Another Sip From The Big Bowl Of Wrong: Trigger Warning

In writing about the sexual abuse which occurred specifically to me I have not followed a plan. It has been a fairly chronological accounting of how a pedophile can step into a situation and unleash his or her illness.
Mainly, there has to be dysfunction of some kind to allow the predator to go about his or her molestation. There are, let's face it, a million types of dysfunction and they can range from alcoholism and drug abuse to mental illness to poverty to narcissism on the part of a parent or caretaker to physical illness to divorce to domestic abuse to...
I can't even list them all.
But the situation almost always involves a child who because of one thing or another feels a lack of love and attention and a parent who, if not complicit in the abuse, is too blinded by a myriad of problems to notice or register what is going on.

My dreams lately have been about living in my mother's house. It's always her house. And she allows C. to live there too. They are both older by far than they were when I actually lived at home. I am being forced to live there by financial circumstances and I am always enraged that my mother is allowing C. to still live with her in this house of hers. C. does not molest me but his very presence makes me angry and sick and revolted and frightened. In last night's dream I was forced to pee in a dresser drawer because C. was in the bathroom, naked, and refused to come out.
Now this is something that never, as far as I know, happened. But it is very common for an abused child to feel as if he or she has nowhere safe to go, to hide, to feel protected and that the abuser is always watching her. In this light, the dream makes perfect sense.
In this dream I finally realized that I COULD move. I could figure out how to support myself and the idea of this was thrilling.

There is so much more to these dreams than can be read on the surface and I think the part I'd like to take up today is my anger at my mother.

I remember distinctly the moment I realized how angry I was at her. I had recently married Mr. Moon and I am certain that his unstinting love allowed me to finally let go of the illusion I had that I had no choice but to love my mother. I was raking the yard when the anger overcame me. And up until that moment I had actually had a decent relationship with her. She was still married to C. and my two youngest brothers were still at home but things were horrible there. C. had become notably crazy. My little brothers would tell me about incidents which had occurred which horrified me. They both hated him and even plotted, in their little boy minds, how to kill him and make it look like suicide.
I will admit that I often fantasized that C. and Mother both would die together in some accident and that I would be allowed to adopt my brothers and raise them. I loved them desperately and after I became a mother myself, my desire to protect and love them, to let them know they were cherished and safe became almost overwhelming.
Of course, no such accident occurred.
And the insanity only increased and it was apparent.
A friend of one of my brothers, when they were in high school, came over to see my brother one day and the door was open and the cars were there but he couldn't find anyone. I can't remember where everyone was but this friend told my brother that he had a horrible feeling that C. had killed the entire family and then himself.
The cracks in the facade of the perfect little American family were widening.
And yet...Mother stayed with him. I talked to her all the time about divorcing him. She wanted to but she was afraid and she also was "staying for the sake of the children." She was determined to hang on until they both graduated from high school.
And she did divorce him when they were both out of the house, to her credit.

But this moment of realization I had came before the divorce. And it shook me to my core.
I had never for a moment believed that Mother knew about the abuse but I did know for certain that she was quite aware of how he was abusing my brothers. Not sexually (perhaps, but that's another story) but emotionally. She, too, was abused by him emotionally. She had to know that the things going on in that house were terrifically damaging to her sons. She had to. She had a Master's degree in early childhood education. She had taught school on and off for most of her adult life. She was not ignorant nor was she uneducated.
But there was no way around the situation except to admit that she, in staying, was allowing her sons to be treated like shit by a crazy man.
And all of my life I had been given the role of caretaker to my mother and as such, her depressions, her verbal declarations of wanting to die, to kill herself, were like chains that a child could not possibly break, keeping me in my role, excusing her behavior, convincing myself that I loved her more than anything on earth.

And then, suddenly, the chains snapped.

