Category Archives: having limits

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.

Stalling on the house.

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I set myself a rather ambitious schedule for house renovating.  It was going to be very difficult for me to accomplish.  I would have to keep up my energy and motivation through quite a bit more hard work.  Right now I can’t do it.  At this point I feel like the schedule was going to not be met anyway, or if it did… barely.  With my uncle dying there is no way.  I am spacy and unfocused.  I am crying.  I have no more patience left.  I am on edge and brittle.  I have to stop the big work.

Which is to say I need to finish puttering in the garage organizing stuff.  But that’s not stuff that other people help with very well. 🙂  So I am going to get everything into the garage, install a grown up level lock on the door so Shanna can’t get into trouble, and I’m going to get it done slowly before my birthday.  As much as I wanted to get this done so I could put pictures up and feel proud of myself… I’m not there.  And I’m not going to be able to get there for a while.  I’m having too hard of a time functioning.

I need to spend time with Shanna doing Shanna stuff for a while.  I need to get her off the movies that turn her into a serious brat.  Oh I cannot stand her behavior when she is watching a lot of movies.  I need to get the sugar that I have been binging on out of the house.  I was very deliberately using sugar and caffeine to fuel my ability to keep working.  But my body feels like shit.  Shanna is whinging and demanding sugar all day long.  It needs to get out of my house again.

I need to come back to the center of what my life is right now.  What am I actually doing at this stage of my life?  I am raising my babies.  I am trying to create a space where they have freedom to play without getting yelled at.  I’ve been missing the mark on that one lately.  I want to put a lock on the garage because I want her to be able to have a “yes” environment most of the time but then there is an adult space in the house where we can go to practice civilized behavior when I am up for it.

Right now I just can’t direct any more people.  It takes energy, both physical and mental, that I don’t have.  It is amazing to me that as wonderful as it is to have people come help, I still have a lot of work to do when they are here.  And all of a sudden I can’t do it.  Even though I wanted to.  I’m so sorry I canceled on people.