Category Archives: breaking cycles

I hate Texas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am the martyr!

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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.

Age appropriate behavior

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s hard and scary.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why the fuck am I so scared.

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

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

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

The first step.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the bottom.

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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.

The difference

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I should have been removed from my family of origin because I was not safe.  No one protected me.  That is a failure on the part of my entire extended family and the system.  The difference between what happened to me and what is happening to my daughters is I know I am in a place right now where I am not competent to care for them as they need so I asked for help.  I went out and I admitted out loud that right now I need other people to care for my children so that they can come out of childhood unscathed. I may be fighting demons but they don’t need to get hit in the cross fire.

That is what my family doesn’t understand.  My sister and my mother have gone through these periods.  I’ve seen this from the kid side.  But what my mother and my sister did was scream at me, bring people home and have sex in front of me, basically they did anything to prove that they were bad.  But they didn’t start out bad people.  They started out good people who were making mistakes.  They became evil because they kept doing it.  Because they shame their victims and require silence about what they did.  I have that potential in me.

I feel the urge to harm them.  I visualize how I should do it.  I have detailed pictures in my head of what I should be doing to them.  And that is why I am freaking the fuck out.  The images are getting more intense.  I am fucking terrified of hurting my children and I don’t feel in control right now.  This is the cycle.  That is what is going on.  This is what my mother and sister were to weak to do.  They were too weak and to stupidly prideful to say, “I am weak and broken and I need help.”  So they perpetuated the abuse on to the next generation after me.  In the approximately 6 years since my brother broke contact with the family I have had conversations with my niece and nephew where they detailed their own sexual abuse history.  My nephew was raped.  That’s not my story to tell but I’m not keeping silent any more.  I was told I have no right to reveal his pain.  But I do.  Because he was abused by the same people who abused me and I have the right to stand up and say that my sister is a disgusting monster and she should be shunned.  She should be in jail.  She is not a good person who makes mistakes.  She is a child molester.  She is filth.  She deserves every bad thing in the world.

And my family is siding with her.  And I sit here and freak out with these pictures in my head.  I want to abuse my children the way I was abused.  And I pray that my friend drives very very fast on her way to care for my children today because I am very close to the edge.  I am not going to fall over it.  I can hold out long enough.

Because that is how you stop this.

And I’m glad I didn’t hit send.  Because I went in there and I dressed my baby more warmly because she was slightly chilly and I nursed her and I put her to bed and my older daughter asked me a bunch of questions and I answered them and then she told me to go away again because she likes watching her movies in private.

Why do I believe I am a monster who is going to harm them any second?

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Last night I went to my support group.  It was more or less “my turn” to share my story but that was not given support or space.  I was expected to give short sound bites in ways that didn’t scare the horses.  But I don’t have that kind of story.  It’s hard when the act of speaking my story traumatizes people around me.

This is more of that “what to say” thing.  When I get up the nerve to say these things out loud, with my voice, it is a big deal.  I don’t do that.  As loudly as I trumpet Radical Honest Damnit!  I don’t actually describe these things out loud very well.  And I need to.  Ok, maybe not every incest survivor needs to, but I need to be able to speak about what happened to me.  It is not fair that I have to continue bearing this in silence.  Silencing me means telling me that I am wrong for talking about myself.  Silencing me means that I am invisible.  Silencing me means I deserve it.

When I finally get to the point of sharing my story I need people to look right back at me like I am still clean.  Like I am still worth seeing.  That’s why I want people to talk to me about my story.  I leave details out every time.  Often on accident.  But when people ask me questions I realize what pieces I am conveniently telling and what pieces I am conveniently leaving out.  I figure out a lot more of what scares me.  But people have a limited capacity for that.  I can only ask the same people to listen to the same stories so many times.  But I have to tell them.  I can’t be quiet and nice about it.  I can’t keep my voice silent so that other people can ignore that horror exists.

The family members who are upset with me?  The ones who sent me long and impassioned, or angry and defensive messages?  Yeah.  They don’t get me and they can’t.  My niece sent me a message saying she hopes I can get over my father some day and return to the family and she doesn’t understand why I am hurting her so much because of things that happened before she was born.  My cousin is saying, “All of that shit happened before I was born and now you are being mean to me so fuck you.”

I am not allowed to have my feelings and processes.  It’s not ok that I view my mother and my sister as culpable.  I am supposed to “let it go” which means forgive and forget and move on with the victimization stuff.  How do I tell my niece that I have to cut her off because of the ways her mother sexually assaulted her and her brother.  Because I need to ensure that people like my niece, who have been pretty badly sexually abused, are not an influence.

I just did a nasty thing.  I sent my niece a response and I shouldn’t have.  I told her that this, right now, actually has very little to do with my dad.  This is about my mother and my sister sent me off to be raped and my sister participated in the rape and molestation of her own children.  As long as people continue to talk to my mother and sister like they are normal people I can’t stand near any of them.  Because they are acting like my mom and my sister ate good people who made a mistake.  I’m sorry but systematically sending your daughter off to be raped means you are not a good person.  You lose the chance at good person status for this lifetime.

And I told my niece that as long as she wants to continue to act like her own abuse didn’t happen and she can go about her normal day to day life with her mother and my mother acting like they are ok reasonable people… I can’t know her.  Because she obviously feels like that kind of abuse is ok and she continues to take whatever people dish out.  And therefore I don’t want her interacting with my daughter because she will pass on the feeling that girls deserve that treatment and you should keep your mouth shut when it happens.  Not my fucking babies you pieces of shit.

I am frantic, scared, and angry.  And I feel like it’s not ok to say what happened to me.  I feel very unsafe.  I feel very attacked.  Even here, within my family in my home.  In my sanctuary I still feel like someone will show up at any second and do horrible things to me.  Want to know why I feel that way?

Because I am in a place where emotionally I am a small child.  But I have small children.  And they have needs.  And small children don’t give a shit about anyone but themselves.  Small children want to be protected and to sit and stare and dream and become.  I can’t be the grown up right now.  Thank god I don’t have to.

As I sit here and spin my wheels getting more and more upset with that group and my niece and my cousin and…  I realize that I am trying to look around me for unsafe people and then getting mad when they are unsafe.  My niece isn’t even close to going through recovery.  She’s too close.  And I need to leave her alone because sharing my story in the way I am is kicking her.  Maybe she doesn’t deserve to have me take on the abuser role too.  I do think I’ll be able to long term live with myself though.  I didn’t say that Tyra was bad in and of herself.  I said that as long as she associates with them she will accept their reality and it is broken.  She doesn’t get to pretend that they are not monsters with me.  With everyone else, fine.  Not with me.

Now I’m drifting off into thinking about my kids.  I need to have chats with my friends.  As much as I am a raging pervert, I’m also the victim of incest, rape, and molestation.  I need to not have sex stuff around my kids.  I need that to not be part of their existence in any way.  And people think Shanna isn’t listening.  It’s not ok.  I have been interrupting people for a while, but I need to take a more proactive stance.  I need to talk to people before the conversation gets going about what is ok in my house.  Because that is how you break cycles.  My daughters will not learn what a blowjob is at this age range.  That will not be part of their world.  And when my daughters do learn about blowjobs it will be because we are having an age appropriate discussion about sex with our clothes on and there will be no porn to demonstrate.  I am not going to lock up my books about being a survivor of sexual abuse but I want to get through this awful period of recovery so that I can stop talking about it around them.

My children cannot support me.  It does not matter that I feel like a small child right now, I’m not.  And my children should not have to support me in any way.  That is not the role of a child.  I’m hurting but they cannot fix me, nor should I in any way ask them to try.  I’m not going to an extreme so don’t get paranoid.  I’m not going to be able to help the fact that I cry randomly sometimes.  But what I say is, “I’m thinking about stuff that happened a long time ago.  I should probably start thinking about you though because you are awesome.”  Then we run off and play.  But I can’t do that today.

