Tag Archives: abuse

This is a little weird

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Ok, so I think I am starting to have a better relationship with my mother in law. Apparently she finally decided that she couldn’t get rid of me and she now has affection for me? She said it in a really awkward sort of way. She said that her sons don’t think she will love the people they have sex with–it’s their modesty. That’s why we had such a rough introduction to one another on the phone when he had his motorcycle accident back in the day. Or something? It was confusing.

But the last visit was frankly pretty dang positive. I get the impression that my understanding and supportive words and manner for how difficult her mother was to deal was taken well. I did my judgy thing and this time it didn’t blow up. Woo. I told her that I completely understand why she has simply thrown away her mother’s hoard and it was incredibly kind and giving of her to do so much for the woman who abused her so badly. I do not have it in me to do such a thing. That takes an intense level of character to fucking do your duty as a daughter. She didn’t let her mom shit all over her–she had boundaries. But she made sure the taxes got filed. She made sure the bills got paid. She cleaned up the disgusting, nasty, health hazard hoards that her mother accumulated many times in her life. Holy shit I can understand what that means.

I’ve cleaned up a lot of hoards. Including some that required gloves and masks because the air was not fit to breathe.

I saw her mother’s house. I know that I saw the house not long after she moved in and the hoard had been entirely disposed of for the last place she lived. The woman did not deal with rubbish. Including food that was completely and totally inedible and it might hurt someone.

I had a shockingly polite relationship with Great Grandma. We spoke as judgy bitch teachers about methodology and pedagogy. We got along. She was effusively in favor of me homeschooling the kids–but I had to win her over first. When we first met she did that attacking thing she does with fucking everyone and I was able to throw off the names of most of the important academic theorists of the last 100 years and explain exactly which pieces of what research I lean on for the decisions I make. She talked to my kids. Then she went back to the nursery school where she was volunteering to teach gardening to the children. She later told me I should definitely not send my kids to school because I had far more to give them that was of value than all of the teachers in her school put together.

Great Grandma was not a nice person. She was a bitch. She was severely abusive to her children to a degree I have never even nodded at. But she was a single mother to four children in the 1950’s. She parentified the shit out of her kids. She beat them when they didn’t take care of themselves. She beat them whenever she didn’t like a decision they made. She threw them out of the house in night clothes when they tried to take independent action as 18 year olds.

She was also incredibly intelligent and super well educated. She did a graduate degree in geology I think in the 1960’s. She babysat at night so she could help younger single mothers get higher education. She worked in very hard schools. After half a century of teaching she retired… to volunteer in preschools teaching underprivileged children how to garden.

No one is one thing or another. No one is black or white. People are complicated. People have a lot going on and mostly they don’t even know what all it is. It is hard for people to learn how to introspect. It doesn’t absolutely require professional help but it does require time. Time to sit and think and figure out why you are doing stuff. It’s not easy.

Great Grandma put a lot of good into the world. She did a lot of things that were really unusual for someone of her generation and poverty level.

I can look at her and see how I would make similar choices in a similar situation. She had no room for a personal self in her life. She was a tool and she was ground to a bloody fucking nub and shit rolls down hill. I mean tool in my personal usage. The way I see myself. Not like in the P!nk song.

I think I have it in me to be horrible and I am very very lucky that I have been able to construct a life in which I no longer vibrate with so much rage that I scream at my kids.

I understand that she was a bitch. She was a bad ass motherfucker and she was nice when she could be until she had to be effective. There I go but for the grace of the g-d I don’t believe in.

But yeah, I can see how being her daughter was a nightmare. I have a lot of empathy for how much pain my mother in law went through. She was abused and it was wrong and there is no justification for how much pain her mother put her through.

I see both sides of this so very clearly. Given everything I know about both of their lives I do not know how either of them could have done much better than they did. They did the best they could under very hard circumstances. It is so awful when our best results in that much pain for the people we love. I have absolutely no doubt that there was love on both sides–love and pain and misery and duty. I have very different feelings about to whom I owe duty and that’s appropriate given the very different life I have led.

