Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: brother-sister incest, father-daughter incest, first kiss, panic, survivor of child sexual abuse
Last night I found myself thinking about my first kiss. I was fifteen, almost 16. I had been kind of dating my friend for a while. I think he felt that at a certain number of dates (3? 4?) that we should be kissing. So on our third or fourth date, we came back to my house, and he leaned in and kissed me. My reaction to this kiss was – not good. I pushed away from him, got up and ran into the bathroom and locked myself in there until he left my house.
He was a nice guy, not a rapist. He thought I was into it, and he kept apologizing. He was so upset. I was so upset. It was a hot mess.
It sure was embarrassing too. At the time, I understood enough to know that my reaction to all of this was weird, but I wasn’t exactly sure WHY I reacted this way. I figured it probably had something to do with my dad or my brother. At that time, I didn’t even know I had a third abuser (the babysitter) – I found out about her like four years later.
It’s been 25 years since my first kiss. I now understand why I reacted that way to such an intimate act. This is what happens when you fuck kids. A beautiful innocent act like our first kiss becomes a complete hot mess because it’s not our first go-round with intimacy. I had already experienced my brother’s head between my legs when I was way younger, but I didn’t want that experience. Even now, the memory of what he did to me – it’s painful.
This is why you shouldn’t fuck kids. What should be beautiful and pretty and sweet and innocent – like first boyfriends and first kisses and ‘I like you’ – becomes a whole other thing fraught with rape potential in our heads. We can’t separate who you are with who has already used our bodies. Even though we want you – the ones we have chosen – we can’t figure out if you are like the ones who have already hurt us. The piss is – we want to figure it out. We are just like all the other girls and boys; we too want healthy beautiful romantic tangible love that we can feel with our hands and our hearts. But we can’t get there because of what has already happened to us.
I went to sleep thinking about my first kiss last night. This morning I woke up from a terrible rape dream. That’s why you shouldn’t fuck kids.
Filed under: babysitter, brother, father, fear, survivor | Tags: babysitter sexual abuse, brother-sister incest, diet, fat, father-daughter incest, Jon Gabriel Method, overweight, potatoes not prozac, sugar addict, survivor of child sexual abuse, weight loss
I would like to lose weight. I am unhappy at the weight I am at. The problem is that whenever I have lost weight in the past, I get to a certain point and no matter what I do, I can’t lose any more weight (even though I would be considered fat at that weight on any doctor’s scale).
Two years ago, I began The Sugar Addicts Recovery Program. Kathleen DesMaisons feels that if you eat enough protein in the morning, you won’t have as many cravings through the day. I think she is right, so I have been doing that ever since. Then about a year ago, I found the Jon Gabriel Method. He explains that if you are anything more than 10 lbs overweight, it is because you do not feel safe losing the weight. He says that as long as you don’t feel safe, your body will never release its hold on the weight because your body simply doesn’t want to be thin.
I couldn’t agree with him more. I have always known that my fatness was about safety. I didn’t start gaining weight till my brother began molesting me. As an adult, every time I have tried to lose weight, I have mostly failed. A thinner body is a smaller body. When I was in a small body as a child, three people used my smallness to their sexual advantage. They used my body for their sexual pleasure, and enjoyed their power over me. When I think about being in a thinner body now, I equate it with smallness. Smallness hasn’t worked out well for me in the past. These thoughts and anxieties have thwarted many attempts to lose weight, and eventually my subconscious overtakes me, and I have put on more weight than I have lost in diets.
This, of course, is why you shouldn’t fuck kids. You don’t like the obesity problem in America? Stop fucking kids. I was once at a conference on incest, and I swear to G-d, every single one of us (and I’m talking hundreds of people) was overweight. Some of us were massively overweight. We have all cleverly figured out that weight is a good shield, a good measure of insulation that keeps people far the fuck away from us. And honestly, this has worked pretty well for me so far. Somehow when I reach a certain weight, I become invisible to men. This weight has kept me safe.
