I now have honest-to-gawd truth that people in my family know the truth and they are still calling me a liar.
I actually think this is fabulous. I’m glad I have days of texts with my brother proving my story. Not because I will keep them or show them to anyone. Because I have physical proof of my story in this minute and he can’t take it away. No matter how he turns around and lies.
I just won.
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!!!!!!
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!
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.
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.
I am having trouble understanding an exchange that is going on with my therapist. I would appreciate some feedback on it.
Continue reading
I am not an addict. No really, I’m not. I am codependent. My relationship with my family is unmanageable. I believe that no power on this earth is greater than me when I make my mind up. I just need to do it. I declare that I am in charge of me. I know the right things to do and I don’t need a magic invisible sky friend to help me do the right thing. Sometimes the right thing will suck. I will do it anyway. One of my greatest strengths is my fearless willingness to look at myself, good and bad. I do that as naturally as I breathe. I want to know who I am.
Right now I feel so desperate that I feel like if I back away from any part of recovery work, any part of speaking my story that I will hit bottom. The only place I see to go from here is to beat the shit out of my kids so I can prove that I am a monster. Until this crisis passes I need to not be alone with my children. As humiliating and pathetic as I feel. That is what I need. I need help.
I have friends coming to spend time with my kids while I hide in the garage. I should contact a few more people. This is very hard. But I have support and I will figure this out. But it’s really hard.
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?
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.
Last night I went to my support group. It was more or less “my turn” to share my story but that was not given support or space. I was expected to give short sound bites in ways that didn’t scare the horses. But I don’t have that kind of story. It’s hard when the act of speaking my story traumatizes people around me.
This is more of that “what to say” thing. When I get up the nerve to say these things out loud, with my voice, it is a big deal. I don’t do that. As loudly as I trumpet Radical Honest Damnit! I don’t actually describe these things out loud very well. And I need to. Ok, maybe not every incest survivor needs to, but I need to be able to speak about what happened to me. It is not fair that I have to continue bearing this in silence. Silencing me means telling me that I am wrong for talking about myself. Silencing me means that I am invisible. Silencing me means I deserve it.
When I finally get to the point of sharing my story I need people to look right back at me like I am still clean. Like I am still worth seeing. That’s why I want people to talk to me about my story. I leave details out every time. Often on accident. But when people ask me questions I realize what pieces I am conveniently telling and what pieces I am conveniently leaving out. I figure out a lot more of what scares me. But people have a limited capacity for that. I can only ask the same people to listen to the same stories so many times. But I have to tell them. I can’t be quiet and nice about it. I can’t keep my voice silent so that other people can ignore that horror exists.
The family members who are upset with me? The ones who sent me long and impassioned, or angry and defensive messages? Yeah. They don’t get me and they can’t. My niece sent me a message saying she hopes I can get over my father some day and return to the family and she doesn’t understand why I am hurting her so much because of things that happened before she was born. My cousin is saying, “All of that shit happened before I was born and now you are being mean to me so fuck you.”
I am not allowed to have my feelings and processes. It’s not ok that I view my mother and my sister as culpable. I am supposed to “let it go” which means forgive and forget and move on with the victimization stuff. How do I tell my niece that I have to cut her off because of the ways her mother sexually assaulted her and her brother. Because I need to ensure that people like my niece, who have been pretty badly sexually abused, are not an influence.
I just did a nasty thing. I sent my niece a response and I shouldn’t have. I told her that this, right now, actually has very little to do with my dad. This is about my mother and my sister sent me off to be raped and my sister participated in the rape and molestation of her own children. As long as people continue to talk to my mother and sister like they are normal people I can’t stand near any of them. Because they are acting like my mom and my sister ate good people who made a mistake. I’m sorry but systematically sending your daughter off to be raped means you are not a good person. You lose the chance at good person status for this lifetime.
And I told my niece that as long as she wants to continue to act like her own abuse didn’t happen and she can go about her normal day to day life with her mother and my mother acting like they are ok reasonable people… I can’t know her. Because she obviously feels like that kind of abuse is ok and she continues to take whatever people dish out. And therefore I don’t want her interacting with my daughter because she will pass on the feeling that girls deserve that treatment and you should keep your mouth shut when it happens. Not my fucking babies you pieces of shit.
