Posted on by histrionicabutterfly

Stitches and Stains

I was born into a job. Pain, anger, lust, shame, guilt, fear, loneliness, hate. They would come for me and open me up and put things inside. And i kept them. People would give me things; things that they could no longer bear. Things that were too heavy, too old, too hot, too dirty, too ugly. Rotten things and evil things and secrets for my tiny little pockets. I kept them until they overflowed, little squares of filth and flesh pressed into my waiting palms that i sewed into my clothes until every hem burst open. I squirreled them away inside myself until my body bulged and undulated, fetid and fecund.

Pushing me into little rooms, pressing against me, pushing until i had no breath. Opening doors without knocking, breaking windows that i had nailed shut, screaming into my empty spaces, filling me like a bellows with their rancid breath. The smell of their panicky need staining my lips like my grandmother’s sample case of lipsticks, the gaudy orange-red made my teeth appear yellow, it bled outside the lines and gathered in the corners of my mouth. No amount of scrubbing could hide the evidence of my experimentation, just as i couldn’t brush the taste of their hatred out of my teeth, my gums, my tongue.

 

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The Long Walk Home

When you have been used for sexual gratification from before you could speak, it does things to you on a deeply reflexive, primal level. I didn’t even know acquiescence until my brain developed more and i learned that i didn’t like it, but i had to submit to avoid pain and punishment. I’ve been sexually victimised my entire life, although the frequency has lessened the older and more aware i’ve become. I wanna write about how it’s still happening and what i think and feel about it, and what i’m learning.

I didn’t know for most of my life that i didn’t like touch, and i’ve only been aware for a couple of years that i could say No. I haven’t said it yet – but at least i know that i can. For the first year i would still go in for the hug, and i was often the one to initiate. It’s a reflex. It’s what people do these days so i should do it. I might hurt someone’s feelings and i wouldn’t want to make anyone feel rejected. It would be awkward, and as much as awkward situations are a regular part of my life, i would prefer it wasn’t that way and i try to avoid them. I’m not the smooth, cool type, but i’ve always wished to be so.
Maybe one day i’ll be fine with touch, but for now, i just really enjoy not touching or being touched. I’m learning to use body language to communicate this in a non-threatening way, without even conveying fear. I’m finding that if i don’t take a step closer to people and i keep my arms at my sides and my palms towards myself that they will respond by not approaching for a physical greeting. One person who has read some of my blog posts even said she was consciously not touching me because she respects my boundaries. That was amazing and felt great. (If you ever get around to reading this, you know who you are, and thank you.)

What i’ve been focusing more on now is the sexual aspect of touch. When it’s okay and when it isn’t. Who can and who can’t. Choosing to be in a monogamous relationship has helped. One person can seek me out for sex and nobody else. No one else may approach me sexually, whether it’s physically or verbally.
This is very difficult for me to write about.

I understand that a person has value just because they’re a person, but it never occurred to me that the concept also applied to me. I’ve only recently begun to understand that, a) i’m intrinsically valuable and worthy, and b) i decide to whom i mete out my value, and what part of the treasure that is me i share or gift them with, and also when i do, meaning that i am not required to do so ever again if i don’t wish to.
But for the vast majority of my life i have not known this.
If someone wants something from me i just give it to them. My time, my effort, my friendship, and sometimes, my body. Not always my body, because thankfully, i have other people who live in my brain who, if they can make it to the face, can either get me the fuck away, or joke me out of it. I’ve never been able to just shut someone down, though. I’ve always had to be nice about it. I crack jokes, or i smile and say I’m flattered, but… Or i apologise and offer a gentle I can’t, the implication being that i would if i could…

All of this started a few months ago when i began walking for exercise.
I live on an acreage and our road doesn’t get much traffic, but we do get the occasional driver who’s lost, or bylaw officer, or farmer checking his cattle or crops. I began to notice that i couldn’t remember the make/model/license plate number of any of the vehicles once they’d passed out of my sight. Nor could i tell you who was in the vehicle or give a description – even if i’d spoken with them briefly. All the Datelines and various forensic programs and cold case murders i’d watched on telly had impacted me and i realised i would be easy pickings for anyone looking for a victim.