Today I am too small.

I’m on vacation.

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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.

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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.

My father raped me

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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.

Good deed

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I was outside working in the yard and my neighbor started talking to me.  He has been coaching softball for one of the local high schools for years.  This year, for the first time, he is coaching the JV girls team.  He’s struggling with the emotions and the drama.  He was ready to quit.  I asked him how he would feel if it was his kid having trouble with a coach.  Would he want them to quit or would he want them to work it out?  I also told him that these girls desperately need men like him and he is doing a great service to the world if he helps them become stronger and more confident in listening to difficult to hear feedback.

He said he won’t quit and he’s glad he talked to me.  Today is a good day.

I choose life

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As of Saturday morning things were not so hot with my dear friend.  However, on Saturday evening I got a phone call from that friend.  He called me to tell me was sorry for the ways in which he was derailing the conversation.  The stuff I was talking about made him think about very uncomfortable things from his own life and he couldn’t handle it and he wanted me to stop talking.  He admitted the whole thing top to bottom.  I laughed and I cried.  I thanked him for trusting me enough to be honest with me completely and totally for the first time in our friendship.  Then I bossed him around (see how that works) and I told him to come back over.

Noah, my friend and I sat around and talked about broken dynamics.  We talked about where we are reacting to old baggage and where we have created new stuff together.  We talked about the parts of our dynamic that are good and healthy for us and we talked about the parts that are not healthy for us.  Then we tried to figure out how we can get more of the good and less of the bad because we are ready to grow up.  We are ready to stop hurting the people we love so much.

And I can’t get very detailed because an awful lot of what we talked about isn’t my story.

And Sunday we had brunch with another very long time friend.  I like to call him the California Mindfucker because he is very interested in getting into peoples brains and playing with the goo.  Not to mention that he was one of my first lovers/play partners in the bdsm scene and he has done a fair bit of fucking with my brain.  But the ways he does it are so screamingly over the top weird California new-agey feeling.  I love it.  Of course we did more spelunking into brains but this time, for the first time ever, I paid attention to his story.  That feels horrible to admit.  I feel like I should not be the one who “takes” in a given interaction.  But I often am, and that feels bad.

But oh man.  Since I have started consciously trying to ask for and accept more help I have seen a dramatic increase in the intensity of my friendships in a really wonderful way.  I am allowing people to do things for me I’ve never allowed them to do before.  I didn’t realize how lonely I have been my entire life.  No wonder I pursue sex with such vigor.  It’s the only time I let myself have a close, mutual relationship.  I don’t let anyone I am not currently fucking do anything for me and I make those people go through hell before I let them do stuff for me.  Instead I set myself up as the victim/martyr with all the need.

Interesting.  Enh, sorta.  Ok that’s hyperbole too.  But that’s my story about myself sometimes.  Anyhow, at this point I am trying to change up how I relate to people I love the most.  It’s an interesting process because almost all of the people I love the most have some fairly major issues.  That’s the whole “prickly and difficult” thing.  In order for us to get to a place where we know how to be more respectful of one another I have to start to look at my friends more.  I have to actually see them in a way I have never looked at them before.  I need to figure out where my defensive mechanisms are and actively try to change them.

I’m not really going to be able to go where I originally thought I was going with this post.  I got derailed by a wonderful, awesome person.  I got to go talk to an old friend and tell her about the highs and lows of our relationship and she gave me feedback on her perspective of them so I could figure out where I end and she begins.  And she tolerated a lot of babbling.  It was nice.  She has been my friend for so very long.

I’m starting to realize that anyone who is in my life at this point is fucking serious about loving me or they wouldn’t be in my life.  It takes intense effort and tolerance to be my friend.  And lots of people do it.  No really, lots of people.  I am putting out feelers for my birthday party and fixing my house and people are showing up.  Not hundreds, but lots.  Lots and lots.  More than I imagined.  I am really lucky.  I am really blessed.  I want to figure out where I end and they begin.  I want to see them more clearly.  I want to stop seeing ghosts.

I choose life.

Interesting food for thought

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I’m stuck in one place while Calli takes a nap.  I was browsing around I found this blog entry.  It’s about lower back pain among Adult Children of Alcoholics and it relates it to the second chakra.

Kind of interesting that I’m so focused on writing and creating a safe space in my house right now.  Even more interesting is that my entire body (but mostly my lower back) seems to have to be brutalized in the process.  Maybe I’m trying to give birth to myself.  God knows birth hurt.

Crossed wires

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I have a thing for difficult people.  I am not an easy person to be friends with and I tend to like people who are also difficult to like.  Sharp people with a lot of edges and defenses.  I understand them.  Unfortunately there are some down sides to hanging out with folks like that.

Last night I invited a good friend over.  The support group I am in is going to involve me sitting down and trying to tell my ‘whole story’ some week soon.  I haven’t spoken these things out loud much.  The majority of my communication about these topics has been through writing.  I feel like I go mute when I want to speak of them.  It is very difficult to overcome a lifetime of taboo and speak the words.  I need practice doing it.  The thing is, I like difficult people.  People with sharp edges and defenses.  It didn’t go so hot.  Basically what happened is that this friend and Noah both have similar geek tendencies and in order to feel optimally comfortable they don’t step outside those patterns when they are in the same room.  But uhm, those geek tendencies make it so I am completely unable to speak about my stuff.

So when things weren’t going particularly well and they were not reacting in the ways I needed I got very frustrated.  And then Calli woke up and I had to go nurse.  We had been sitting in the hot tub.  I was hoping the dark would make it easier for me to talk.  When I got out of the hot tub I realized that I was pretty much done outside anyway.  I tried to communicate that I did not intend to come back and they should follow me in fairly quickly.  I didn’t mean for them to do so instantly because I needed to nurse the baby anyway.  But the wires got crossed.  They didn’t come in for about an hour.

So I sat on the couch and rocked and felt increasingly invalidated.  This isn’t exactly something I do much.  I don’t even say the details out loud to Noah much when we are doing our metaconversations.  No really, I am not able to physically speak about these things well.  As time passed I felt increasingly unsafe and like I had made a bad decision to try.  They came  in and acted like little kids who broke a window and are hoping no one noticed.  I flipped out.  I called them names and ran to the office and sobbed.  Then I got up and I went to the cupboard for a towel and I walked back into the office and I picked up the scalpel.

I don’t know what it is like for other cutters, but I love it.  I love the fact that for those seconds the only thing in the world is the hot, terrible burn on my leg.  I can’t think about anything else.  By the time I get to cutting I am no longer capable of finding the words to talk about the monsters.  I can’t.  I am too much absolutely in the present.  I cannot think about the past because I am unrelievedly in the present.  I feel like cutting is a gift.  Cutting allows me to walk away from any situation in my past and not think about it.  No matter how intense my feelings are, I can make them stop.  I can go completely and totally flat line.  It’s not disassociating.  It is forcing my body to have no space for anything other than the pain.  That may sound unpleasant, but I promise you that emotional pain is harder and hurts more.

I yelled at Noah that he said… something.  I don’t even remember what.  Something about them wanting to hurt me.  Noah’s response was, “No.  We didn’t say that.  And you will know it later.”  I thought that was wonderful.  It gave me space to think it then without trying to demand that his reality supplant mine right then.  My friend apologized profusely and genuinely was upset.  He is a wonderful person and he would move mountains for me.  He loves me a lot.  But you see, I like sharp, difficult people.  And they often have a lot of defenses.  He was trying to make himself feel comfortable because the things I was talking about upset him.  He wanted to comfort me, but he didn’t know how.

