part 125, or "I guess it really is what it is"

***Kind of a trigger warning. It triggered me, anyway***

The first time I started this post was about two weeks ago. It hurts very much. It’s really been bothering me – I’m very irritated that I haven’t posted it yet. At this point, the only reason I am posting it is because it might make me feel better about the whole situation. That has worked with things I’ve written about before; it’s why I keep writing and posting on this blog.

But this...fuck. It is ROUGH. I’m very much remembering how I felt at the time this happened. I remember being in the front yard, stuck because I wanted to go somewhere ELSE, but across the street is where I was violently raped, and I was too scared to go there much anymore, even though those boys that lived there – my best friends, the sons of the bastard that raped me in theri basement - were what I needed at that time.

I had stopped mid stride in the grass, with one foot pointing across the street, but my face turned back to look at the big bay window of the kitchen – where my mom did that to me – and I was so fucking angry.

I was stuck.

I still know how that house smells, and that the ceilings look like, and the size of the closet under the stairs, which was one of my favorite places there. I remember what it was like to stand in the rooms, to lay down on the couch and read for hours, to be so relieved to find no one home after school, and I think again about her –my mom.

Why did she do that to me? Why?

Even if I feel like I cognitively understand why, my chest hurts so bad, and my heart is breaking apart, and all I can do is stand there frozen in the front yard and look back at the kitchen window, and my brain is so overcome with pain that I can’t make sense of anything at all.

It was the worst – what she did to me was the worst. After all the things my dad did, and other people did, all of the torture and rape and being the star of kiddie porn, what my mom did to me was the worst.

Before she did that to me, I at least had HER. I had some anchor that I was only subconsciously aware of, a foundation for my sanity – she’s my MOM. She’s my fucking MOM.

And in that moment, any inkling of security I had left was ripped away from me, and I had absolutley no idea what to do.

Oh my god, it HURTS!!!! It hurts so bad, remembering what it felt like to lose those last remnants of my sanity, and to feel it all float away, and I remember what it felt like for all of it to float away, and from then on, it was all just so blurry.

It was just all a screamingly desperate attempt to not know that she did that to me, and the anger really set in, and stayed there and festered for the next fifteen years.

Anyway, I am posting this shit now. I’ve had a good cry, the real kind, where everything in me feels like it is going to implode, and tears flow out from eyes, and insteard of the anger and hatred, I just feel pain.

Here’s the original begining of this post:

Yesterday I had this thing where I vivdly relived the time that my mom raped me. I actually had not even thought of it as rape until just now. Even as I am writing the word, and knowing that what she did to me is, by definition, rape, I keep double checking the reality of the concept.

What she did to me is very similar to what the rapist guy did when I was fifteen on superbowl sunday. It took a lot of cognitive analysis to finally recognize that as rape, and I can't deny now that what my mom did to me was the same thing.

Jesus. I don't like thinking about rape this early in the morning. I especially don't like thinking about my mom raping me at all. I suppose I really don't like thinking about rape at all, either, but my stomach in the morning is so fragile. I mean, I am nauseous right now. It reminds me of elementary school.

So anyway, I don't want to think about it, but it was a really significant and intense experience yesterday, and I feel quite compelled  to write about it.

It was one of those times that I really relived the experience, except that I was still aware that I was here, today, and that allowed me to respond to my mom now in a way I wasn't able to then. I even talked out loud to her. Talking out loud in this remembering type of situation, even when I know for certain that no one can hear me, is really scary for me. I have such a fear of being overheard, or watched, or whatever.

I found out recently that people with avoidant personality disorder have an extreme fear of anyone seeing them blushing, and I wonder if this is the same type of fear I have about being overheard talking out loud to people in my past memories.

So anyway, I felt good about being brave enough to talk to that memory of my mom out loud.

******

I started this post three days ago. I'm scared to post it.

My mom raped me.

I don't even like thinking about it. Why would I write it in a fucking blog?

I am back to being afraid of what she might think or do if I post it, and also being afraid of what my brother and sister might say.

I'm not afraid in a concrete way - it is more like the girl in my brain is afraid of being abandoned or ostrasized or shamed or ridiculed.

But I am not the same girl now, and I have already been shamed and ridiculed and ostrasized and disowned, so what am I afraid of? What's left to scare me? 

It's the reality of it. If I say that my mom raped me, then I have to think - did my mom rape me? Then I go back to all of the ways that what my mom did to me constitutes rape. I keep running out of any other answer than:

My mom raped me.

part 124, or "accessories sold separately"

I was just re-reading my last post, about my dad and evil, and I realized that I had witnessed (and written about in my last post) my dad before he was totally dead inside.

I know that mental illness left untreated is usually a gradual process to madness, but for some reason, I have only thought of my dad as completely bad; completely evil; completely soulless. He wasn’t always like that, though.

Sometimes there would be a light shining in him. It was always very brief, and I remember feeling very uncomfortable by how vulnerable he was allowing himself to be. It was like he was flashing his soft underbelly in a world I believed was filled with daggers.

