It is Child Abuse Awareness Month.  I’m a big-mouthed advocate, telling everyone who will listen, my son’s story.  I’m pretty open about all we’ve been through, because I don’t want anyone else feeling as alone as I did going through this type of trauma.  But you know what I’m rather tight-lipped about?  My own abuse story.  I guess the time has come for me to knock that right off, eh?

It’s not easy to tell my story.  Shame really isn’t a component, I’m well aware that I’ve got no blame in this.  It’s just that my perp is a family member and if this gets out, gets passed around, I don’t know what the impact will be on the rest of the family.  You see, this family member is quite ‘iconic’, you could say.  I would go as far as saying that he has some real disciples in the family and it just may be that my spilling his story will get me cut out of the family, and not him, not that I want him cut out of the family.  I just don’t want to lie about it either.  My extended family is already pretty split apart and all I have left are my cousins, some of which are the aforementioned disciples.  So, the reality here is I could lose everything.  But I feel like a hypocrite not telling, after I push Vale all the time to speak.  So speak I shall.  My abuser was my father.

My home life was pretty interesting.  Our family put the ‘fun’ in dysfunctional.  My mother was married once before she married my dad, my adopted dad.  My biological father, I never knew.  My mother went on to marry two other men after my dad, because she is pretty darned screwed up.  I guess she’s come to the point in her life where she has some stability, but there’s a lot of water under that bridge and I just take it, and her, without much expectations.  My father, a man who already had an anger problem, became pretty messed up and very resentful after his separation and very long, very costly and very taxing divorce. He turned into a person I don’t think he ever intended on becoming.  He was under incredible pressure at work, he had no support from his church, who only condemned his divorce, and he lived far away from his family.  The strain ended up costing him his health for a while, and he was diagnosed with chronic fatigue.  Now I am not trying to give my dad an out, many parents have gone through horrible, bitter divorces and didn’t beat or sexually abuse their kids.  But my dad was, well… still is very acrimonious and he was afraid I would turn out like my mother.  So when the occasion came that I would do something that reminded him of her, he was determined he would beat it out of me.

There were a couple of tools my father liked to use in his discipline techniques, besides the belt.  The belt was simply a staple.  My father liked dominance, manipulation and his all time favorite was shame.  My father reasoned that when I did something wrong, I brought shame to the family, to the family name, and thus, he in turn would shame me.  Shame came in a lot of forms.  Sometimes it was juvenile middle-school stuff, like allowing my brother to humiliate me in the middle of the grocery store by talking about how gross it was that I had my period.  I was about 13 or 14, there were no women in the house and I would dread asking my father to buy me sanitary supplies, because they always came with a price.

He also liked bullying me by doing stupid little acts that clearly showed his dominance.  I recall one instance very clearly.  We sat at mealtimes around an oval table; my father on my left, my grandfather on my right and my brother across the table.  My father took it into his head to tap on my elbow incessantly through the entire meal.  It didn’t just last a day, or even a week.  It went on for weeks.  I wasn’t allow to move my chair.  I wasn’t allowed to change my position at the table.  I wasn’t allow to get away from him at all, I just had to take it.  After a while of taking it, I remember becoming so angry that I grabbed my fork and tried to stab his hand with it.  I missed and received a bloodied lip for my troubles.  But how I wish I would have stabbed him, even now, nearly 30 years later.

My father liked to make fun of me.  Apparently, when I was younger and into my teens I had either some sort of discharge or possibly didn’t wipe well after using the toilet and the evidence was in my underwear.  My father would make little nick names up for me relating to that, like “Star” and then sing “Tinkle, tinkle little star…” thinking he was so incredibly funny.  It wasn’t like a once or twice type of deal either, it was often, and for years, and in public.