I am frantic, scared, and angry. And I feel like it’s not ok to say what happened to me. I feel very unsafe. I feel very attacked. Even here, within my family in my home. In my sanctuary I still feel like someone will show up at any second and do horrible things to me. Want to know why I feel that way?
Because I am in a place where emotionally I am a small child. But I have small children. And they have needs. And small children don’t give a shit about anyone but themselves. Small children want to be protected and to sit and stare and dream and become. I can’t be the grown up right now. Thank god I don’t have to.
As I sit here and spin my wheels getting more and more upset with that group and my niece and my cousin and… I realize that I am trying to look around me for unsafe people and then getting mad when they are unsafe. My niece isn’t even close to going through recovery. She’s too close. And I need to leave her alone because sharing my story in the way I am is kicking her. Maybe she doesn’t deserve to have me take on the abuser role too. I do think I’ll be able to long term live with myself though. I didn’t say that Tyra was bad in and of herself. I said that as long as she associates with them she will accept their reality and it is broken. She doesn’t get to pretend that they are not monsters with me. With everyone else, fine. Not with me.
Now I’m drifting off into thinking about my kids. I need to have chats with my friends. As much as I am a raging pervert, I’m also the victim of incest, rape, and molestation. I need to not have sex stuff around my kids. I need that to not be part of their existence in any way. And people think Shanna isn’t listening. It’s not ok. I have been interrupting people for a while, but I need to take a more proactive stance. I need to talk to people before the conversation gets going about what is ok in my house. Because that is how you break cycles. My daughters will not learn what a blowjob is at this age range. That will not be part of their world. And when my daughters do learn about blowjobs it will be because we are having an age appropriate discussion about sex with our clothes on and there will be no porn to demonstrate. I am not going to lock up my books about being a survivor of sexual abuse but I want to get through this awful period of recovery so that I can stop talking about it around them.
My children cannot support me. It does not matter that I feel like a small child right now, I’m not. And my children should not have to support me in any way. That is not the role of a child. I’m hurting but they cannot fix me, nor should I in any way ask them to try. I’m not going to an extreme so don’t get paranoid. I’m not going to be able to help the fact that I cry randomly sometimes. But what I say is, “I’m thinking about stuff that happened a long time ago. I should probably start thinking about you though because you are awesome.” Then we run off and play. But I can’t do that today.
Today I am too small.
If I have a type at all it is asshole. I like blustery, aggressive, often sociopathic men. And then god damnit they had better melt for me. And it works. But I don’t go for the traditional bad boy. I like geeks. I like the smart kid grown up into the bully role.
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.
My brother said that our father absolutely encouraged him to rape me.
That’s what I call it when I go behind closed doors and don’t really respond to requests. I’ve already done once since becoming a parent and I kind of expect it to continue. I’ve been through these kinds of super intense freak outs before. I did a few while I was dating Tom. And I wrote about them then. I need to go read my archive again.
Everything is all jumbled up right now. I’m sad about my uncle dying. I’m sad that I didn’t know it was time to say goodbye because no one thought to tell me. I’m sad that my mother used his death as a chance to ambush me so that she could try to get her own needs met. I’m proud that when my mother called me I told her she needs to go to therapy and say out loud many times that she sent me to my father so he could rape me. She did that. She has to say out loud, “I sent my daughter to her father so that her father could rape her.” She has to say that. If she doesn’t say that, there is nothing. Ever again. I cannot acknowledge that she is alive. Until the day my mother can say, “I allowed my daughter to be raped” I have nothing to say to her. It is her fucking fault.
I called my mother in the middle of a horrific sexual assault and begged her to come get me and she told me no. She bears the burden of that guilt. I want to punch her in the face. I want to run her over with my car. That fucking horrible disgusting repulsive excuse for a mother. I think she should be dead. I hate her so much. My mother sent me to my father over and over. The custody agreement said he should NEVER BE ALONE WITH ME. And I was. Repeatedly.
My brother told me that our father didn’t explicitly say it but he made it very clear it was perfectly ok for my brothers to have sex with me if they wanted regardless of whether I wanted it or not. Let me say that another way. My father told my brothers that it was ok to rape me. My brother told me that it was very understood in the household that if my mother wasn’t up for sex my dad would fuck my sister. If my sister wasn’t up for sex… guess who that leaves. Me. I was three years old when my parents divorced.