It seemed as though he was incredibly awkward in a lot of ways, socially speaking. He didn’t really have a good lead on what other people thought was normal, and he would make inappropriate jokes and remarks, and then look embarrassed and cease talking when no one laughed or otherwise validated him. He only seemed confident and comfortable around people who were afraid or in awe of him.

That is just one more thing I can completely relate with, though. I guess me and my dad really were a lot alike.

My brother insists he is nothing like my dad – he’s terrified of being my dad, which is silly, because half of his genetic makeup is my dad, whether my brother wants to acknowledge that or not. It’s funny, because I always felt my dad was terrified of becoming HIS dad – it’s why he would insist on saying that he loved us every day, because his dad never said that to him ever.

My dad spoke less and less of his dad as years went by. I mean, he hardly ever mentioned him at any time, but I do remember him bringing up his dad when I was younger, and then not doing that as I got older. He would talk about technical things concerning his dad, like what he did for work and stuff like that. I don’t remember my dad ever really being emotional about his dad. Actually, I don’t remember my dad ever being emotional about anything.

I saw him cry once. It was when he and my mom reconciled after their separation when I was in the 5^th grade. They were in the bed talking, and then they called the three of us into their room, and told us that they weren’t going to get divorced, and we all climbed in the bed and cried together.

I wasn’t shocked to see tears dripping down my dad’s cheeks, but I was struck by how unusual it was, and I knew I had never seen him cry before, and I don’t think I ever saw him cry since then. It was all very weird and emotional, and I felt very much that our family was one unit, and that we were each part of it, and that we were all working together for the best of us all.

That was a fleeting moment, but it was real – it did happen.

I’m not trying to say that sadistic sociopaths never cry, or are incapable of crying – I know people can tear up and start crying on cue as a means to manipulate other people.

But I don’t think my dad was doing that the time I saw him cry.

There were times, too, when he would look at me, at my face and my eyes, and tell me how much he loved me, and that I was special to him, and he would bear hug me, and I would feel happy and safe for a moment. I believe in those tiny pieces of my childhood, that my dad really did love me.

I really loved him, too.

I have this odd, off-kilter feeling about the role my dad has played in my life, as far as the role of “my dad” goes. There were certain expectations I had of him that would fit into the “normal dad” category. Sometimes I would forget who he was, and who I was, and start to feel safe leaning on him as “my dad.” It was a nice feeling.

I wonder if that is how it feels to have a dad who doesn’t hurt you, and who wants to keep you safe. It seems like it would be so solid, so comforting, to have that faith in a parent. I can’t imagine – I can’t comprehend – what it would be like to feel that all the time, to never doubt that it was real.

I’ve written before about seeing other dads with their daughters, and feeling puzzled and foreign and grateful and envious that these daughters had dads who made them smile and laugh and feel safe. I have been recognizing that I did have that feeling with my dad, as frail and eluding as it was.

Losing that feeling of safety hurt so bad – it was devastating. It was ice picks through my gut, and cement in my lungs, but I was a sucker for getting a taste of that feeling. I don’t think always, though. I denied my dad my trust and confidence and faith regularly – turned my back when he was trying to show me a nice part of him.

But when I didn’t turn my back on him, those times when he gave me the feeling that he was “my dad” were heavenly. For a moment, I believed that I actually was like the little girls in commercials playing with Barbi dolls and riding bikes and doing mischievous little girl things that dads acted upset about, but actually really endeared them to their girls all the more.

Those girls were their dad’s girls.

Those dads looked at those girls and said, not matter what was going on, “that’s my little girl. That’s my baby girl, my beautiful, amazing baby girl, and I would gladly kill anyone who might have the gall to hurt her.”

At those times, I could see that my hair was smooth and shiny and had cute bows or barrettes in it, and my clothes were so pretty, and everything I wore matched perfectly with the bows and barrettes, and the lace around the ankles of my socks would match, too. My room would be pink or purple, and have matching curtains and comforter and pillow shams, and a bed skirt, and – dream of all dreams – a canopy over the bed.

I always imagined it would feel nice to sleep with a canopy over me – not enclosing me or entrapping me, but just protecting me from the world by shielding me with floating pastel banners.

But then “my dad” would just be my dad again, and it would all crash down onto me again, get jerked away from me, and I would be ugly again, with ugly clothes and ugly shoes and not one single pair of socks with lace around the ankles, and not one single Barbi doll, which I didn’t want anyway, because what fun were Barbi dolls if it was too freakishly weird to introduce Barbi to Ken and make them have sex on that goddamn pink canopy bed?

part 123, or "like a box of chocolates"

(Note: I keep trying to re-read and polish this up for publishing, but my brain keeps getting all soupy from the content; as far as it making any sense, you're on your own)

My dad was a sadist. He loved to hurt people in innovative ways. Actually, he loved to imagine hurting people in innovative ways. Once the actual act of hurting someone became a part of the real world, during the time he was doing the hurting, his mind retreated. Any part of him that was human shrank back into an almost-oblivion as his body inflicted the pain.

