part 74

So the neighbors have apparently gone from glaring in silence to smiling and waving. I preferred the glaring in silence. At least that indicated to me that they were aware of the fact that I was telling as many people as possible what they did to me.

The smiling and waving thing is really baffling. For one, I am again shocked by the dedication these people - including my mom - have to keep the truth from being real in their own lives.

It seems as though the solution to the past is to ignore that anything bad ever happened and instead continue to ease into their twilight years sitting in rockers on the front porch and drinking wine and watching people go by and the sun go down. Smiling and waving.

It is a good strategy, one that has been very successful when used against me specifically. I mean, how much are you going to keep telling how people hurt you when the people who hurt you are smiling and waving and the people you're telling are trying to convince you that you're crazy?

I watched Rosemary's Baby for the first time when I was 19 years old. I was also pregnant at the time, and so a bit more vulnerable to the effects of the dramatization of mind-fucking a young women knocked up by Satan. I never thought my baby was Satan's offspring, and as much as my ex-husband pissed me off, he was definitely not Satan's clever little imp sacrificing his young wife's sanity and uterus to perpetuate the evil one's bloodline.

However, I was very disturbed by the mind-fucking part. I had other things on my mind at that time (such as keeping myself and a baby alive with tremendously limited resources), and I put my reactions to that movie off to the side.

Looking back, I can really relate to poor little Rosemary. She was so naïve and young and wanting so much for everything to be as perfect and wonderful as it seemed. She didn't want her darling new husband to drug her and offer her to Satan to be raped and impregnated with evil. She didn't want the sweet loving neighbors in her building - her social support system - to be part of the insane conspiracy.

But that's what really happened (in the context of a fictionalized movie, of course), and the more Rosemary tried to address it, the more she was treated like a delusional freak.

She was convinced that she was weak and mentally infirm and in need of a great deal of care by those around her. Her memories of what was real were dismissed as nothing more than very silly "misinterpretations" of what she was told by those around her was real.

By employing this analogy, I am not suggesting that I believe the events portrayed in that movie can actually happen in the real world. Quite frankly, I think Satan would have a much simpler plan to perpetuate his blood line - if I believed Satan exists, which I do not.

But I do believe people can be as evil as Rosemary's husband and neighbors were, and I can definitely believe there are people as vulnerable and naïve as Rosemary, and I can definitely relate my experiences to the absurdity and horror of what Rosemary experienced, and of course to the mind-fucking she took.

Seriously, if you want to get an idea of how I felt as a child, watch Rosemary's Baby and try to empathize with Mia Farrow's character - yes, I am saying that really is how I felt for most of my life.

Unfortunately for my abusers, I am not that naïve and vulnerable and dependent child any more. I don’t have to rely on my mom or my dad or the people in that neighborhood to survive.

I am much stronger than that now, and I really actually believe that I am strong.

My confidence in my strength and in my ability to discern what is real from what is bullshit makes everything that was huge and terrifying and crazy by huge and powerful people when I was little into a bunch of really fucked up abuse and torture of a child by small and weak people.

(Just as a side note, my confidence in my strength and ability to discern what is real from what is bullshit is a continuous process of reality-checking with trusted friends and professionals on a daily basis. Having those people in my life is a tremendous advantage to me, and something I didn't have growing up. Another tremendous advantage is the knowledge that just because I am not perfect - that I am definitely wrong about some things - does not mean I am incapable of being a good person who can make healthy decisions. Now that I think about it, this little side note describes an arsenal of empowerment that no small and weak person stands a chance against.)

So anyway. As baffling and shocking as the smiling and waving is, I can see why the neighbors and my mom continue to employ such methods - they have always worked before, why shouldn't they work now?

It makes me think about bad people who do bad things and keep them secret for their whole lives. When you have done something bad to someone else and spend your life trying to convince yourself and everyone else that you are not capable of doing anything bad to anyone else, do you anticipate the day of reckoning?

Do you realize that the good guys really do always win? Do you wonder about the fact that no one is perfect, and the only thing that separates the good guys from the bad is the willingness to acknowledge and accept our own human imperfections? Do you wonder if the bad things you did in the past will prevent you from being a good person now?