But the truth is that my adult self is unhappy with this weight now. I don’t feel protected by it so much anymore. Instead, I feel hampered by it. I feel like my weight is holding me back from being my best self.
As you know from my last post, this year is my year of trying to empower myself. I have spent a lot of time working through this issue in therapy, and listening to Jon Gabriel’s visualizations. And today I had such a lovely thought. I tried to imagine myself in a thinner body. And immediately my mind did its usual thing where thinness=smallness=me getting violated again. But today I changed the ending of that thought. The violator still tries to violate me, but in my thinner smaller body, I am confident and fit. I am strong and I have a good relationship with my body. My body and I work together and I fight my would-be violator, and I KICK HIS FUCKING ASS.
He will think twice before ever fucking with me again.
Filed under: babysitter, brother, father, fear, night, survivor, Uncategorized | Tags: brother-sister incest, evil, father-daughter incest, just world theory, survivor of child sexual abuse
My mom called today, and she said “You know, I was thinking about your situation with the babysitter, and it’s such a case of good coming from evil.”
I said “How do you mean?”
She said, “Well look how much she hurt you. Look how that has fueled your passion about child sexual abuse. You’re doing so much good on behalf of survivors, and I think that never would have happened were it not for that babysitter.”
I think that when bad things happen to good people, we all want to make meaning of it. I think that making meaning of tragedy or evil is a human way of processing terrible things. But I really do think that good can come from bad, and maybe that is me trying to make meaning of the babysitter, my brother, and my father all using my body against my will.
I think I am passionate about survivors’ voices being heard because of my own painful experiences. At the same time – all of this comes at quite a fucking cost. It’s true that trauma survivors are much more empathetic to pain because we know what that pain feels like, but the problem is that no one is home with us at night to see what is really happening, so the whole thing seems so seamless.
Can good come from bad? Yes. But generally it means ‘good for society’ but still ‘bad for me’.
I write a blog in secret that details every new time my child abuse history interferes with my adult life. It’s good for society because it breaks the secret, continually. Generally speaking, I am very empathetic to anyone else’s pain, which is also probably good for society. However, I am still afraid to leave my house, and my nights are punctuated from beginning to end with fear. Even though good has come from bad, I’m still fucked up. That’s why you shouldn’t fuck kids.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Aunt, brother-sister incest, passover, survivor of child sexual abuse, transgender
So you remember how I was so worried about my sister-in-law and Easter dinner? Well, it turns out I should have looked a lot closer to home before worrying about my sister-in-law. My sister-in-law came around on her own! She said that she finally realized “How does this affect me, really?” Then she said that once she realized that this is not a threat to her in any way, she became cool with it. She also said that once she was with her brother for two seconds, she realized that the relationship has not changed at all. I thought this was such growth on her part.
Unfortunately, it looks like some members of my family have not experienced such forced growth. This past Saturday night, my ex and I went to Passover dinner with my family. A note about our divorce situation – I know it’s different than the normal divorce. As my mom remarked — “Your divorce is better than most marriages!” This is true – we are still living together, and we are okay for the most part. Well, I should say, I cry myself to sleep almost every night, but that is more about my sadness over where I am in life, and not a reflection on the way we get along with each other. Anyway, my point is, we are still living together, and have no immediate plans to separate living spaces. So, we still function as a married couple, kind of. But we have been in separate bedrooms for a long time now, and we no longer kiss or hold hands, obviously. And we do plan on getting around to actually divorcing at some point.
In a way, our relationship has kind of morphed from being husband and wife to being close sisters and best friends.
So we went to Passover dinner on Saturday night, and my Aunt fucking attacked my ex. I felt like I had to stand up for my ex because it was my family. When we were married, we worked under the assumption that my ex would take care of his family shit, and I would take care of mine. This seemed to work really well for us. Now, I still feel the same even though we aren’t married and he is a she.
So, I got into it with my Aunt. She said such nasty things to my ex. She obviously felt that the whole transgender thing was a choice, and a bad one at that.