And then he would come back, and see and think about he had done, and he would be horrified - but only for a second, maybe less. Once he came back into his mind, the knowledge that he had hurt someone in such a brutal way was the worst pain he had ever felt. It devastated him. So he only kept it in his brain fleetingly, and would not have felt it at all, but he didn't have a choice, because he was not completely dead inside.

The part of him that was not dead lived in a nightmare. It was stuffed down so deeply inside of him, and coated all around with thick layers of apathy. Most of the time he couldn't feel it, or have to think about it, but it was still there.

He hated it. He hated the part of him that would not die. I don't think he started out hurting people so that he could kill what was alive in himself, but that is what it eventually became. Each time he did something horrific, the alive part of him would scream, and he would remember what it felt like to feel. He would remember that he was not completely evil - there still resided a bit of innocence in him.

So he would try harder to prove to himself that he really was completely evil. This is how things escalated, how his methods of torture evolved. Initially, he simply loved how it felt to hurt someone (or something). He had been hurt so much by people and places bigger than him, and the realization that he could hurt things smaller than himself made him feel strong. Like cocaine. It made him feel like he could take on everyone in the world, and he truly believed that it would happen someday, and that he would not be afraid of anyone, and everyone would be afraid of him.

I can relate to this. My big problem, though, is that I have not been able to kill nearly as much of my alive self as my dad. As a child, he had much more time left alone to harm other things - when he was a kid, from a very young age, he would wander around, and to get the pain of isolation and rejection out of his mind and body, he would search out creatures he could hurt. And then he would hurt them, and he would feel better - or at least feel less, because he was killing a tiny bit of his alive self with every act of pain inflicted on another being.

When he was young, he loved the thrill of it, and how the thrill would completely shut out his own pain. But he began to get indifferent to it - he was gaining a tolerance to the pain he inflicted on others, and it wasn't working for him after a while, and he had to inflict more and more pain on others in order to get rid of only a drop of his own pain. Like cocaine.

By the time I came around, he was still able to cancel out some of his pain by hurting others, but when I was born, he gained a completely defenseless being, completely within his power, to hurt. Game ON.

My dad, I believe, felt that he was abused because it was part of the process of becoming "better than." I know he hated his dad, and his brother, but could not comprehend that they would hurt him simply for their own sadistic pleasures. I used to be very sure that my grandfather thought he was god, too, or a prophet or something, and that he passed this on to my dad. I think my grandfather was actually just completely nuts, but his indoctrination in a religious cult is where he got his god-superiority from.

I have tried to tie my grandfather's and father's failed attempt to castrate me to something that makes some sort of sense, even if it is a crazy sort of logic. But it's not logical at all. I thought of it as a ritual, again part of the process to make me the next generation of superiority. Maybe I have not been able to comprehend that my father and grandfather would just do that to me simply for their own sadistic pleasure.

My abuse has always been so heavily shrouded in religion that I am only just now realizing that it may have all been just madness, that religion and superiority may have been superficial normalizations for such horrendous behavior, but that none of it ever actually clicked together.

Maybe I have been seeing the generational "superiority" as my dad's motivation to hurt me because I can't comprehend that he was a straight-up crazy dude who liked to do incredibly sick and damning things to me.

My dad really did eventually come to believe he was god. I don't think it was all aimless madness - he definitely had a linear frame of mind, albeit outside the realm of reality. But it was real to him - that's where his shitty childhood and his being a cowardly little bitch drove him to. Being god was the only conclusion that he found appropriate as an answer to all of the shit he suffered, and to all of the shit he did to other people. I mean, only non-human types of beings could have been the victim and predator of what my dad experienced, and the only non-human beings he was taught existed were god and satan.

He saw everyone who tried to "get in his way" or to "destroy" him as satan, so the only thing left for him to be was god.

I don’t know.

I really do think my dad's brainwashing me to think I was some sort of godling is what ended up holding my mind together; it gave me strength to not give in to killing myself, literally and figuratively.

Part of my parents' façade was the use of religion to hide their evil. They had to do enough for me to appear as good parents. Except that the good in my life was not a ruse to me; to me, it was real. Maybe that's why the part of me that is alive hasn't been quieted.

Regardless, my dad very gradually glided from the pain of loss and rejection to the appearance of complete apathy. I don't know if he succeeded in killing his alive self completely before his physical self died, but if there was any of him left alive the last couple of times I saw him, I could not see it. If there was any life left in him, it was the root of misery and despair - he simply had no access to it, though he had no way of completely extinguishing it. Just KNOWING, somewhere deep in his body and mind, that he did have an element of recognizing that what he was doing was horrifically evil, and any glimpse of the evil in himself was the embodiment of suffering.

I don't know how I know these things about my dad. I just know that I do. I have had a very difficult time resolving that my knowledge of evil is different from being evil. But as I get more familiar with the person I really am, the more I am able to use my knowledge of evil as a tool to make the world a better place. Or at least a safer place.

That knowledge of evil, though, has come from hurting others - the things I have done to other people (granted, primarily at the behest and coercion of my dad), are tremendously difficult to live with. I guess I am fortunate that I have figured out a way to live with it without indulging myself in it as a means of becoming numb to my own pain.

I guess I'm just lucky that way.