This is not to say that I immediately began to treat her differently. I did not. I continued to communicate with her frequently. I even enjoyed times with her. But. I saw her through a different lens. And I began to list in my mind the ways in which she had not protected either me or my brothers and how her needs and the needs of others had always come before ours.
She was something of a martyr. When my grandmother had to be moved to a nursing home, Mother found one in Winter Haven, very close to our house and she visited her EVERY SINGLE DAY. After spending a full day of teaching. And she had two small sons at home.
Now of course it is noble and good that she visited her mother. And she was praised for it by nursing home administration, by neighbors, by friends.
And when Granddaddy needed a place to stay, having become frail and ill, she took him into her home and cared for him and still visited Granny every day.
She railed about this bitterly to me. She was angry at her brothers for not helping more although she no more would have told them this than she would have flown to the moon. She adored her big brothers as she adored her father. And I'm sure she loved her mother but it troubled her greatly that Granny managed to live long, long after her mind was mostly gone and she said on so many occasions that she never, ever wanted to live like that. She told me time and time again that she hoped I would never have to care for her the way she was caring/had cared for her parents.
Complex message there, folks.
I remember finally, one day long after they both died and she was getting up in age, she repeated this to me again and I said, "Don't worry, Mom. I won't. Chuck will do it."
Lord, but she was angry.
I still chuckle a little when I think of that.
Yes. I'm mean.

But all of this is a theme- she wanted me to take care of her while she took care of everyone else in the world. I, like her, was the daughter. This was my role in life.
Remember Like Water For Chocolate? 
Oh, how that movie hit home when I saw it.

And the older I got and the more I realized, the less and less I cared to caretake for her.

When I did finally start going to therapy and at long, long last got up the courage to tell her about the abuse (in a letter) she went crazy. Her main reaction was to insist over and over and over again that she had had no knowledge of it, that she never knew, that this was destroying her life. That the one thing in life she had ever wanted to be was a good mother and she obviously WAS NOT!
Etc.
I encouraged her to find a therapist, which she did. She started going to some church-related counselor who actually WROTE ME A LETTER telling me that for my mother's mental health, I really needed to discuss with her the issue of MY SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP WITH C.
I had not been able to talk to her much about it after I wrote the letter. I simply couldn't. I heard what she had to say and my thoughts just cut off.
Defense mechanism, plain and simple.
And for once, I realized, this was not about her, it was about me. And I could not reassure her that I knew she was innocent in all regards.
And she never could bring herself to tell me she was sorry that it had happened to me.

I was able to write her counselor back. I am sure the letter was venomous. I educated her on the difference between having a sexual relationship with someone and being sexually abused by them. I told her that at the moment, my mother's mental health was not my priority. That mine was.

And it was. This was the time when it was all the hardest. The ripping off of the scab time. I was barely stable, barely functional. And I could not be responsible, for once in my life, for my mother's wellbeing.

*****************************

There. That. 

This is what is on my mind this morning. Obviously, my thoughts jump and cross, skip and descend as I try to untangle some meaningful explanation of what happened. Of how it happened. Of how it felt then, later, and how it feels now. Of how it affected my entire family. Of how there is never just one type of abuse. Of how the abuse has affected every part of my life and always will. And how, in some ways, the grief I will always carry for the mother I did not have will be worse than the grief I carry for the loss of so many things that the abuse caused. 

Innocence, trust, faith in myself, a sense of deserving love and on and on. 

*****************************

I have written myself into a bit of a mental mess here and have taken an Ativan because I fucking need it. But even this is valuable because it makes me realize how very close to the surface all of this still is, after all of these years, after all of that therapy, after all of this life of love and goodness and it reminds me that suffering from depression and anxiety is not a weakness but is, in fact, not only genetic but also a very normal and expected response to my childhood. 

And I'm still fucking here. 

So are you. 

Love...Ms. Moon

P.S. Please forgive tortured sentences, misspellings, bad punctuation and so forth. I'm sort of writing from the seat of my pants and sometimes I simply can't spend much time going back and rereading and editing the way I should. This is one of those times. 