The whole thing made me remember how she handled the news that I had been incested by my brother. She said to me “Things happen between brothers and sisters.” I finally had to tell her “Oral sex doesn’t happen between brothers and sisters”, which stunned her into silence for the moment.
It may seem like the two issues – incest and transgenderism – have nothing in common, but in fact they do. Incest is a fairly common thing that happens in many homes. But no one ever talks about it. It’s such an ugly thing, such a shitty taboo to break. Transgenderism is somewhat rare, but it’s not something that anyone has ever had any personal experience with until it happens to someone you know and/or love. Both issues take a lot of education.
In both issues, there is a lot of downplaying and a lot of victim blaming. My Aunt wishes I would shut the fuck up about how incest and child sexual abuse has affected my life, so that she doesn’t have to be uncomfortable with the knowledge that this happened to me. My aunt also likes to think that transgendered people should hide who they really are so as not to make her uncomfortable.
I live with the hope that my Aunt Will come around, in terms of her thought processes with all of this. It’s not a choice. It’s not my ex’s choice to be transgendered, it wasn’t my choice to be an incest survivor, and it’s neither of our choices to suffer ill consequences of what has happened to us. But these are our lives now, and we have to live them. I’d rather do that with my family’s support, but she really has never come to understand that my being incested wasn’t a choice (even with all my attempts at educating her), so she probably will never understand my ex’s life either.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: brother-sister incest, Easter, sister-in-law, survivor of child sexual abuse, transgender
My sister in law has been acting like an ass around my ex ever since my ex has come out to her as transgendered. Her latest shit was that she arranged for an Easter family gathering at a time she knew my ex couldn’t make it. My ex-husband/wife was understandable upset about this, and remarked to me (in a surprised but hurt voice) that “she would rather exclude me from a family gathering than have me there, just because I am transgendered”. I felt so terrible for my ex then, and I wished I could fix it for her.
I don’t really understand my sister-in-law’s attitude about this. I mean, as the wife in this relationship, I was betrayed. Unintentional betrayal, but it was betrayal all the same. I married a man, and ended up divorcing a woman. It has absolutely fucked with my world-view, and I am having a host of other effects from this latest betrayal in my life. But what does my sister-in-law care that her brother is becoming her sister? I mean, in what real way does this affect her, really? Does it take some adjusting? Yes. Should she have feelings about that? Of course! But to shun a family member who’s been so good to you just because you’re too closed-minded to accept that human beings come in many forms? I don’t understand that. For me, humans come in two forms: good people who don’t/won’t intentionally harm me, and bad people who do/will intentionally harm me. That’s what happens when you fuck kids; we base our entire opinions of people based on whether they will or won’t harm us.
The thing is, when I think about it, I wish I could face my sister-in-law and say this: You have no idea how lucky you are. I would have killed to have had a brother like the one you had growing up, and yet you’re willing to piss away the whole relationship just because your brother is becoming your sister. I take this issue personally, mostly because I wasn’t lucky enough to have a nice brother. I wasn’t born into that kind of family. Instead, I had a brother that sexually abused me and didn’t really have any love in his heart for me. You had a brother that was nice to you all the time and genuinely loved you. Abusing your spirit and body would have been the furthest thing from his mind. I had a brother that did not love me and the only time he was nice to me was when he was molesting me. Now you have come to find out that your brother is not who you thought he was. I am here to tell you that just because someone is not who you think they are doesn’t make them any less worthy of your love. Your brother is becoming your sister, and I am so jealous. I wish I had a brother who loved me, who didn’t abuse me, who I could feel close to. If I had that kind of brother, and I found out she was becoming my sister, I’d be overjoyed. Instead I have the kind of brother who I fear would rape me if I were alone in a room with him.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: brother-sister incest, father-daughter incest, survivor of child sexual abuse, transgender, Valentine's Day
Valentine’s Day is coming up. It will be my first since the breakup of my marriage, though certainly not my first V-Day spent alone. I was alone for many Valentines’ Days before I got married.
