Rina
I have a bone spur sitting on my spine. It doesn’t usually hurt and I rarely think about it. You can’t see it unless you are looking at an x-ray. There are no marks on my skin or visible deformities. But, I have a bone spur just the same and when the weather is bad the pain can knock the breath right out of me. They found the spur after an accident I was in and the doctors couldn’t figure it out. Bone spurs take years to form and I was too young to have one of this size. I knew immediately what caused it but my shame was too great to say anything. I remembered the beating I took for no good reason in front of my uncle who did nothing to stop it. The pain was gone within hours but there were bruises. The bruises faded within a few weeks but this spur continued to grow as the years passed. A hurt no one can see unless they go looking for it
I am not a victim. I am a survivor. A survivor of child abuse, date rape, domestic violence, rape, mental abuse, emotional abuse and of treatment no human should ever have to experience. I’ve been torn down, walked on, beat up and verbally assaulted more times that I can count. But I am not a victim. I am a survivor.
I am the product of abuse. I spent most of my young life searching for love and acceptance, convinced if I was just “good enough” I might have some value to someone. Having constantly been told I was stupid, fat, lazy and ugly, as well as being shuffled off here and there when I became a burden, had left its mark. I was never able to settle into any kind of routine or structure. Drugs and alcohol became my closest companions. The only relationships I knew were destructive and, more often than not, abusive. I gravitated towards people that I would need to prove my worth to and accepted being treated badly because it’s what I was convinced I deserved. I was repeatedly raped; emotionally, mentally, and physically battered and abused.
My high school sweetheart left me unable to walk for two years courtesy of a beating with a wooden chair. I remember going to the hospital and lying to the nurses, doctors and police who did their best to get me to press charges. I didn’t because I figured when my own brother refused to come help me that it must have been my fault. I must have done something to deserve the beating. The lesson I should have gained from being told that it would be years before I would walk again was lost on me because when I went to my mother for support I was told, “You’d better get used to it because that is how men are.” Then she proceeded to beat my head into the floor until I had a concussion in front of family members who did nothing to stop it. This simply fueled my continued belief that I was unworthy to exist.
I launched myself into downward spiral after spiral of drug and alcohol-fueled bad choices and abusive relationships. I got involved with a crack-head who sexually abused me and stole my money. A wannabe “wiseguy” who used psychological torture, as well as emotional battery, to keep me in my place. He had convinced me I could not survive without him and he was just like my mother who lavished clothing and jewelry and gifts on me so to the public I looked perfect–and then he would beat, berate and belittle me in private. A married man who used my desire to be let out of that gilded cage for his own twisted sexual wants. Until ….
There finally came a day when I came to a place in my life where I was either going to literally lie down and die or get up and fight. I chose the latter only, instead of fighting for or against other people, I fought for myself–for my sanity, for my life. I walked out the door and never looked back. I left it all behind, the men, the drugs, the alcohol and the family who really wasn’t much of a family at all. With every mile that passed I felt the toxicity begin to slough off like dead skin cells. With every day that passed the fears would lessen. It would take years for the emotional hurts to even begin to scar over and some haven’t to this day.
But I can stand here today and say that I am worth something. I have value. I am a good person. I am kind. I am compassionate. I can give and accept love. I am smart. I am talented. I am alive! I am a survivor! I am a survivor and I am here to tell you that you have value. I am here to tell you that you are worth more than the world tells you that you are. I am here to tell you to fight for yourself. You are not alone. There are many of us that are pulling for you even when you can’t see us.
Eileen
It’s hard to know where to start…
Do I start with the earliest clear memory? Me at 6 years old with my oldest brother asking me if he can watch me go pee. He is 11 then. I remember clearly thinking it is gross and telling him no. Of course, the no’s only work for so long…
Or do I start with that foggy memory of me at 4-years-old. Sleeping upstairs in my grandparents’ home. My mind’s eye can see the pants in front of me and the hands that pull down the zipper and then pull out the ugliest body part I have ever seen. My wrist feels the tight gripping pull towards the body part as I try to resist. My ears hear the squeak of the step… fourth from the top… as someone is coming up the stairs. Quickly, the hands and body disappear.
