My Dad Was an Emotional Sea Monster

Content Warning: Child abuse, spousal abuse, and a brief mention of sexual assault.

The first draft of this post had like a jillion paragraphs about my family’s messed up relationship with food but

A.   I really just don’t want to talk about it.

And

B.    The emotions I’ve been uncovering here, the feeling of being judged, surveilled, the I’ll-never-get-it-right feeling, they don’t really come from fatphobia or my mom’s weird controlling/mystical ideas around sugar. They come from my dad being fucking terrifying.

In the present day, my dad is a mild-to-absent part of my life. He’s part of my lifeboat of family liberals, though he does mention Al Franken a little too often. (Ever is too often.) He’s doing this weird thing lately where he regales me with his slight calorie intake and his enviable walking routine, but it seems sad rather than judgey. He bought me and my sister Elizabeth Warren’s book as soon as it came out.

But of course the terror of him from my childhood still lives in my body, makes it hard to feel privacy or autonomy and trust.

I’ve written posts about incidents of explosive violence from him, but I think the frozen feeling comes from the day-to-day of him. It’s hard to focus on my dad, even in the kind care of Summer Therapist, even now with a pink wine spritzer and a Hazy Summer Lofi playlist on. Let me light a few candles and some incense, be right back.

Okay, here I am. I remember the feeling of getting home early for a half snow day and my heart just falling when I realized dad was home early too. I saw him out back chopping wood and all my festive snow day emotions just left me. I felt apprehension, sadness, a beautiful day lost.

I don’t remember a specific instance of him calling us worthless. I remember “lazy.” My senior year of high school, I remember “cocksucker” when I won a photography contest and didn’t give the prize money to him. Also from the teenage years, I remember “You brought this into our house,” (meaning I’d brought violence into our house by being raped and assaulted at a party) as his fists rained down on me, just after he’d kicked my mom down the stairs.

But “worthless” was the insult that sunk in deepest, it was so present that it feels like weather, like, what’s the opposite of a snow day? It’s embedded in my brother too, who’ll use it on me at the slightest provocation. Which is part of why we don’t hang out with that guy.

My dad loomed over everything like the worst supervisor. During the process of grieving the Shy One relationship, one of the hardest things was the way I could still feel TSO with me, fucking judging me all the time—I wasn’t getting over him fast enough, wasn’t doing dating right. I was wallowing too much in my feelings. Mostly, my brain had made up this snippy version of my probably genuinely-rooting-for-me ex, but he was buzzing around my brain for months, reminding me that I’d failed, that his rejection meant I wasn’t lovable, telling me to just fucking give up.

Worthless.

My dad was like a sea monster. You never knew what was going on under the surface or when he might come screaming out of the sea and sink the ship. The simplest things could turn from rumbling menace to terror on a dime.

Once, when I was around ten my sister and I were changing for something and, in the middle of a fight with mom, he decided he needed to come in our room and yell at us too. We locked the door but he kicked it and kicked it until it broke. My sister and I stood there naked and frozen with fear, nowhere to go for cover.

In present-day moments of panic, I feel that day: exposed, afraid, unable to solve the problem or shift the moment. Unable to protect the more vulnerable people around me. I knew there was no privacy or safety, that I didn’t and couldn’t own my own body. There was no place where he ended and I began.

There were school mornings I couldn’t get out the door because I didn’t part my hair correctly. I would stand on a chair, looking into the little mirror on a wall sconce, combing and recombing. I would climb down from the chair, he would check it and find it crooked. I would have to climb back up on the chair and try again. The endlessness, the hopelessness, the feeling of just being too stupid to figure it out.

Worthless.

I feel so much regret, remorse, and loss for the for the ways the father I carry projected itself onto the relationship with The Shy One. I know part of me wished I could Get It Right this time, that that would somehow solve the childhood ache. Though TSO was in no way abusive or scary, I chose someone withholding, uncommunicative, snappish, and exacting, and set out to win him over, to make him into a safe home. I wanted him to make me worthy. Tale as old as time.