Now my dad wasn’t the kind that would just come home from work and just start wailing on me.  I had always done something he felt was wrong (and yes, it was wrong) and thus he would have the right and obligation to discipline me.  But there was never any training that went along with the correction.  He would tell me, again ~ quite rationally, that he was angry.  He was going to hit me until he ceased being angry, and that usually depended on whatever the offense was, how like my mother it was and how cooperative I was about receiving it.  He would use his hand, his belt or whatever else was handy at the time.  One of the last beatings I received, I recall there being about 40 strikes with a 2×4 type piece of lumber.  I really had difficulty working the next day, as I was 19 years old at the time.  Being a parent and looking back on that, I am not as horrified by the actual assault but remembering the triumph I felt at the time, because I didn’t give in.  He caught me doing something I truly shouldn’t have been doing, and I lied about it.  He wanted me to confess and provide more evidence, but I held to my lie no matter how bad that last beating was.  I didn’t walk away from it feeling remorse over my lie, just satisfaction that he didn’t get what he wanted.  He made me hard.  The damage to the body was temporary, but I’m still paying for the damage to my soul.

One of the hardest parts of this abuse is both of my grandparents and a few of my aunts and uncles knew about it.  My uncle stepped in once, and nearly got into a physical altercation because of it.  My my grandparents would tell me, “If you’d only keep your mouth shut…”.  If only I had controlled myself, as the child, then my father wouldn’t have physically abused me.  Yeah, it was my fault.  I loved my grandparents so much.  My grandmother was the closest thing I ever had as a mother.  But she did like to cloak people’s sins, her one true failing.

And in the later years of my adolescence came sexual abuse.  I want to be clear here, my father never raped me nor forced me to perform sexual acts, per se.  Not that I want to protect my father, it’s just that I know that people read this blog who have suffered appalling sexual abuse and I don’t want to lump what I went through into that.  In fact, I didn’t even know what my dad did was sexual abuse until I was well into my adulthood and came to learn about the expanded definition.  Some things became really clear to me then, why I had some of the hang ups I currently have.  So I share my story to illustrate that while what I endured was so truncated compared to so many others, compared to Vale, the impact is still very strong and is still with me.  My dad was weird and a little twisted.  Things started simply when I was a little younger, I wasn’t allowed to wear underwear to bed.  I have no idea why.  He was really quite adamant about it, and I would get in quite a bit of trouble for it, if I did wear underwear.  Then my father would make sexual comments to me.  He claimed that I would stand in front of my mirror with my door open either sizing up or rubbing my breasts.  I don’t recall ever doing that and I can’t imagine I would ever do something like that with the door open.  But he would make fun of me for that and mimic what I allegedly did.  I once saw a woman openly breastfeeding her baby in public and I expressed how disgusted I was by it (I think I was in my early teens).  My dad went ballistic!  He told me I was a dirty minded pervert and called me so many names.  I wonder why he went so over board about that.  None of this is all that tragic I realize, just kinda weird.  But it got worse.

As I grew older, for some reason my father started walking from his bedroom to the shower naked.  I was horribly embarrassed to see my father naked.  He, again, would roll his eyes and told me what a dirty mind I had.  That I must be thinking perverse thoughts that it bothered me so.  I really thought there was something the matter with me.  I now know better, it’s dreadfully wrong to see your parents naked.  I would never do that to my kids.  Before I had children, I would sleep naked.  But once I had them, I was concerned that they would need me in the night and come into my room and I wouldn’t be covered.  Why would my dad do that?

Then my dad started a really disturbing ‘spanking’ routine.  Because I deserved to be shamed, when I was spanked I had to strip from the waist down, my pants and underwear around my ankles and bend over and clasp my ankles while my father spanked me.  This wasn’t when I was 8 or 9 (although that doesn’t make it any better).  This is when I was in my later teens, thus fully developed.  My father would then force me to stand in that position for as long as it suited him as he walked around looking at me and sometimes touching me, not exactly sexually, but on my hips.  He would ask me questions about whether I was sexually active or not.  Had I lost my virginity?  Had I lost my ‘maidenhead’ (a term I have never heard of)? and other questions of the like.