Do you really, actually, for realsies believe that pretending you didn't do all of those bad things that you did will make you happy? Will give you peace? Will allow you to sleep at night? Will keep your knowledge of those bad things from eating away at your soul for the rest of your life?

Does it scare you knowing that regardless of how vehemently you deny the accusations, how successfully you discredit your victims, and how steadfastly you stand in denial you will never, ever be able to change the fact that what you did was real?

These are things that I wonder about, and the idea of having that shit swirl around in my guts for the rest of my life is much more terrifying than acknowledging that I have done bad things and am capable of doing more bad things and try very hard to do what is good now. It seems very simple and logical to me.

I suppose that is why I am so baffled by the smiling and waving thing. It takes so much work and causes so much pain and a lifetime of dedication to lies - it is so much easier to just acknowledge it and move on. I mean, why would you want to dedicate your entire life to lies? Like I said, it is baffling.

I am really hurting right now, still about all of this shit with my mom. I expect that pain to take a really long time to get past - if it ever happens at all.

I am finding that no amount of harm and betrayal and bad things people did to me, or their attempts to conceal those things, can destroy the peace of knowing what the truth is, and being able to have that peace and knowledge on my side.

Because really - the truth is the bottom line, the foundation. Anything else is bound to crumble eventually.

part 73

When I was a teenager I hated being in my house. I would go out as much as possible. I remember distinctly the feeling of walking out the front door and slamming it behind me and flying down the porch steps and across the front yard, and getting into the car of whoever was gallantly waiting to pick me up and take me away from there.

It was a fantastic feeling. It was a mixture of "thank god I'm free" and "go to hell bitches."

One of the worst feelings - well, not the worst, but maybe the most helpless - was when I would hit the wall-of-no-understanding with my mom. That's what it felt like when I was trying to express my outrage at the things my dad did to me or how he treated me or how she made it easier for him and I finally accepted  that she was not going to concede a single centimeter of her stance to at least just acknowledge that I was in pain. That's what the wall-of-no-understanding is, and I always tend to hit pretty hard.

I hated her so much at those times. I have thought about how much hate I felt toward her a lot since my oldest has gotten older. When he was little, I wondered if he would hate me like I hated my mom. I thought it was part of the natural progression of getting through the teen years.

But he doesn't. He is definitely not always happy with me, but it is rare when I see his face show me his utter contempt and disdain for whatever it is I'm not allowing him to do. I remember feeling that way almost constantly with my mom.

I have also been trying to remember when I felt protected by my mom. I know it happened. I know she hugged me and made me feel better sometimes, but I can't remember a single instance of that. Even when she would step in between my dad and I, she would be just as angry with me as she was with him.

It seems as though she felt she would be compromising the integrity of the parental disciplinary team, like any alignment with me would be a stand against my dad and a crack in their wall of solidarity.

I wonder if she ever figured out that the wall of solidarity only existed in her mind. It was a vehicle of manipulation - my dad convinced her (though she may believe she convinced herself) that if there was ever any disagreement while disciplining one of us, it would be a tremendous act of betrayal and detriment to their relationship. Also, it would show weakness to whoever was getting punished.

Divide and conquer. That's what my dad was always trying to convince my mom I was doing - split them up. Apparently she believed him. She stuck by that asshole like he was god and she was Jesus out in the desert getting tempted to stray from her unquestioning faith in him. The person doing the tempting was Satan, of course. That would have been my role in that scenario.

Her devotion to him always kind of baffled me, and I remember feeling how absurd she could be when she would stick by him when he was at his most glaringly worst. He would just do stupid shit as punishments for us and she would back him up every time.

Even the time we had to take our stuff out onto the driveway and smash it up with a sledgehammer.

When I was a little older and was working for my dad (at his manufacturing company, not as a child prostitute), I confided in my mom about work stuff. My dad was hard-core running his business into the ground, and it was very tense around there. I told my mom about my concerns and about how nervous the other employees were.

Later I found out that she told him everything I told her, and he used some of the information against some of the employees. I was stunned - I asked my mom why she would tell him things I only wanted to share with her.

This is what she said: "You know where my loyalties lie."

I can hear her saying that in my head even now as clear as though she was sitting on the other end of the phone saying it the first time.