I started applying my mindfulness techniques to my walks. Looking around at things instead of just being lost in my thoughts. Using my phone to record license plates and other details about the vehicles i’d see. Who’s driving and is there anyone else with them? Calling my husband to talk to him if someone was pulled over for whatever reason and i had to pass them. Memorising the emergency number assigned to our acreage; knowing our land location and range road, and what township road we intersect. Awareness of my surroundings; body language that conveys that awareness and also let’s anyone know that Yes, i see you, and Yes, i’m taking note of you and your vehicle.

As i’ve improved my fitness level i’ve grown to really enjoy my walks, and sometimes i’ll take on more distance. Sometimes i’ll walk into town for an errand.
It happened the very first time i did it.

A friend had taken me into the city for a doctor’s appointment (i don’t drive), and when we came back, i asked her if she’d drop me at a shop in town where i had some business, instead of taking me home. I’d then walk home from there. After i assured her that i actually wanted to walk home, it didn’t take long for me to be finished and on my way. I was nearly on the highway when a man drove by in a truck and he slowed, Wow!ed and whistled at my appearance, and asked me to go to coffee with him.

I beamed a smile at him and said, No, thank you.

I fucking beamed a smile at him and said, No, thank you.

That’s when i first started realising what i was doing. The reflex – like breathing. No thought involved at all, totally automatic.
But i’d already learned from my walks on my own road. The awareness kicked in and i stopped walking after he’d gone on a bit, and i made sure he was out of sight before i gave away that i was crossing the highway, lest he take note of the easier access a deserted road might allow him, and mark that that road likely led to where i live.

A few weeks later my husband dropped me off in town so that i might walk the dogs at the park for a treat. On the way home, i stopped at the local highway gas station for a cold drink. I came out not more than 2mins later and there were 2 men petting my dogs. They made with the dog compliments as they eyed my body up and down. They asked me to come out for a drink with them, and when i smilingly turned them down, offered to take my dogs home first. Again i declined, after which they tried to insist on at least taking all of us home. It’s so hot out today, you’re going to get heat stroke.
They had greasy smiles and i could smell the booze on them, and then i switched. Hard and fast. 
Whoever took over was a GTFO type. Crossed us over to the service road that goes past the road home. I found myself back in the face before i’d even made the turn, so she must have thought we were safe.
But i clocked them in their truck, driving down the highway.
First in one direction, and then in the other.
I pretended to talk on the phone and made like i was waiting for someone.
I didn’t start walking again until i hadn’t seen them for 10mins or so.

After all the work i’ve done in order to deal with my past, i’ve learned some things that help me deal, and being targeted since then has confirmed some of it.
It’s not about me, personally. It has nothing whatever to do with how attractive i am or what i’m wearing or what i’m doing.
Predators are gonna hunt.
I’m potential prey.
That’s it. That’s all. That’s everything.

Then there was this morning’s walk.
As i set off, i can see right away that there’s a truck on the road, driving extremely slowly, but away from me. I mentally tick off the possibilities: bylaw officer, farmer, sight-seer, someone walking their dog the disabled or lazy way, guy getting a blowjob, etc. The closer i get, i’m crossing more off the list.
Maybe i recognise the truck but i can’t be sure. One male. The passenger side is so close to the shoulder i’d have to walk in the ditch to get around, and if i cross on the driver’s side he could easily grab me.
I pull out my phone to record his license plate and make/model/colour of the truck.
I make the pass on the barest shoulder of the passenger side, and he rolls down the window.
He’s not looking at me and i can feel an aura alerting me that i’m getting ready to switch, but when i look at him, i think i know who he is, so i relax. A little.

He says he’s just checking the fences, he’s not a robber.
I say I’m walking my dogs alone, and a girl can’t be too careful.
He seems a little offended.
I’m considering this as i pass, and i almost went back to apologise.

I almost fucking went back to apologise.

And i referred to myself as a girl. Ugh.
There was some progress, though. I wasn’t smiling, and i didn’t say sorry.
Not perfect, but it is progress, and i’ll take it, thanks.
It’s okay because i was raised to be that way. It’s going to take time, advertence, and energetic application, but i will get there. Ownership of my body. My body serves me and my needs and desires, and no one else’s unless i decide i want to share.

