Quin
So often those of us who write about violence in our lives start with, “I can’t remember when it didn’t happen.”
I’m one of those people.
I can’t remember when it didn’t happen. As a child, when I’d do something ‘wrong,’ my grandmother would get a willow switch and use it on me. Then she’d tell my mom when she came home from work, so I’d get it there. Finally, my dad would arrive home; by that point, I’d be asking god to just strike me dead.
I was never spanked.
I was beaten. Willow switches (that I had to cut myself), belts, pancake turners… once an antenna. I had my head put through walls, bones broken, bruises everywhere. Even in those years of ‘sparing the rod spoils the child’ mentality, my parents were harsh disciplinarians. I am aware now they were miserable with each other, and took it out on me. My brother was hit on occasion; usually, though, I would take his licks. He was scrawny, and he was my little brother, and I stepped between.
I’m not sure they ever noticed the substitution.
The last time I was beaten I was eighteen. I was on the ground where I’d been slapped to, and being kicked. I heard a rib crack. The next day I moved out to a friend’s house and never went back. When I was a woman my father asked my forgiveness, allowing me the power in our relationship. My mother has yet to acknowledge her mental, emotional and physical damage to me, and we do not speak any longer.
I moved on, not forward — just on. My first love (that I lived with, adored, felt so inferior to) had addiction problems. His way of dealing with me was to… well, beat me. Slaps at first, then punches, then pushing me down stairs.
I left him when I found him outside our bedroom door with a loaded gun. He told me if I came out, he’d shoot me. He was drunk, and I managed to talk my way out, talk my way into getting the gun. Talk my way into living.
I finally felt it was okay to date… I was aware, right?
Wrong. The first man I dated had me over for dinner, for drinks. When I announced it was time for me to leave, he followed me into the bedroom where I had put my coat, and he took his payment for dinner. He kept kissing me, saying how wonderful i was. I guess a sobbing woman lying there after being worn out fighting was a hot date for him? He kept kissing me, and it lead to an aversion to kissing that remains to this day. I used to love to kiss, to feel someone’s mouth on mine; that delicious sensation when the inside of your lip slides over their lips…. He took that from me; took it, and it’s taken me years to recover even that bit of pleasure. I said “no” over and over. Some part of no sounded to him like, “Do me, baby!”
Date rape is something a number of people don’t believe in. Even my (ex) husband, when years after our marriage I finally told him of the event, (the first person I’d ever told!) he said, “Well, you must have done something to let him think you wanted to fuck.”
Why, yes, I did! I ate dinner and laughed and chatted. I suppose he translated my stories of my job into me begging for sex.
The droll side of the story is the guy called me the next night, asking me out again, since, “we’d had such a good time!”
Then, I met my (ex) husband. I thought I was strong and able to put forth a demeanor of being strong and secure. I was so wrong.
I married a man who never touched me physically, but abused me emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. He’d ‘talk’ to me in a monotone, a hard voice… telling me how I’d disappointed him, how I’d failed to be a good wife, what a bad person I was. He’d keep it up, as I literally slid down the wall I was leaning against, sobbing and begging him to stop. He’d lean over me as he squatted beside me, still going on and on and on. I don’t remember huge parts of my marriage. I only knew I’d cringe when he’d say, “Would you come back to the bedroom, I want to talk to you.”
He then put me into a place I never want to go again. Weak, beaten down, broken.
It’s been 13 years since he left me for a friend of mine. He left behind children and a house that needed work, and no money. I pawned my diamond, I burned old furniture, I became creative in how to make mac-and-cheese tasty and new. I took account of myself, and stood tall.
I’ve survived parents, abusive men, cancer, and New York City. I found I can care about someone, but I have to watch myself — a phrase from a friend will resonate in me as a negative thing, and I react immediately. I’m learning to listen and digest and not bark answers.
I have strong daughters and supportive sons. I am blessed with wonderful friends, and I found my niche in life; I write and work in theater, and I am content with those things. Do I desire a relationship? To willingly go into that minefield? As I write this, I pause, wondering. I know I have the capacity to love deeply, to care and worry and like and all those good things. I am not sure I have the capacity to accept those same things for myself.
I still struggle with the understanding I am deserving of someone caring about me. I slipped recently, started a relationship with someone and accepted less than what is due me as a person. He didn’t abuse me, he abused my trust — and that, too, is a sin. He did tell me via Facebook he was in a relationship — it simply wasn’t with me! Classy, eh? I breathe a sigh of relief I never kissed him, because that makes me feel I did control some part of that time together.
My dear friend, Nathan, tells me sometimes he thinks before I came to this life, I told the universe, “Just give me all of my karma paybacks now, so I can get them over with!” It makes me laugh, even as I wonder if he’s right. He also reminds me that I am funny and smart and talented and, yes, beautiful. That whomever is in my life is as lucky as I feel having them in mine.