My mom hasn't tried to contact me in three weeks, ever since our big falling out. I imagine she feels as though she is in some kind of danger, like we would hurt her or "attack" her again. Maybe she is imagining that I have done something to her - something so terrible and hurtful that she is punishing me by removing herself from me.

I don't know. It feels like a slap in the face. I know what a slap in the face from her feels like because she slapped me in the face one time, and this is how it felt.

I don't understand what my expectations of her have been - I know what kind of person she is, and I have had my entire lifetime to establish an impression of her based on her actions. I am incredibly angry at her for her role in what I was subjected to growing up, and the perpetuation of the idea that I am somehow delusional.

It still hurts, though. Pretty bad. Like someone took a melon-baller and scooped little bits of my stomach out over and over until there's only an empty, gruesome cavity left there for my belly.

Her silence for some reason has surprised me. We had spoken so often about how the neighbors reacted when I told what they did to me. She agreed that they were definitely acting like people who had something to hide - like people who are guilty of the things they are being accused of.

And now she's acting that way.

Maybe she can make up with the people living around her and they can get neighborhood legal representation and file a class action suit against me. As much as that would shock me, it wouldn't surprise me at all if that is what actually happened. Seriously.

I feel like I did when I was a teenager. I am angry and hurt and scared and betrayed, and I want to surreptitiously smoke cigarettes and get my tongue pierced and probably a new tattoo, also. I want to fill up the front seat of her car with shaving cream. I'm not sure why I want it to be shaving cream - maybe just because it is age appropriate to my teen angst.

I want to rant about her and call her a fucking bitch to anyone within earshot. I want to drink Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill and lie about staying overnight at a friend's house and go do bad things with boys in the woods and the back seats of cars. I want to skip school and dye my hair purple. I want to scream at her - not necessarily words, but definitely loud, shrieking noise.

But I'm not a teenager anymore. I don't drink alcohol any more (also, Boone's Farm? I'm getting nauseous just thinking about it), and I don't smoke anymore - not cigarettes or anything else. I like going to school. I think it would really hurt in a prolonged manner to get my tongue pierced, and I am tired of prolonged pain.

I could probably still swing a new tattoo, though. I could probably find some people to listen to me rant and call her a fucking bitch, too. I am almost certain Jonny will be up for doing bad things with me - maybe not in the woods or in the back seat of a car - I mean, we have a nice comfy bed to do bad stuff in, and after doing bad stuff in a nice comfy bed for 15 years, the woods and the back seat of the car seem pretty uncomfortable.

Regardless, I am hurt, and no matter how angry I get, there is still a raw pit scooped out of me where the mother I always wanted and needed used to be.

However, I am not stuck in that house anymore. I also am able to choose to be with people who love me and are nice to me. I am also a mom with my own teenager, and I can keep contemplating with wonder how he doesn’t hate me like I hated my mom.

And if all of those things fail to make me feel like me again, I can always watch The Royal Tenenbaums - for some reason, my spirits are lifted and calm by the end of that movie no matter how many times I've already seen it. Wes Anderson is a genius.

part 72

There have been some questions concerning my credibility lately. Actually, I don’t know of a time when my credibility was not questioned.

For a long time, the only way I could find my own mind credible was if other people agreed with me or did not think I was making any inappropriate moves or comments or whatever. I had very little confidence in my ability to discern what was real from what was not real.

I mean, there are a lot of really obvious reasons for this. The big one is that I was taught to unquestionably believe lies and to consider the truth a figment of my imagination. I could go into a whole other blog post on that subject, but deciphering that part of brainwashing just makes me feel really tired right now.

So back to my credibility.

When I first went into the hospital (four years ago exactly), I was terrified that what I was remembering was real. I honestly would have preferred a lobotomy and a straightjacket to counter my insanity than for anything that I was remembering to actually be real. I obsessed on all of the things in my head and what they could possibly be, as long as they weren’t real.

Leave me drooling and useless in an asylum, but make it so my parents loved me and wanted to protect me and didn’t want to hurt me and didn’t want to let anyone else hurt me. That would have been very much preferable to all of that shit being real.