I spend a lot of time living at that juncture.  That is what living with an Aspie is like.  They can stand near you and really not understand at all that you are having a whole emotional experience in front of them.  I don’t know how to describe what that is like on a day to day basis.  To be fair, Noah has learned my “tells” for when I am having an emotional experience at this point.  Noah is quite good.  It took him years and we’ve had some awful arguments.  But he learned.  My friend hasn’t learned my tells.  And when Noah is distracted by other people he stops staring at me intently looking for tells.  So they both managed to miss almost all of the signals from start to finish.

They didn’t mean to, but they did actually create a space where it was unsafe for me to talk.  And they are big boys and get to put on their big boy panties and deal with feeling bad about that.  And I need to put on my big girl panties and accept the fact that I set them up to fail.  Talking about this stuff is hard for me.  I need very specific kinds of support to do it.  There is not a worse possible two person combination for creating that space amongst my entire network.  Both of my boys can be wonderfully supportive and safe to talk to… one on one.  When I get to dictate 100% of the terms of the conversation.  Heh.  But when they are standing next to one another (or sitting, whatever) they all of a sudden have to take one another into account and I feel like they are both pathologically unable to be safe for me around another alpha male geek.  I’m not sure why.  But they trigger the fuck out of one another.  (Ok, I have suspicions as to why, but that’s not part of this story.)

Thing is… this isn’t news.  At all.  And I invited these two men to be the ones I tried to practice telling my story to?  Awesome way to ensure that absolutely everyone is upset.  That was the wrong decision.  I could have invited just about anyone else.  I could have invited that friend and sat with him in a separate space from Noah.  I could have told them early on in the night that I need them both to take a vow of silence because if they talk over me I will be unable to speak–and they would have done it.  They love me.  They love me so much that they have both been through years of me being nasty and mean to them.  The friend in question?  Uhm, I cracked a few of his ribs years ago when I was overly rough with him.  He wasn’t thrilled, but he has never ever been nasty to me because of it.  (It was an accident.  Really.)  Naw, it is part of this story.  I think this friend would have walked away from whatever else he was doing and married me if I had asked him to.  He loves me.  A lot.  And Noah and he kind of have a low level dick contest when they are together.  And they are both socially clueless all the time anyway.  Yeah.  I really invited the wrong combination.

Why do I do that?  Why when I get to the point of wanting to spill my guts, do I need to talk about my sexual abuse in front of men who feel slightly competitive towards one another and are unwilling to be flexible when the other is present?  Maybe because I don’t want to tell the story and I want reason to be upset and angry instead so I can focus my energy there.  I want to be mad at my boys because they love me so much and I want to hurt them badly for committing the unforgivable sin of loving me.  I want to start getting hyperbolic now because that’s the headspace I am in.  I think that is the underlying reason.  I think I picked them because talking about these things is horribly painful and I would rather derail onto another strong emotion than look at them.  I would rather look for any reason in the world to turn around and start emotionally kicking the people who love me as hard as I can.  I am quite certain my friend didn’t sleep well and he probably feels very bad for hurting me.  At this point he probably is blaming himself for being a terrible friend.

Or not.  Or maybe that is my story and he went home and slept great and he thinks that I am in a place where I am hurting and he is sorry that I am hurting so much and it’s not about him.  I hope that is what happened.  I’m not sure he has boundaries that strong, but I’ll hope for him.

And that leaves me.  In the office.  With a leg I can’t let my kids see for a long time.  Right before our big European vacation.  Awesome.  It won’t blow up my life, but it is going to add a low level of stress for a long time.  I am going to be freaked out about the possibility of Shanna seeing it.  We are kind of a naked house.  I am more of a clothes person, but when it is hot I don’t have a problem with stripping.  I often work in the yard with no clothes on because I’m easier to wash off.  It just seems practical.  But that’s off the table for a while.

It’s really not big as far as patches go, at least not for me.  I was pretty tentative last night.  I haven’t used a scalpel in a long time and I was having trouble figuring out how I wanted to hold the blade.  You see, as much as I may be suicidal, I am a perfectionist.  I am not interested in going in deeper than I intend.  I want to be very particular about going through just one layer of skin at a time.  It makes it a much longer more burning process.  It also requires more self control to move very slowly.  That is what gives me the intense focus that severs my connection to the memories.  My old therapist, Traci, was a Harm Reduction person.  She didn’t think that addicts or cutters, or whatever other self destructive behavior pattern you have, necessarily needed to stop.  Obviously they were filling a need.  You just should be aware and careful of how you use it.  Obviously it is better to find other ways of coping.  But if this is what you got, you use it.

I haven’t needed to cut in a long time.  Last night it didn’t feel optional.  Last night I felt like I was completely unsafe and in danger of being actively hurt or reprimanded or something if I continued to feel those feelings.  It was not ok to be in that part of my brain.  I’m not even sure I understand entirely why.  Ok, yeah… their behavior was sucking.  But I know that about them.  My entire relationship with both of them is predicated around me bullying them into acting how I want them to act.  I’m probably not supposed to admit that out loud, but no… really.  The default expectation when we are together is I decide how they are allowed to behave.  I give them longer and shorter leashes depending on my mood. Really.  That is pretty much the only way I can stand being around them and oh man that sounds horrible.  I’m feeling terribly guilty right now.  But the thing is, I’m setting boundaries.  And it’s ok for me to set boundaries.  The boys don’t notice when I try to set my boundaries in subtle, nuanced ways because that is not part of their language.  They both really appreciate a 2×4 upside the head because otherwise they do not notice what is going on.  They cannot step outside their own stuff to listen to other people unless the other person bullies them into silence.

What an interesting symbiotic relationship.  To be fair, I am describing them while picturing them at the absolute worst of their combined behavior while together.  Both of them are much easier to communicate with one on one and I normally only need a flyswatter and not a 2×4.  Ahem.

Through the writing of this I have gone through feeling hurt, angry, sad, melancholy, amused, and at this point I’m shaking my head with resignation.  My boys were my boys.  The problem is, I wasn’t me.  The little girl who was badly sexually abused and who was badly emotionally abused at home isn’t part of who I am on a regular basis.  I am not a hesitant person.  I am not withdrawn.  I am engaged with the world.  I am strong and assertive.  I have opinions and by Gawd I’ll not hesitate to share them.  But I’m also nice.  I believe in justice and bullying is one of the fastest ways to make me stand up and shout someone down.  My boys are bullies.  Lovable bullies, but bullies.  Normally I am great with that dynamic.  I think it is fun and funny.  It is endearing.

But my little girl doesn’t need a bully.  I shouldn’t have invited that friend.  That was a very hurtful thing for me to do to both of us.  This is the kind of thing that is normally a stumbling block to forward progress.  I know that the friend in question doesn’t know this blog exists let alone read it.  So I could go forward feeling like I made my mea culpa to the world and “oh look how evolved I am for dissecting my feelings” and then I will stop trying for a while because I proved that talking about these things in person is unsafe.  But the thing is, I picked someone who doesn’t know how to talk to a little girl.  That’s not really his fault.  He doesn’t have that life experience and he doesn’t recognize whatsoever that I’m having a massive psychological experience in front of him.  He thinks I’m me.  And I’m just as much of a bully as him and I love him for it and he loves me for it.  We accept and like that part of one another.  In respectful ways.  Our dynamic has gotten much healthier over the years.  I still have to set the terms for our interactions.  And I didn’t last night.  I’m not sure I would have been able to keep it up even if I had tried because the space where I can talk prohibits that kind of strength.

I need to talk to someone else.  And that’s normally the stumbling block to progress.  I need to create space in my life to talk about this more.  It’s hard though.  Calli is uhm, resisting weaning efforts.  I think she is nursing twice as much as she was three weeks ago and I’m ready to put my head through a window.  She is, in fact, in the living room with Noah fussing loudly.  But I have 2 more minutes of personal time.  Damnit.

