***TRIGGER ALERT***
I had a doctor’s appointment yesterday. It was just a
routine thing, but it was with a new doctor.
I don’t like going to the doctor – any doctor - but one of
the things I have been learning to do is take better care of myself, and that
means going to the doctor for routine stuff.
Anyway, I was not at all expecting to experience a doctor’s
appointment like the one I ended up having yesterday. I was expecting routine
questions and routine answers and routine tests and routine results. But this
wasn’t a routine doctor.
After she learned some of my history, she started asking
questions I wasn’t really sure how to answer…wait, let me back it up. I was
there for my routine checkup, but also for a consult about a tubal ligation. She
asked me why I was afraid of becoming pregnant – not why I did not want to have
any more kids, but why I was AFRAID OF BECOMING PREGNANT.
I told her about my dad, and the abortion when I was 15 that
was the result of his raping me. I told her I hadn’t started remembering things
about the rapes and abortion until after my second child was born, and that the
idea of being pregnant again terrified me because I felt like I would have to
remember how it felt to be pregnant with my father’s child.
She asked me what I had felt when my dad raped me. I literally
did not understand the question. I kept trying to specify whether or not she
was asking me how I felt psychologically or physically, and she kept saying she
just wanted to know how it felt.
I hadn’t really thought of that in any cognitively
processing kind of way before. How DID it feel when my dad was raping me? When
he forced himself onto me and into me, and injected me with himself, and it
mixed with myself, and a whole new entity that was the combination of me and my
dad was created in my body?
I couldn’t answer the question – I still really couldn’t
understand the question. Whenever I tried to think of how that felt, when he
was doing that to me, I just shut down. My brain automatically threw up a line
and designated it as the line to never cross, and when I faced the possibility
of crossing it anyway, I just wanted to throw up or lie down on the floor and
go to sleep or leave there and go to the nearest bar and get shit faced.
But she insisted I cross that line, even after I told her my
brain shut down. She said that shutting down was not allowed.
And so I thought about it, what it felt like.
It felt awful. It felt heavy, and it felt like getting
ripped open, and it stung. And it felt shocking – even though he had been doing
it since before I could even really remember, every time he did it again, I was
shocked that it was happening. I wouldn’t stay there – I would leave into my
mind when he was doing it.
Sometimes he would talk to me when he was raping me, and it
was harder for me to stay inside my mind. He would ask me questions about how
it felt. He would tell me I was such a good daughter for going along with it –
that it was the hardest part of being a daughter, but I was such a good
daughter for doing it.
He would tell me what he was feeling, what he was doing – he
would describe it to me, and say that was how men worked, it was what men did,
and I couldn’t understand that unless he showed me because I would never be a
man.
He was teaching me.
He was punishing me.
He was dominating me.
He was hurting me.
He was showing me the only thing my body would ever be
worth, that the only reason I had a heart beating inside of me was to fuel that
body for him to use, and that the only reason I had two legs was so that I could
open them up for him.
He injected me with himself, and when I found out I was
pregnant, I was horrified at what kind of monster I carried in my body – what kind
of monster the combination of him and me made.
I knew he was a monster, and I knew that I was a monster,
too – at my core, that was who I was. Just like him.
And no combination of monster and monster could be anything
other than a super monstrous monster. Would this baby monster get born and grow
up and hurt people and kill people and torture people? Would it hurt me and
torture me and kill me?
I worried that he would not pay for an abortion, that he
would not be willing to destroy such an opportunity – the opportunity of having
a concentrated version of his flesh and blood walking around, made purer
because I was also his flesh and blood walking around, and I was the other half
of this new flesh and blood.
He didn’t try to stop me. He didn’t refuse to pay for the
abortion and he did not refuse to take me there to have it done.
What he did refuse to do was acknowledge that he had done
this to me. It seemed like it never actually hit his reality that I was
pregnant with a monster that he had put inside of me – he told me I was a slut,
and from that I knew he was saying to me that someone else got me pregnant –
there was no acknowledgment whatsoever that he knew he did that to me. That is
what got me mad- really mad.
I wanted to reach in a take that tiny monster out with my
own hands, but I couldn’t do it – I couldn’t
reach, and I didn’t know how it worked, and I was so, so scared. I punched it
over and over, but I knew that wouldn’t work, and I had to tell him because he
was the only one who could help me get rid of it.
And he did.
When I was pregnant with my own children, my brain didn’t
know what it had felt like that time I was pregnant with the monster. But my
body did. When I was pregnant with my own kids, I started throwing up the
moment I found out I was pregnant, and didn’t stop until my own little babies
were out of me.
I am grateful that I was able to have my own babies growing
inside me without having to remember what it felt like having that tiny monster
growing inside of me.
But now this doctor asked me what it felt like. I couldn’t
hardly find words. I cried. She cried, too. She hugged me over and over again,
and told me that my uterus was a beautiful part of my body, and that she did
not recommend a tubal ligation because I had a condition that could be treated
with a hysterectomy.
I hadn’t known all of the pain there had been from anything
other than my own body’s memories – learning that there is actually something
wrong with my uterus – and that it can be fixed by taking it out – was not
something I had at all expected.
I also did not expect for a doctor to tell me that it was
not an urgent procedure at this time, and that she did not want to do the
surgery while I believed that getting rid of my uterus would mean getting rid
of something bad – I told her that if I had never had a uterus, I would not
have been raped over and over and sold to men I had never met before, and sold
to men I lived across the street from and next door to, and I never would have
had to be a good daughter to my dad.
I realized I hate my uterus, I hate that I was a girl then,
and not a boy, because I would not have been hurt that way if I had been a boy.
And I hadn’t realized all of this until that doctor tipped
my brain over and asked me what I felt when my dad was raping me, and what I imagined
I would feel if I were to get pregnant again today.
She said she wanted me to work out that I didn’t need to
have my uterus removed because it would make it easier for me to not have it in
my body. If I needed to have it removed only because of a physical condition,
then it could be done. But she didn’t want to do it when it was still a part of
my body that I hated.
A lot to think about…and I wasn’t expecting any of that at
all.
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