I look back on all the sexual harm that was done to me, and i will never, ever get over it. I was fully indoctrinated, brainwashed, made, schooled, expected, ordered, demanded, to always be available for whatever my mother wished. I did what she told me to do, went wherever with whomever; didn’t ask questions, and easily intuited that i wasn’t to speak of the evenings and weekends i went to a “babysitter”. It is the contention of the Peanut Gallery that i first split in infancy, but i’ll never know for certain. It doesn’t matter, but i am certain that i was fractured and fracturing by 4yrs old, which is the first time i clearly remember leaving my body and hearing someone else speak from inside my face.

The thing that i’m currently most angry about with respect to the sexual abuse is that they made me complicit in their actions. Not just while they were actively abusing me, but after they had stopped. They taught me to allow myself to be used, abused, and victimised, by any and all who would come for me. Because of them i craved and was flattered by any sexual attention from anyone who’d show it to me, regardless of whether or not i wanted them, or would at least accept them, into my bed. And when i finally could smell the stink of what they’d done all over me, it caused me to act out in dangerous ways, in an immature and terrified attempt to scrub it off of me. A pretense of triumph and control.

Because of them, predators may always get at least a whiff of prey about me.
I will never forgive a single one of them for that, and i’m glad for every death that’s already come, and look forward to the last breath of those who yet have it.

Fuck Them All,
~H~

 

Posted on by histrionicabutterfly

Bother

Woke up the same damn way as i have for over 2 weeks now. Once the hubs and our Kiddo were gone, i was sorely tempted to go back to bed, so tempted in fact, that i brought out my body pillow to cuddle with on the couch, by way of compromise.

If we don’t go back to bed, i’ll let you cuddle with the big pillow, okay?

I’m always “we”, but i only use the pronoun when other parts of me are directly involved in what’s happening, which they were this morning. Some were active in my dreams last night, and sometimes that will result in some more conscious interaction continuing on once i’ve woken up.

Dreams are a very potent aspect of how my brain works, and always have been.
My dreams have been an outlet and a safe place and an alarm bell and a movie based on real life events, and even my very own episodes of This Is Your Life, masquerading as dreams. So, while i remember my dreams with varying levels of recall, from vividly to barely, if i wake to someone close-talking* me, there’s a fairly good chance that i’ve been dreaming rather intensely.

So i wake up and someone is close-talking me, and their commentary is negative and constant. Luckily nobody talks much around here in the mornings, so i don’t have to filter them out in order to hear anyone else. I let her drone on because she’ll fade soon enough if i do, but by the time my guys have gone to work and school for the day, i’m already running low on energy and feeling heavy with depression. I sit in my recliner, put the body pillow on the arm, place my wee fluffbutt on the pillow so he’s giving me intravenous puppy shnuggles, place my laptop in position and begin to write.

My dreams are incredibly thematic and rich with meaning, and have been since i can remember. My earliest were of being chased through a neighbourhood that looked very like the epitome of middle class suburban life in the 70s – by a nameless, faceless terror that was always right behind me. I’d run into a house that looked like my grandparents’ looking for help, but no one was ever there. No matter how hard i tried to stop myself from going down into the basement i’d inevitably end up there, facing away from the stairs, on my knees, and i’d place my face in my hands  in submission to the thing that was about to touch me from behind.

In my early 20s i began to dream about being in a group of popular young people, and we’d hang around town and go shopping and eat out, but i would always get separated from them somehow, and spend the rest of the dream trying to find them – feeling so alone and hopeless. In my late 20s it morphed a bit into me winning my place in the group by impressing them with either my singing, or my secret superhero powers, but i still managed to lose them along the way, and even mutant abilities couldn’t find them again. I would be left with this same feeling that i’ll invariably end up alone, with nothing and no one. The young girl inside me that feels that way all the time is the one that was talking to me when i woke up this morning.
She’s all Eeyore, all the time.
I cannot muster up Tigger for her today. I don’t feel up to Christopher Robin, either.
I try to Pooh for her. Heh.

I almost went back to bed. I thought of lying about it, too.
I thought about it. And then i thought about how it would make it easier to lie again.
Of course i can’t do that. Not to myself, and not to anyone who reads this.
So i’m sitting here and tapping away on this blasted keyboard, not about anything in particular, and not with any other purpose in mind save not going back to bed. It’s funny, i don’t do that often anymore, but once i’d made the commitment not to do it for a month, i supermega want to. Like, a LOT. Fortunately, i know myself well enough at this point in my life that i knew it was a distinct possibility, if not practically a sure thing.