Being bad

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I’ve always had a thing about being called a bad girl.  There is no quicker way to get me to modify my behavior.  If someone even strongly hints that what I am doing is bad I disintegrate.  I am instantly ready to appease that person pretty much no matter what they require of me.  A lot of the anger people see in me is because I have no other way of defending myself from the overwhelming pressure of feeling I am bad all the time.  I am not bad.  I am not mean.  I am not a terrible person.

These thoughts haunt me.  And the thing is… mostly I’m just upset at myself for my thoughts.  I guess that Catholic baptism really took.  I imagine doing bad, violent things.  I imagine starving my baby because I hate her so much for wanting to come near my nipple.  What I actually do is go to my baby and nurse her.  I might delay for a minute or two as I try to gain physical control over myself so that I can sit through the painful experience without lashing out at her.

But from Calli’s point of view I am a slightly dotty but affectionate and thoroughly adequate mother.  But I still feel like I am bad because I have thoughts towards her that I consider inappropriate.  I shouldn’t ever feel that way about my beautiful, wonderful baby.  I am a monster.

I even went out and bought formula.  But she didn’t like it.  So I grit my teeth and I went back to nursing.  I need to be careful about that gritting my teeth thing.  I’ve cracked two teeth and my dentist is rather upset with me.

I am doing it.  I am doing exactly what I am supposed to be doing.  I am providing not quite instant, but fairly rapid care around the clock.  I even mostly smile while I am doing it.  I cuddle her.  I wear her on my back for hours every day.  I kiss her.  I hug her.  Why do I feel like my very existence is a terrible horrible thing and will hurt her.  Post partum depression, blah blah blah.  No.  Because it isn’t just Calli.  And it isn’t just right now.  This isn’t all the time, but it’s a lot of the time.  And it is far less true now than at any other point in my life.  (Except the first year of Shanna’s life.  That was the longest period I have ever gone without a depressive episode and it was still brutal.)

I’m telling stories about my father.  That’s wrong.  I know that is part of it.  But why do I like to have my lovers do obscene things to me while telling me I am a good girl and I thank them and call them Daddy? (Uhm, not every lover.  Just some special ones.)  And then there is that eternal quest for Daddy.  I want to name them all.  I want to point out that two of the most important ones have the same name as my father/brothers.  In retrospect that has been interesting.

I had to break there because Calli woke up crying again and again last night.  I have now had a relatively full night of sleep despite her having a lot of wake ups.  I had to sit in here and cry hysterically for a few minutes while Noah rocked the baby.  And then as her cries got increasingly distressed I realized that this is one of those chop wood, carry water moments.  My baby needed me last night pretty desperately.  She is just hitting a bunch of new milestones.  She is teething.  She is hitting separation anxiety like a brick wall.  So I got my crying under control and I started chanting, nurse baby, cuddle husband.  And I did.  And I didn’t sleep well but I got through the night and Calli got to nurse as much as she needed (which was a lot) and Noah got to have the kind of cuddling that makes him feel better.

And I still feel bad.  I did everything I was supposed to do.  I’m beginning to feel like there isn’t a way for me to truly be right.  At least on my bad days.  Good days are fine.  I suspect today will be another bad day.  But my friend is coming over so I will hold it together.  Enh, I would mostly be fine whether she is here or not.  But I will fake cheerful better with her here.

It’s weird to be deliberately faking my emotions.  I do a lot of it with the kids.  They don’t need to know what I’m really feeling most of the time.  So of course there is this big part of me which feels like I am a terrible awful liar.  Is it lying if I never tell my children about my self-loathing?  Or is that just good boundaries?  Does that fall into the category of not telling the cashier in the grocery store?  I’m really struggling with understanding appropriate disclosure right now.  I’m really struggling with the idea that most of the time I shouldn’t disclose because other people will be made to feel uncomfortable.  I shouldn’t even be allowed to talk about being assaulted because other people feel bad.  I am making people feel bad.  It’s all my fault.  If I could keep my stupid, pathetic mouth shut I wouldn’t be hurting other people.

There.  That’s why I’ve never been able to get deeper into my shit than this.  I hit this brick wall.  I feel like I should shut up.  I feel like what I am doing, even if I am doing it just on my journal on the internet, makes me a terrible person because people feel bad when I do it.  The logical part of my brain understands that people an opt out of reading this and the logical part of my bran understands that people aren’t feeling bad because of my actions.  They are feeling bad because horrible things happened to me and they are sorry.  But that doesn’t seem to matter.  It’s not really about other people.  It’s about me.  It’s about my family telling me that I should keep my dirty laundry in the closet.  It’s about being told that it is embarrassing for me to tell anyone what happened.  How’s that.  My mom doesn’t want me to talk about this stuff because she thinks I should be ashamed of it and she doesn’t want people to know about my shame.

I am ashamed.  I do feel like it was my fault.  There is some part of my brain that decided that the stuff with my father had to be my fault.  And as a result I have spent 17 years fucking men I shouldn’t and often calling them Daddy.  I want my Daddys to hurt me.  No, I don’t want it.  I need it.  I require it.  If they do not violently abuse me I don’t want to call them Daddy.  That is one of the biggest triggers for me.  If someone scares me just right during a relationship they instantly feel like Daddy.  This is so Electra Complex.  So standard.  But it is standard.  I have been trying like hell to find a Daddy to fuck since my father killed himself.

I started dating a man when I was 18.  He was 30.  He had ten years experience in the bdsm scene when I met him.  He was my first Daddy.  He absolutely followed the campsite rule, so don’t start jumping to awful conclusions about him.  He left me much better than he found me.  I dated him for four years and lived with him for three years and I was in a 24/7 Owner/slave relationship with him for two of those years.  We engaged in some really intense play in that period.  I will say that for all we played absolutely to the edge of safety, he was very serious about safety.  He let me play with fire (literally) and do terrible self-destructive things and he kept me safe.  He let me grow up in a safe, secure environment where I was very loved.  He was very anti drugs and he didn’t drink while I was under 21.  I cannot stress enough that despite there being all the hallmarks of it being a terrible situation to outside vanilla folk, that was a very stable healthy relationship.  He taught me how to ask for what I wanted in very detailed and specific ways.  He taught me what communication looked like and didn’t look like.  (Which is not to say that he was always perfect at communication.)

But because society in general isn’t so big on relationships like that I fear it was “bad”.  I fear I am “bad” for having it and liking it.  Am I bad because of the things I do and the things I like?  I like to be beaten.  I like to have friends and lovers take implements like a cane or a single tail whip (I hate floggers) and beat me until I cry and scream and struggle to get away but the pain just keeps happening.  I feel very comforted by being completely overwhelmed with pain and having it stop.  I feel like that is a way for me to have control over an unavoidable physical process.  I cannot help the fact that I am in pain a lot or most of the time.  I have lower back pain from one of the assaults when I was a child.  I don’t even know if it is really physical pain from an injury at this point or if it is psychosomatic, but still hurting.

Specifically when I was a little girl there was a neighbor boy.  We were living in Whittier and I was in 4th or 5th grade, so whatever accompanying age that is.  He was 17.  He was a high school football player.  I talked to most of my neighbors because I was pretty desperately lonely.  This was after Tommy’s accident and he was living with us at home.  Tommy terrorized me.  He repeatedly tried to kill me.  He hurt me constantly in big and little ways.  My sister was dating the drug addict loser who gave her her second child.  She had no time for me because when there is a dick around she can’t think straight.  She never knew that the loser drug addict asked me for sex too.

Tommy would come into my room at night with knives and try to stab me.  I have never been able to get passed that in any way.  My brother literally wanted me dead.  He hated me that much.  How in the hell could I have deserved that?  Why did he feel that way?  Why did he think I was so awful?  It doesn’t really matter.  He was a kid with a lot of problems.  He was a boy with an evil father who was deliberately twisting him into a monster.  Tommy hurt me early and often.  And I had to get away from that.  So I wandered the neighborhood.  I left to get away from being physically hurt constantly.