Do I speak of the years upon years of constant, daily sexual abuse by two of my three brothers? Never being able to sleep for fear of who may walk in that night. Never having friends stay over – to keep them safe from the hell I am living in. The bruised body along with the wounded soul… beaten for saying no. The eyes that watch me shower. The head between my 11 year old legs as I awake one morning. Do I dare share the day when my father walks in and catches my oldest brother molesting me? I am 12. My father asks my brother to move out. Nothing is ever talked about. He is just gone.
Do I talk to you of the day after school when I arrive to find that I am home alone with my middle brother? The most violent of them all. How can I describe the rape that wasn’t the violent event that most people imagine when they hear that word? After years of violence, I had learned it was safer to succumb. To take leave of the room in my mind – leaving my body to suffer the consequences of their actions. I can hear the fan in the room as he pulls down my shorts and pushes me into the chair. How many minutes does it take? I don’t know, honestly. I only know that I have a record album in my hands. I hold it up and read it over and over and over again. I don’t know what album it was. I only know he finally finishes and he walks away. I am 13 years old and, unbeknown to me, that day I become pregnant. Three months later, my mother sees what I didn’t know but she knew – stretchmarks on my young breasts. There is much hollering and fuss and then my father finally asks me who the father is. When I tell him, his response to me is, “Did you want this to happen?” I still don’t understand that question. He leaves my room and moments later I hear my mother crying and screaming, “My baby! My baby!” But she never comes in to console “her baby.” A few days later, I pee in a cup. A few days later, I’m told by my parents that I have an appointment. I am taken to a hospital for an abortion. Seated in a room with women older than I. A few hours later, it’s over and I’m vomiting my way out of the hospital. My mother offers me Nacho Cheese Doritos and Honey Buns to eat as soon as I get in the car. My middle brother is asked to leave our house then.
I start to get comfortable. Maybe that’s the end of it…
A few weeks later, I awake in the morning to my father’s hands between my legs. He asks me if it feels good. I reply that it doesn’t. He leaves that day, but returns morning after morning. And I am catapulted back into hell.
I attend a pizza event with some high school friends in October of that year. A conversation with a female friend leads me to reveal my suffering to her. She can’t handle it, but luckily for me there is a boy there who can. A boy whose mother works for CPS and who has the foresight to give him some of her business cards. He gives one to me that night.
I’m now 14 years old; I’m at the bowling alley after school with my father and my remaining brother. My father is at the counter, my brother is playing Asteroids and I am on the pay phone with CPS. They want to get me right then, but I ask for them to come to school the next day. And they do. I am taken that day to a receiving home which is the entry level home in the foster care system in California. A few days later, my mother is allowed to come to the home to bring me some clothing. She sits on the couch in their living room, crying. She wants to know why I did this to our family. I am stunned that she doesn’t believe me. She leaves crying and a few moments later, my father is at the door. Pounding, yelling, threatening. I am shoved into a back bedroom while the police are called. Shaken. My brothers are never charged with any crime because of their ages and locations. My father denies any wrongdoing at first. He claims that I abuse drugs and that I have been prostituting myself for cash. Eventually, he finds out that if he pleads guilty, he will spend no time in jail. He takes the plea and gets sentenced to community service and counseling. I am moved to a foster home. My social worker arrives a few weeks later to pick me up. To take me to attend my father’s first counseling session. I refuse to go and am told if I don’t? I’ll be taken to juvenile hall for defying a court order. I am stunned. My social worker is visibly upset at having to tell me this. He lets me slide that day, but next time… I attend sessions with my molester for several months and then he is proclaimed HEALED and I am put back into my parents’ home. Yes. He starts abusing me again. This time, I tell my mother with the warning that if she doesn’t make him stop, this time I won’t rely on the system to protect me. I will just leave. The molestation stops. The violence begins. I endure.