As my two months off from dating draw to a close, this is what scares me the most—will I really be able to hold out for someone emotionally available, or will I slip into this fantasy again, hurting myself and some unsuspecting guy in the process? Will seeing the pattern help me be kinder to myself, to believe in the chatty, joyful, equal relationship of my dreams? I hope so! I’ll do my imperfect best.

 

 

My White Supremacist Mom, The End

 

Seriously get this book!

 

“God.” She said defiantly.

 

Mom said that the reason the country was so far astray (besides, presumably, Socialism) was that we’re “no longer” a Christian nation. (I remember seeing this “One nation under God” idea in second-cousiny Facebook feeds before I blocked them, but the violence of the sentiment never truly hit me until I started writing this.) I wish I had said something coherent about the founders or the Liberty Bell or Catholicism under Hitler, but I did not. I wish I’d said that forcing everyone into the same religion was not only counter to the values of Christianity (well.) but part of the very definition of fascism.

 

So that was the conversation that finally propelled us out the door. On the way out, I told mom not to contact me, not to send cards or anything, a directive that she (vexingly and also sort of touchingly) has ignored. In the car, I horror-movie screamed. Back in the Nineties, I was in a housefire and the small comfort of that day was that I got the line “Screaming like a David Lynch movie” on the news. This wasn’t that, wasn’t any aesthetically tortured wail, it was full horror. It was a scream of a lifetime of religious oppression, of standing in front of police cars, of friends boxed into riots when the street-fires were starting. It was a scream for the then-200,000 dead and those who were vicious and scared and stupid enough to deny the loss. Because it was a scream, I’m embarrassed and ashamed, but I can’t actually think of a more rational response.

 

As Sweetie (Never, anymore, afraid of a panic) drove us down the country roads to my sister’s, I did that five senses thing to quell the panic: I see mailboxes, road, a sparrow, a yellow stripe, my purse. I hear the car, my voice, Sweetie’s voice, my breath. I can touch the door, my scarf, my jeans. I can smell coffee and peach-pear fizzy water. I can taste gum.

 

By some miracle of compartmentalization, a skill that has never come naturally to me, we spent a lovely day with the niece and nephews. Our regular comic shop was closed, but we did thoroughly enjoy our traditional thrift store run. I bought way too many random things.

 

By the time Sweetie and I were picking up road trip coffee in our nearby old hometown (SO many feelings of love and beauty and loss there) I was posting through my feelings and starting to make estrangement official. I told my sister, brother, and dad the next day that I would be avoiding all mom-related activities for the foreseeable future.

 

For now, it’s not so bad, except those nauseating prayer cards on which I need to remember to write “refused”. I run the family Zooms and the Liberal Cousins Side Convo has been great at keeping in touch. I’ll feel guilty adding extra logistics to the family routine, but I’ll figure it out as I go.

 

I’ve never understood how people with Trumpian relatives can feel safe around them, even pre-Covid. I don’t know how anyone avoids feeling the violence of their beliefs all the way in their bones. Do they think that the violence the seditionists marinate in won’t come for them? Do they interpret violent beliefs toward black and brown and queer bodies as somehow not a real threat?  Or are they just too scared to do something about it? At any rate, I’m glad of these miserable years of trying to do something about it, even when that something is only to try and get myself safe.

My White Supremacist Mom Part Four

(After Beach Aunt had her Trump-renouncing moment last month, I let myself hope a little that Mom would do the same. That’s why I opened her Valentine card over the weekend instead of writing “refused” on it an putting it right back in the mailbox. It could be, I thought. It could be an apology, a pledge to do better, a request to be mailed a copy of The Mueller Report. Hope is dumb sometimes. What WAS in the card was information on the masses my mom had paid for, to be said for me and Sweetie. I know that Mom would have seen this as a kindness, but this card honestly made me sick to my stomach. My mom thinks we should have a national religion, that we’re off track as a nation because not everyone is Catholic. So, in addition to donating to her child-raping church in my name, it was also a donation to fascism. And always, always, the feeling sorry for us—as queer folks, as fat people, as liberals, as people who believe in science and history and truth. She thinks that makes us less-than. She thinks the only thing that can save us is donation-funded prayer. And because the card was pretty, she can feed her idea that she is a good, loving person instead of a sinkhole of narcissism and pain. So I took the “I miss” off this series of posts. The shittiest-Valentine-ever made me let go of just a little more denial, a little more stupid hope.)