At this point in the game, though, it is much more about accepting that the things in my head really did happen, and grieving and being sad and angry. And trying to live the life I was given.

I have spent a lot of time and concentration and energy on learning how to differentiate truth from fiction. I have remembered so much shit and have gone through the process of testing to see if it was real or not, and if I could accept it or not, that I’m an old pro by now.

I know what it is to have a memory surface and no matter how sick or twisted or shameful or disgusting it is, to learn how to incorporate that awareness and knowledge of being abused into my past – so that I can live in the present, and look to the future.

Remembering for me is not a simple process. There are very distinct ways my brain and my body go about re-introducing the horrors of my childhood into my present consciousness. One event – or even one second of one event – could take months of processing before it goes into my day-to-day consciousness.

Remembering for me involves feeling my body being hurt the way it was hurt then, smelling whatever I was smelling at the time of the trauma, hearing the noises I had heard when this was happening to me, and seeing it unfold in front of me and inside of me, and experiencing the fear and terror of it all over again.

It happens again and again and again – it is a process I’m familiar with, and it only happens when I remember the truth.

What that means for me is that I find myself very credible. I know what happened to me. I know a lot of the people who did things to me. I know I’m not making up this horrendous nightmare for whatever reason there could possibly be to make up such a thing.

It is real.

It is shitty and exhausting and disgusting and shocking and cruel and gross and incomprehensible.

But it is definitely real.

Having learned how to build this foundation of sanity around the concept of continuously looking toward what is true, I no longer need anyone to agree with me or tell me I’m not weird or that I’m not crazy in order to know what is real and what is not real.

The entire issue surrounding my credibility is irrelevant.

All I’ve ever really wanted was to know the truth, and now I am learning what the truth is and what it means to me now. I haven’t asked anyone to believe me.

I hadn’t expected anyone to believe me from the get-go (the reasons behind that are an entirely separate blog post, too), and I have been unspeakably grateful for the support I have from all different kinds of people.

But I don’t have to stress out about how credible I have to sound or appear to anyone else anymore. It is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t have to do with anything at all. I don’t have to convince anyone that I am sane because I know that I am sane. I don’t have to prove the truth behind my assertions because I know that I am truthful.

I don’t have to convince anyone of anything because I am not asking for anything in return. I have what I need. I have found my voice and I am using it. I’m not asking anyone to listen. I’m not asking anyone to react in any particular way. I’m not asking for revenge, or even for justice.

I’m just using my voice. For the first time in my life, I am using my voice. I have never experienced peace like the peace I feel by using my voice. I use my voice because I can. A lot of people can’t say that. But I can say that, and I know how amazing it is to be able to do that, and I’m not planning on hiding my voice behind other people’s insecurities and interests anymore.

My voice is for me and I am using it. I don’t plan to stop any time soon.  

part 71

I’m still pretty bummed from all of this shit with my mom. I have started doing that thing where I go back in my mind to before my mom and I had a fight, and I feel fine, and then remember what happened and get sad all over again.

That happened a lot when I first started remembering the abuse by my dad, and it happened when I first started remembering about the abortion, and it happened a little bit when I first started remembering about the neighbors. I guess its part of the whole Dissociative Disorder thing.

I know I’ve said this before, but I would like to reiterate what a gigantic mind fuck this has all been. The torture aspects of the abuse have been the most difficult to get straight in my head. I had convinced myself that a lot of what my dad did to “punish” me and my siblings was just part of being a strict parent. It had not occurred to me that lining up our belongings on the driveway and having to smash them with a sledgehammer could be anything other than innovative discipline.

One of the reasons I am so bummed about my mom is that I am seeing her role in the perpetuation of the notion that something is wrong with my mind. I’m seeing this for the first time ever.

I mentioned before that I already did not trust her, but for some reason it took a few more years for that to evolve into the realization that the reasons for my not trusting her were based in her ability to keep fucking with my head. She would say she was 100% supportive, and that whatever she needed me to do, she would do it.

She also told me that she believed me. She told me that some people didn’t believe any of it is real, and that she lets them know just how “credible” I “appear” to her, and that I’m telling the truth.