What the fuck happened to me. I can’t remember it very clearly. I was too little. There is court documentation of my fathers confession. The detective on my case told me that my father confessed to far more than I remember and he was horrified by what my father said. Let me say that again, a professional police detective who works on many many many abuse cases. That is his job. He was horrified by what happened to me. But I don’t remember it. It scares the shit out of me. What the hell other memories are lurking in my body and in my brain. When I am 75 years old will I wake up and say, “72 years ago my father raped me and I’m not over it.”
I am so fucking pissed off at my mother. She wants to deny that it happened. She doesn’t want to admit her guilt. It is her fault. She was my mother. Her whole job was to ensure that I reached adulthood in relative safety and she failed.failed.failed. I get to be angry about that. I get to take her to task for that and no one gets to intervene. No one, including my co-dependent, enabler, abusive sister, get to tell me that I have to change how I feel about my piece of shit mother.
Abusive. My mother told me that if she hadn’t been Catholic she would have aborted me. My sister told me that my mother was packed and ready to leave my father when my mom turned up pregnant with me. There was always the very clear implication that it is therefore my fault that my sister was raped for three more years.
Maybe that is why that stupid, worthless piece of shit never said anything about my mom sending me off to my father’s for the weekend. Maybe she just thought it was my turn.
From The Courage to Heal page 44:
“Write about the ways you’re still affected by the abuse. What are you still carrying in terms of your feelings of self-worth, your work, your relationships, your sexuality? How is your life still pained, still limited?
Write about the strengths you’ve developed because of the abuse. Think what it’s taken for you to survive. What are the qualities that enabled you to make it? Perseverance? Flexibility? Self-sufficiency? Write about your strengths with pride.”
Well right this minute I am hiding in my garage alone in the house. Noah took the kids off to a fun sounding party and I was not up for it at all. I feel incredible anxiety about going there. I feel like I could probably handle being around people who are already close to me but the circle has to be insanely close to me. I don’t trust that people aren’t going to hurt me or the kids. I am not able to connect with new people at all. I cannot assess current threat. That’s really the problem. I feel like I am being revictimized pretty much all the time right now. I feel like I am living inside my nightmare. And I’m trying to recognize that it is right now. This came hard and fast. This is not always. This is not usual. This is not my whole life.
I am not this broken person hiding in the garage. But I am. This is awful. Right now I am full of hate. Hate hate hate hate hate. I can hate everyone. That is one of the big ways I am still affected by the abuse. I am afraid to learn more about magic. I am afraid of being a neophyte in public. I am afraid that if I take agency and change things that everything will go to shit.
What strengths do I have? Well, there isn’t a whole lot in the world that scares me. It’s kind of funny, actually. My father held a gun to my head when I was 9 years old. He forced me to suck his cock. What in the hell else is likely to go wrong in modern America that will rivel that? Acts of nature? Bah. Acts of terrorism, well if you must. Do I deserve to live? Yes, mother fucker, I deserve to live.
I deserve to live and you don’t. I am glad you are dead you piece of shit. And I hope my mom grows a set and offs herself soon. Because then I will be over this god damn sword of Damocles. I am ready to move on with my life.
Oh stages of grief, how I know you well. I want to rush through you. Can I fake it till I make it?
And the most important reason I am doing well and my mother is not? I tell the truth.
Edited to add: this post is about to hit 6,000 views. If you are looking for pornography, please keep looking. Heck, you can even look around this blog. I write pornography sometimes. This post is not about pornography. This is my life. I was a brutalized child. Please don’t beat off thinking about my father raping me. I don’t mind in the slightest if you kind of imagine that kind of thing in abstract, please have enough respect not to use my actual trauma.
If you are a rape survivor there are much better posts here for you than this one. This one just makes you sad.