It’s hard to know where to end my story…
Flash forward… I meet, then marry my high school sweetheart when I am 19. When I am 21, I give birth to our first daughter. Four years later, our second. When my oldest daughter turns five, I began having difficulties. Episodes of disassociation and panic attacks send me into counseling. I begin with group sessions and then move into individual counseling. I speak to my therapist in one particular session about seeing my father in a store and having to run to the bathroom to vomit. She asks me why I still associate with him. My response is that it’s just something I have to do. It’s then that the sweetest words ever are spoken. “You know that you’re an adult now? You know you have a choice?” A few sessions later, I write my father a letter and ask him to stay away from me and my family. That was 17 years ago now.
Four years ago, I did some research on the internet regarding child abduction laws and I stumbled across a piece of legislation that was set to go before the California Senate that year. This piece of legislation was to change the incest exception law. Was to ensure that predators who “grow their own victims” receive the same punishments given to all molesters. It had gone before the Senate the year before and failed because the California legislators refused to believe that this sort of thing happened. I contacted the Senator who wrote the bill and offered my support. The next thing I knew, I was sitting at the Capitol speaking in front of a Senate Committee. Sharing my story. It waffled back and forth, but SB 33, The Circle of Trust Bill, passed. Three years ago, I was back in Sacramento again testifying. This time on behalf of legislation that would stop criminals convicted of a sexual crime from ever obtaining custody of their victim or any other child ever again. This piece of legislation passed as well.
I’m certainly not healed completely. My story doesn’t end here. I had limited contact with my mother for years but have since discontinued the contact because it became to harmful to me. I don’t know that I’ll ever forget her asking me, “When are you just going to get over it?” I’m twice divorced. Searching for my happiness still but I’ve raised two gorgeous, brilliant daughters who have never been abused. That is what I am most proud of. I am also proud that I was able to change the laws to hopefully help the children we all know are still out there – suffering. Perhaps eventually, I’ll be able to write more of my story. This time? With a happy ending.
Zoey Jane
The following survivor story was written by Zoey Jane. She blogs at Mommy is Moody.
***
“I never thought it was okay to hit a woman, until I met your mother.”
I remember my father saying these words to me and my reaction, half nervous chuckle and internal disgust shaped out of fear of him and nausea that any one person could deserve that. I could only assume at the time that my mother had gotten as much, if not worse, than I had. I was 14 and had already fractured two ribs, chipped a cheek- and brow-bone and dodged intervention by child protection representatives four times.
When I was 16, I got into a heated argument with my boyfriend. We were sitting in his car outside my home, a small basement suite I lived in alone. I refused to go in and he refused to drive away with me still in the car. I believe it’d already been a couple of hours, or was verging on it, that we’d sat there, with me needling at him and his verbage downgrading to just get me to shut the fuck up and let him leave.
I was good at blocking doors. I’d start an argument and as the crescendo rose, I’d get closer and meaner and harsher and before you knew it, I was going too far and then when seeing the metaphoric slap in the face, daring them to slap me back literally. I deserved it, I knew, and worse than that, if he really loved me, he would feel strong enough to need to hit me.
In this case, I was soon admitting that I’d had a miscarriage I’d never told him about because I knew it’d just make him feel and cry and I was tired of him crying so easily, the constant reminder of how he was softer than other boys. Truthfully, it was more the fact that I was the one often making him cry, not that he did cry, that I hated. He reacted by seethingly making an accusation that amounted to the label Slut.
Now, I know that this is one of my triggers. That Slut can make me think and visualize and rationalize all kinds of aggression into fairness.
Then, I warned him. I told him that I would lose it if I heard Slut one more time, and that I might not be able to control myself. He called my bluff. And I fantasized about backhanding him across his beautiful, tear-stained face.
Then, he was out of the car and running away from me, choking back tears. When I caught up to him, he said that I’d hit him, but I knew it wasn’t so. It couldn’t be so. I didn’t actually move, I just thought it.
Flash forward nine years and I’m living with a man who cannot cry. An alcoholic who only lets feelings out into the open whence enough has been drunk to make it possible to erase their meaning and the pain they might have inflicted with blackout. He’s yelling at me that my father, whose been dead for only ten days, would slap me if he were alive and I would deserve it. That I’m the stupidest cunt he’s ever met. That I’m disgusting in my neediness and inability to just not let someone fuck me. I’m a Slut.