I didn’t expect my mom to believe me when I first told her about the sexual abuse almost 4 years ago, but for her to convince me that she did believe me only to turn around and harbor her friends’ doubts is pretty painful. It’s another big mind fuck.

I feel like an idiot. I feel terribly naïve and like one of those people you see in the movies where they are realizing just how much they don’t matter to the rest of the world, and you feel sorry and embarrassed for them.

I don’t want people to feel sorry and embarrassed for me, but I really truly believe that is what my mom chooses to do.

She is still making things out like I am an unstable, hallucinating lunatic. When my view of what is real clashes with what she wants everyone to believe is real about her, she tosses my opposition into the box of things-not-to-be-considered-due-to-instability-of-the-source. It’s a get out of jail free card for her.

My mom actually believes that if she feels any emotion about me or all of this shit that something is wrong with her. She believes that only people who are calm and composed in front of other people at all times can legitimately claim to have been harmed.

When I think about my reliance on her as someone safe, I think of other people I relied on to be safe. Growing up, especially as a teenager, I relied a lot on the boys across the street – the sons of the bastard who raped me three different times. I don’t know why I relied on these boys – or on my mom – but I truly, truly loved them.

They really were my safe place. My mom was my safe place at home, and those boys across the street were my safe place when my mom wasn’t safe enough.

I would sneak out of the house at all hours of the night and, still in my jammies, dart across the street and up the steep, brick steps of their front porch, and look in the window to see if either of them was up watching tv. A lot of times they were, especially in the summer.

If I saw them I would tap really lightly on the screen, and if they heard it, they would come out and we would sit and talk. Or they would sit and I would cry.

There were times when I went to check and see if they were up and saw their dad sitting there watching tv instead of them. That scared the ever-living shit out of me. I would suddenly turn into a mist of fear and drop soundlessly off the porch and onto the ground and drift as quickly and silently as I could back to my house.

Those boys across the street both ended up in military school in Alabama. I missed them terribly when they were away. I would write letters that would actually have tearstains from crying while I was writing to them. One of the best memories I have is looking out the kitchen window expecting them to get home from school any second, their mom pulling up in their driveway in one of those giant boat cars she drove, and then both of them jumping out of the car and running and meeting me in the street.

We hugged, and each time I hugged one of them, they would pick me up and spin around and scare the bejesus out of me. In those moments, when my feet were not on the ground and I didn’t know which way was up or if I was even going to remain conscious, my feeling of relief that they were back with me existed in direct proportion to my fear of being spun around, and I was hugging whichever one of them tightly enough to avoid being spun onto the street and my eyes were closed and everything was spinning – but they were there.

It just felt safe.

I used to have that feeling of safety with my mom when I was really, really young, but it eventually ebbed off until it became simply a fact that I could not even comprehend questioning. But it was just a fact – it was not a feeling.

And now I look back and see how truly alone and unsafe I was, and how I imagined those places were safe because I had to feel safe somewhere, not because they were actually safe. I feel sad when I think about those boys not loving me the way I loved them. In the end – at least as of today – they grew up to be bastards like their father, and so it wouldn’t really matter if they ever loved me or not.

Except that it would.

Anyway, I really do believe my mom loved me. I honestly don’t think she has ever liked me very much, but I do believe she has loved me in whatever way she can.

part 70

Here is the thing about evil: it eats your mind and your heart and your soul consistently over your lifetime. If you are not fortunate enough to be killed suddenly in the midst of some freak accident, evil will kill you, too. It is a slow and painful way to die.

The things that my dad and my neighbors and even my mom did to me are evil. I don’t know if they recognize that by hurting me in the ways they did, they have condemned themselves to misery. I don’t know if they recognize that what they did was even evil at all.

Evil people are not happy. They might be rich and powerful, but they are not happy. Evil is the opposite of happiness.

Of course, people can always attempt to convince themselves that they are happy when they are not. It is another quality of being human. The problem is when the pretend happiness is confronted by the real evil.

Hurting other people is real evil, no matter how it may be justified. Hurting other people is evil, and the more you hurt other people, the more evil hurts you.

I truly believe that when my pretend happiness is confronted by my real evil, I have a choice about how to handle it. I can deny it is real (despite insurmountable and irrefutable proof of varying degrees) and continue to hold onto and feed off of that evil and thereby have only pretend happiness.