 

Anyway, back to that apple picking weekend back in early October. Mom and Stepdad are grousing about masks. I’m just trying to stay out of it and play Animal Crossing, but Mom asks me what I think.

 

“I’m on the side of the TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND PEOPLE WHO DIED. I want to help in whatever way I can.”

 

And I’m yelling. Sweetie rushes in from the other room to help out. I don’t want to be yelling, I know it’s wrong, I know I’m bad but six months and also a lifetime of gaslighting brings up the same awful childish helpless horror I felt when I was eight and Mom was beating up my doll Cindy with a wiffle ball bat because she knew it would make me feel worse than getting hit myself. I know I’m 46 and not eight. I know it’s all wrong. But I’m yelling.

 

It’s hard to track the conversation on my end or on hers, so here are some points she made:

 

-“Some people HAVE to die! Wouldn’t the world be a terrible place without death?”

-But also “masks make people sicker” and she wants to save us.

-Russian disinformation doesn’t exist or have an impact, but she might be willing to see what Mueller has to say because he was appointed by Trump.

 

-“Do you actually know anyone who has died from coronavirus? Because I don’t.”

 

(Apparently, Sweetie’s at-that-moment-hospitalized sister was not evidence enough.)

 

“At least I’m not a baby-killer.” I sort of wish I’d asked if she meant this in the Lizard People/Qanon way or just in the regular misogynist sense. Maybe both!

 

Next time: So much racism.

I Miss My White Supremacist Mom, Part Three

Since I started (glacially) writing this series, I’ve found out what it’s like to check the FBI’s terrorist photos to see if I find family members. (I didn’t. Just lots of reasons for my vagina to pack her bags and move away someplace safe.) Fascist Beach Aunt and Fascist Former Favorite Aunt, “Women for America First” that they are, had planned to be in DC on 1/6 to “save the country.” My brave and wonderful cousins talked Fascist Beach Aunt out of going (She and Worst Fascist Uncle have since renounced Trump, or at least taken their shrine down.) but I think Fascist Former Favorite Aunt did go. I would like to think that she was maybe further back in the crowd, but,to paraphrase that one attacked Capitol Police officer, fuck her for being there. I want to ask FFFA’s kids about this, but I’d like to keep our Liberal-to-Moderate Cousins’ Among Us night as cordial as possible.

 

Anyway, back to Fascist Mom. Last fall, Sweetie and I planned an apple picking trip up north so we could see my sister and her family before the cold made outdoor gatherings impossible. Because my sister and mom live in a very pretty leaf-ful tourist area, all the nearby hotels were booked up. So I, with crazy mixed-up hope, asked if we could stay at mom’s beautiful-but-politically terrifying rural home.

 

That choice seems INSANE now, given that my mom and stepdad are anti-maskers and fatness is a Covid-19 co-morbidity, but I really really wanted to have a normal visit. I didn’t want to admit how bad things had gotten, between us and in the country. I still kind of don’t. Mom and stepdad had plans during apple picking so we had a lovely time catching up with the niece and nephews, banking up hugs for the long winter.

 

The Sunday morning after apples, a few hours before Sweetie and I had planned to leave to take the kids on our traditional comic store and thrift store run, I was sitting at my mom’s dining room table playing Animal Crossing, collecting up star fragments from the previous night’s meteor shower. Mom and stepdad started grousing about some neighbors who had balked at their decision to hold a mask optional-meeting for their local beekeepers club. (I so hate that my bee siblings have to be roped into this story! No honey for fascists!)

 

I focused deeply on my Switch, making noncommittal noises as they gradually steered the conversation toward me. Mom has a “no politics rule” at her house but I’ve learned over the years that it’s really a “no politics unless nobody is looking and I can use world events to torment my oldest daughter for sport.”