Because I’m having this man’s baby.
He never hit me. There were reactions to me hitting him. Fingers pressed too hard into flesh as I was thrown onto a bed and straddled with a fist raised over my face. Most women would shake in fear, it occurs, and a fucked up side of me, shook in excitement. Finally. He never did hit me, just shoved and poked those needle-like fingers into my easy-to-bruise skin.
That fist was raised at least another four times in the next year, but he never hit me. I hit him twice.
Once, it was a backhand delivered while he smoked a joint out our apartment’s window, looking away from where I stood behind him. He was telling me to go fuck myself because I told him he wasn’t allowed to smoke up – I was going out, leaving our sleeping daughter under his watch. I pictured throwing him out the window, but instead I asked him, even-voiced and calm-in-mind, “what was that?” and he repeated, turning.
It was a Hollywood moment, when my hand connected to his cheek as he enunciated Fuck yourself perfectly.
The next time, we were wrestling over the phone.
I was hemorrhaging, in the process of losing (another one of) his babies. I had been to the hospital the week before, having passed out after losing half of my blood. This night, he yelled at me that I was fucking ridiculous for just lying on the floor after momentarily losing consciousness, because I wasn’t taking a taxi to the hospital.
Our daughter was screaming in her bedroom, because he’d had to put her to bed for the first time in a year and she didn’t agree with that. He was done taking care of her every five minutes or so, giving him the opportunity to smoke and scream obscenities at me.
Because I was doing absolutely nothing to help him and she was only screaming, refusing to sleep, wanting me. He suggested at one point that I rock her to sleep while he stood behind me, in case I passed out while doing it. I insisted that he take care of her and once she was fine, I’d go to the hospital.
Why he never called an ambulance or suggested it, I wondered. I eventually crawled to the bed, navy seal style.
Later, he brought her to bed to sleep with me after proclaiming that he was definitely done taking care of her and she could scream all night – he had to work in the morning. I wasn’t going to get to the hospital and I pretty much yelled every What kind of a fucking person, Father, are you? at him. I wouldn’t let him set the alarm clock because if my daughter and I were just getting to sleep, we weren’t being woken in four hours. He tried to grab it, and I tried to keep it away from him, barely being able to move without becoming light-headed. He tried to yank it out of my hands, the cord burning like rope might and I let go and threw a half a cup’s worth of water at his legs.
He raised that fist again, with our daughter between my face and it. While I was bleeding (I’d find out later, literally, almost to death) and she was screaming. Moving her to the centre of the bed, I screamed at him to leave and he refused. I grabbed the phone to call the police and he tried to twist it from my hand. Coming around the other side, he attempted to grab it again as I turned it on to dial 911. I smacked him directly down the side of his smug, alcohol-infused face and then came that fist raise again.
“Go ahead. See if you ever see your daughter again, since you’ve now raised your fist twice at me, with her in between us. I’m having a miscarriage and you’re threatening me in front of our child? Do it, I dare you.”
I guess I didn’t know what I wanted, really – him to hit me or not. But I do know that really, little has felt as good in life as smacking him.
And I know this: violence in a household isn’t much more than a shallow message of control and anger. I know because I received it growing up, because I handed it out to the men who disrespected me and because tonight, when my two year old daughter punched me in the face, I immediately put her into our bed, kissed her cheek and told her goodnight.
She screamed, because it was bedtime that she was originally protesting when the blow was dealt to me. And I cried, because it’s a horrible feeling to want to hit your child back.
I’ve come to a new realization: after hating my father for so many years for the kicks and punches. The spankings with a 1X4 inch stick. For being locked in my room on weekends while he slept in, having to piss in the sink of my fibre-board play kitchen and then being spanked for being so disgusting an animal. Standing with my nose in a corner for all of dinner-time, primetime and through to the colour bars on the television and the national anthem. The belittling and the emotional abuses. All of it…
The thing I hate him the most for is not making the choice to just put me to bed, kiss me goodnight and shut the door.
