Some scenes from my childhood that I am afraid to share on my public blog but have to get out. I feel like a loser because I can’t ‘out’ these things out of fear of harming my mother. However, I also wonder if I’m just fucking myself over by some confessional urge…in any case, I will start by putting them here…
I am getting myself up and out to school, starting age 6. Sometimes I also try to get my parents up to go to work.
At 10 I am left with a babysitter who almost kills me, and I respond to this by going to school and getting straight As. I never mention anything about it and no one understands why when David saves me. I end up feeling guilty for not having gotten myself out of this situation.
I am sitting at a booth in a restaurant with a man behind me groping me and bothering me. I am about age 11 or 12. I cannot move. My mother is watching this and laughing. She is drunk, stoned or both.
There are more and more men coming home with my mother when I visit from boarding school. I finally freak out one night and she falls on the floor, crying and saying what a horrible mother she is. When the man of that night says he will leave, she turns from me and begs him to stay.
There is the slideshow my father shows when I visit him in California aged 13. It starts off with leaves in trees and ends up with naked photos of my step-mother. I sit paralyzed. She finally tells him to switch off the photos. He seems to not understand why.
I am naked in a bath with my first step-father. He has an erection, I don't know what it is but I can see it. Is my mother there? She has no memory of this. It goes blank after that.
OK, so...writing this makes me feel sick. I feel I am not supposed to tell anyone any of this, even now. I want to rush and explain a lot of this away, tell you my mother was an alcoholic at the time and is now completely different (which is in fact true), that she had me young (18) and has her own history of trauma (also true), that she is a good person not a monster (also true). But first, I had to take the risk and tell you this. I think when I press post today I may be sick...well on the private blog not so much but on the public one I would...
Thanks for sharing. That's very brave. And important I feel. I would like to see a society where we are much more open about our experiences. No need for shame and guilt and sick. Hopefully one day we will be more embracing and loving of tragedies and traumas. I am curious about your relationship to your mother, who has changed. There is grace.
ReplyDeleteyes my mother and I have a good relationship now, especially as she is sober. My fear in writing about this stuff publicly is in hurting her by making her seem like a monster, which she was/is not - just a drunk. I was one, too, later, but without children. So, that's the problem. I do have my own shame about these events but the ethics of harm are what is involved here too. Any thoughts?
ReplyDeleteIn my eyes there are no excuses when a child is abused. Drunk or mentally ill, 99% of the time they could have gotten the child out of harm's way. They chose not to. It was a choice. Period.
ReplyDeleteThey can be a sorry as they want to be, but it doesn't change a damn thing.
I have a hard time talking about what happened to me too and I have NO relationship with my abusers (parents) anymore. It's shame that keeps it in, when it should be their shame.
I understand not wanting to hurt people, but I would hope that she would want to know what she's done (or let happen), esp if she is in "recovery" - either that or this "recovery" they speak of in AA is pure crap.
Hey there, yes I hear you n...and she does know, I have told her all of these things - many years ago and she was horrified as much of it happened when she was in blackout but stood there and accepted it. My ethical dilemma is not in telling her personally or even in putting it out in this forum anonymously, but about putting it out on my public blog or in my writing. I think it will eventually make it into a book but a public blog seems quite, well, public...anyway, just to clarify.
ReplyDeleteAnd no AA recovery is not complete crap. There are some people in AA who are full of it but no more or less than the average percentage of people. I'd be dead without AA, so obviously I'm biased, but no one I know who stays sober for a long time doesn't face up to their past fully.