Thursday, April 23, 2009

My Story, Part II.

My mother and C. went on a honeymoon and although I don't remember, I feel certain that my brother and I were once again taken care of by my grandparents. Mother and C. drove across the country and I believe they were gone for a couple of weeks.

I was either just about ten or actually ten. I cannot, for the life of me, remember the date of their anniversary. Not surprising, really.

But I know I'd finished the fourth grade and they got married in the summer (I think) and my birthday is in July, so I was, for all intents and purposes, ten years old. My brother was seven. I was still a fat little worried girl, my period was several years away from arriving, but I already knew what sex was. At least the basics. Growing up in Roseland, I was exposed to all sorts of kids but most of them were from what we would kindly call underprivileged. There was a boy in my grade who seemed to come from the worst of the worst of the local families and I'm certain that he and his siblings were exposed not only to violence in their home, but also a lot of fairly overt sexual behavior and he took great delight in sharing what he knew with the rest of us. He even brought in condoms one day and showed them around to all of us. He got sent to the principal's office for that one where he received a paddling from the principal which was the worst punishment the school had to offer. The principal was a former coach and could wield that carved wooden board with more authority than any of the women teachers. And did. These days those children would have been taking into the care of DCF but in those days, they were merely beaten by authority figures. Thank god those days are gone.

Anyway, so I knew what sex was and I knew that people on their honeymoons had it. And I also knew that I had feelings in my body which were somehow related to sex although the idea of ever actually having sex seemed vastly impossible. But I think that children are far more capable of sexual awareness than adults give them credit for.
Most adults.
Sexual preditors know this and it's one more tool in their toolbox.

It's natural for children to have sexual feelings. And I say "sexual" for lack of a better word. The response of the human body to touch and thoughts is natural and is present from birth. Anyone who's ever had a little boy is quite aware of this. We're human. We respond.

And when Mother and C. came back from their honeymoon, my brother and I did what we always did on Sunday mornings which was to pile into bed with our mother for a few minutes before we all got up and got ready for church. C. was surprised, Mother thought it was funny and my brother and I simply were delighted that there were two adults in the bed to cuddle with. I believe it was quite soon after the honeymoon that on these mornings, Mother would get up to go fix breakfast and leave my brother and me in the bed with C. (and this is so hard to write about) and before long, C. would center his attentions on me. It was all so subtle and it was all touching. He touched me. At least that's all I remember. I've had events in my life which triggered such severe reactions that I'm not sure I remember everything, but touching is what I remember. On the physical level, at least.

That's it.
And I could, quite naturally, feel a response.
I knew it was wrong. It FELT very wrong. But I loved this man. He was my new daddy. My brother and I called him Daddy. He had made our family whole. And I craved the attention he gave me in such profound ways that I allowed him (how could I have not?) to touch me like this.
I knew somehow that this was a BIG SECRET. Not to tell. How do predators get this idea across to children without words? Sometimes they use words. Most times, I think, they don't have to. They prey on children who have had to keep secrets already. Who are good at keeping secrets. Secrets about violent fathers, about alcoholism. About mothers who lock themselves in their rooms and weep. Secrets and secrets and secrets and here's just one more.

I knew I couldn't tell my mother. It had always been my job to protect HER. She loved this man. He made her happy. Although...it seemed to me that she wasn't as happy even a few weeks after the honeymoon as she had been. C. began to change somewhat. He grew angry with my brother and me for little things that before the marriage, he wouldn't have said a word about. I forgot and opened the freezer during a power outage and he yelled at me. He began to berate my brother and me for not eating everything on our plates, even things we hated. He made me eat cabbage once, which I despised, and I vomited.
He began to tease my mother in a way which seemed cruel. He used his big intelligence to make her feel small. He talked about psychology as if he knew all about it and therefore, he could bend people's will with his own.
Little things, but the feeling in the house changed dramatically. Again, there was tenseness and the light which had been replacing the darkness was chased away again.

