right now.  Right now I need a therapist who is used to dealing with addicts and people who don’t have their lives together even slightly.  Because right now I am reverting to shit with my family and no matter how many high fallutin psychology “experts” you can quote long passages from, if you don’t know what a seriously abusive family is like… I don’t think I can talk to you right now.

My therapist had fuzzy boundaries.  She made a big deal in group about how it is specifically illegal for her to share her story… but then she dropped details.  She is not rigorously accurate with her word.  She thinks it is ok to say, “Ok, person A will go tonight and person B will go in two weeks” and then something happens in the intervening week and she decided that person B wouldn’t go in two weeks.  I was person B and she didn’t tell me that she decided that we should do something else on Monday.  That’s why she didn’t give me room to speak.  Because she didn’t understand that I was clinging to the ability to speak.  That was the only reason I crawled my way out of my house shaking and upset.  And then she expected me to sit there and listen to everyone else process and only take my short turns and be appropriate for the group.

I can’t do that right now and the fact that she acts like I am a problem because I can’t?  Yeah… not a good fit.  Most of the time I am highly functioning.  Most of the time I can sit there and explain why she is totally right.

I have been awake for ~40 minutes now and I’m sober.  The longer I think the harder I shake.  I’m scared because I know that I do have rage issues.  I know that I am angry with my entire family.  I think that is why I am sitting out here shaking.  Someone HAS to be in a lot of pain as their punishment for me hurting so much.  And the only people here are my kids.  This is how the cycle goes on through generations.  I am not able to hurt my father because he is dead.  I have cut off my mother and sister and quite frankly the only damage I was able to do to them was to refuse to keep my silence.  That is the only tool I have.  This therapist does not understand that being able to speak my truth regardless of how or where or how appropriate it is, that’s what is keeping me alive right now.  The fact that I am allowing myself to express what happened to me.  The fact that friends are coming out of the woodwork to listen?

Maybe I can’t walk into a group and find the support I need.  Maybe I am too broken.  This isn’t the first group I’ve terrified.  But if I am too broken to go find a group because the people in a group are too broken to support me… it’s hard.  I get good support from my friends.  Sometimes I feel like it is better than I deserve.  But I don’t have people in my life who were abused like me.  I actually just sent an email to a woman I used to be close with.  She has a horrifying background of sexual assault, prostitution, drug abuse, etc.  I hope she responds.  We’ve kind of lost contact.

I know why I am afraid to be cold and why I keep my house so warm.  When I get cold I start shivering and I feel like I am going into shock.  When I feel like that I have a harder time keeping the memories at bay.  I used to sit in our house in the mountains under a pile of blankets and think about my abuse.  My mom and my sister went back and forth between telling me I was an abuse victim and saying I was just a whiner.  The story was always that what happened to me wasn’t as bad as what happened to my sister.  So I shouldn’t complain, because look!  She’s fine!  Only she’s not.  She can’t hold down a job usefully.  When she manages to get into a relationship with a nice guy she destroys their life until they stop dating her and go off and fix the damage.  She is a very broken person.

So I keep my house warm so I don’t have to sit here and shiver and feel scared.

A few minutes ago I had to break and go nurse Calli for a bit.  Of course I felt like I was a better mother because I was sober.  But there is this thing that happens when I nurse, I don’t know if it’s common and it’s weird body tmi.  Nursing makes me have to poop.  For the 5am nurse, if things are timed badly, I sometimes lie there in agonizing pain trying to not shit the bed because I need Calli to go back to sleep and she won’t let go of my nipple so I can go to the bathroom.  During this time period, honestly it’s only like a 2-3 minute of crisis feeling, I sit there and visualize the ways I want to hurt Calli in response to her hurting me.  Because I feel like it is her fault that I am in so much pain because it hurts only when I’m nursing her.

Maybe the right answer is to let her scream and get up and use the bathroom.  Today what I did was I told Noah that I was in a lot of pain because I have to use the bathroom and she won’t let go.  And Noah stayed up late last night so I didn’t want to bother him and I was feeling really upset about the fact that I was in pain and wanting to hurt my baby because of it.  Noah told me, “It was my choice to stay up late.  I’ll take the baby.  Go.”  I love him so much.  He is so good at giving me permission and space to have whatever feelings I need to have.  I don’t know what I would do without him.

So I have some rage issues.  Ok.  When folks like Sharon (or my ex-boyfriend) tell me that I am destroying my life with rage I feel confused.  I get the impression I feel way more rage than other people.  But I don’t really see how it is destroying my life.  I have bad periods where it puts my life on hold.  I am out in the garage right now and I am absolutely not part of my life right now.  It’s sad.  I’m not happy about it.  But I don’t see how I am destroying my life.  I am stepping out of my life for a little while and I am having my rage issues come out by myself with a computer in the garage.  No really, that is about the best kind of control anyone can ask of me.  The alternative is to tell me I’m not allowed to feel the rage at all.  Excuse my language, but fuck off you fucking cunt.  Don’t tell me that rage is destroying my life because it isn’t.

Rage is causing me to sever the bonds with an abusive family.  Rage is causing me to admit out loud that my father raped me.  Rage is causing me to have the strength to stand up and say that my mother and my sister are evil.  That they are child molesters.  That my sister is a rapist.  I need to say those things and I do not have the courage to say them without this level of rage.  Not really.  But given that I am surrounded by people who love me and support me, and given that I am extensively checking in about my mental situation (I feel more than a little uncomfortable with the fact that I am live blogging my breakdown, and yet… I feel like I am being very accountable so I know that I am not crossing any lines) I don’t feel it is in any way shape or form appropriate to say that I am destroying my life.  To be clear Sharon said, “Your rage is going to burn you and your family alive if you don’t get some support.  Expressing the rage is fine for a start, but you can’t sustain this level of fury on a moment-to-moment basis forever.”

Forgive me for laughing as I think about the idea that maybe I should get some support.  I have many many people checking in with me as I do the hard work.  Maybe I’m just doing it in a way that doesn’t work for her.  But I am doing it.  I’m tired of feeling invisible.  I cannot see a therapist who sees no value in the way I am processing.  The way I am processing has allowed me to have a very good life and very good friends.  I am no longer in an abusive situation.  At this point in time I am surrounded by people who love me to distraction who want to give me every ounce of help they can.  And I’m letting them.  People are coming over and caring for my kids and doing my laundry.  People are showing up with food.  People are calling and leaving comments and texting me and emailing me and…  I have support.  I am not past (See Ali, I do listen) the crisis yet.  But I will get past it.  I will.  I have done it before.  I’m not sure if this is the darkest place I’ve been, but it’s pretty bad.

Let me state this pretty clearly.  I am not dead because I will not do that to Noah or my kids.  My will to live is a flickering flame right now.  But god damnit I am going to get through this.  Those mother fucking pieces of shit aren’t going to kill me.  They aren’t powerful enough.  But I’m still scared.

I think I should fall down the rabbit hole and tell stories.

The difference

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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?