Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: child sexual abuse, flashbacks, husband, intimacy, PTSD, sex
I have this thing with the huz where if he is able to verbally express his feelings, I congratulate him and encourage him by saying “Good for you for using your words.” When we fight, it is generally because he didn’t use his words and he explodes about some other shit and then we have to work our way back to what originally upset him. He’s gotten really good about using his words though, which I think is awesome. I think we should all use our fucking words. Which brings me to the point of this post.
Last night, the huz and I were kissing. He started getting into it, and since we don’t fuck each other, it’s been a while since we last kissed so passionately. I could see he was getting really into it and probably wanted to kiss some more. I quickly said “I don’t want to go any further than this” a little loudly. He immediately said “Okay, no problem.” Then he just held me for a while, because he’s a sweet guy.
This morning, I said “Last night was nice.” I meant it sincerely. When you haven’t fucked in a while, the intimacy that we had last night (kissing) was nice. The huz said “It was nice, and I thought it was really great that you used your words when you were ready to stop.”
I looked up at my husband’s face, trying to discern if he was making fun of me (because “use your words” is usually my line to him). He could see what I was thinking, and said “No, seriously baby, I am glad you used your words before you got all fucked up.”
This is why you shouldn’t fuck kids. No husband should have to say some shit like that to his wife. He was speaking from experience though, and I was glad he said it. I just wish he didn’t have to.
I was thinking this morning about the trouble I’ve been having sleeping lately, and the amount of anxiety and worry that has been a part of my normal daily life for all these years. I mean, you figure if that babysitter fucked me around the age of 5 or so, then that’s 30 years of being afraid every night, being afraid every day, etc. 30 years is a long time.
As I thought about it, I got mad. The more I thought about it, the more mad I got. Anger is a good thing in my opinion. It is motivating and it is empowering. So I thought about it, about this well of anger that I have inside me. I believe I can be rageful in the right circumstances.
This is why you shouldn’t fuck kids. We survivors are angry. Really fucked up going out of our mind you better be shitting your pants angry. And there are more of us than there are of you.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: babysitter, child sexual abuse, Jewish, mishegaas, obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD, underwear, Yiddish
For those of you non-Jews out there, mishegaas is a yiddish word that means ‘craziness’, and that is what I am experiencing. Underwear craziness. Seriously.
The only two colors left in my drawer this morning when I went to pick my underwear were blue and black. Now, I didn’t want to pick blue because it could mean bad things and I didn’t want to pick black because it could mean bad things. I wear black on the outside all the time, but this black would be close to my vagina and I don’t want black or blue close to my vagina. But I only had the two pairs. What to do, what to do. The thing is, I wore the red ones on the day I needed extra luck because red wards off evil (Jewish superstition), and I wore purple on the day I was looking towards healing, and I wore the pink ones figuring it’s in the same family as red so it’s okay too.
But today, you see, I was left with just the blue and the black pair. Now, blue I figure would mean ill health. No reasonable reason why that would be, but then none of this shit is reasonable. Fucking kids isn’t reasonable either yet people do it. I wore the black pair today figuring I always wear black on the outside, maybe it would fool whatever powers that be into thinking that it is really just part of my outside outfit.
Here’s the best part. I asked G-d to bless the underwear before I put them on. If G-d blesses the black underwear, then it is okay to wear them. G-d can certainly wash away any color weirdness that might accidentally result in my unintentionally wearing a color that attracts evil.
Seriously, this is why you shouldn’t fuck kids. I mean, come on, underwear color mishegaas. I literally pray for my fucking underwear. That’s fucked up right there. I am reasonably certain that had that babysitter not entered our lives and shown me that bad things can happen to good people, I would not continually be trying to ward off surprise badness that might come via my color choices for underwear.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: brother-sister incest, child molester, child sexual abuse, marriage counseling, molesting the dog, pedophile, therapist, therapy
So the huz and I are in marriage counseling, as you might know from my previous post. As any good marriage counselor does, she made us come in separately once so that she can get our history.
I saw her a few days ago for my ’single’ session with her. She asked me about my history, my family. I told her about the babysitter and then about my brother. She immediately starts with ‘it’s okay if you enjoyed it’. Well, I didn’t enjoy it. I handled it by pretending I wasn’t there, and wishing the whole thing would go fast and be over soon. Then she says how it’s okay if he didn’t coerce me into it. I was like well I said no a bunch of times, but apparently my no’s meant jackshit to my brother.
I hate it when therapists try to jump in and fix my shit before knowing all my shit, you know?
Then we started talking about whether my brother was fucked up or not. I told her I walked in on him molesting our dog when I was a teenager. That’s when the therapist got visibly upset. (shaking my head in disbelief while writing this). Apparently it’s okay to fuck me, but fucking the dog – that’s too much.