The one that stands out was the one spent during my freshman year of college. I binged on sugar that night, and began a long crying jag. My mom ended up picking me up from school that night because she was worried about me. She said I was fucked up from eating too much sugar. What she didn’t understand then and doesn’t understand now is that eating too much sugar is/was a SYMPTOM of the problem, not the problem itself.
I ate too much sugar that day because I was terribly sad. I was terribly sad because I understood that I was different from all those girls with boyfriends (like my freaking roommate that year), and I would always be different from those girls. Of course they had boyfriends! They weren’t afraid of sex!! And I knew I always would be. I knew that my brother and father had scared me away from anything resembling consensual sex or healthy sex or boyfriends or loving valentines days, etc. (At that time, I didn’t know there was a third molester yet.) So yeah, I ate a shitload of sugar to try to anesthesize these shitty feelings. But instead of anesthesizing it, it just made the whole situation worse. As I ate each stupid candy heart, I was reminded of my own fatness, my own disgustingness, my own unloveability.
This week, I talked to my therapist about how painful this Valentine’s Day will be for me, this being the first one I have to face alone in a while. I mean, my husband and I were together for nine years, married for seven of them. She didn’t seem to truly understand VDay as a painful day for me. She told me to celebrate the day for what it is, a celebration of love.
I told her that I was right all along, from back in my college days. I knew I was different then, and I still understand myself as that now. I told her that what actually happened in this marriage is that two ‘differents’ found each other and fell in love. I was different because three people fucked me, and he was different because he was born in the wrong body. Two ‘differents’ found each other, and now that we know for sure that love is not enough to save what was ultimately doomed from the start, we are each alone again, and I want to eat a shitload of candy again to numb the pain.
This is why you shouldn’t fuck kids. Valentine’s day comes every year, and every year I am painfully reminded that I feel like a freak.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: brother-sister incest, dating, eating disorder, fat, father-daughter incest
I happened upon the Incest Survivors’ Aftereffects Checklist by E. Sue Blume , and I was perusing it. I, of course, have many of the symptoms on this list. But then my eyes rested upon this one: “Manipulating body size to avoid sexual attention”. This is SOOOO me. Somehow every time I am in a relationship, I end up gaining a shitload of weight. I gained so much weight in my marriage that the number was pretty astounding. The number of pounds gained was so much, it would almost seem like a conscious decision to gain it. But it wasn’t, and I have always been generally consciously unhappy with my weight.
I first started gaining weight after my brother began abusing me. I didn’t start throwing up my food until my father started molesting me. I have always been overweight, and I have tried every possible diet that there is to try, from Atkins to Weight Watchers to counting calories to nutritionists, etc, etc, etc.
The truth is, and I can only understand this now in retrospect, I have been manipulating my body size to avoid sexual attention. During my thinner times, males have felt perfectly comfortable walking up to me and asking me out. They have felt okay with talking to me to get to know me better in order to ask me out. They have felt okay talking to my friends about me to see if I like them. I cannot even count how many places I have literally run away from because some guy has done these things. Once I was in a restaurant and when I was in the bathroom, the waiter told someone at my table that he thought I was cute. She told me about it when I got back to the table, and the way I handled it was to hide behind her as we walked out of the restaurant.
Somehow when I gain weight, the number of males that show interest me is greatly reduced. It’s like by becoming fatter, I actually become more invisible to men.
The heterosexual female part of me likes the idea of attention from men. But the molested girl part of me usually takes over and then all of me runs away.
I asked my therapist about the manipulation of body size stuff, and she said that in her practice she has noticed that whatever way the child looked like while being molested becomes the opposite of what they choose to look like in adulthood. So, for instance if a little girl has been thin her whole childhood until some asshole molests her, then she chooses to become fat (subconsciously, in my case). And if a little girl is overweight, she becomes anorexic, etc. I don’t think this applies to everyone, but shit, it sure is true in my case.