But yeah. Things with my mother in law have improved dramatically and I feel sorta bewildered about that. She is being friendly and encouraging and telling me she loves all of us–which isn’t a direct “I love you” but is so strongly implied I would have to willfully knock it to the side.

Noah’s mom was very rough on him as a little kid. She was still deep in the throes of her own trauma. She did not have more or better to give. She did not have experience with therapy yet. She has come a very long way in Noah’s life. She has done a tremendous amount of work on herself. Heck, in the approaching 20 years that I’ve had experience with her she has come a very long way. She’s not an easy woman and I doubt she ever will be. She doesn’t owe anyone ease and I can appreciate that on a great many levels.

I suspect she has noticed that I talk about how I cannot have a relationship with my mother because the trauma is too great and I have deep respect for how she has managed to do what she did. That took great strength and fortitude. Whether or not we ever get to the point of feeling comfortable with one another in a casual way there is a level of mutual respect.

She tells me often that she appreciates how I care for her son and our children. She sends my son cards addressed to “grandson”. She is usually really careful with my kid about how to be respectful of whatever name or pronoun is working at the current point. (She’s a little muddled on transition stuff and not perfect about pronouns 100% of the time but she also has sewn beautiful skirts for her daughter’s transgender girlfriends. She does the work to be supportive even while being a little sloppy in speech sometimes. I can live with that. It seems like it is good enough to the kids.)

There is a part of me that believes that we had to have over a decade of bristling and holding our own separate castles lined with booby traps. We are both extremely wounded people.

But even stunted trees reach for the light.

The Reckoning

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I knew it would come. The time when my children no longer believe that I am God and whatever I happen to do is Right and Just and Appropriate. It was honestly really weird being in that zone with them and this discomfort and tension is preferable. What I mean to say is last night my big kids and I cried together and talked about how hard it was when they were really small and I would scream at them for hours for stupid things that little kids do. They talked about how much I hurt them and why it wasn’t ok.

I said that it is true that I did these things. And I did hurt them. And I am sorry. I do not excuse my behavior. There isn’t a justification that makes it “ok”. We both just have to live with it being true. You get to decide how many more years of knowing me you can handle given how I treated you.

EC said he remembers one time when MC was screaming at him and I interrupted and told MC off and said it was entirely inappropriate for them to talk to him like that. He said he remembers asking me why it was ok for me to do that when it wasn’t ok for MC to do. I didn’t say anything. I walked away. He could hear that I went in another room and cried. He was confused and he couldn’t figure out what he had done wrong.

Last night I told him I was embarrassed. It’s pathetic for a grown ass woman to need to get called out by a child that small for her inappropriate behavior. I knew I was I was fucking up. I knew that my behavior was wrong. I also didn’t have much of a support network and I had very high needs children and I was still deep in the mess of my own trauma. I told him, “That’s why I went to therapy even though you told me you didn’t want me to go. Because you were showing me every single day how I did not have the skills to be the mother you deserved.” Last night I told him a little bit more about what I was going through at the time and why I was fucking up the ways I was. I told him that I could not talk to him about it way back then or I would have made him my confidant and I would have leaned on him for emotional support. He would have completely believed that it was his job to do whatever he had to do to “fix” me.

He said I was probably right and he was very glad I hadn’t told him any of it at the time. But it was hard.

I know.

I mean, I’m still not telling them everything about what I went through. But like: when the older kids talk about remembering me completely fucking freaking out about food waste… when I married their dad I was 2 years out from being food insecure. By the time EC remembers my earliest paranoia and panic and overly extreme reactions I was something like 5 years out from food insecurity? I am more calm about food now. It’s also been over 18 years. I feel in my bones that it’s ok now if we don’t eat every piece of food because there will definitely be more.

I told him that what he remembers and the ways that I hurt him are part of what I mean when I say that he has an ACE point because having a mentally ill parent is a heavy burden. It is hard on your body and I deeply regret the ways I have hurt my kids.

I know that there were people at the time who expressed concern about the level of screaming that I wrote about. I didn’t respond in the moment in the ways that you might have preferred, but I have done the work to change. I don’t do that anymore. It was very hard. I have hope that my third child will not have the need for such intense conversations about my fuck ups. I certainly don’t think I have been as hard on her.