 

“What do you think about masks?” she asked me “I’ve been doing my research

 

(PLEASE SPARE US FROM WHITE LADIES ONLINE DOING THEIR “RESEARCH”)

 

And I think they’re actually making things worse.”

 

Important to this story is that Sweetie’s sister, with whom she is close, had been admitted to the hospital with Covid-19 that weekend. Interspersed with the virtual island-visiting and apple-y adorableness were tense hours when Sweetie was waiting for updates from her family text chain and worrying that her sister might die. I didn’t know how to help except to be there for her and believe in science. Sweetie’s sister did recover within weeks, but until that point it was my closest and saddest brush with that stupid asshole virus.

 

I didn’t want to tell mom what I thought. I didn’t want to open the floodgates. But I did.

I Miss My White Supremacist Mom Part Two

I want to try and piece together the beginning of Covid, familywise. Just before the quar hit, I would have said I was close with my mom and aunts. In February, Sweetie and I spent a day at my late Grandmom’s house, trying to help sort her stuff, which really just boiled down to mom and aunts convincing us to take home a bunch of stuff to ease the burden. I took home many spools of ribbon, a ratty but retro pink towel, trash bags’ worth of silk flowers for art projects, and a random little business card holder that I now use every day for my work Zoomings.

 

Despite Catholicism/conservative politics’ lifelong irking of my soul, I loved my Grandmom so, so much. I felt united in grief with my mom’s generation, intensely aware that I might be doing this sorting in my own mom’s house before too long. That night that we sat around Grandmom’s old table, Favorite Aunt, Beach Aunt, Mom, Sweetie and me, I felt closer with them than I ever had before. I don’t always allow myself family attachment easily, but that night, I was all in. I felt powerfully purposeful and secure, buoyed by these women who’d shaped me all my life. It wasn’t like I forgot politics, but love did let me forgive and transcend.

 

When quarantine came, when I wasn’t taking trauma naps or crying into Zoom, I shifted mightily into tend-and-befriend mode. I checked in daily with family members to make sure everyone was okay, sending (I hope) undemanding good cheer in the form of cats-and-flowers pictures and bird-sightings updates. The first inkling that they were tapped into the disinformation machine was subtle, but it heaved me into reality and a lifetime of stored hurt.

 

My mom was sewing me a gorgeous set of masks, as was Favorite Aunt. While Favorite Aunt griped along about some nebulous “they” forcing us to wear the masks, I thought my mom was mostly in sciencetown with me.

 

But then, in a Messenger thread, I expressed worry about my mom (68) visiting the post office to mail the masks.

 

“Oh, I’m not worried,” she said “I have a really strong immune system, and besides, it’s not like this is the city.”

 

Pretty innocuous, but to me what she said had the bitter sting of racism. It reminded me of back in 2016 when she’d told me that “Rural people are just better with guns than city people are.”

“Sometimes,” I typed as gently as possible, “It comes across as racist when you say things like that.”

 

That concern went unresolved as mom pivoted into her fave form of gaslighting, medical magical thinking that ranges from the victim-blamey to the Eugenic.

 

“I think fear is what’s causing the disease. I wish you weren’t so fearful.”

 

I wasn’t going through my days in fear, at least I didn’t think so. I was listening to poetry from far away, I was taking walks, I was working when I could, I was checking on the neighbors. I was proud of how well I was taking care of myself and Sweetie in such a horrifying month. But all my mom could see in me was weakness and cowardice and self-fulfilling dread. The grief-chasm between who I am and who she thinks I am made me panic and flail like Wile E. Coyote realizing belatedly that he has just walked off a cliff.

The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow, Part One

For this one, we’re going all the way back to the early Nineties, to the summer after the Big Trauma happened https://kittencalendar.blogspot.com/2012/04/triggers-and-my-voice-story-of-hard.html?zx=e0bd5bdf8967148e. He was fourteen and I was sixteen.