As I sat across from her though, I too started getting upset. I thought about it, about what my brother was doing to the dog, and I started to cry inside. My sweet beloved doggie, whom I couldn’t do right by. When I walked in on it happening, I wasn’t sure what to do. I told mom about it. I have no idea how she handled it. I like to think it never happened again, probably because I took pains never to leave the dog alone with my brother again. I was terrified of him though and I am sure I didn’t handle the situation right. I wonder now what right would have been. Would it have been maybe giving up my beloved dog to a proper home? In a house of crazy, was it okay to keep the one being that loved me? I don’t know. I feel terrible about the fact that I couldn’t protect my dog.
I suppose it is easier to be upset about the dog than about me. It is easier to face, and yet more horrible to face at the same time.
The session went on, now with both of us upset. She asked me if I thought he would molest children again. I said without a doubt yes, but he is not a pedophile. There is a difference between child molestors and pedophiles (though neither are desirable). A pedophile is sexually gratified by children, whereas a child molester generally molests for power via sexual abuse. There’s a difference. Anyway, I think my brother is the latter kind. He wouldn’t go out of his way to molest a child or a dog, but the world is a lot safer if he doesn’t have any kids. (Or dogs.)
I told the therapist that I have watched him very closely my whole life, making sure he is never alone with children. If he ever got close to a kid, I promised myself I would go public with what he did to me. No child will suffer by my silence.
The therapist said that when I said that I watched him closely my whole life, she got sad for me. She said no child should have to watch anyone that closely. She is right; I am trying to protect the world at large in a way I couldn’t protect myself or my pet. This is why you shouldn’t fuck kids.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: afraid of the dark, babysitter, betrayal, betrayed, child sexual abuse, suicide
When I was less than five years old, my mom innocently hired a babysitter from a newspaper ad. This teenaged girl came into our home, my mom left, and she proceeded to use my brother and I for her own sexual enjoyment. I have no memory of this, of the actual event, of this person. But right after that, I began a lifetime of hypervigilance and panic. I began covering my head while I slept. I would leave a little hole so I could breathe, but other than that I was totally covered.
I would lay there hidden under a mountain of covers even in the summer. I would be hot and sweating, but I would never even consider the possibility of less than three covers. I would lay under there wondering if the bad people could see me. If they stabbed me while I lay there, would the knife penetrate all those layers? Would they even know I was under there, under all those covers? Now that I am an adult, I know the answer to these questions is yes, so I still lay there like that. This, by the way, is why you shouldn’t fuck kids.
When I was 13, I was seeing a shrink because I was suicidal. I described to him how I was literally afraid that when I laid down, I would be stabbed in the back. I said “I know what you’re thinking – that this is some metaphor for betrayal. Well it’s not.”
It was and it is, and last night as I lay in bed huddled under the covers with the image of the knife in my back, I thought to myself “This is some fucked up shit right here.” Then I couldn’t take the overwhelming fear of the imagery in my head, the knife in my back, so I sat up and turned the tv on. The light from the tv lit up the room. Suddenly things were easier. Light makes everything easier in a world where you are afraid of the dark. As I lay back down with the covers over my head, I could see the flickering light of the tv out of the airhole I left for myself. As I tried to fall asleep, I comforted myself with this thought: ‘At least when they attack me, I will see it’.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: child sexual abuse, father-son incest, fight or flight, incest, V
I told my husband that V had been leaving comments on my blog. The huz asked about V, and I said “He’s a male survivor of child sex abuse. His father raped him.” The huz looked horrified, and said “Holy shit. That’s fucked up.” I said “I think it’s worse than we think, I think his father might still be raping him. Like in his adult life, I mean.” The huz said “What? How can that happen??”
My husband has a really nice father, the kind of father who soothes hurts and pains, instead of creating pain. If you’ve never been raped or abused in your own childhead, I imagine that it’s easy to wonder why a grown man is getting raped by his father. However, as a survivor of incest and child sex abuse myself, I can easily come up with a few fucking reasons. Let’s see, off the top of my head, Uh, because he’s been getting raped his whole fucking life, and even though he is in a grown body now, he still reverts back to his childhood role with his shithead father? Maybe because when he is around his father, he goes into survivor mode? Or maybe it’s real simple – his father has a fucking gun??
That fight or flight shit is such a lie. Abused kids tend to freeze, not fight or run. We may look like adults, but whatever age it was that we started getting fucked, that is the age we stay in scary situations. When something scary happens to me (as simple as walking into a dark room), my hand immediately goes to cover my throat. It’s instinct, I don’t even realize it’s happening until my hand is at my throat. My dad used to choke me when he was angry.
Even though he isn’t choking me now, my hand still goes to my throat. This is why you shouldn’t fuck kids.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: child sex abuse, couples counseling, sex, therapy, trust
The huz and I went to our first couples counseling session today. (Because we have no sex.)