EC told me he hates how in stories there is always this big deal made of the person in his position forgiving the person who hurt them. I told him that it’s partly because people in my position have nothing to forgive. We only have regret and guilt and shame and self recrimination and that doesn’t make for as interesting of a story. I told him that in the stories the character isn’t forgiving for the sake of the person who hurt them–they are forgiving so they can set this experience down and stop carrying it around in their head and in their heart. I told him that I cycle in and out of forgiving my mother and I expect he will have a similar experience.

I told him that I am not asking for his forgiveness. That is not something I deserve and it isn’t something he should feel compelled to give. I told him that if he wants to talk about this more over the years I will and I will explain more so that he can see a fuller picture of what was going on and I do not offer that as a justification. It’s not a justification.

There is a part of me that struggles with trying to figure out the intensity of my own self recrimination here. I didn’t call him names. I wasn’t hitting him. I wasn’t using inappropriate language. I was using inappropriate volume. I ranted for hours and at least a few times for days about stupid fucking shit because I did not have better coping tools for my emotions.

These days when I can feel that starting I walk away until I am calm enough to come back and say, “I am not ok with this for x, y, and z reasons. I need you to do a, b, or c to make amends because that was not acceptable.” I’m still really freaking not ok with active lying. You can tell me to my face that you are not going to obey some restriction I have put in place and have far fewer issues than you will if you tell me “Ok I won’t do it” and then you do.

In the birthday book that Noah and Pam put together years ago there is a quote from Jenny: “When you look at yourself you see how far you have to go. I see how far you have come.” Ok, I’m paraphrasing. I haven’t looked it up in a bit. I think I’m right +/-3ish words. I am a lot closer to being who I want to be in this world. I have dealt with a lot of my shit.

Hell, I wonder how much Andrew telling me off and telling me that I was addicted to my rage spurred me on. There have been a lot of things and a lot of pushes from people who love me.

I am not the parent I was and mostly I think that is good. If you can’t look back on yourself 18 months ago and think “Wow, I really sucked” you aren’t trying hard enough. I’m looking back 10 years ago. I really really really sucked. It is hard to feel that I deserve to have a relationship with my children as adults. And that’s one of those tricky self-fulfilling prophecies. If I feel that way I will act shitty and I will push them away.

I mean, even with telling me that sometimes the way I handled shit wasn’t ok he still comes into my room for snuggles on a regular basis. He still radiates confidence and self-assurance and happiness most of the time. He now says that he can foresee a future when he will probably want to move out but he’ll be surprised if it happens much before 30.

He looks back on the arc of his life and thinks I want to double this amount of time with my parents.

I agree that when I screamed like that it was abusive. Maybe it is kind of an ordinary level of abusive where if you knock it off people won’t reject you permanently. I don’t know. I don’t get to decide. I just need to keep on walking and keep on trying to be less of a prick.

I would do anything for love, but I just won’t do that

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I feel like I am trapped in a Meatloaf song. I want to do things to be pleasing. I want to show my love. But I don’t want to do that. What is that? I don’t know. What do I want? I don’t know. I want to not feel how I feel right now.

I keep thinking I didn’t have kids because I wanted a convenient life. If I insist on my kids staying in school it means I am ok with their classmates hitting them, spitting on them, elbowing them, telling them that they are fucking morons–shits–stupid–pathetic. It means I am ok with little girls telling my little girls that when they gain weight in preparation for puberty they should really go on a diet. It means I am ok with the authorities having a bigger problem with my children standing up to bullies than with the bullying behavior. It means I believe that my children should have to put up with low level harassment a lot of the time because it doesn’t rise to the level that a teacher considers worth paying attention to so stop complaining.

“It is preparation for the real world.” Bitch, if someone did that to me in the real motherfucking world I would either punch them or press charges. I wouldn’t shut up, put my head down, and take it.

You aren’t preparing them for a healthy adult life. You are preparing them to be victims and you feel quite sanctimonious about how it needs to happen.