Unable to stop taking their unease with the Big Trauma out on me and on each other, my parents, near divorce and overflowing with violence, sent me to stay with my Favorite Aunt at her beautiful Colonial-era home, about six hours away from my immediate family’s cramped and feral suburban home. Favorite Aunt had always been the person who most vocally liked me when my parents, clearly and emphatically, did not. She was an oasis of hugs, praise, and affection, in a childhood full of coldness, contempt, and turning to teachers as my only daily source of grownup approval.

She was also, though, Catholic. That part of the story makes it hard to not become incoherent with rage. Favorite Aunt’s spirtuality felt like a bright white escape hatch, a way to clean and simplify myself of such a dirty and complicated life, a way to escape the pain, trauma, abandonment and fear of the previous months. Of course now I understand that in being pulled (temporarily, I’m relieved to say) back into the religion of my upbringing I was both victim of and complicit in a more effective and insidious factory of rape than any teen party, no matter how out of control, could ever be.

At the time though, it seemed that the best way to regain control after a brutal rape and subsequent assault by my dad (https://kittencalendar.blogspot.com/2018/10/metoo-letter-dear-dad-stfu-about.html) was to blame myself, my sluttiness, my sense of adventure. That seems heartbreaking now, but at the time it felt self-explanatory. Such is the power of an adult willing to dole out affection. I don’t think my Favorite Aunt was rape-culture-gaslighting me on purpose, because at the time, blaming myself seemed as natural and as life-giving as air.

Favorite Aunt’s charisma and generosity of affection means she often has children as friends. (I share this quality, for which I am very grateful.) She thought one of these friends, the artsy, quiet son of one of her church families, would be a perfect match for me, and he was. (All these years later, she still ships us, in spite of a lifetime mostly apart and a mountain of evidence. This doesn’t bother me as much as maybe it should.)

I don’t remember how he and I got together, whether we were pushed or drawn, probably both. I can’t clearly remember my first kiss with The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow (also, the first truly kind or loving kiss I’d known) but I know it was postcard perfect. Favorite Aunt and I went to visit him and his family where they were camping for a week, on a vacation island not too far ways from Favorite Aunt’s home. We walked (maybe I was holding his hand, seems like something I would do…) down the beach a little ways away from the families. We stood beside the water, the tall waves making for the closest approximation of privacy we were likely to get.

I remember the sea as rough but kind that day, the dizzy feeling in my throat, the sense of finality, of accomplishment. Having a sexy feeling that was also loving, with anyone besides myself, was a new and blissful sensation, as big and reliable and all-encompassing as the ocean itself.

The day went by fast. Favorite Aunt and I had made homemade poptarts for him and his family (how Emily Gilmore of us!) and we gave the container to him out the car window as Favorite Aunt prepared to drive us away. He kissed me on the forehead and said, not unkindly, “You have really big dandruff.”

All of the beach days and other excursions with Favorite Aunt meant that my scalp was sunburned and peeling. I was only a little bit embarrassed. I was a jumble of salt and skin and hot-pink feeling, riding away from the beach and towards a sunset as pink as my cheeks.

#metoo Letter: Dear Dad, STFU About Senator Gillibrand

Dear Dad,

            I’m going to need you to stop complaining to me about Kirsten Gillibrand. While I obviously agree with you about global warming being an important issue, your repetitive complaints which only target female politicians, echo your 2016 “I go easy on you about Hillary” comment. All these comments sound, at best, like low-key sexism and at worst, like a gentle continuation of a lifetime pattern of abuse, both on a national and personal scale.

            When you tell me, over and over, that the senator who is most vocally in support of the #metoo movement isn’t doing a good enough job (For YOU. After one donation and one survey response. Are you KIDDING ME WITH THIS!? I know you see how much work I do very day, why do you feel so entitled not to? And WORSE why do you expect ME to do your work FOR you? I pour countless hours into justice work and I have my own senators to nag!)