I don’t think I would have ever had such profound weight issues, and such profound eating disorders, and such a profoundly fucked up relationship with my body and with food if three people hadn’t molested me. This is why you shouldn’t fuck kids.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: babysitter child sex abuse, brother-sister incest, father-daughter incest, fear, panic disorder
I really hate the parking lot where I work, and I don’t like the entrance to the building either. It just seems like an awfully easy spot for rapists to hide. Sometimes I work from home so that I don’t have to face that parking lot. Or I will make plans to go to the building with a friend so that I don’t have to face the parking lot alone.
Today I had a meeting at work so I had to go in, but my friend decided to work from home. I got to the parking lot, parked the car and got out of the car. I looked around. Where is the rapist hiding? Or is he behind me? (Turn around to look behind me.) Start walking to the building. Try to look confident, so that if he is thinking of attacking me, he’ll know that I’ll put up a good fight. I already took my gloves off in the car so that his skin will be under my fingernails when they do the rape kit on me.
I get to the elevator. I look around. Is this where he’s gonna jump out at me? Elevator doors open, I hurry in, press the ‘Close Doors’ button again and again really fast before he jumps in with me. Why do these doors take so long to close? Hurry, please hurry doors and close already.
Ok good, doors are closed, I am safe until they open again. They open on my floor, I run out. If someone is waiting by the elevator door to catch me and rape me, I have thwarted them. This time, I remind myself. Walk down the hallway where no one ever is, and then I sit in my cubicle where there are at least people.
My friend isn’t there today, I remind myself, so I will have to brave all of this again to get back to my car. No, wait, my other friend has to come in today because she will be at that meeting! I will walk back with her, I reassure myself.
The meeting comes and goes, and I am back at my desk, busy with a project. My friend suddenly stands up, puts her coat on and announces she is leaving. Shit!! Why is she leaving now, in the middle of the day?? SHIT!! Should I shut own my computer and leave with her? I can finish my project from home. If I don’t leave with her now, I will have to face the elevator and the parking lot by myself. She is in a hurry, and I am too embarrassed to ask her to wait a few seconds for me to shut my computer down. She leaves.
I am getting more freaked out as each minute passes, and finally I give up, shut the computer down and leave for the day. I get to the elevator. Why, why didn’t I just leave with my friend?? Then we could have walked to our cars together! Already I am starting to shake. This is so embarrassing. I hurry into the elevator, hurriedly press the ‘Close Doors’ button, and wait. I hate leaving this building. The elevator stops, I step outside. Look around, put on same act of bravado as I did coming in here.
Please, I pray, please let there be someone else out here, a co-worker. If someone else is out here, he won’t have the chance to rape me. I am shaking with fear now. I see the bus stopped in front of the building. He appears to be waiting for someone. Thank you G-d!! I rush to my car, check for rapists in the back seat, get in car, immediately lock doors. Try to act like I am normal, like all the shit that I just thought and did didn’t happen.
This is me walking to my car, or walking from my car to work. This is why you shouldn’t fuck kids.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: brother-sister incest, father-daughter incest, guilt, hospital, survivor of child sexual abuse
I was recently hospitalized again (same problem as before, only this time they actually removed my gall bladder). When I got home from the hospital, the huz/wife and I spent some time explaining to our son that when we touch mama, we have to be very careful around my tummy.
My sweet son gently put his hand on my tummy and said “We have to be gentle with mama’s tummy.” Later, he found me alone in my room and he looked me in the eyes and asked “Did mama go to the hospital because I hurt your tummy?”
My sweet beautiful innocent son. That’s kids. They can’t understand a world where they are not the center of it, so in his little mind all of this was his fault. Obviously, I took some time to explain to him that this had nothing to do with him, that he did nothing wrong at all, and that he is a good boy. I told him that sometimes people get hurt and they get band-aids put on them. I helped him remember some times where he too got hurt and had band-aids too, and how it wasn’t anyone’s fault.