I’m not yanking them out immediately. I am going to start emailing the fucking head every day with a report of what bullshit happens. Then when I deregister the kids I will have a paper trail of allllllllll the shit the school doesn’t think is important enough to deal with.

If I had a full time job and I had to work I would tell my kids to start punching people. But I don’t and I don’t and I don’t really want my children to have to toughen up in that manner. I have not put this much time and effort into helping them verbalize problems instead of hitting to give it up now. Sure, they are annoying to authority figures in a school who don’t want to hear it. But fuck the fucking school authorities. Their priorities are shit.

And really, there are a lot of things I miss. I miss not wasting so many hours on “Get up. Do your chores. Eat faster. Get ready to go. Pack your bag. Go. Hurry up and unpack. Do your chores. Eat faster. Go to bed because we have to wake up early and do this all again.”

We can get a lot done home schooling. But we do it at odd hours and when we feel like it. Is it a lot of stress? Absofuckinglutely. I feel less like I need to ride the kids super hard though. They are doing more than fine compared to their peers (Except for hand writing and fuck hand writing. Ok, we will work on it…. but seriously. Fuck hand writing.) and that was what kept me up at night worrying. Yeah, I hate having to push them through work.

But I love having hours a day to read together. I love having time to sit around and draw together. I love watching the neat projects they build with all of the time they have. I love knowing that they get to play with dolls and be imaginative when kids their age in school have already given it up because they are trying so hard to be “big”.

I am making contact with the home education community. I’m finding kids their age who are into Minecraft and Scratch and art and reading. Do you know what they aren’t finding at school? Kids who play Minecraft or who use Scratch or kids who are as obsessed with art and reading as they are. At school kids call them names because they don’t play Fortnight. At school kids mock them for not having an expensive brand new phone. At school the kids make fun of them for not being on social media.

Fuck school.

A mother told me the other day that she is getting her 7 year old an iPhone 6 for Christmas because the kid is getting mocked at school for not having one. What the absolute fuck? She said that she doesn’t want to waste money on toys because her daughter is only interested in perfecting her selfies anyway. Uhhh my 9 year old is getting a doll house and the thing will be played with constantly.

Yeah. Different strokes.

We are working on some fairly big changes in our marriage. It’s complicated. I don’t want to bitch about it here. I just want to write down for myself that this is when the contract ended.

I don’t know how to properly advocate for myself without throwing tantrums. I don’t know how to feel like I am being treated how I want to be treated. I don’t fucking know how I want to be treated.

I keep thinking about that doctor who told me that I just need to focus on keeping the bus on the road. (It’s a long metaphor.) He said Noah knew what he was getting into with marrying me because I was honest about my trauma history so he doesn’t get to bitch about it being hard. I don’t agree. I think Noah gets to bitch.

But sometimes keeping the bus on the road is hard even when I don’t have a good reason to point at. Sometimes just being me is hard. I feel like a whiner. I feel annoying and high maintenance and a whole lot of other rude descriptors. I definitely definitely definitely don’t think I am worth the effort.

But I throw tantrums if the effort isn’t put in because I am a fucking bitch. Apparently I have an incredibly high sense of what I deserve.

I think I am depressed. Noah thinks he is depressed. We aren’t the sorts of depressives who stop working. We put our heads down and plough on feeling little to no joy in anything. I don’t think it is SAD. I think we have been working so hard for so long without resting that our bodies are collapsing. Our spirits are collapsing.

Both of us feel like the other isn’t doing very much for us even as we can rattle off the ridiculously long chore list that we know our partner is doing… it just… feels inadequate. We are productive, just not content or happy or satisfied. We keep waiting for a long enough break to breathe.

I now have definite confirmation that our stuff is in the UK. It’s going to sit in a warehouse till December 30th when a company will go pick it up and a few days after that they will call me to arrange delivery. Our stuff will be in transit for 19 or so weeks. The estimate was 4-12 weeks. I feel glad that I can stop worrying that our stuff is lost. That’s been really bothering me.

I want my socks. And my long johns. And my books. And and and and and. I WANT THE GOD DAMN BIKE TRAILER.