The Summer I Turned Twelve: Trigger Warning

The summer after fifth grade, instead of caring for the baby which was not to be, my mother decided to finish her Master's Degree at University of Florida, in Gainesville. This summer, however, my brother and I would not be staying in Roseland with my grandparents but would be moving to Gainesville with Mother and C.
C. had recently gotten a job at the brand new Polk Community College in Winter Haven, Florida, and would start teaching there in the fall but until then, we would be living in an apartment in Gainesville- a completely new experience for me and my brother. Although Gainesville was still a sleepy town in those days, compared to Roseland it was a big city with probably more buildings in it than were in all of Indian River county at that time. Instead of being in a tiny village where we literally knew everyone and where we were allowed to roam anywhere we wanted on foot or on bicycle, we would be in a place where we knew no one at all but Mother and C. and were completely lost by the many roads, the college campus, and (to us) urban areas.
Fortunately, the apartment was bordered in back by a tiny stream which trickled and sang that all of us children played in endlessly that summer. We made dams, we laid in the water and looked up at the sky, we collected rocks, we dug clay from the banks and tried to make things with it, shaping it into cups and bowls with our hands. And we were enrolled in the summer program of a developmental school called P.K. Yonge which was associated with the university.
That was completely alien to me. I had only ever attended Sebastian elementary where again, everyone knew everyone. And instead of high-ceilinged, old-fashioned rooms with great windows which opened up to the breezes and heat and bugs and sometimes birds, P.K. Yonge was housed in a modern building with air conditioning and teaching centers and a two-way mirror in the back which students and teachers could stand behind, hidden, and observe us as we were taught. We all knew we were being observed, it wasn't a secret but it still felt odd. Everything that summer was odd, though, and being looked at all morning by strangers was definitely not the oddest.
It was all right. I don't remember a damn thing I learned at P.K. Yonge but I do remember juice and graham crackers at snack time. It seemed babyish to me and pretty boring but it was tolerable.
The best thing, the very best, miraculous, amazing, wonderful, unbelievable thing was that as students of P.K. Yonge we could check books out of a big library. For the very first time in my life I had all of the books I could read and I took every advantage of that I could.
That part was heaven.
The stream was lovely.
The fact that I was allowed to take my brother (I was eleven, turning twelve, and he was nine) down city streets through a fairly sketchy neighborhood to a five and dime store where we could buy amazing junkie treasures for cheap was thrilling.

So all of that was good.

But.

Mother was in deep, deep depression. Times then were absolutely cruel when it came to things like mourning a baby who died before birth. The general thought was to forget it, get on with life, and try to have another.
And Mother was trying to do all of that. She went to classes, she spent massive amounts of time in the library studying, she was absent literally and figuratively, and I don't know how she did it.
Still though, she was stranger somehow, than even all of this would explain. She had begun to confide in me again. She showed me her newly-wed underwear, silky, sexy things. She pointed out that although the apartment had only twin beds, she and C. had pushed theirs together to make one for them to sleep on. I wonder where this came from. She had never, ever explained or discussed sex with me. I suppose she merely assumed that in all of my reading I had figured it out. Or...something? I have no idea. But it put me in a terrible position. She was obviously happy about her sex life with C. and was, in fact, bragging about it to me in this subtle way. And at the same time, he was still molesting me.
Two things happened that summer in Gainesville which I will never forget.
Ever.
One was that one day when my brother and I got home from school, C. took me into the bathroom. By this time, I knew far better than to allow him to get me anywhere alone. But when your father-figure tells you to do something and you are as good a little girl as I was, you just do it.
And in the bathroom, he proceeded to show me several quite lurid porn magazines. His rationale for doing this was so that when other kids started showing these things around on the playground, I would know what they were and wouldn't be shocked.
This of course was the least convincing argument for showing a child porn that I can imagine.
I may have been relatively innocent but I was not stupid.
And I had never seen anything like that. At the time I still thought "Mad Magazine" was cutting edge racy.
I had no idea what to do and just tried to jabber my way out of that bathroom which, eventually, I did.
And as sordid and wrong as this episode was, the other one I recall was far more bizarre and perhaps a cry for help from C. although if that were true, no help showed up at all.
It was an early morning. Mother and my brother and I were in the kitchen of the little apartment, eating our cereal, getting ready for school, and suddenly, C. was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, leaning up against it like a model, wearing nothing but one of my mother's pairs of her sexy, sheer underpants which were stretched impossibly over his much larger body, the nylon fabric barely able to contain body parts which they had not been made to contain.
We all looked up. There was silence for a moment. C. had a look on his face which still gives me nightmares. Sheepish and defiant at the same time.
"C! What are you doing?" my mother finally shrilled.
I don't remember what he said but eventually, he turned around and went back to the bedroom.

That was never mentioned again.
Never.
And in later years, when I asked my brother if he remembered it, he denied that it ever happened.
More tellingly, I asked my mother the same once and she, too, denied it ever happened. Vehemently.

This is a common theme in the families of abuse. Some children are able to block things from their memories. Some adults are too. And then they accuse the one who does remember of making things up. Of remembering a dream, not a reality. Of...being crazy.