She asked us a question that went something like this: “If you both woke up tomorrow and the problem was gone, what would that feel like? What would that like?”
I wanted to answer “We’d be fucking each other too much to see what it looks like.” But I didn’t say that. I said “We’d be having sex. We’d have intimacy.” Then I looked at the huz and said “I’d feel connected and close to you. And I would fully trust you.”
My history of sex abuse came up in session. The therapist said “Earlier in the session, you mentioned trust issues with your husband. The sex abuse is mega big when it comes to trust.”
When she said that, in my head I said ‘and that is why you shouldn’t fuck kids.” We totally lose our ability to trust.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: brother, child sexual abuse, father, incest, incest conference, sadness
About 15 years ago, I attended a conference for incest survivors. I was in college then, and I was just starting to explore the reasons why I kept wanting to commit suicide. Every reason always led back to the sex abuse.
Anyway, the conference people warned us that shit would get real hard there, so we should bring something that comforts us, like a stuffed animal. I brought along a stuffed animal that my mom bought for me, a bunny rabbit. I called her “Survivor Bunny”. I felt stupid carrying the bunny around, but when I got to the conference site, there were a bunch of us carrying stuffed animals.
On the first day of the conference, four of us got into an elevator with our stuffed animals in tow. A woman and her husband were already in the elevator, and when she saw the four of us standing there with our stuffed animals, she asked us what kind of group we belonged to. The four of us all looked around uncomfortably and didn’t say anything. She asked again. Finally I said “We are all incest survivors, and we are here for an incest survivor convention.”
She was pretty shocked, and she didn’t say anything in response to my statement. This of course made all of us even more uncomfortable. But at the time (and now) I felt like “Why am I keeping this a secret? I didn’t do anything wrong!”
The conference was long and very emotionally painful. Lots of men and women were there. All these people whose family members had fucked them when they were children. Most of us had similar experiences with the cutting, the suicide, the depression, anxiety, etc. All of us were hurting, sad, scared, and emotionally raw by the end. (This is why you shouldn’t fuck kids, by the way.)
The conference was actually pretty beautiful in that it was the first time that a bunch of incest survivors could gather in a room and not feel ‘otherized’ at a gathering. We weren’t the other here. We were ourselves, and we all understood each others’ pain. The thing about incest is that it happens in silence. The perpetrator is silent about it, the victim is silent about it – no one ever says what is really happening there. That is how child sex abuse keeps happening, because none of us talk about it. Now with the advent of the internet, hopefully children can see that they are not alone, and what is happening to them is wrong. Once all of us start talking, there are more of us than there are of them. Once all of this is out in the open, maybe people who fuck kids won’t feel so safe doing so anymore.
The most amazing thing happened on the last day of the conference. The same four of us were in the elevator again, and that same woman and her husband got on. All of us looked uncomfortable, our secret hanging heavy in the air in that elevator. The woman opened her mouth to speak, and I thought to myself ‘Here it comes. Here’s another shithead who is going to call us fucking liars, or tell us our shit is too hard to hear or say something stupid and insensitive.’
She said “I am so glad to have found you. I wanted to tell you – I hope all of you find what you are looking for here and heal.” Then she hugged us.
Whoever she was that was so beautiful to us that day – thank you.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: child sexual abuse, husband, incest, zoloft
Last night, I was tired by 10PM, but the huz wasn’t. He said, “Why do we always have to go to bed at the same time?”
I felt ashamed, as I always do whenever my terror is brought up to my eyes. I went to bed alone, thinking about my friend who once told me that even if she gets tired at 7PM, her husband always comes up to bed with her. If he isn’t ready to go to sleep, he just watches tv until he falls asleep.
It has been two weeks on the zoloft now. Shouldn’t that shit be working by now? Maybe it’s the dosage. Or maybe it’s the fact that three people in my life fucked me when I was a child, and now as an adult I am fucking afraid.
I laid in bed last night terrified of my closet. What if someone was hiding in there, waiting for me to fall asleep, so that he can catch me unaware? Isn’t that the way all terror works – evil catches good unaware?
So, I am laying there in bed last night, alone, scared, terrified, eyes wide open. I went up there because I was tired, but who the fuck can sleep with the man in the closet? So, I laid there awake until the huz got there. Ashamed of myself, ashamed of my relief when he finally came up to bed. Ashamed at all of this.
“Why do we always have to go to bed at the same time” he had asked. Because I am a survivor of incest and child sex abuse, and the miracle of surviving it also unfortunately means that I am afraid of imaginary people touching me, no matter what new pharmaceutical drugs the medical world comes up with to help me relax.
Obviously, yet again, my history of sex abuse is taking its toll on yet another relationship in my life. This is why you shouldn’t fuck kids.