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Oh fuck. I remember. I remember how it happened. After he gave me the milkshake that tasted funny, I’m sure it was spiked, and after he took me to bed and made me sleep naked and fingered me and after I got up to throw up in the bathroom…
I remember and I wish I didn’t. He came to get me. He asked me why I was sniveling in the bathroom. I told him I had been sick. He made me clean up. Then he told me I needed to apologize for making a mess. He walked over and sat down on the couch. He sat down and then I noticed a gun in his hand. He set it down pretty obviously on the seat next to him. He told me to crawl to him. I did. He told me to apologize while I was sucking his cock. And I did.
And I’m not allowed to feel anything about this memory right now.
But now I am because it is 2:30 am and I just sent Noah to bed. I forced him to hammer out with me what memory was surfacing right now, why is it triggering me so hard, and how can I get through it a bit faster, damnit. I am now re-reading The Courage to Heal and mocking myself for how very classic my pattern is. Yes this is a spiral, and yes I am in recovery, Chris. I am the survivor of incest. Tonight I said out loud to my husband that my father raped me. I am pretty sure that is the very first time in my life I have ever said that out loud. And oh my fucking god now I feel about it.
This feels overwhelming and horrifying and awful. I am drowning. This hurts so much. My father held a gun to my head and told me to suck his cock. And I was supposed to get up the next day and go to the amusement park with him. I asked him to take me home instead because I was sick from the alcohol poisoning he had given me. I couldn’t tell him that. And that is why my stomach hurts so bad if I have much alcohol. The sensation scares the ever loving shit out of me. When I was 18 years old I was given a date rape drug by someone I was out to have a one night stand with. I intended to have sex with him anyway but I doubt he knew that. I sincerely doubt he knew I was a sure thing. I’m pretty sure he thought I was the normal sort of stupid 18 year old who invites a guy up to a drinking party in a secluded mountain house and intends to say no. You know, one of those stupid women who have never been repeatedly raped from toddlerhood.
Right. You can see the problem there. And you can see how I can get away from this feeling. There are a lot of fucking valid reasons I want to derail from going where my head is heading right now. That’s a god damn terrifying place to be. I am trying to talk myself into releasing into the horrible body memories of my father raping me. And maybe I will have to pause and I will have to tell Puff about it. Maybe if I quiet my fingers I can find my voice.
Oh my fucking god. My mother told me that she breastfed me longer than any of her other children because, “It was the only way to keep them off of me.” I think she means my father. I think my father started actually raping my sister after I was born and that is why she resents me so much. But that’s a story I’m making up and I have no reason to think it is true. That’s trying to explain her actions with motives that make her actions justified. No. No. No. I am not to blame for my father molesting my sister. It is not my fault that my mother stayed as long as she did. Women in domestic violence situations often have to try leaving several times before they manage to get out. Even once they get out there is a ridiculous legacy of guilt and shame to deal with around allowing your FUCKING HUSBAND TO RAPE YOUR DAUGHTERS YOU PIECE OF SHIT CUNT. I don’t have to be diplomatic here about my mother. I don’t need to find a way to excuse the fact that she is the most disgusting, pathetic, worthless example of mothering I have ever fucking seen and I think that if she dies in a lot of pain it is exactly what she fucking deserves.
I called her on the fucking phone and begged her to come pick me up. She told me that I made my bed so now I have to lie in it. That was a consistent theme, sadly. I was often left with my father in a way that was phrased as me deserving him because I was a little kid and I asked to see my daddy. When I asked to see him she dropped me on his lap and said, “Fine! You want the bastard! Fuck you then you little bitch!” No really. My mother said that to me, verbatim. That was how she sent me to my father’s house. And then he molested me. And I called her and asked her to intervene because I was a god damn outrageously precocious child and I knew that what was happening to me was wrong and my mother told me that I made my bed now I have to lie in it.
Then my father raped me. And then he wanted me to get in the car the next day and go to the amusement park with him so he could show the world what a good dad he was. I’ve told the story about him insisting on me wearing short dresses with zippers so he could molest me in public, right? Yeah. And on the car ride home he screamed at me for being an ungrateful, pathetic, useless bitch because he already had the theme park tickets and he fucking wanted to go and now I’ve ruined everything and it is all my fault for being such a horrible, selfish, stupid bitch.