And I wandered the neighborhood and I played sex games with adult or nearly adult men.  There were the neighbors a few doors down.  We played strip poker.  Obviously I lost basically every time.  They taught me a lot of sexual positions with my clothes on.  They thought it was fucking hilarious that I was willing and interested in having them teach me how I was supposed to have sex.  I’m pretty sure I’ve never told anyone in the world about them because I am so ashamed I did that.  I was what, 8? 9? 10?  Something like that.  And I went to any man available to learn what I was supposed to be doing.

I have treated basically my entire life as an apprenticeship to be a good enough lay for my father.  Before I had kids probably more than 75% of my masturbation involved thinking about my father fucking me.  Thinking about me begging my father for forgiveness for hurting him while he hurt me and fucked me.  While he did humiliating things to me.  While he forced me to perform for his friends because he believed I was his whore to do what he wanted with.

That’s why I am bad.  Because I’m fucking pissed off that he killed himself and I will never get to do it.

Food, Glorious Food

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I’m pretty excited about the party today.  I probably should be off starting to prep for it right now.  The reason I am not doing so is because it is still pitch black outside.  I think the first thing I do should be to hide the eggs so the girls aren’t woken up by me moving around in the house before then.  Excellent.  Time to think.  One of the things that has been on my mind a lot lately is food.  Seems normal, I think everyone focuses on food.  Especially when they are about to host a party.  But that isn’t really what I mean.  I mean that I’m thinking about food in the abstract.  I’m thinking about what it means to me.  See, I’m doing that because I’m not really eating.  Yesterday I had an egg mit from Noah’s Bagels and a 16 oz drink from Jamba Juice for breakfast.  For the entire rest of the day I had a slice of cheese, a couple bites of sausage, half a bowl of ramen, and about 5 bites of meat at a Japanese restaurant.  I am not a small chick.  I am breastfeeding.  That is simply not an adequate number of calories for a day.  Right before going to bed I asked Noah to bring me food and he did and I ate a sandwich.  I did that because I knew Calli would be up all night nursing (I was mostly right) and I didn’t want to deal with the level of stomach pain I get if I let her keep nursing when I’m over hungry.

Maybe that is part of why I hate nursing her so much.  And that’s why my jeans are falling off.  It’s this weird thing.  I am so clearly punishing myself.  Wait.  I’m getting ahead of myself.  I’m not telling the story right.

I’ve been thinking about food a lot.  I’ve been thinking about food a lot because I’ve been playing games with denying myself food.  This feels unsettling and weird to me because… it’s not October.  I accept that I do things like this every so often, but it never crossed my mind until this morning when my wonderful online girlfriend asked me about it.  My father committed suicide in the beginning of October.  I think I have spent every October since his death not eating.  This was actually an issue with Tom.  He got very worried and upset the first two years of our relationship when I didn’t eat for a month.  I mean, I do eat some.  But I eat 25-50% of what I normally eat.  And my weight tends to plummet rapidly during this time.  I’ve always gotten a lot of positive feedback about that and uhm, that’s weird.  It’s weird that I get so much overt societal approval for being that specific flavor of fucked up.  Society as a whole would love for me to develop this kind of overwhelming shame at all times so that I could finally have the appropriate body size.

And yet I’m not real inclined to do that.  I have very quiet anxiety that I don’t express to almost anyone about being “too fat” where I don’t know where the line is.  And I don’t even know exactly why I feel so bad about this anxiety.  Ok, here’s the thing: my actual shoulder bones are very narrow.  And for whatever reason I don’t tend to put on much weight in the very upper arms/shoulder/upper back areas.  So my upper body is always going to look funny in larger sized clothes because they hang wrong.  And I feel like I can never look attractive in my clothes.  And that really bothers me.  It really and truly bothers me that when I am heavy it is literally impossible to find things that fit me in the shoulders.  I’m starting to wear strapless dresses/shirts because then I can wear an open size medium sweater that doesn’t hang off my shoulders.

So obviously this is a complicated issue.  Food is love for me.  Very very much so.  I love to feed people and I surround myself with people who think food is love.  And then I do things like telling Noah last night that if he ever tries to get me to eat Japanese food again it will be proof that he is a terrible person who doesn’t love me because something in the flavor palate really bothers me.  Ok, I didn’t use exactly those words but that was strongly the gist of it.  And for the record I apologized as soon as my brain caught up with what my stupid mouth had just said.  I was horrified.  Oh man.  For the record the Japanese food thing is almost certainly connected with my overall food issue right now.  Nothing tastes good to me these days.  It’s complicated.

And that’s a lot of why I feel so awkward right now.  I’m really nervous about my ability to pull off being adequately social for the party today.  I don’t know how to talk to people because I am leapfrogging from one yucky thought to another about food stuff.  Why do I surround myself with feeders and then refuse to eat?  Because I don’t deserve love.  Because I’m saying bad things about my Daddy.

And that is why I don’t eat in October.  I am paying penance for killing him.  Without ever having considered if I should or shouldn’t, I am.  That’s an awful thing to think about.  I don’t think he deserves it in my big kid brain.  I don’t know where to begin to find a road around this obstacle.  Even if he doesn’t deserve it the little girl inside me is really upset about hurting her Daddy.

I’m kind of twitching about using that name for him.  You see, I tend to refer to him as my father.  Because he fathered me.  He spawned me.  That sort of thing.  I have had multiple Daddys at this point and they’ve been good men.  It’s kind of an odd story really.  Even I am not slow enough to have missed the connection between me having multiple friends and lovers I call Daddy and thinking about my father molesting me.  It’s kind of odd that the process has healed me in many ways.

Side note: I noticed that it was 5:30 and that I was kind of hungry.  I made a conscious decision to get up and get something to eat because it is absolutely mandatory that my mood be stable today.  I don’t want to eat it.  It actually tastes disgusting enough that I am having difficulty chewing and I feel nearly unable to swallow.  I’m eating a Vanilla Chip Chewy Granola Bar made by Cascadian Farms.  Normally I think these things are just about heaven on earth.  Right now my mouth feels coated and waxy and I feel repulsed and I am having minor gag reflex responses at the idea of taking a third bite.  But I don’t want to be a nasty bitch to my friends today so I took my damn third bite and I will just try not to think about the taste.  Because if I do this, if I allow myself to sit in this cycle today, I will cause a nasty big blow up fight in public and I will feel humiliated and proven right that I am an unstable bad person.

No thanks.  I’ll eat the fucking granola bar.  And every time someone tells me to eat today I will.  Because even if my little girl thinks I deserve to lose all my friends and be punished because I am a terrible person for prosecuting my father my big girl says fuck that shit.  I am not going to do this to myself any more.  I have people in my life who are just itching to feed me and love me.  I really should let them do both.  Even if I can’t love me when I am breaking family taboos and talking about family or relationship secrets.  But I don’t even know if that is it.  I just know that I feel upset enough when I am processing abuse stuff that I begin to withhold food from myself.

Hmm.  Interesting thought.  I wonder if part of the reason I am so prone to attach strongly to people who show love with food because I know I do this to myself and I know that *for me* it is necessary for me to have a cushion of fat to deal with these times of punishing myself.  Years ago I did Weight Watchers and I lost 50 pounds.  It was rather dramatic.  I was also doing a lot of intense exercise and I got into rather good shape.  (I realize now as I mourn that vigorous body.)  I’m trying to get back to feeling like I have that kind of energy.  Though now it occurs to me that it will probably not happen as long as I am waking up at 4 in the morning to write about being sexually assaulted while I was little.

But I have to wake up at 4 and write about it or I will answer cashiers in grocery stores with, “Hi, I’m Krissy and I’m a sexual assault survivor.  Specifically incest that primarily happened in the first ten years of my life, and multiple horrifying rapes when I was 7-10 years old, and a few date rapes and near misses as a teenager.  And then I prosecuted my father and he killed himself and I’ve been a hot mess ever since.  But thanks for asking how my day is!  I hope you are having a good one!”  That wouldn’t be ok, you know?

