Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: babysitter sexual abuse, marital therapy, survivor of child sexual abuse
I have been seeing our marital counselor by myself once every other week, ostensibly to work on me, in order to fix ‘us’.
I saw her this week, and she naturally asked me how I am doing. I told her I have been waking up at night, afraid and hypervigilant. She asked how long that has been going on. (I wanted to say “as long as I can remember.”) But I thought about it and said “Ever since that ant fell on my head.”
She asked me what happens for me when I wake up like that. I described what happens. I lay there awake and afraid, wondering if I am hearing the voices of rapists downstairs. So I listen, listen, listen so carefully. Wait, was that something? There it is again, do I hear him? Quiet. Listen. Listen. Nothing. There’s nothing there, Butterfly, I tell myself. Wait, was that something? Listen, listen, listen.
She said “What if there were someone there? What happens then?”
I explained how I had given this a lot of thought, and how I would run and get the baby and lock the door and call the cops. How I keep a pair of scissors on my headboard and I would grab them and stab him. I keep a heavy flashlight and then I would hit him across the head.
Then I said “But the truth is, at the end of the anxious scene in my head, I am always bloody and battered and then I have to go to the hospital and tell everyone what happened to me.”
She said “And what if that happened?”
Here’s where I started to cry, as usual in her fucking office apparently. I said “Then I would know this horrible thing had happened to me, and I would have to walk around everywhere as if nothing had happened, when really this terrible thing had happened to me that split my world apart.”
She said “Is that maybe how you feel right now? That this terrible thing happened to you and you have to walk around knowing it happened to you but you have to act as though it didn’t?” As usual, she reads my mind.
I nodded and looked at her through tears, and said yes.
This terrible thing happened to me. This babysitter came into our home and my brother and I were so small and we were so trusting and our parents were in the middle of getting a divorce, so we were just getting used to living with only mom instead of a mom and a dad. And mom left us to do whatever it was that she just had to fucking do that night, and hired this terrible woman to keep us safe for the night. And instead of keeping us safe, that babysitter hurt us, irrevocably. She asked us if we wanted to play a game, and we didn’t have a choice in playing the game, and she hurt me and she hurt him and she hurt us and we’ve never been the same. And since her arrival into our lives, I have been terrified of the whole world ever since. She hurt us, terribly, and it was really scary and we didn’t have anywhere we could go or anyone we could tell and we knew for sure then that evil exists and could come get us any time we were caught unaware.
Before her, my heart was whole and my smile was real. This terrible thing happened to me, she did this terrible thing, to us, and every day since I have had to smile and act as though I am whole, when really I am broken and shattered into a million little pieces. That’s why you shouldn’t fuck kids.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: blood pressure cuff, brother-sister incest, health care, nurse, survivor of child sexual abuse
Today, I had to go to something akin to the emergency room. Not quite the emergency room, but a way to see the doctor if you happen to get fucked up sick on a weekend. Anyway, we had been sitting there for about an hour when the huz noticed that two people who came in after us got called in before us. He went up and talked to the people in charge, and the head nurse called us back within two minutes of him speaking up for me.
When we got back to her station, she was completely nasty with us. Her first sentence to us was to explain to us why the other people got called in ahead of us. She attributed it to someone else’s mess-up, but my husband didn’t buy that explanation. He said nothing, but afterwards when we were alone in the car, he said it was fairly obvious that she was so defensive because she fucked up.
I am sick, and have lost most of my voice. It’s very hard to speak and be heard today. Getting sound to come out is like a Herculean task, so I was grateful to have the huz there to speak for me today. I thought two things today:
1) I felt powerless, without my normal mental and emotional faculties and my voice. I had no voice. I was yet again voiceless. When my brother was molesting me, I had a voice and I used it and it meant nothing to him. I was nothing to him, I had no power with him.
2) That nurse was completely nasty to me, the sick person in her care. She took my blood pressure so roughly that I am bruised all over my right arm where the blood pressure cuff was. My take home message from that was “When we speak up for ourselves, people hurt us.” And instantly, I was back there, that 8 year old girl whose brother was secretly molesting her on the couch in the living room.
I wonder if people who haven’t been fucked think this way? I mean, do non-abused kids go where I went in terms of “When we speak up for ourselves, people hurt us”? Or do they just think “Wow, that nurse was defensive”, or worse, “That nurse was a bitch!” The thing is, she wasn’t a bitch. She was someone who was obviously overworked and tired, and the last thing she needed was a customer pointing out that she fucked up. Or am I identifying with the abuser when I have empathy for her?
Maybe the sickness is making me more emotionally vulnerable than normal, or perhaps it puts me in a better place to assess things. Or perhaps this is just the 199th way that being a survivor of child sexual abuse has fucked me in adulthood again. I knew the blood pressure cuff was too tight, but I said nothing when my arm was hurting like that. I was afraid of the nurse today, the way I was afraid of all the other people in my life who have used my body.
I am not a child anymore, and yet I reacted to this hurt today as if I were a child. That’s why you shouldn’t fuck kids.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: binge-eating disorder, bulimia, compulsive eating, survivor of child sexual abuse, survivor of incest
I have begun seeing a nutritionist. During my first appointment, she asked me why I was there. I said “I am fat, and I don’t want to be.” (I tend to be blunt.)
I described my eating patterns to her. Her response? “You have a full blown eating disorder.”
A lot of survivors seem to struggle with weight issues and disordered eating. The research literature is full of studies showing a link between bulimia and child sex abuse, and anorexia and child sex abuse, and compulsive eating and child sex abuse. In this way, I guess I am yet another statistic.
I wonder – if that babysitter hadn’t used my body as a weapon, and my brother hadn’t used me like I was nothing, and my father hadn’t betrayed me – I wonder if I would only be eating for hunger reasons, the way I see a lot of thin people doing? I mean, I wonder if my relationship with food, and also my relationship with my body would be different? I can’t help but think that it would be.
I know for sure that I use my fat as a method of insulation. I know that most men find me less attractive when I have fat on my body, and that they find me more attractive when I have less fat on my body. Fat is protection, and that protection is more than I had in childhood.
I suppose that the hard truth is probably that no matter what I would have weighed, that babysitter would have molested me anyway. And probably my brother would have too. I guess my dad would have as well. Somewhere in my head, I understand that logic dictates that none of the sex abuse was actually about my real body, in that these people in my life would have used me anyway, no matter what my actual body looked like. None of it was about attraction to my actual body, except their attraction to an easy victim, which I was.
But somehow in my distorted way of thinking, I feel like if I insulate my body with layers of fat, then perhaps I can ward off the kind of evil I have already experienced. It’s disordered thinking which lead me to a lifetime of disordered eating, and I am sure it plays a heavy part in my constant dieting failures. That is the 198th way that surviving child sexual abuse has fucked me up.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: babysitter sexual abuse, nelson mandela, survivor of child sexual abuse
I once read this story about Nelson Mandela and his lack of hatred for those who jailed him. He was wrongly imprisoned for 26 years, for fighting for the rights of his people. In the story I read about him, he said that if he were to hate his jailers, he would be no better off than they were.
Three people have helped to create the jail I stay in. However, I only have hatred towards her: the babysitter. She was the first one – the one that showed me that there is such a thing as evil. I hate her. G-d help me, I hate her.
I have never thought of myself as a hateful person. Hate, however, is a creation, just like fear. You have to be taught hate, just like you have to be taught fear.
Nelson Mandela is a beautiful soul. I don’t think I can or will ever achieve that kind of beauty. That’s why you shouldn’t fuck kids.
“There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.”
Nelson Mandela
Reasons You Shouldn't Fuck Kids 