That bit I’m still learning. I only know that every day I wake up, glad I am alive, glad I am willing to love, glad things are certainly stressful at times, but, they are violence-free.
And that, my friends, is a good thing.
***
Quin blogs at FMD.
Mr. Lady
My story is not an exceptional one.
It ends the way most of these stories do, with me standing over a steaming hot sink full of suds scrubbing the remnants of the past few nights’ wine out of the bottoms of stemmed glasses, sweating out decades of re-directed anger that I’m not supposed to feel, not allowed to voice. How I got here now is a twisting road of heartbreak, of rage, of disgrace and stubbornness. Here is no longer the thing that defines me, those suds in the sink turning red and oxidizing are no longer my enemy, nor is the man that I love who slowly destroys himself in the adjoining room as he looses his nightly battle with shadows he can never expose to light, as he bears the weight of his own ancestry and the projected reel-to-reel videos of mine. He sits in that room, after we’ve all turned in for the night, destroying himself, but he no longer destroys me, too. Every empty bottle that I get to return for deposit is $0.05 I get to put back into my soul.
My story is not an exceptional one.
It begins the way most of these stories do, with a boy and a girl and a bottle and a car and a plus on a stick. How I got here now is a twisted road of violence, of abandonment, of violations of mind and body and soul by friend and family and God. It’s the tale of divorce lawyers and custody disputes and worn photographs and rock bands and psychiatric wards. It’s the story of mirrors that are all cracked, reflections that will always be askew, of mistaken identities and overblown fears. I have followed the blackened roots of a withered ancestral tree to bring me to the place I stand today, and I greet the demons that hide in its shadows with nothing less than measured dread.
His story is not an exceptional one.
It ends with salvation brought about by little more than dumb luck and hopeful courage. The plot is full of upward climbs and downward slides, of demons that reach of from the depths of his own personal hell and pull his tattered shoes back down with them, of secret ladders and hidden weapons he’s stored away just in case he might need to use them to claw his way back to the surface. His story is a beacon, a fire in the lighthouse calling all of us who are still lost as sea to his shore. He’s lived to tell about cruelty and torture and abandonment. He’s learned to tell it with love and understanding and forgiveness. He is the person most people will never become.
His story is not an exceptional one.
His story begins by re-telling the story before him, just as mine does. His story bears the same footnotes as mine, develops the same characters and follows the same outline, yet his tale is of a nightmare that, though I witnessed, I can scarcely bear to recall. It’s the re-hashing of deceptions and omissions, of misplaced rage, of experimental anti-psychotics and perpetuation of victimization. It’s the story of creating and propagating vulnerability, of the ways nurture can take nature, smother it in the middle of the night and replace it with something that is almost similar, almost real, almost living and forever altered. It is filled with visualizations of humiliation and shared agonies and helplessness in the face of monsters. His story is that of things that go bump in the night, that which take and never give back, that which bloody and bruise but refuse to break.
Our stories are the same stories. We are the same person, he and I, born of common ancestry and into shared madness. I am the bone of his bone, and he the flesh of my flesh, the footprints of ourselves etched into the walls of the same womb. At our microscopic core, we are identical in every way. The lines of delineation are drawn simply at the titles we have been given in life, labels provided us by that boy and that girl in that car with that bottle in 1967.
Mine was first born daughter, his was first born son.
Our stories are exceptional. We are exceptional. We beat odds before we knew how to multiply with nothing more than a cherry blossom tree to hide in and a hole in a wall to whisper to each other between when no one else was listening. We unleash the ghosts and reveal the mirages in the story of our lives, our history, our family tree together in whispered tones over international phone lines in the middle of the night, and he continues to show me the way to not live in fear, and I continue to try to give our secret pain a public name.
Our stories are exceptional, and I am going to tell them for the whole world to hear. I am no longer afraid.
***
Mr. Lady blogs at Whiskey In My Sippy Cup. She asks that you kindly keep all comments here on VU, rather than at her blog.
Kay
This is one of the things I’ve known for a long time that I needed to write about, but I kept finding other things to write; fun things, sad things… anything but this. There is nothing sexy, amusing, or even mildly entertaining about this one. This goes back 19 years to something I’ve shared with very few people. Something that, to be honest, I’ve never even dealt with internally. Not in therapy, not in rehab, not in recovery, not even when I knew I needed to.