I hold that boundary.  And I don’t talk about my abuse and trauma very much during the day.  Even though this is an intense period of processing I don’t allow myself to talk about it during the day outside of therapy much because it isn’t appropriate for my kids to hear.  That has to be a boundary.  So instead I just punish myself.

And I grow to resent my children.  Especially nursing.  They are taking so much from me right now but I keep picturing this wonderful scene from a movie I recently watched.  The movie was Mother and Child with Annette Bening.  I sobbed my heart out through the whole story.  But specifically towards the end a woman is successful in adopting a baby after great personal sacrifice trying to do so.  She calls her mom in the middle of the night and throws a temper tantrum about how needy the baby is.  The grandmother in question, S. Epatha Merkerson, pulls back into this stern dignified look.  She then proceeds to tell her daughter off up one side and down the other for daring to have the gall to complain about a baby having needs.  These days when I start to feel pissy with the girls I close my eyes and picture that stony face of disappointed fury telling me to get off my ass and take care of the god damn baby.  And I plaster a smile on my face and get over myself.  I am not always as fast in some of my responses as I would like because I have to stop and take deep breaths to deal with my frustration level sometimes.  But everyone here is happy and healthy and growing and feeling really loved and supported as part of a whole unit.  A big part of that is I have decided that the version of Attachment Parenting we want to practice does not involve all the extremism that some loud voices in the “Natural Family Living” community think it should.  And that’s ok.  I don’t have to think that everything in the mainstream is wrong just because it is a common thing to do.  That is conforming to a specific kind of non-conformity and oh man it is killing me.  So I’m not doing the perfectly available 24/7 thing anymore.  And you know what?  It’s helping a lot.

You can see why I feel that thinking about food is complicated?  But the sun is stealing slowly over the horizon.  I can now clearly see the outline of the tree in our yard.  It is time for me to get up and go hide Easter eggs for a party.  I have something like 12 kids coming on a hunt today.  It will be super fun.   Luckily 5 of those kids are too young and 1 is probably mostly too old because I only have 48 eggs.   Always look on the bright side I say.  The kids will all have a wonderful time and it will be a great party.  I will eat every time someone mentions that I should.  The awesome thing is, no one who loves to feed me will have a chance to read this journal entry before the party.  But they will read it later.  Then the game becomes, do I tell them this morning what stupid destructive game I am playing so they can help me break the cycle?  Or do I act like a crazy person and create drama.  Yeah.  I think I’ll be talking to them as soon as possible.  I wish I didn’t need as much support as I do but I’m really glad that I can get it since I need it.  I am very lucky.

Evil Soul

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So I’m a counter phobic 6, as least that is what Noah tells me. And Rebecca. And other people concurred. Maybe someday I will study the Enneagram and I will decide if I agree or not. Until then all I know is the more something scares me the more intensely focused on it I am. And right now I am so terrified of what I am currently thinking about that I am shaking. It is difficult to type. The thing is, what I am afraid of is being called a liar. I’m afraid of someone reading this and saying it isn’t true. When I first starting writing about things like this I was in graduate school. It was actually a fiction writing class. I chose to write creative non-fiction, basically telling stories about my trauma, because I couldn’t think of anything else to write. I didn’t present it that way to the class. One of the other students was very assertive in her position that what I was writing was unrealistic and not very good. I haven’t ditched that criticism yet, though I should.

I’m scared to write about these things because they are crazy. Really, seriously crazy. Why do I think they are that crazy? Because I have spent my adult life around atheists who have no patience for the woo. But I believe in the woo. And I need to own that and stop beating around the bush and just… say it.

Oh god this hurts. I found it. I had to come back to it. I had to come looking for the dark place instead of waiting for it to find me. That was harder than I thought. It was a lot harder than I thought to get back to this frantic state where I have to type or I am going to explode. It is even neat to me that I can’t say these words, I do need to type them. Thank god for computers. Fuck computers. That’s my life. And I’m already losing it. Shit.

After therapy this week Noah and I decided that it was a great night to go do more of the two chair thing starting at about 10. I was wired for sound. Something that came up a lot in therapy and then later with Noah was thinking about my current level of suicidal ideation. It’s really at an alarmingly high level. I feel more active compulsion than I have in years. My therapist asked me if I wanted to get into it with her and I told her no. When I told Noah that I had done that he responded with, “Ah! A challenge!” or the slightly less bombastic equivalent, which nonetheless means the same thing.

I am suicidal. Statistically speaking it’s really quite unsurprising. My particular brand of suicidal seems to be spurred mostly by shame. But here I am using my analytic voice. And each word of composition is ponderously considered, difficultly spelled, and not conducive to actually doing this. Let’s try something else.

It’s really scary to let these feelings come up. I feel intense pressure in my chest. I feel my throat tighten. I want to sob uncontrollably and yet I can’t breathe enough to get out sound. This is one of the feelings that produce intense, copious liquid tears. Often in other times when I cry I rack with sobs but no liquid comes out. I wonder why there is such variation in crying. And oh look. That was a really weak ass, uninteresting derail. Maybe some discomfort? Ha.

I don’t wanna. I don’t wanna talk about being terrible. I don’t want to say out loud that I believe I am evil. I believe my brother and my father are dead because I was loud and drew attention to myself and everything bad that came after is all my fault. I believe I am evil because my father whispered into my ear from when I was a tiny child that I was a witch. I have casually told stories for years about my maternal grandmother being a witch and I’ve told stories about things she supposedly did.

I learned every single one of those stories from my father. And the grandmother in question was not his. He was villainizing—no… he was literally demonizing my mother’s bloodline. He bloody well convinced me that I cannot escape being evil. He repeatedly encouraged me to seek out black magic because I had powers. When I was a teenager I read a bunch of books about Wicca, Shamanism, and a few other off-shoot pagan religions. I tried to cast a spell on a then-boyfriend to make him become obsessed with me. Hey, The Craft had just come out. He did become pretty obsessed with me. I think it’s much more likely that he became obsessed with me because I was a pretty girl who was willing to have sex with him.

But oh my god. I have built up this entire narrative in my life about how that scared me off of trying to pursue more magical endeavors because I have power. That is the crux of it. I have power. I do. The fact that I have survived my life is pretty much proof. I have survived my father molesting me all through my earliest memories. I have survived risky sexual activity during the periods of intense acting out I have had. The 25 year old man who fucked me at my request when I was 12 years old didn’t wear a condom. He was a drug dealer in Santa Clara. His name was Sean David Segura. And no, I don’t feel bad for naming him. Yes, I do. I hate that I feel like he deserves the shield of anonymity. He didn’t rape me and I’m not claiming he did. Only I was 12 years old and reeling from the last time my father sexually assaulted me and I wasn’t being supervised because no one gave a shit about me and I ran wild. I did it because everyone in my life was forcing me to be a grown up but I wasn’t fucking ready. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready. I have been having sex as a consenting adult since I was 12 years old. That’s 18 years. Super Bowl Sunday is my “anniversary”. No wonder I feel so.fucking.old. I started working when I was 15. It was intermittent at first, but I contributed an awful lot towards my support. My mother would pick up my paycheques and dole out my $20/week allowance. It was festive. This is relevant, but not what I am doing tonight.

I have power. I have gone through fucking hell. My early childhood was abusive in ways I am just beginning to be able to understand. I became an adult at 12 years old. I made some really really bad choices along the way. I did not choose the straight and narrow at pretty much any point. Why did I survive? How was I able to keep so much of me private from my family and the abuse? I think I have power. I don’t know how to explain this and I’ve spent my lifetime wracking it back and forth in my brain. I don’t even know if this is just how it works for absolutely everyone on the planet. But when I decide I want something I god damn make it happen. Whether it is good or bad. The only thing really big goal I have set that I haven’t made was getting my masters. But I started grad school because I wanted to have more knowledge before I started being a teacher because I felt unqualified. Uhm, well, I met that goal. Why again am I a failure because I didn’t obtain a piece of paper that would impress other people but not improve my life? Yeah, scratch that. I am a god damn rock star. When I say I am going to do something, I do it.