            ANYWAY, when you complain about Senator Gillibrand, you are also dismissing the work that I do, both personally and politically, Every. Single. Day. You are dismissing the power and courage of not just me but of every single rape survivor who perseveres although life feels like a constant attack on our bodies. When the sea levels rise, do you imagine we will somehow be LESS vulnerable? Less raped? Do you imagine WE are somehow the ones endangering the planet, by rising up and insisting that---GASP---we be treated as humans?

            But there are a couple of more insidious reasons you should not be low-key trolling me by running down female leaders, particularly Gillibrand.

            When I was in third or fourth grade, I overheard you at least try to rape Mom. You’d both been fighting about sex for weeks and I was WAY too up to date about what was going on in there. I heard Mom scream “No! Don’t! (his name!) Stop! Stop!” and it scared the shit out of me. I started to cry really loud and she said “See? Now you made (me) cry.” And then things seemed to calm down in your room. I don’t know how I understood what was going on, but I did.

            After that, the world changed for me. I became darker, less hopeful. Though Mom denied it to me when I asked a few years later, I know what I heard. You took something profound away from me that night—my trust for the world, my trust for love. I’ve been fighting like hell ever since to get those things back. (Senator Gillibrand?! Also fighting for those things.)

            Fast forward a few years to when I was drugged, raped, and beaten at a party. A few days later, you beat the shit out of me too—just pounding and pounding away and saying “You brought this into our house! You did this!” Meaning, I guess, that that I’d somehow made you and Mom violent by getting raped, even though you’d been that way my whole life.

            That night my friend Bethanne came and got me and I stayed with her family for the night, but I had never felt so deeply and horribly alone. Over the years, that feeling of abandonment and betrayal has come back to me over and over, causing me more panic than any of the original violence. “You are alone, the panic tells me, and the people who say they love you are only waiting to attack and blame you.” You taught my panic how to speak.

            And yet, here I am with the optimism you keep trying to undermine. I did not get this way by accident. It has taken me HUNDREDS of hours of therapy, writing, self-care, activism, and many other kinds of work. I am optimistic and productive by both sheer force of self-creation and as a tribute to the people who have helped me build, thread by thread, vote by vote, scream by scream, the person I am today.

            And not only can you not write ONE GODDAMNED LETTER to Congress, but you have the callousness, cruelty, and entitlement to give me a hard time about how YOUR SENATOR CARES TOO MUCH ABOUT WOMEN’S RIGHTS? PLEASE.

            I have loved you and done my best to forgive you for all of these years without asking you for anything in return. Now I’m asking for two things:

1.      Acknowledge that you got this letter.

2.      Stop retraumatizing me and trying to put me in my place by running down female politicians.

I am not going to give up the fight to own our own bodies. We are not going back and there is nothing you can do about it. If you EVER crap on Senator Gillibrand or any other female leader to me again I can’t promise I won’t FLIP THE FUCK OUT. And NO ONE will get an apology letter.

Love,

Me

An Extremely Personal Reason Why I’m Voting for Hillary Clinton

As I’ve written here before, my conception was an accident, while my parents were still in college. Her family’s Catholic faith mean that she had no option of abortion. She was coerced by her family into marriage at the age of twenty. Throughout my childhood, in the worst of times, she told me that her marriage, which included both verbal and physical abuse and marital rape, was my fault. Because I was a child when I heard that accusation, I had little choice but to believe it, and even after decades of hard inner work, a tiny fragment of my heart believes it still.

Though it’s the central pain of my existence, that dual sense of unwelcome and responsibility is also a huge gift. It fuels my drive to make the space around me safe for those who have less power and to push back against coercion and sexist norms whenever I can. My background compels me to do whatever little bit I can so that someday women won’t be forced by religion, family pressure, or tradition to give up control of their own bodies.

For large swaths of my life, I’ve simply hated my mother, almost thought of her as a monster. (My dad, of course, deserves as many paragraphs, and he’s had them.) She and I have spent four painful decades trying to make friends with each other, and to both of our credit, we now enjoy an uneasy peace. But I never truly empathized with twenty-year-old her until the pope’s visit to the U.S. unlocked a treasure trove of anti-Catholic fury in my heart.