Why am I writing this now? Because I got a phone call from one of the few family members I speak to, one of the only ones I trust, and she asked me an outright question that I wasn’t prepared for — and I couldn’t lie in response. So I told her. And I know telling her hurt her almost as much as talking about it hurt me. Because she suspected — nothing of the details, but suspected SOMETHING. The few times I’ve talked about it have left me feeling numb, but last night was different. She’s lived through this as a parent, and knew the questions to ask, the things to say, that would make me think –- that would shift the view of the whole thing in my mind. Things that no one I’ve shared it with ever knew to ask. So to her, I’m grateful. Because burying it doesn’t make it any less real, it doesn’t make it go away. I’ll stop talking about writing it now, and just write it. It’s probably going to come out sounding very clinical, and for that I apologize. It’s not that I’m not willing to share the emotion, it’s that I haven’t learned what the emotion is yet, I haven’t even begun to process it… not even after 19 years.
I was 11 years old… already “older” than I should be, hanging out with kids a few years ahead of me because I felt more comfortable with them. I’d had enough responsibility caring for my younger brother and sister that 11-year-old’s seemed so immature to me. Our interests and maturity levels just didn’t mesh. I also spent a lot of time with “the guys” because I’ve never been able to make female friends easily, though I’m not sure why. I’m not going to go deep into my mental and emotional state at that age — I’ll just say that like most girls without a father in their lives, I was desperate for attention, affection, and love.
As usual, mom was out getting drunk — only this time it was at a family member’s house, so she had taken the two younger ones with her. I didn’t get dragged along because I was supposed to babysit for someone that night, and had things to do at home first. I wish I had gone with her, as much as I hated seeing her that way, then having to get in the car with her wasted as she drove us home, my eyes closed and praying the whole way that we’d all make it there alive.
It was me and a female friend, plus one of the guys from the neighborhood. He was 15 or 16, and his friend was visiting. I’d never met the friend before that day. He was even older, either 17 or 18. We were hanging out in the living room, watching some stupid movie, nothing out of the ordinary, joking comments being thrown back and forth between all of us. The guy threw out a “fuck you” comment in response to something – and being the smart ass that I was, my response was, “C’mon, let’s go — right now.” I was mouthy, it was the only way I knew how to assert myself. Besides, the guys I hung out with were used to me. They knew me. I’d kissed one or two guys by then, but other than that had no experience. Hell, a year before that I hadn’t even known what a french kiss was. He, apparently, didn’t see me that way. He grabbed my arm and walked me upstairs. I went, willingly, because I figured we’d kiss for a little, and then that would be it. I was so very, very wrong.
This is where it all gets fuzzy in my head – I’ve buried it for so long, it’s hard to remember, and I think I prefer it that way. I know the details are going to come back to me, but I honestly don’t know if I can handle them.
We went upstairs, leaving the other two downstairs to watch the movie. Writing this has me wondering what they were thinking – but I don’t think either of them could even comprehend what was going to happen… they knew me, and my male friend (thought) he knew his friend. Another wrong assumption. I remember him kissing me, then starting to touch me – I started to back away, but he was right there, and so much bigger and stronger. He kept going… I know I didn’t scream, I know I didn’t fight as hard as I could have. But I also (now) realize that probably wouldn’t have made a difference. I do know that words and phrases like “I can’t” “wait… don’t” “I don’t want to…” — things like that were said by me. But at some point, I stopped pushing him away, I stopped fighting him, I stopped saying anything, because nothing I was saying was making a difference to him. I shut myself down. I closed my eyes and my mind to what was happening. I hid inside myself. And he raped me.
When it was over, he went back downstairs without saying anything that I can remember. I cleaned myself up and did the same. When I got down there, my friend pulled me into the kitchen and asked what had happened – I told her I didn’t have time to talk, had to get ready to go babysit. And that’s what I did. I went to work, took care of the kids, and came home to her waiting for me. Again, she asked… and I told her a glossed over version of what happened, leaving out the fact that I didn’t want to. She knew me, so she pushed, but I refused to call it what it was, or admit that there was anything wrong. She, who was a good 4+ years older than me, was still a virgin, and couldn’t believe that it had happened. But she couldn’t budge me from claiming it was a choice that I made, even years later when it would come up in conversation.
That’s where I changed… from the child I was into the teenager I became. Sex was no longer something important, something special. It was something to endure, a tool to get that affection, that attention, that sense of love – even if it was for just a few minutes, and I hated myself every time afterwards. I learned (quickly and suddenly) how to disconnect myself from what was happening to me. Where I went from there is another story, one I’m not ready to write yet. Hell, I wasn’t ready to write this one yet, either. But sometimes what you’re ready for and what you need to do are two different things. This needed to come out, for me – it needed to happen, because for 19 years, I’ve buried it. And I can finally see that until I deal with THIS, there is no dealing with the rest of my issues. And yes, 19 years later, I STILL struggle with remembering, with realizing, that it was NOT my fault. I know that on so many levels… but there’s still parts of me that believe that I put myself in that situation, that I could have done this, or should have done that, or whatever. And that’s the next thing to deal with – realizing, completely, that this was NOT MY FAULT. I’ll get there.