Or I can acknowledge and accept it, and thereby reduce the damage to myself from my evil. This is a painful thing to do, but it is the only way I know how to separate myself from that evil, and to find peace in my life.

A few years ago, I was planning out how I was going to kill my dad. I had justified it from every different angle.

The one thing I couldn’t get around, though, is that it was my real evil, my capability of taking someone else’s life regardless of the reasons behind it. Carrying that evil with me and using it to pull the trigger of a gun aimed at my dad’s face would have done a lot more harm to me, maybe even more harm than he did to me.

At the time I was planning to kill my dad, I couldn’t conceive of any other resolution to the problem of his existence and my conscious knowledge of what he did to me and to other people. I didn’t end up killing him though – it took a few more years, but he died on his own by holding on to all of that evil.

I’m very grateful that he is dead and that I didn’t kill him.

I still have the realization that I could and would kill another human being, though the other human being I could have and would have killed is already dead. Granted, the other human being was an incredibly evil and dangerous human being who had harmed me and others beyond anyone’s imagination, but still – he was human. I can call him a monster and say that he deserved to die, but it doesn’t make him not a human.

He was a big, giant, disgusting, horrific, festering ball of stinking, rotten pus – but he was still a human.

I honestly do not believe I would have had any problem killing him, or any remorse that he was dead. But I would be carrying the evil of killing someone else, and I would have to live with it, and it would eat at me for the rest of my life.

It wasn’t about what was right or wrong or what he did or did not deserve – it was the damage I would be doing to myself as a result of killing him. It also would have had horrible consequences for my family and loved ones – again, I am very grateful he is dead and that I didn’t kill him.

He was almost completely consumed with evil the last time I saw him, about seven years ago. That is a lot of evil.

I am not the only person my dad hurt. I saw him hurting other people. He brought me along. He wanted me to be his protégé. He believed he was god and he wanted to pass his supernatural powers down to me – a person created of his own blood. He was very proud of that – creating a person of his own blood.

He believed it was passed on to him by his father – that he was somehow special and chosen to be the next generation, I guess, and he wanted to pass it down to me.

If my grandfather exposed my dad to the same types of things my dad exposed me to, it would be very easy to see how he got so fucked up, how he came to warp reality and to believe that he had all of this power over human beings. The things he did to prove to himself that he had these powers came about in the form of raping and torturing me.

They also came about in the way that he hurt other people, and how he made me watch, and how he wanted so badly for me to participate so I could carry on his powers and he could become a legend, as he saw his own dad. I guess he thought if he could do these atrocious things to other human beings, it proved his godly superiority and control over them.

Very, very sick, and absolutely bat-shit crazy.

Okay, I am shaking like a leaf in a tornado and also feel like I am going to throw up, so I’m going to move on now. I’m glad I know how to type because no one would be able to read my super-shaky handwriting.

I did have a point – my neighbors – the men and the women – have been fabricating their own happiness for years. I confronted them with their real evil. They are pretty pissed about it, too.

But they are also suffering because of it.

Sometimes this is not such a great comfort to me, but being exposed to so much evil and seeing what it does to the people carrying it gives me a sense of peace in the midst of the fury and the pain those people caused.

I don’t have to do anything to retaliate. I don’t have to sue them, or somehow force them to become accountable, or throw eggs at their houses, or be consumed with an ingenious plan for ultimate revenge a la The Count of Monte Cristo– not only would all of those things hurt me more, it would force me to think about those assholes almost constantly, and they are certainly not worth the energy.

In hurting me, they created their own punishments. I am not really sure exactly how evil works or how to avoid it or heal from it, but I do know that doing the things those people did to me sealed a very unpleasant fate for them. Having been confronted, I know their minds are being eaten up even faster with the evil they have carried and tried to pretend was not there.

So I had my say. I don’t need to do anything else to resolve the situation. They will make themselves more miserable than I ever could, and I don’t have to carry around anymore evil for it. I also don’t have to put myself in the position of determining what should or should not happen, or what they do or do not deserve – being free of that kind of responsibility makes happiness much easier, and I really like having the ability to be happy.