The whole thing got me thinking though. When my parents got divorced, I thought it was my fault too. And you can damn well bet that when my brother and father started with me, I thought that was my fault too. I’m sure in my little mind, I thought the babysitter was my fault too. That’s probably why I never said anything about it for such a long time to my mom. The fault thing took up so much time in therapy. I mean SO MUCH. I would say that trying to understand that it wasn’t my fault was probably the biggest breakthrough of all my therapy. Once I began to understand that it wasn’t my fault, I was able to begin dealing with all the other aspects of surviving child sexual abuse (like betrayal, fear, depression, etc.)
I’ve had a lot of therapy. I know it’s not my fault. But fucked kids automatically think it’s our fault, and it’s not until everyone in the whole world tells us it’s not our fault over and over and over again do we begin to realize that it truly wasn’t our fault.
Truly, it’s not your fault. You could have screamed at the top of your lungs “NOOOO!!” and your perp still would have found a way to abuse you. You could have sat on his lap naked and said “Fuck me”, and it still would have been up to him to say “This is wrong. You are a child. I am an adult. I will not ever touch you in a sexual way. Let’s get you some therapy.”
It wasn’t my son’s fault that I had to go to the hospital to get my gall bladder out. It wasn’t my fault my parents got divorced. It wasn’t my fault that a babysitter, a brother, and a father abused me. But I thought it was my fault till I was around 32 or so, and I am almost 38 now. That’s a long time to carry the burden of guilt of someone abusing me.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: babysitter-child sexual abuse, brother-sister incest, hospital, survivor of child sexual abuse, survivor sleep
I am still sick, in pain, nauseated, etc. The surgeon still needs to remove my gall bladder, which will necessitate a further hospital trip, which is scaring the shit out of me. I pretty much lay awake thinking about it, and worried that he won’t get it in time. He refuses to touch me until the pancreatitis heals. In the meantime, I am scared that another stone will slip into the duct and the whole thing will start all over again.
It is hard to get on the computer due to the pain levels and most of the time it is all I can do to sit there and just be alive. I am having a stronger moment right now so I decided to get on the computer and visit with you, my blog friends.
Today is four weeks since I entered the hospital; four weeks of new trauma to work on, compounding the old trauma. Four weeks of sleeping fitfully, especially since I got home from the hospital. I am scared of going to sleep. Laying there awake at night is an exercise in fear. Actually, all of this has been an exercise in fear, frankly.
I was thinking last night about this physical/emotional trauma, and its similarities/differences to when I was a kid, getting molested by a babysitter, and then a brother, and then a father. As an adult, the nurses were horrific to me in the hospital, and their lack of empathy absolutely worsened my condition. As a child, no one even knew what was happening to me, but I knew. I guess they couldn’t be empathetic if they didn’t know what was wrong in the first place. I guess.
When I told my aunt what my brother did to me – I was still a child when I told her – she asked me what his penis looked like. I guess that was her way of seeing if I was telling the truth. I told her it looked like an egg roll, which is what it looked like to me. My brother is uncircumsized, and I hate that I know that through firsthand knowledge.
In the hospital, the nurses were assessing my pain level constantly, trying to see if I was truly in enough pain to warrant medicine to stop the pain. They, too, were trying to see if I was telling the truth. Are we just a world that thinks that everyone is a fucking liar?
When I said that he was hurting me, I wish you would have said “My G-d, what happened to you was wrong, and it wasn’t your fault. I’m sorry I wasn’t there to protect you. But I will be now, and I won’t let anyone hurt you again. I will help you heal.”
To my mother’s credit, the minute I told her about the abuse with my brother, it stopped and never came back. She believed me from the first second I uttered the words. Thank G-d. I guess the damage was already done. My brother and I both had fitful sleep and nightmares and bedwetting and all the other signs of abuse after that babysitter came into our life.
I am 37, and I lay in bed awake and afraid every night. Most nights I just keep escaping through tv shows until I am so tired I can’t keep my eyes open anymore. But as soon as I get in bed, I am AWAKE, you know?
I dread the night. I hate survivor sleep.
Reasons You Shouldn't Fuck Kids 