This is my third night in a row of not really sleeping until absurdly late. It’s almost 1. This isn’t helping my mental health. Tomorrow I need to take a sleeping pill.

Fork.

Probably not the best plan

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People aren’t awake to distract me so I responded to Tyra instead. I told her:

I shouldn’t do this, but I’m going to. Tyra, what your mother did to you was sexual abuse. The fact that you want to continue a relationship with someone who sexually abused you isn’t ok. That means you are doing something bad and broken. You continue to let her act like she is a good person who has never done anything wrong. The fact that your mother invited you and your brother into her sex life. The fact that she encouraged you and your brother to have sex with each other. The fact that your mother allowed her husband to rape your brother. The fact that your mother raped my brother Jimmy and will flat deny it right now.

I am not walking away because of what my father did to me. I am walking away because your mother, my sister, and your grandmother, my mother, are sexual predators. They have sexually assaulted a couple of generations of people. They are disgusting, bad people. I hope they rot in hell for what they did to me, you, and Denny. Because we are only the most recent. My kids will not be victims of that mindset. Because even if I managed to be vigilant enough that no one ever did anything to my kids I would be raising my kids around a family who thinks that sexually assaulting little kids is ok.

And all of you obviously think it’s ok because you keep letting it happen.

Blast radius

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Right now I am exploding. I am doing so all over the internet. I have now sent extensive messages to everyone I know in my extended biological family telling them I was horribly molested and raped for 10 years and none of them did anything to help me. I have mixed feelings about this.

support

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I think I should keep going to the support group. I think I’m not going to get much out of it. When the other folks need to have PTSD defined, we are just not at the same place in our journey. Nice women though. It’s remarkable how overwhelmingly fucking cocky I felt. God damn I like myself compared to them. The group leader asked us to list five things we were proud of/reasons we liked ourselves from the last week. The other two couldn’t come up with stuff. Shit, I can come up with five things in the past few hours. Parenting interactions, marital interactions, finishing the mural… it’s not hard to come up with stuff really quickly for me. The other women couldn’t do it. That was interesting to me. Despite me feeling like I have a lot of self-loathing I’m not sure I really and really and really truly do. (Yes, that was a specific language choice not a typo.)

The words… they are stuck. :-/

Checking in

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Thank you for the phone calls. I really appreciate my friends. I’m trying to keep a more firm line in how much I talk about my shit with Shanna standing nearby. The last couple of times I have really unloaded about what was in my head repeatedly in a day she woke up with night terrors. Today I had the one outburst at my mom on the phone outside in the yard. Then I had one ~15 crying thing immediately following. Then I was calm the whole rest of the day. And Shanna didn’t have a night terror. That, to me, means I erred on the correct side of freaking out. I did a lot in the midst of my mom actively treating me like shit, but I did it outside and away from the kids. I did a little bit in the house with the kids nearby. Then I stopped. I was probably slower than average for the rest of the day, but I kept it together.

Mostly I did this because my friend, K, was due to come over in the morning anyway because she was coming over to babysit my kids while I went to therapy. Handy. Mostly at Jenny’s suggestion (Ack! Two Jennys! My brain is overloading and I will figure out that situation later.) I asked K to drive me down to therapy and they hung out in the park right across from the office. By the way, I’ve realized I’m going to have to do some work on my feelings around unsolicited advice. If I’m going to really do the blogging thing then I’m going to have to just deal with it. Oh man. That will make me twitchy.