My mother discovered she was pregnant. She was elated. I suppose C. was happy too. I was more than excited to think about a new baby in our house. And then, on an Easter Sunday as she sang in the choir, the baby inside of her moved violently and then stopped and she later found out he was dead. A cord accident. This was a tragedy of vast proportions. She had to be induced to go into labor to deliver a baby she knew was dead. Her depression returned. She went through her days in a fog of sadness and disbelief. My new daddy's touching of me continued. Wrongness piled up on top of wrongness and somehow, instead of our home being a happier place, a more normal place, it became a place of sickness and sorrow.

I don't remember much from this time. I went into the fifth grade and I can't remember a thing about being in class except for looking at the clock, waiting for the time for me to go down to the school cafeteria where I worked. In those days children were allowed to work in the school cafeteria. I have no idea why. But looking back, I realize that this work for me was a saving grace. The cafeteria lady was also the bus driver. We called her Aunt Flonny and she was a large, black-haired woman with a huge bosom and she was a Cherokee Indian, I believe. Her husband, also a Cherokee, was known as Uncle Henry and sometimes he drove the bus. My work in the cafeteria was to sweep the floor, to scrape the plates of what was left on them, to help the load the dishwasher. Sometimes I swept the bus, too. I loved that sweeping. I loved being alone and the way the broom found the sand under the seats and I herded it down the center aisle and out the back emergency exit. I loved swinging the chairs up on the cleaned tables after lunch was over so that the floor could be swept and mopped. I didn't love scraping plates but I learned that yuckiness can be washed off the hands quite easily with a little tincture of green soap and water. No one wore gloves in those days in food service. Sometimes Aunt Flonny let us help with kneading the dough she made into her delicious rolls.
In that kitchen, where Aunt Flonny ruled as a benevelent despot, I felt safe.
In the classroom, I did not. I had a sort of nemisis there. A girl who was as smart as I was, but who was the sister of the bad boy. They weren't twins. He'd been held back a year and so was in the same class. I'm sure she hated me because I had more than one dress, I had books of my own (our school was so poor there was no library and there were never enough books to read) and because my mother was a teacher.
It was in the fifth grade that I learned I could look at something and not see it. I could allow my focus to blur and although it would look as if I was staring at something, I was not. I was far away in my mind. This girl who hated me noticed me doing this and it was one more thing she teased me about. "Teasing" is such a mild word for what children do to each other.
It was cruelty and just another part of the unhappiness and stress of my world.

So that was my tenth year. The beginnings of the actual abuse. The loss of my unborn brother or sister. The depression of my mother. My fear I carried with me all the time. Fear of the children in my class. Fear of my mother's sorrrow. Fear of my stepfather whom I had begun to avoid being alone with. I remember we all went to the beach one day and I asked him where I could change into my bathing suit. He told me that since we were a family now, it would be okay to change in front of him.
I declined and changed in the car. I knew by now that he would get "a look" and that was when I had to defend myself in whatever way I could. Ineffectual ways, for the most part. I was a ten-year old girl. What did I have to defend myself with?

Not much. Not much at all.
I escaped into reading. I read Little Women over and over again and I lived in that family where Marmee looked after her children with constant loving concern, where the father, although distant, was kind and moral. Where little girls grew up and had families of their own. That book changed my life in that it gave me hope that there were other sorts of families. Families not like mine in the least.

I still loved my new daddy but by now, I think I loved the idea of him, not the actual man, living in our midst. That man I was starting to hate.

8 comments:

  1. Ms Moon, my heart is with you through this story.

    But you are definitely writing a story as well as your own. So I have to ask, have you read Bastard Out of Carolina, by Dorothy Allison?

    http://www.amazon.com/Bastard-out-Carolina-Plume-Essential/dp/0452287057/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240506749&sr=8-2

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  2. Ms. Jo- Of course I've read it. Genius.

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  3. It must have been very hard for you to accept good things in your life as you grew into a young adult after someone you wanted to love and be loved by so much betrayed your trust in this way.

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  4. Learner- Thank YOU. You tell many, many purposeful stories.

    Steph- Don't you know it. Still do. Part of the onion.

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  5. *hugs*

    I've been trying to think of anything to say but I have nothing. So I am here, as always.

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  6. How horrible for your mother to have to deliver the baby! I can only imagine the kind of sorrow that brought to her, to you.

    I can imagine that this story isn't the easiest to tell, but you are doing an amazing job with it. You are painting such a clear picture of that time.

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