I have a lot of memories of that summer but those are the two that stand out. I do remember playing tennis with my brother and C. on the courts at UofF. In the same spirit of us laughing behind his back when he got finned by the catfish, we conspired to hit balls where he would have to run frantically to return them. It was one small way we could get back at him. And why did we want to get back at him? Well, for me, it was obvious but he had already started displaying behavior which can only be called cruel and selfish. He accused my brother and me (especially me, because I was older) of being thoughtless and bad because we caused our mother so much trouble when she was working so hard on her degree. I have no idea what it was we were doing or not doing but I remember feeling constantly observed and criticized along with being constantly observed in that sexual way. Also, he and mother seemed to be arguing a lot which made Mother even more unhappy than she was. There was a great deal of crying on her part. I was crying a lot too, but tried my best to hide it. I had also started biting myself in the fleshy part of my hands below the thumb which left marks. No one seemed to notice either the tear-stained face or the bite marks. I was obviously furiously angry in a way in which I could not express and I think I wanted desperately for someone to notice and force me to tell my secrets. But no one did.
It was not a happy summer.
It was not a happy family.

The other main memory I have of living in Gainesville was of C. taking me out for my birthday. Just the two of us, like a date. That's what we called it. A date. My mother, I am sure, was completely relieved not to have to deal with a birthday party and she was still under the delusion that C.'s interest in me was a very, very sweet thing, indicative of nothing more than how much he wanted to be a good daddy.

So. I dressed up in my best dress and he took me, just me, to one of the fancier restaurants in town. A steak house with candles on the table and it was just like a date. He gave me a piece of jewelry, albeit one that was fairly appropriate for a child- a silver pin of two Scottie dogs. I didn't really like it at all but I pretended that I did.
And I liked the steak and the baked potato with sour cream and the salad with roquefort dressing. I surely did. Food was still (and will always be) my comfort.
But the whole time we were alone together I was in a state of near terror, knowing that being alone with him was the most dangerous situation I could be in.

Ah, the mixed messages. The being chastised for being childish one moment, being treated like a grown-up the next, expected to help keep the apartment tidy, make my brother's lunches when we got back from school, help with the dishes. The obvious insanity going on all around me which no one but me seemed to note. And soon enough we would be packing up and going back to Roseland and packing up everything I knew in life from our house there and moving to Winter Haven.

Where the insanity definitely did not end.

A Responsible Little Girl: Trigger Warning

So. How to continue, and...why?
I think I'd like to talk about how abuse of any kind affects a family, a person.
It is certainly not just those moments of the actual abuse. Those are merely the manifestation of everything else.
I'm not quite sure how to explain.
But. Without certain dynamics already set in place, the abuse would probably not happen and if it did, it would be dealt with and ended. And after it has begun, the effects of it spread out like poisonous tendrils to to infect and affect everything else.