Only that’s not true. That’s the positive side of my brain. I’m there maybe 70% of the time when I’m doing extraordinarily well. I’m there like 45% of the time right now. It’s odd to flipflop back and forth between that kind of optimism and the kind of overwhelming self-hatred I have. I don’t have ‘meh’ feelings about myself. I either think I am amazingly wonderful or I am so despicable that I am using the power I have to do evil. Oh, and I have lots of silly examples of things that I decide I want and then they magically appear in my life (no really) but the best one is the dream about Tommy’s accident. I haven’t explained that yet. It’s 11:43 pm on a Thursday night and my children will be awake (possible multiple times) within 6 hours. Why the hell not tell that story. (Editing note: it is now 3:48 am on Saturday and I haven’t slept much since starting this.)

(Minor background note: my parents divorced when I was 3. There was knowledge at the time of the divorce of sexual abuse but the belief was it only happened to my sister. Or at least that is what I was always told growing up. I am currently struggling with my feelings around what I think my mom did or didn’t know and that’s challenging for me. But that’s a digression for a different day. My mom and I bounced around moving a lot. I went to 25 schools before dropping out of high school in my junior year. My brothers mostly lived with our father.)

So to start this right, I have to set the stage. That’s what you do, right? I was either 6 or 7. Tommy wanted to come live with us for a while. We were living with Auntie and Uncle B. in Northern California in the house they still live in. One night Tommy and I were bickering, as a 6ish and 10ish year old sibling pair will do that sort of thing. My uncle intervened. Specifically speaking he started yelling at my brother and spilled a cup of boiling liquid on my brother. Luckily my brother escaped major damage. But that was it. We were out.

Basically, I baited my brother and then we had to move. But I don’t want to leave the story like that. There was a lot going on. My brother and I had weird sibling dynamics. I was significantly more intelligent than him and better in school but he was good at sports and charming and knew how to get along. I was prickly and difficult and acting out. I wasn’t an innocent victim in the situation, but neither am I to blame for all of it. And ultimately it was my mother, as the adult, who handled the situation badly and abused us and set us up to fight so… yeah. Maybe not any of it was really my fault. But it will always feel like my fault. It will always feel like I was mean to Tommy and then everything in my life blew up. That is my story. That is what is stuck in my head. That is the age I am. I’m 7. Maybe I should do some research on 7 year olds. And that is the end of where this digression is useful.

My mom packed up our stuff and drove south through LA to drop off Tommy back at our dad’s house. My mom and I went off to Oklahoma and Texas and that was a whole adventure. Texas is was where I was raped for the first time when I was 7. But one night in May of 1989 my brother Tommy was hit by a car. Specifically, he was hit by a drunk accident injury attorney. It’s almost comedic. Only it’s tragic. He was on drugs and the belief is that he was more or less trying to commit suicide. He succeeded. He was hit by a car on Imperial Highway, which if you know Southern California is a major road.

(Side note: shoulders, center of breath and ability to move between mindsets)

Tommy died. Sure they brought him back but he was never the same. He had a severe traumatic brain injury. He had a horrible life up until I prosecuted my father and Tommy once again tried to kill himself. This time he went out walking and bought a gas can. He went behind a shopping center. He doused himself in gasoline and he lit himself on fire. Tommy was still alive when they got him to the hospital even though 80% of his body was burned. My father, in one of the most magnanimous acts of his life, told them to turn off life support and let Tommy die.
The story in my head is that Tommy’s suicide was my fault because I prosecuted my father and Tommy couldn’t handle the idea of our father going to prison. But it’s total fucking bullshit. The truth is Tommy had been suicidal from when he was a small child and he tried over and over and over and over in more and less successful ways over the years. There was a long period where he had to wear a helmet and boxing gloves full time because he had a habit of shoving his head through windows for fun. How in the hell is it my fault that he finally succeeded?

But it is. And I am trembling with terror as I try to write this. My lizard brain is screaming out in terror no no no no no no I’m bad I’m bad I’m bad it’s all my fault. I killed Tommy. I killed Tommy twice with my selfishness. God gave him back and let me have a second chance at being a good little sister and I killed my big brother twice. And I believe this because I believe I have the power to influence things great and small. And I hated Tommy more than almost anyone on this earth.

Admitting that about my poor, dead brother makes me wrack with sobs. You are not supposed to speak ill of the dead. Tommy had a brain injury. It wasn’t his fault. I should be loving in my thoughts towards him. But I’m fucking glad the son of a bitch is dead. As much as my every memory of my father is laced with molestation, every memory of Tommy is laced with cruelty. He liked to see me in pain. Really it was my first SM relationship and I just didn’t know it. Tommy would arrange to have other people beat me up. Tommy was there the day I was thrown off the monkey bars and broke my arm when I was 6. He pretty much told the kid to do it. After the accident Tommy hated me with the intensity of the sun. He did things to me that hurt every single day. Practically any time I came within arms reach. As he got older and further through puberty he would attack me and try to knock me down so he could rape me.

Our father told him that if he couldn’t get sex outside the family it was my responsibility to provide it for him and he was allowed to take it.
This was my reality growing up. These were the things that went on behind closed doors. And I’m talking about them. I’m telling the secrets. And I feel like I will choke to death. I feel intense shame and horror. Seeing these stories in front of me like this hurts. When the stories just keep coming and there is detail after detail after detail and I know I am leaving 90% of the horror out of the story for the sake of time to write it all down…oh my god. It was monstrous. Why does this continually surprise me? Because day by day one atrocity at a time you can’t see the picture. You can’t see how horrible it is. And this is a nice digression and all, but it feels awfully comfy and that can’t be useful.

Yes, actually there is something very useful here. I grew up to have a four year long bdsm relationship with a man named (tbd). I called him Daddy. For two of those years (the middle two) we were in a 24/7 Master/slave relationship. Oh my god. There is so much there to write about. I need to write about him. But not today. Not till he says it is ok.

I’m supposed to be talking about being suicidal. But I really don’t want to. It hurts to talk about being suicidal. And I’m experiencing a lot of bursts of manic creativity in other directions and that is really rare for me so I am on to something big. This has to be huge. What the fuck is this.
I’m feeling a lot of internal pushback about talking about the witchcraft stuff. This is really hard for me. This is the part where I start to feel awkward and uncomfortable because I don’t feel secure that it is ok to have the beliefs that I have. Right this minute I’m feeling very freaked out because what portion of my very odd belief structure is taken directly from my father’s brain washing. Oh my fucking god I was brainwashed into believing magic and believing that I am an evil force in the world.

No no no no. Fuck you. I’m not going to do that. Saying that does not make it true. I feel incredibly uncomfortable with the idea of being brainwashed. I’m not going to let that be something I sit with right now. I’m allowed to make that choice.

I believe in magic. I believe that if you want something bad enough you will take action and create that thing in your life. I believe this is a
positive and good thing. Given that I have repeatedly managed to shove myself through ridiculous amounts of work in very short periods of time I would say it works for me. I’m allowed to have this belief without my father being allowed to take it away. I wonder if that is behind the current obsession with Alice in Wonderland. I’m playing in my mind with the idea of agency and Alice is certainly a very different character through the different representations of her. I feel like I am turning about looking in funhouse mirrors trying to figure out which version of my agency is the right one. How much control do I get to believe I have in the universe.