That is my story. That is the tape I hear in my head. I want to start listing off when… but I’ll only list the times that make my story seem better. But it’s totally fucking random. Sometimes it’s at times when it’s convenient and sometimes it is a nightmare. To continue setting the stage, it is now 3:00am. I took ~5 minutes off to visit the restroom, find carrots for mindless eating that will allow me to focus without contributing to my negative self esteem issues, lots of water, and I’m now out of excuses for not going down the rabbit hole. I’m sitting in my little corner under the cave next to the flowers. It’s not ready yet… but I’ll post a picture tomorrow. I hadn’t even realized what I was building until I typed it in this paragraph right now. I have a pretty sledgehammer like subconscious, don’t you think?
Oh my god. Why is that the first thing I say when I think of my father raping me. Why do I cry out to god to save me? Am I searching for that higher power? My therapist clearly thinks so and she’s pushing me loudly towards Wicca. (I saw what you did there, Sharon.) Which is a very clear choice. I was systematically told throughout my childhood that I was evil and bad by every one around me and I didn’t realize how blatant it was until Noah listed it off tonight. I don’t realize it until people express shock and horror that I don’t just know that my childhood was off the charts brutal.
My father gave me an alcoholic milkshake then penetrated me vaginally while rubbing himself vigorously against me. And right now I have the most overwhelming urge to masturbate it isn’t funny. I feel like I cannot continue telling this story because I have to go masturbate because it is so fucking hot that he did that to me.
That is why I am a disgusting piece of shit. That is why Femme Car does her stuff. Ha. Enh, Or maybe that’s me projecting my story onto other people I don’t know. That’s the annoying part of this introspection stuff. I am realizing that I don’t even know my friends. Most of the people I have been bonding with lately are big, physically intimidating men who were themselves hurt as children. I am solely interacting with people who identify as survivors. I am testing people out, slowly, one by one, seeing if they understand my language. Because only other survivors know what I’m talking about. And I’m text book. And that bothers me.
I feel offended by the fact that I am a text book incest survivor. God damnit don’t I think I am more special than that? Oh shit now I’m trying to get nasty with myself rather than feel this. See how this goes?
I’m going round and round in circles because I don’t know if I am actually breaking cycles or if I just moved them somewhere else. I’m desperately looking for proof that I am not like my family. I have to trot out these long list of examples of horrible exchanges. They aren’t horrible (uhm, mostly) in and of themselves if any of them had been one thing in my entire childhood. But it’s kind of a … wait. What the fuck am I saying. No. They were god damn horrible. I was heinously abused. I was horrifically, over the top, ridiculously abused. I was blamed for events that happened before my fucking birth. I have confirmation of this from my brother. He said it once, I can never ask him for that validation again. Now I have to just go on with my life believing my side of the story.
But first I have to hate my mother for a while and that’s hard. I love my mother a lot. I desperately wish that I got to be in a relationship with her right now. I want support desperately. No, let me rephrase this. Right now I am in a period of intense stress. Culturally I was brought up to believe that when you are in periods of intense stress and you need to ask for help you should first ask your family. Only my family would respond to my response for help by bringing the Titanic over and dropping it around my neck. And saying it that way makes it sound like I don’t care about their suffering, and I do. But nothing I do can fix their suffering and standing near them will allow them to hurt my children. So they can fuck off and die.
Earlier this week I was losing it with the kids. I was not in control of my emotions anymore. As the book calls it, I was in the emergency phase and I needed to call in as much help and childcare as I could. And I did. Before I picked up the book even, go me. And by losing it with the kids I mean that I got a bit ranty when Shanna was standing in the door way screaming at me because she wanted me to stop working but I was trying to paint. You can see how the conflict of needs here could feel intense. Maybe. Or maybe you think I am fucking nuts. But you are going to be in one of three camps. Either you will understand because you have also seen something hard and you have that monster somewhere inside of you and you are afraid of it, or you do not understand and you think that having that kind of monster inside of me makes *me* a monster, or you are a fairly empathetic person and you extrapolate from your own childhood (which was whatever it was) and you then react to how extreme my life was compared to your own life. I think most people are in the third category.
And that means that no matter what, forever, my discussion of my abuse has to be a private journey. Because it doesn’t matter where someone is in that trifecta of approaches, they can’t help me. Only I can. And my mom and my sister have to help themselves. And this is the 12 step talk stuff that I pick up in the water living in California. It’s just here. People talk about them as if they are things that everybody just knows. What does it say about me and my friends and my life that absolutely all of them know the 12 step language? All of us are in abuse cycles.