And I’m up in the middle of the night trying to figure out what to think and feel about this latest development. I’m trying to decide how many cycles in my brain it gets to have. It doesn’t get as many as it wants right now. I have already decided I need a break from processing this kind of stuff right now and my mother does not have the right to override my decision making process. She doesn’t get to ruin my life anymore. I am on a semi-manic upswing right now. I am trying like hell to get upward momentum started. I can’t stop to obsess about this. Today I need to just get into my head that my mother is doing this to me because she is acting out the story in her head. She is not interested in doing the hard shitty work to break the cycles she has established. That’s not my problem. I am interested in doing that hard work. I am doing that work. Part of doing that work is stopping and telling the quiet, scared little girl inside me that she can’t actually hurt me anymore. Never again will she be allowed to send us to a monster. Tyra’s childhood was ruined too, but Shanna and Calli are escaping. My brother’s kids are escaping. One of my siblings absolutely continued the cycle but I have hope for Tyra. The way forward can’t be me staying up all night obsessing and it can’t be me feeling distracted and apathetic all day with the kids. That’s not acceptable. My life is good, wonderful, and I have all the possibilities in the world. I am not yet 30 years old. My life isn’t over yet. I get to grow up and be anyone I want to be.

Ok. I think I’m going to follow a few random paths for a while as I try to figure out which direction I want to grow in. But that’s ok. I have time.

Oh my fucking god.

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Tyra told my mom everything I said. My mom called me to tell me she wants to go see a mediator because I am lying about her and she wants to get the story straight. She swears up and down I was not molested when I was little.

I feel like I am losing my mind. I’m crying. I screamed at her on the phone that she has no fucking right to tell me I wasn’t sexually assaulted. This is my body. These are my memories. How fucking dare she lie to my face. I am shaking and so upset I can barely breathe. But I have to drive in 40 minutes to see my therapist so I can’t do anything to help me calm down.

I want her out of my head. I called Tyra and said that if she ever does anything again to cause my mother to call me and harass me that I am done and she will never hear from me again.

Called my brother

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So really what happened is I called my brother days ago and we’ve played phone tag since then. Anyway. Tonight we really talked. We talked for 45 minutes and there were so many little subtopics. He said he believes me absolutely 100% without question on all of it. I spent a while sobbing and spilling out my memories of our father and what he did to me. I kept apologizing to him because I know he doesn’t want to hear it but he told me that he is willing to listen to whatever I need to say. He considers my mental health more important than his momentary discomfort at hearing these stories. That’s huge. That’s monumental. I mean, it’s not like we are suddenly going to be close and spend time together. But I was just told by a person in my immediate family that the fucked up version of reality I knew growing up was indeed happening. I am not crazy. I am not imagining any of it. I am not lying. My mother and sister can go fuck themselves.

He believes me. He heard what actually happened and he believes me. He told me that yes, I am used as the scapegoat by everyone. My brother believes me.

Sentry

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Right now I am sitting sentry duty next to my elder daughter’s bed. Her beloved bed. You see, it is a Big Girl Bed! She even climbs a ladder to get into it. Picture an overly intense cherubic blond haired blue eyed german ploughhorse. She’s stocky and perky and deliciously incongruous. She wants people to love her so much. We shower her with love constantly. I carry her until my arms give out and then I put her in a carrier and keep going even now that she’s my big 30 lb going-on-three-year-old. Even while her baby sister is on my back. I do this because I remember that agony of need of assurance of love. I remember feeling no one in the world would ever love me enough and desperately clinging to my mother. I was so very attached to my mother. On MDC they think that is a good thing but I’m not so sure it was good for us.

I think of my beautiful child. And I think of my mother. And I think of the power she had over me. The power I have over my beloved, adored, forever wanted Shanna. I begged God for her. I named her and wanted her when I was 13 years old. To think that my mother most likely received the exact same blind absolute trust and love. My mother saw that in her child’s face and let a monster violate her. I can feel my whole body quake with hate and fear and rage. Most of the muscles in my body alternately cramp and flex. This hurts so bad. I hate her. I think if I drove to her house right now I would honk the horn until she came outside and run her over. Oh god. I’m trying to calm the panic attack closing my throat. You fucking bitch. I hate you so much. You did this to me. At the end of the day you stupid bitch. This is all on your head. I hate you. I hate you so much.

Why didn’t you love me?

And that question will never be answered. And no matter how much terror I feel. No matter the nightmare I face sitting next to her bed, my baby needs me to be happy. My baby needs me to take in her love and return it to her as joy. It is so hard to appreciate her like she deserves. I wish that my sweet girl didn’t have to show me her remarkable empathy so often. I wish my baby didn’t offer me hugs and kisses to feel better.