Oh god this hurts. I found it. I had to come back to it. I had to come looking for the dark place instead of waiting for it to find me. That was harder than I thought. I believe that my father’s death is my fault. I believe it with an intensity that consumes me. And I have a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome and I want my fucking Daddy. That is what is going on. I am thinking about him molesting me. I am thinking about him hurting me. I want him. I want to be hurt. I want to do an intense sm scene. I want to do something horrible and destructive.

I want to kill myself.

What other act is there in the world that I could commit that would prove beyond the shadow of a doubt to every single person in the whole wide world that I am a worthless piece of shit and my father wanted to rape me and I kind of wish he had. I wish he had raped me instead of killing himself because then I wouldn’t feel this fucking guilty. And that is what I am hiding from. And that. Oh dear god.

I believe that prosecuting him was an evil act that forced him to do it. I believe I had the ability, with my hate, to do that to him. But I don’t really have that power. And I wasn’t acting out of evil. I was a scared half-kid-half-adult who was flailing around trying to not die. There was no bad in defending myself. I’m allowed to say no. I know that now, as an adult.

The funny thing is, reading this… you’d think I have trouble expressing boundaries. But I don’t. I’m actually fantastically good at expressing boundaries. I explore how to expand and retract them as necessary on a frequent basis. I put exhausting quantities of energy into defending my boundaries in a way that I believe is in the “range of acceptable normal boundaries” and I have to see it that way or I can’t do it at all.

I’m going to take a break here to say that this piece of writing is brought to you courtesy of a California Medical Marijuana permit. Without it I would be crying and beating my head against a wall and trying to slit my wrists. Instead I am writing productively in a way that is completely outside the parameters of my normal life and I am able to carry on as a functional human being during the day. Right now I am fighting to save my life because if I don’t deal with the extent of my father sexually assaulting me I don’t know if I will see my daughters grow up because I don’t know where else to begin fighting the monsters in my head. I have to say all of this out loud. And that is hard. That means going places my brain doesn’t want to let me go. I have to hack my brain and it hurts a lot. I’m not sure I can say I recommend this method of dealing with trauma. But if you feel like you don’t have a lot of time, why the hell not. I think this is my favorite digression ever.

See, I don’t want to talk about being suicidal. Being suicidal hurts. It makes me cry. I feel like I am evil and bad. No really. I believe that with an intensity that overwhelms me at random points in my life and I cannot focus on what is before me. I think I am barely aware it is happening, but it colors my intense paranoia. I am not reaching out to specific people right now because I believe no one wants me to. And I truly know this is paranoia because I sent out an invitation to a birthday party on Labor Day weekend five months in advance and within 24 hours I had 27 people who said they wanted to be there. It is simply not possible that everyone in the world thinks I am bad. It is more likely that people are busy and don’t notice me. It’s not personal. But I am doing what my mother does. I am sitting at home feeling like everything is wrecked forever and ever and ever because this terrible thing happened to our family and I can’t get passed it. Only for me right now it is the story of my abuse. I am stuck in cycles that are not good for me. I am trying to blow up my life because I cannot handle stability. I cannot handle stability because I was horrifically abused. I need to work through that and it’s going to hurt.

I am suicidal because I am the victim of incest and sexual assault. I am suicidal because I believe the things my father told me. I believe I am evil and a witch. I believe it deep in my monkey brain and I don’t know how to get these things out of me.

No. Fuck that noise. I don’t know yet. I haven’t done it yet. Just because I haven’t done it yet doesn’t mean I won’t. It will just be harder. I’m really tired of harder. I’d like a break one of these years. But if I have to get stronger I will. Because that is what I do. Because that is who I am. I have a really good, really stable life now and I am not going to fuck it up. I am going to hold it together. And I am going to write in the middle of the night. And I will get passed this.

But not in this essay. Because it is now 5:22 am on Saturday morning. My agenda for today is rather a busy one you see. Today I get to: finish the side yard drainage problem no matter how long it takes me nor how much it hurts because otherwise I won’t have a smooth pathway for people to walk on when they come to my Easter party and it is very very very important to me in my neurosis that when people come to my home they have a smooth path. No one there would judge me poorly in any way if I said, “We had a flooding problem in the last rainstorm and the yard is full of weird potholes because I have been dealing with a severe mental health crisis and I haven’t had time to deal with it!” But that’s not ok to say. That would be stepping all over the boundaries of everyone who wants to be generically, softly encouraging of my life in a light social way. So instead I will write intense journal entries in the middle of the night. I will frantically repair my side yard until I believe that I will not be embarrassed to have people see it. Before anyone gives me a panicked phone call, I’ve got it mostly done. You see, I don’t have the luxury of sitting down to do a project all in one go in one day basically ever. I’ve been working on the side yard for days. My entire body hurts. I am physically and mentally exhausted. I feel like I have nothing left to give to any part of my life.

But do you know what I will do? I will finish the delicious scone I have been noshing on with a nod to my wonderful online girlfriend who is doing a lot to help me grow right now and I will plaster a smile on my face. This was a really really big success in the war for me. I’m proud of it. No one gets to make me be silent any more. I can talk about my demons. I can brainstorm ways to deal with them. I can invite commentary. I can be real about the fact that there are two sides to every story but the only one that matters in my recovery is mine. I have to be aware of not losing my story to thoughts of being the scapegoat. I am not to fucking blame for almost anything that happened to me as a child. And I have behavioral patterns that I watch like a hawk. Because I have come a long way. I do hold it together. Shit. Or maybe this will be a rough day. Fuck.

Attention Whore

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I struggle with my need for affection and love.  On one hand I know it is a perfectly normal, perfectly healthy urge.  So I just sent out a mass invitation to my birthday party in September.  I’m practically having a panic attack about it.  I am completely overwhelmed with terror and anxiety.  I’m terrified people won’t want to participate.  I’m terrified that me asking for people to put out effort is just not ok.  I feel like if only 4 people show up I will feel let down and like it just isn’t enough and that makes me a bad person.  Why aren’t those 4 people enough?  On my birthday I will have Noah, Shanna, Calli, and Sarah all living in my house.  They love me to distraction.  They would walk through fire for me.  They can and do shape basically every single day of their lives around me if I ask for it or need it.

But it’s not enough.

I need magic.  I need a ritual.  I need to be seen.  I need to say to the universe that I am here and I am good and I am wonderful and I want to see that affirmed in the love and faces of the people around me.  I want to go through the rabbit hole.  I want to wander in  Wonder Land with my friends.  I want to make my house fantastical and inviting and have many people come have tea with me.  I want to play.  I want to be a little girl.  And I want everyone to come and tell me how wonderful I am.  And I feel pathetic.  And I feel like I am loser for wanting that.  I feel like that is proof of my inadequacy as a person.

Why can’t it just be proof that having people like you feels nice?  Why can’t I let myself ask for this without such self contempt?  This is agonizingly hard.  Asking for support and love means risking having people be busy.  It means risking knowing for an absolute fact that you aren’t the center of peoples lives.  Knowing that *hurts*.  But you know what?  It’s true even if I never say it.  Even if I never confirm it.  Right now I am orbiting out here in space alone because I can’t handle the fact that if I want attention from my friends I won’t be their everything in the universe.  God.  That fucking sucks.  I don’t want to do this.  I don’t want this life.

I want to throw a great big party.  I want to invite everyone in the universe.  I want some of them to come.  I want some of them to genuinely want to come and not be able to due to conflict in scheduling.  I want those people to make some token for me.  It doesn’t have to be big or expensive.  I want these to be fairly permanent, useful things.  It could be something artistic to go with the mural (I will finish the house project as quick as possible and get more pictures posted) or a neat random lamp you think just *fits* in a room.  I want to fill my house with love.  I want to look around my house and see magical tokens that will help me fight off the demons in my head.

I’m scared I’m losing the battle.  No.  That’s not true.  I’m not losing the battle at all.  I’m just not making progress at the rate I want to.  I’m god damn tired of this inching progress.  I need something that will help me rewire my system.

I need help.

Early morning demons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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