My father used to send me to different psychologists all throughout my childhood.  Apparently I had many psychological things wrong with me, although looking back on it, I can’t imagine why he would think that.  As I became a young adult, he insisted yet again that I go for me counseling.  I remember telling the psychologist about some of these things that were happening.  I remember the therapist asking me if any of it was happening to my brother, which it was not.  My brother is 8 years younger than I so he was still very much a child.  The therapist told me that if I had told him that any of this was happening to my brother he would be forced to call the police and my father would go to jail.  My memories are a little confused about this next bit, but I think he may have asked if I wanted to press charges.  But I didn’t, because who would take care of my brother?  I was only 18 or 19 at the time.  I did come home and tell my father about what the therapist had said, because the therapist supported that my father was to blame at least for part of the problem and not all me like my dad always said.  Did you guess that I was told that this therapist was no longer any good and I shouldn’t go back and see him?  You’d be right if you did.

I left home shortly after that, when I was about 20.  I felt very guilty leaving my brother with him, although he always treated my brother far better than he did me.  My brother was biologically his son and there was always a marked difference.  I think it was more that I reminded my dad too much of my mother than the fact that I was adopted.  I used to have these nightmares that I was trapped at my father’s house and I would try to call my husband to come get me.  I would use a payphone (remember those?) and either I would continuously drop the quarter, or misdial or I would forget the number.  I can’t tell you how many times I had that nightmare.  I think that even in a case of sexual abuse this mild, the impact has been very deep.  I’m, by nature, an angry person, prone to bitterness and an unforgiving spirit.  I behaved rather promiscuously once I hit 18 and got out on my own.  Being able to attract a male, even for just sex, made me feel powerful and in control.  I could sense what he wanted and it was a total head trip for me.  I recall once being told I was exquisite.  I was totally being used but I didn’t care, I clung to that compliment, as backhanded as it was.  I won’t say too much more about that because 1. there’s no point to more graphic detail, 2. it would horribly embarrass my children and 3. it would shame my husband.  But there is a darker part of me that lusts for violent anonymous encounters.  That’s a little creepy, so I keep that under lock and key.  I still, after 22 years of marriage, have a hard time undressing in front of my husband.  I have had sexually inappropriate dreams about my father, my oldest son even.  In the dreams I do horrible things and I am convinced that the dreams are real and I’m mortified at my own behavior.  I wake and cry and thank God that it was only a dream.  I have fought against depression and suicidal thoughts since I was 16.  I had some pretty bad social awkwardness that I didn’t get past (at least to a large degree ~ I still think I’m socially awkward) until I was in my late 30′s!

I’ve never confronted my father about this.  He would deny it, or worse excuse it away and blame it on me.  He would tell me I remember things wrong and that again, I was in error.  Nothing would change, so what is the point?  My father is not a happy man now.  He is a big conspiracy theorist who is lost in all his… crazy.  He has to be on the mailing list of every subversive political and pre-apocalyptic group that’s out there.  He searches the skies for contrails.  He avoids soy because it will make him gay.  He scours the Bible for hidden messages that most people don’t know (did you know that Queen Esther was really evil, and the only reason she’s in the Bible is to show us how not to be? uhhhh, what?).  He almost never sees his grandchildren, and not because I keep him away…he’s just too busy with all of his I-don’t-know-what.  I speak with him on the phone on occasion, but he can’t even stay focused on what’s going on in our lives, he just has to get out what he’s heard about this political candidate or that latest health craze or some other Biblical fantasy he just discovered.  He exists in his on nutty little world, and it’s not much of a life.  But it is of his own making.

What my dad put me through in a very large sense was evil and it wreaked a lot of havoc.  But it also made me sensitive and compassionate to other kids in crisis and in a way, made me who I am today.  I think I am a better mother for Vale because of it.  I didn’t experience what he did, but because I what I lived through, knowing how devastating and life altering that it was, it enables me to empathize with Vale and support him better.  So I guess I turned it into a gift of sorts.  Isn’t that really the best revenge?