And every time one more person tells me more reasons that who I am or what I am doing is bad or wrong it just makes it one little bit harder. Like what I am doing is not hard enough.

Confirmation

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Today my oldest friend in the world came to visit with her mom. We were born across the street from one another and we are 4.5 months apart in age. So I asked the mom if she knew what was happening to me when I was my daughter’s age. She said yes. She said that all of the kids’ rooms had locks on the door and she asked my mom about it. My mother told her that the locks were to keep my father from molesting us, but she knew they weren’t terribly effective. I asked her why she never turned my mom in and she said, “You weren’t neglected. You were always clean and well dressed and you didn’t go hungry. There was nothing to turn in.”

I’m uhm, predictably not doing so hot. So far I have been assuming that the abuse started then because I remember my acting out starting so young. People knew. It wasn’t the secret I thought it was. They just didn’t stop it.

Anniversary

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Today my father has been dead for 12 years. He committed suicide to avoid going to prison for molesting me. It sounds so… dramatic. I wish I could stop having mixed feelings about it. I wish I could just get over it or hate him or feel at peace. I’m sad that I never really got to have a father. I’m sad that he made the choices he made. I’m sad that so many people were hurt because of him.

I’m not sad I broke the cycle.

Yet more processing

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This morning is hard. I had a ‘moment’ where I realized that my first sexual acting out was at about three and a half. My rather clear memories of that were that I was just ‘supposed’ to do that. Now, as an adult I realize that in order to have such a clear sense of place associated with sex acts I was probably being molested at about Shanna’s age. I simply cannot conceive of anyone being such a monster that they would hurt a baby like that. But someone (someones?) did. It is becoming harder and harder for me to continue to have the self-narrative that I was just sexually precocious and any of what happened to me as a kid was by choice.

This is really really hard.

What’s going on in my head lately.

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I haven’t been posting much of substance lately. This is largely because my laptop screen is dead and I am trapped in the office and Shanna only gives me short periods of time where she is ok with me being in here. Challenging. I can read in short bursts but I can’t write like that. Thus I have been posting lots of banal one or two sentence things on facebook.

What I am mulling over and trying to figure out how to talk/think about is the next step of processing abuse I am working on. I have spent almost the entirety of my adult life dealing with the large scale sexual assaults in my childhood. That took a lot of work. That was a big deal. What I have never really gotten around to is truly examining and processing all of the small scale abuse and day-in-day-out neglect and awful that I experienced. Thing is, now that I am doing this parenting gig that is seeming much more important. When I talk about not wanting to pass on the cycles of abuse I am not worried about sexually assaulting my kids. I’m just not. That’s just not something that will ever be much of a temptation for me. (I’m kind of repulsed by people who are two years younger than me.) What I need to worry about is how to not tear down her sense of self. I need to worry about how to create a positive atmosphere where Shanna (and TBD) are free to become any person they want to become without my baggage being dragged along behind them. As we are getting deeper into toddler-hood I am noticing more and more of my baggage that way and I need to deal with it now. This can’t wait. Part of the problem is, I don’t really have the time or mental space to work through this stuff. I have to create it. I can’t just float through and ignore this. This is mandatory.

I don’t think I am being a bad mother, but I can see bad habits starting to pop up. I am not ok with Shanna crying unless I can see a direct reason for it (that I approve of). That’s not ok. When Shanna expresses an opinion I don’t like (dude, she’s a toddler) I come down really fast and harder than necessary. I need to stop thinking/talking about how I would like to hit her when she is frustrating. That’s completely unacceptable. I’ve smacked her hand a couple of times out of pure reflex and I don’t like it, but I don’t feel like that is a huge problem long-term. What is a problem is that I talk about wanting to hit her pretty frequently. That’s unacceptable. That is using the threat of physical control and it’s not really much better than a judicious spanking occasionally for serious problems. It’s probably actually worse. It’s trying to instill fear. I have to stop. That’s not ok. I don’t want my daughter fearing me. At this point she doesn’t really understand and it’s very clear that she doesn’t fear me. I want it to stay that way.