Trigger Warning- Childhood Sexual Abuse

I had so many pictures yesterday and today, this is all I have and to tell you the truth, I took that one yesterday too. I found the plate when I asked Mr. Moon to please reach up and get a box off the very top shelf of a kitchen cabinet that I knew held some vintage snack sets that someone had given me years and years ago. 

Okay. I took a picture. I did not, however, clean the plate or the cup. I'm not in the mood. 
They are sweet little plates and cups though. I am imagining the refreshments at a bridge club being served on them. There are four plates, four cups. Can't you just see little egg salad and cucumber and pimento cheese sandwiches on thin white bread with the crusts cut off? Perhaps a few radishes on the side. Definitely a cookie or two. And a nice cup of tea or, instead, punch. 

Something fancy. Something ladylike, something demur. 

Despite their sweetness however, I knew for a fact that I was never going to use them and so I reckoned I'd give them a wash and put them in the laundry basket where I collect things to take to the hospice re-sale place. They've been around here long enough. 
But I had forgotten the three little plates on top of the box holding the glassware. As soon as I saw them I thought, Damn! How did I ever let those get out of my sight? 

There are no markings on them and I couldn't find an exact replica on Google search but they are very similar to other types of mid-century hand-painted ceramics from Japan. And not worth a whole lot. They were sold as souvenirs. Those I have washed and are in the cabinet where I can reach them because I want to use them. I won't be putting any teacups in the little saucer depressions but as far as I know, there ain't no dish etiquette police around here. 
Yet.

It's been gray and gloomy all day long. It spat a bit of rain for about ten minutes but that was it. I don't mind gray days at all if we're getting rain. Otherwise, it's just heavy and depressing. 
As Sunday's can be anyway, no matter what the weather. 

I'm going to keep this short today. I will tell you a story about when I first started shaving my legs. I was reminded of it because I did shave my legs today and don't ask me why but it had been ages. So what? Anyway, I think of this story every time I shave my legs. 
Every time. Each and every of the hundreds (at least) of times I have shaved my legs, I have thought about it and this is a good illustration of how ridiculously ignorant it is when someone asks a victim of childhood sexual abuse why they can't just let it go. 

All right.

So when I was probably in the seventh or eighth grade, I noticed that all the girls were shaving their legs. I don't know about these days but shaving your legs was a rite of passage for girls. It was a signal to the world that we were no longer children. Perhaps not women yet, but definitely not a child anymore.
So I asked my mother if I could shave mine. I asked with great trepidation because I knew she was going to say no and she did. But the thing was- the person who really did not want me to start shaving my legs was my stepfather. 
My abuser.
He had quit visiting me at night by then but his psychological abuse was just as bad and just as frightening. He hated it that I was growing up, growing older. He later insisted that I could not date until I was sixteen, and he made me try on my bathing suits to make sure that they fit his definition of modest. 
He was not religious, people. At all. So it wasn't that. 
So me shaving my legs was another thing that he fought.
Finally, I suppose my mother talked him into "letting me". Why the fuck did he even have any right to say when I could or could not shave my legs? Why did my mother think this was normal? 
But. I got permission. He even gave me a razor...

It was a sort of bronze color and it looked a lot like this. I look at that picture and I can feel the way the handle, made for a grown man's hand, felt in my hand. 

It used a double-edged razor blade which required unscrewing the head from the handle and then handling the old blade, taking it out, and then the new, putting it in. 
Here's the thing:

This had been his razor when he was serving in the army. It was army issued. 
How could anything be more fucked up than that?

Well, for a fifteen-year old girl, anyway.

I cut myself every time I used that heavy, dangerous thing. And I didn't have shaving cream. Shaving cream was for men. I only had soap. Zest soap. 
(You're not fully clean unless you're ZESTFULLY clean.)

So every time I shave my legs now with my light-as-a-feather Venus disposable-head razor, I think of how creepy and strange and scary it was to shave with my stepfather's brass army razor. Even though I did not understand the concept of "inappropriate behavior" by an adult in those days, I knew that something was very, very wrong, despite the fact that in my house, it was just the water we swam in. 
And always, for a moment, that feeling comes back, or at least the memory of it. 

And that is why I cannot "let it go." It would take a lobotomy. 

Well, that was cheerful. 

Love...Ms. Moon