It wasn’t right for my mom to take her anger out on me, but she was absolutely right and justified in being angry. In that forced decision, her autonomy was taken away, and only now, as I’m learning to relish my own autonomy, can I begin to fathom that loss. She lived, we all lived, in a tyranny in which chaos and violence could rain down at any moment if, for example, she hadn’t washed, matched, and put away the correct pair of brown socks. What’s more, she thought that she deserved the abuse, because Catholicism and sexism had taught her that she was less than he was, period.

Even long-divorced, she told me that she should have just shut up and obeyed him better, that that would have kept us safe.

But what about existing, you ask? I really love existing, and I wouldn’t trade my family for another in a million years. But what if, in that momentous moment, she’d felt empowered to choose? I think she might have still had me, but if I hadn’t been the product of coercion, she and I may at least have had less of a struggle to make a relationship. I do hold both of us accountable for our own actions, but what would it have been like to grow up in a world where my mother’s body was her own?

I’m sure that some little-kid part of me thinks that by advocating for choice, I can go back in time and repair that essential wound, but I can’t. What I can do is hope to give other mothers a better chance at deciding their own lives, and give more children the chance to be genuinely loved and wanted.

Electing Hillary Clinton send a clear message against misogyny and oppressive gender norms, and she is also the Democrat who is most vocal in her support of Planned Parenthood and women’s (AKA everyone’s) health. I am voting my mom’s life, for my own, and for children of all genders, that they may be wanted, loved, chosen, and safe.

Big Therapy Project, Week One: Telling the Bad Story

***If you get triggered by images of sexual assault, definitely skip this series. Plenty of kittens and snuggles to come, I promise. ***

This past Sunday, my therapist helped me to begin the process of confronting the teenage trauma that’s unfortunately one of the defining factors in my psyche, in the hopes of making it perhaps less so. After I told her the story, she tasked me with starting a dialogue with my sixteen-year-old self, with the goal of reaching some kind of…forgiveness isn’t the right word…acceptance, understanding, amends? Maybe embrace. Last night after I wrote the story on paper and put it in the Box of Things to Be Worked Out Later By Unseen Forces (What, you don’t have one?), I actually could feel my young self, ragged and feral, holding onto me for dear life. Maybe I can write her to safety, since I couldn’t fight our way there.

It’s possible that such a process might repair some of the holes inside me, break down the walls of anger, defensiveness, and detachment that come between me and self-love.

Before I can start the dialogue with the girl (Let’s call her S.) I have to tell you what happened. I’ve written it here before but I think it’s important to tell it from where I am now, from a place of processing rather than panic. There are many echoes of the story in the present-day one—sometimes I’m very proud of the ways I’ve relived and rewritten it, how I came from a place of helplessness and shame and somehow became a person who wins at parties, gets rescued by the Cutest Boy, who smacked the shit out of the guy who put an unwanted hand over my mouth before I figured out I liked it. But before all that, there was this. If you read it, thank you in advance—you’re easing the project along and easing the burden.

One spring when I was in high school, my body woke up and made me antsy. Because I didn’t count myself among those who could have relationships, I opted for quick and anonymous sex with any good-looking man I could get my hands on. The basketball court, conveniently located in the park three doors down, was an easy place to pick them up, and I still kind of envy myself the ease with which I took them home, fucked them, and sent them on their way.

I’m not introducing the story of the trauma with the fact that I was slutty in order to suggest any cause and effect relationship (though I admit, for years I did) only to give you an idea of what people thought I was, what I kind of thought I was for in a situation where it might’ve been helpful to see myself any other way.

My best friend told me that her boyfriend had a friend who’d fuck me, so we set it up for a Saturday night. We did the classic thing of telling each other’s mom’s we were staying at another friend’s house and went to meet the guys. They picked us up at the grocery store, of all places.

They took us to a park on the outskirts of town. My friend stayed in the car with her guy and me and the friend hiked up a big hill that overlooked the lights of our suburban town—I wanted to leave on my glasses to enjoy the view, but he didn’t like the way I looked in them, didn’t really like the way I looked at all, I don’t think, but he fucked me anyway, doggie style, maybe so he wouldn’t see my face. I enjoyed letting out yowls that echoed through the hills, felt both pleasured and degraded, mostly kind of coldly successful at life.