And I’m getting off topic and I’m getting tired. But this is something. This is a start. My father raped me. I don’t seem to be ready to feel it yet, but I will get there. And I feel in this moment like I have no choice but to recover the body memory of that. Why do I feel like I must go through intense personal discomfort (I was planning to stay up ALL NIGHT) in order to force myself into a weak enough physical state where I could no longer fight off the terror of feeling abused. My throat closed while I was typing.
And I had to pause right there to go check facebook and see for myself that the person who said he would come back and help me paint tomorrow responded and yes he really will be coming back. And the friend whose birthday party I am skipping said she understands. And I believe her. I don’t think she is lying and secretly fuming. I think she is probably sad for me that I am in a place where I am hurting like this. Why do I want to think she is mad at me? Because I want to start the cycle where I am begging people for reassurance. I feel like it is ok for me to ask for small amounts of reassurance constantly from the people I live with (We say “I love you!” multiple times a day and that counts), but not big displays. I need to keep that to a minimum. I seem to feel like it is ok for me to ask for help from the community in a big open way where anyone who wants to come shows up and does whatever kind of help they kind of halfheartedly get done because I feel bad directing them. I feel like I shouldn’t be bossy.
I get to the point of having panic attacks when I think about directing people right now. Dude. I taught high school. If anyone can direct large groups of people it’s me. Only I can’t. And I’m not sure how I feel about that.
I am sitting at home feeling upset that my friends are out at a dance event, or rather just getting home, and I’m sitting here obsessively writing on the internet about how broken I am. My father raped me. Not saying that out loud is ruining my life. I guess I need to start saying it then. After I go to sleep.
I set myself a rather ambitious schedule for house renovating. It was going to be very difficult for me to accomplish. I would have to keep up my energy and motivation through quite a bit more hard work. Right now I can’t do it. At this point I feel like the schedule was going to not be met anyway, or if it did… barely. With my uncle dying there is no way. I am spacy and unfocused. I am crying. I have no more patience left. I am on edge and brittle. I have to stop the big work.
Which is to say I need to finish puttering in the garage organizing stuff. But that’s not stuff that other people help with very well. 🙂 So I am going to get everything into the garage, install a grown up level lock on the door so Shanna can’t get into trouble, and I’m going to get it done slowly before my birthday. As much as I wanted to get this done so I could put pictures up and feel proud of myself… I’m not there. And I’m not going to be able to get there for a while. I’m having too hard of a time functioning.
I need to spend time with Shanna doing Shanna stuff for a while. I need to get her off the movies that turn her into a serious brat. Oh I cannot stand her behavior when she is watching a lot of movies. I need to get the sugar that I have been binging on out of the house. I was very deliberately using sugar and caffeine to fuel my ability to keep working. But my body feels like shit. Shanna is whinging and demanding sugar all day long. It needs to get out of my house again.
I need to come back to the center of what my life is right now. What am I actually doing at this stage of my life? I am raising my babies. I am trying to create a space where they have freedom to play without getting yelled at. I’ve been missing the mark on that one lately. I want to put a lock on the garage because I want her to be able to have a “yes” environment most of the time but then there is an adult space in the house where we can go to practice civilized behavior when I am up for it.
Right now I just can’t direct any more people. It takes energy, both physical and mental, that I don’t have. It is amazing to me that as wonderful as it is to have people come help, I still have a lot of work to do when they are here. And all of a sudden I can’t do it. Even though I wanted to. I’m so sorry I canceled on people.
I have been working like mad for months. I’m tired. I’m worn out.
This is blitz week, so all of my energy has been going towards trying to get house stuff done as quick as humanly possible. It’s been rather stressful. And then today, my uncle died. My uncle raised me. I was very close to him until my niece was born and I became not-the-favorite and I was just never very important again. My family took great pains to remind me today when I went to the hospital to say goodbye. I didn’t arrive until after he died because no one felt they needed to tell me they were taking him off life support. All of a sudden I have grave doubts about whether I will finish this project this week like I wanted.