I can’t get anywhere else until I do.
***
Kay blogs at Chains of Yesterday.
Mrs. Mess
I was four years old when my mother took me to live with her and her boyfriend in Montana – we left my father and brother behind in Washington because this man was ‘the one.’
I remember him backhanding mom into a sleeper sofa -– knocking her and the mattress back into the shell of the couch, and it was taking way too long for her to get it together and get up out of the couch’s giant mouth. As soon as she would almost free herself, he would push her back in –- laughing and yelling at the same time, “Just get up! What’s the matter?! Get back up!” again and again. I remember wishing that the couch-mouth would chew her up and swallow her. She finally just stopped trying to get out and sank back into the mouth. I couldn’t see her anymore once she stopped struggling -– I thought she would probably stay in there forever.
I remember him hitting her in the face with such force that she slid across the kitchen floor and landed under the table -– it didn’t even seem like she ever touched the floor and she never made any noise getting there -– just like a cartoon. And after she sat under there for so long that I got bored waiting for her, she just crawled out and stood up and wiped off the knees of her jeans; started washing the dishes like nothing happened. We just pretended it didn’t.
I remember him sitting under the living room window with me, holding me and kissing my temple, telling me that he would take care of me now. He had just pushed mom out the front door with a shot gun. He figured she should just leave –- he was angry that she was still out there sitting in her car with the headlights out. He kept asking me, “Why won’t she just go?” I had no idea why. I remember sitting there with him at the window all night long till the sun started coming back up, watching her watching us. Eventually I starting thinking why won’t she just go?
And then I remember that one time; the only time anyone ever mentions. She was pregnant; he was mad. Those are the only details I know. He was going to kill her -– he said so.
First he kicked her — hard – in the stomach. I was stunned. I remember thinking they must have taught him Kung-Fu in the “Vietnam” that everyone was always talking about. The place they said made him this way -– where he got the injury that made him so mean and want to hit. I always felt sad that he had an injury like that and I thought it must really hurt to make you want to hit so hard. He kicked her and punched her and kicked her and punched her and I don’t remember when or how it stopped -– but it did stop. The cops arrested him and the state put me on a plane back to Washington. They put mom in the hospital. I learned years later that someone from the hospital called and told my aunt to get my mothers affairs in order and that if they wanted to pay their last respects and say goodbye to her, they needed to hurry.
She didn’t die.
Fast forward 10 years: I was so cool to have a boyfriend so much older than me. And he was a soldier -– going off to Desert Storm to save our lives. A hero. Hero’s can’t hurt you. I felt safe around him, because he was big and older and made me feel important and grown-up. I was fourteen, after all, and I knew everything. On the night before he left, I snuck out of the house to say goodbye because he asked me to –- because I was special and he wanted me -– he was probably the one.
When he finally let me up off his fathers’ basement carpet, he said that I had wanted him to do that. He said I acted like I liked it, so I should quit crying. He said that he deserved what he just took from me and I should be happy that he didn’t make it hurt more. He said people would never believe me if I told on him; he was right. I just wiped off the knees of my jeans and pretended it didn’t happen and I never saw him again.
Fast forward another 10 years: I couldn’t leave this man. My son was little and needed a father-figure; no one else would want me; I couldn’t leave. I would just have to take this –- fix it. He was probably the one and if I fucked this one up -– what then? I was damaged goods -– I had “baggage.” I’d been through a long embarrassing string of abusive boyfriends; I was tired. If I could just keep him sober, he wouldn’t push me anymore. He wouldn’t hold me down anymore or say the nasty things anymore. He was an okay guy, sober. And he never ever hit me with his fist. He just pushed and squeezed; threw things and pulled me around -– at least he was not really “abusive.”
Only then he was, because he always was. He dragged me up the stairs by my hair at a bar because he thought I was probably fucking someone in the bathroom. He yanked the steering wheel when I was driving till I slammed on the breaks and tried to force me to snort coke out his hand; when I wouldn’t, he tried to push my head through the side window. He picked me up and threw me down on my mother’s living room floor and put his foot on my neck because I didn’t want to have sex. He called me a whore and a bad mother and said he was the best thing that would ever happen to me.
I believed him. I just got angry that he said and did those things in front of my son; he was only four.
I finally left him for good when I found out I was pregnant with my daughter. I know he would have killed me. I know it would have killed my son’s spirit if I didn’t save him and my baby and myself.
Fast forward seven years: We are free. We are safe. My daughter has never had to watch anyone hurt her mom; my son is fiercely protective of girls. My husband knows where I have been and he praises the strength it took to get out. He understands my need to dissect my past and is patient when it spills over onto my present. My mother doesn’t talk about it; I do. Someday maybe she, too, can wear her scars like badges and be proud that she survived the war.
***
Mrs. Mess blogs at This Blessed Mess.