When the guys were all done with us, it was only 12:30 and we’d told our parents we were at Kristi’s house so we really didn’t have anyplace to go. We sat in the little park by my house, thinking about falling asleep on a park bench, when a pickup full of whooping partiers stopped to see if we wanted to join them.

I felt absolutely no hesitation, enjoying the idea of how horrified my mom would be if she knew I was riding in the back of a pickup. They drove us to a nice, neat apartment complex with “green” in the name.

I can’t say for sure that I was drugged, but I do know I was way more drunk than the number of beers I had. They were drinking some Cisco and could have slipped that in, too. We were sitting around playing quarters and I was barely able to sit up when the ugliest, most snaggle-toothed of the men said “So, which one of us are you gonna fuck?”

I said nobody, that I’d had enough that evening, but they kept pushing and said I had to pick someone. They kept insisting and I did feel like it was who I was, like it was something I had to do, like I couldn’t escape them or my slutty self. So I picked the cutest guy there, who I also figured wouldn’t do anything because his girlfriend was with him. But he sent his girlfriend home.

He took me in the bedroom and closed the door, made me strip off all my clothes. I was kind of a sex robot. I lay beneath him and tried to do my job of making noises, but he put his hand over my mouth. I don’t remember what the sex felt like, really, just remember scrambling around after my clothes because he left the door open after so anyone could see in.

I did get most of my clothes on but after that I couldn’t really move and I started throwing up everywhere. I passed out and when I came to, everyone was hitting me, atleast 5 people including one girl, with what turned out to have been tennis rackets, blows coming down everywhere in the pitch black and I still couldn’t move. They were all calling me names, yelling at me for throwing up, telling me I was a stupid slut and in between saying “I’m sorry, I’m sorry” I was screaming my head off so that some blessed person heard and called the cops. Otherwise, those might have been my last moment on earth.

The next thing I remember was seeing my bloody face in the bathroom mirror, the girl who’d been helping to beat me up was making soothing sounds and cleaning me up. My favorite shirt (a bright mod swirly thing in the manner of De-Lite front woman and my style-hero, Lady Miss Kier) was spattered with blood.

As the police put us in a circle and questioned us, it dawned on me that my best friend had been in the front room, all of this time, standing by while those things happened, that she had let it happen.

I refused, no matter how many times they asked, to tell the police or anyone the sex part of the story. In no way did I think it wasn’t my fault for being drunk and slutty. I’d never seen The Accused, but I’d seen a review of it on Siskel & Ebert and I knew well enough who the accused would be. The not-telling is the part I feel most horribly ashamed about, the guiltiest. Some of them did go to jail for what happened, including the guy, but not for rape. I’m very, very sorry for not having done what I could to try and protect other women from that experience; I wish I could go back and do the right thing.

The following weeks were a family nightmare. My mom, horrified that I’d chosen to dye my hair the same purple as the bruises beneath my eyes, upset that it made her look like a bad mother, held my head over the tub and tried to bleach it out with Clorox. In the culmination of a fight with my mom, my dad pushed me down to the floor a week after the incident, kicked me and punched me, called me the same names the other people had and blamed me for bringing this violence into our family, though of course it had always been there. He pushed my mother down the stairs and the next day, she had bruises to match my own.

A newish friend, an artsy dykey girl I totally had a crush on, came and rescued me that night, but there wasn’t anyplace safe to be until I was shipped off for a few weeks that summer to my Catholic aunt’s house in the Maryland countryside, which had always been my favorite place in the world. I learned how to make homemade pop-tarts and fell in love with a boy from her church, who’s as gay as the day is long, but that didn’t stop us from kissing in the waves and whispering sweet nothings with the wild ponies of Chincoteague island. I took comfort in his innocence and it took me through that horrible year, but the wall of refusal and dread inside me was otherwise insurmountable. I’d already been a damaged girl, but now I was very often nothing but fight.