In my case, one of the factors which made me an easy target was the fact that I'd always been a chubby kid. I was bullied, made fun of, laughed at and taunted. I felt, to say the least, ugly and ungainly. Add to that, I was different from all of the other kids at school.
I loved to read.
I lived to read.
And I lived in a community in which poverty and abuse were rampant, I am sure. We were not rich, but my mother had a decent job and she and my grandmother would make me clothes so I didn't have to wear the same dress to school every day which some of the girls I went to school with did. Some kids had rotten black teeth. Some kids came to school with nothing to eat in their lunchboxes but biscuits. Day after day after day. Needless to say, books in the home were not a priority for many of the children I went to school with and even the children whose families could afford to buy books for their kids didn't seem to care about reading the way I did. And I'm sure I came off as a smarty-pants who loved reading circle instead of dreading it. Add to that, my mother was a teacher in the school. It was a small school, grades 1-5 and she taught third grade. She was my teacher in the third grade, in fact, and that was a whole other story of horror.
But. Here I was. A fat, smarty-pants, teacher's pet kid without a father and here came a big ol' handsome man who let me know that he thought I was fine. Like I said, he praised my cooking and baking. Sometimes to the point where it sort of pissed off my mother. My chocolate chip cookies were better than hers, according to him. This sounds innocuous but in some way it set up the beginnings of a disquiet between my mother and me.
Oh god. I could go on for days, talking about the ways in which my home life was dysfunctional, my school days miserable except for the obvious interest one specific teacher took in me. And, strangely, she was one of my mother's best friends and also, the wife of the pastor of our little church. I adored her. There were a few other women who showed me love and affection in those days and I clung to their words and actions like a drowning child.
Which, in a way, I was.
Anyway, because of C's obvious care for me, because he treated me as if I was an adult, in a way, I absolutely fell in love with him. As I have said, he courted not only my mother but me and some of that is natural if a man falls in love with a woman with children.
Where is the line, though? How much is good and healthy and when does that end and it becomes toxic?
You can only imagine how much I struggled with this when I was a young, single mother with children.
I'll probably talk about that more later because it was a huge issue.
Mother had also treated me in a very adult-like fashion. I was her confidant, even at the age of seven or eight. I was a sort of care-taker for her in many ways. I learned early and well that my job was to do as much as possible to make Mother's life easier. This could mean folding the towels on the towel rack or it could mean not going to her with problems of my own. And when C. came along, part of me was jealous, even as I was learning to love him, because my mother no longer leaned on me the way she had during her depressions, her unhappiness. One would have thought it would be a relief for me not to have to fill that role any more but actually, it was not. And as time went on and things in the family got more and more difficult and crazy, she began to rely on me again because honestly, I was saner than her husband was.
That's just the truth.
But briefly, there was a period of time where he made me feel cared for, loved. He made our family feel safe, complete.
Briefly.
The abuse began. Mother was pregnant. She lost the baby. Her depression ramped up once more.
And I had nowhere to go with all of this.
I was in the fifth grade and honestly, my teacher that year was not a good teacher. Somehow though, I had gotten a job in the lunchroom. I have no idea how this happened. I think it was actually some sort of reward for being a good student. And I was a good student. But I hated being in the class room that year and remember looking at the clock, waiting for it to be time to go down to the lunchroom and kitchen to help Aunt Flonnie, our cook and bus driver, with chores there. I also got to sweep the bus.
I suppose it's a bit telling that scraping plates and sweeping a bus and the lunchroom were activities that seemed like a reward and also, far more enjoyable than sitting in that classroom where I was bored and anxious and way too often stuck with my own thoughts which were not good thoughts.
And Aunt Flonnie was a nurturing woman. Not overly so, but I felt as if she noticed and respected my work. She was kind and funny and took her job seriously, with pride.
I have to keep reminding myself that I was only eleven years old then. When I think back to that time I feel as if I was as adult then as I am now. And truthfully, I was bearing things that only an adult should have to take on. Also, the adults around me treated me that way. Our school finally got what we called a library but which was really only a few shelves of books in the auditorium but I was given the task (joy) of checking the books out to other students. I was used by other teachers to run off work sheets and tests with the mimeograph machine. Remember those? I was given completed work sheets to grade.
Boy. Things were different then, weren't they?
And at home I was trying to protect and help my mother in every way and...I was being sexually abused.

Meanwhile, our family looked pretty darn swell from the outside. New daddy/husband, mama a teacher, two kids, two cars, a  boat, a house, plenty to eat, and so forth.
This was to become a theme. We looked so good on paper, while within the walls of our house, after the doors were shut, there was depression, abuse, fear, anger, and vast unhappiness. And I suspect that my mother knew that something was horribly awry with this new husband of hers. But after one "failed" marriage and divorce, there was no way she was going to rock that boat, no matter what she or anyone else was going through.

***************************

That's enough for today. I've taken a walk and it was a miserable walk, hot and humid and hard. But all is well. It just poured a sudden storm and the temperature has dropped and Miss Trixie is looking spryer and indicated she wanted out of the coop but when I opened the door for her, she changed her mind when she saw all those roosters. Poor old thing. She never sings her little song any more and I don't have any other hens who sing the way she used to. It was so sweet. I still remember the three notes of it. A crooning little song. A sweetness in my day whenever I heard it. 

I'm going to finish Maggie's dress. The Century Link guy is supposed to come (for the second time) to see why our internet is so slow. I may pick some peas and shell them with the ones I picked last week. I may lay on the bed and read although I'd probably fall asleep and I really don't need to do that. 

I am content and I am grateful for all that I have. 

I will add one thing. 

A house we used to live in when the children were young had many windows in the back and if you stood outside, it was almost like looking into a doll house which has only three walls. You could see what was going on in almost every room. 

I loved that. I loved that we had uncurtained windows and I could stand outside and see all of the life going on in that house and it was all good. Homework and dishes being done and TV watching and maybe dancing or projects or whatever. 

Just the every day business of a family's life, some of it hard sometimes, some of it funny, all of it prosaic and normal. 

And there was nothing to hide.