Dear Eeyore-Girl,

“People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.”
You dreamed your dream, now go to sleep. We’ll still be together when you wake up.
I promise.

Love,
~Pooh-ish~

*Have you seen the Seinfeld episode about the close-talker? Well, my bits n’ pieces can do that, too. It’s when they aren’t fully in the face**, but i can hear and feel them one or more of them as if they’re standing directly behind me.

**In the face means that i’m either not there at all and someone else is working the crowd***, or i am there, but i’m the close-talker.

***Whoever the world outside is currently interacting with, is “working the crowd”.

Posted on by histrionicabutterfly

Sledgehammer, Part One

WARNING: This piece is about my relationship with my mother, and includes references to both physical and non-physical forms of sexual abuse, including rape.

“Let me tell you about my mother.”
~Leon

I don’t really know what happened to my mother. She told so many stories that cannot now be verified, and i’ve caught so many of her lies, that i cannot paint her picture with much detail.

Abstract expressionism it is, then.

My mother was born out of wedlock in 1945, to an young Canadian nurse and a British RAF officer.* She was adopted out to a first generation Canadian couple in southern Alberta. They’d lost their first child, a son, within weeks of his birth, to measles, and my grandmother was unable to bear more children. They adopted her first, and then later, a boy. This was during a time when many people believed that adopted children had “bad blood”, because they’d been born to loose, sinful women.

They were raised in a place where nearly everyone, including their relatives practised a particular faith, a faith my mother’s family decidedly did not. The bullying in school was constant, and terrible. The teachers were all of the same faith, and the bullies were never reprimanded. Her brother though, as a boy and a baseball star, avoided most of the school bullying, and all of the suspicions of adopted children being tainted at home. He had replaced the son my grandparents had lost. Mother was an unfortunately necessary step to getting their precious boy – girls were less desirable than boys, but a girl could get your foot in the door, you see.

She must have at least sensed from the very beginning that she wasn’t wanted. When she was raped by one of my grandfather’s ranch hands, their response must have settled the matter. The man had threatened to kill her brother if she told, but she was hemorrhaging so badly it could not be hidden. She wasn’t taken to a hospital, a local doctor came to the ranch to see to her privately. The man wasn’t accused, arrested, charged, or punished, he was merely fired. She was 5yrs old.*

She got pregnant at 15, and was sent to a home for unwed mothers in the US where she was forced to give her baby up for adoption.* Following the surrender, she attended school away from home, to help keep her secret shame safe from the rest of the town and area. The girls at her school being as purely vicious as they were, i don’t imagine she minded at all.

At 22yrs old, she got pregnant again.
This is the point in her life where i enter, and now there are too many asterisks to even bother using them.

~~~~~~~~~~

-she got pregnant by a married man,
-she was raped by a married man,
-she got pregnant by a man of another faith whose parents would have disowned him,
-she got pregnant by a man who left to fight in Vietnam and was captured in country…

She went again to the States to the same home for unwed mothers, but this time she rebelled. She left and got a job and her own apartment, where 8mos into her pregnancy she was the victim of a break and enter and a violent rape.

~~~~~~~~~~

She fled the US for home, only to go into labour on her way, requiring her to make an unscheduled stop in Vancouver, where i born.

I won’t be going into what happened the first 7 or 8yrs of my life. It’s a story that doesn’t need to be told again. What i mean is, i can tell you a bit about my mom by way of explaining the terrible fear i always carry of becoming like her, without putting myself through the unnecessary pain of recounting the most painful years of my life. The years that fractured my brain into the little pieces that i am now trying so hard to manage and love and maybe even heal…

What i will say about those years is this: Afterwards, i believe that she suffered a crisis of conscience over what she’d done, and she didn’t manage the crisis well. I think she fell into a deep depression. I think she tried to fix what she’d done by having other children and parenting them better than she had me. And when she wasn’t able to (she was better to them in some ways and worse in others), she set upon years of self hatred and vain attempts to excuse her behaviour. Finally, it is my opinion that she eventually gave up and gave in to what she had become, and spent her final years reflecting more and more on the outside, what she was on the inside. Filthy. Bloated. Foul.

It is her final years that have most imprinted upon me this fear i have inside.
I watched her descent into utter depravity. As parts of me can move forward or recede as required, as parts of me can emotionlessly record events i have watched her slow free fall into a bottomless pit of what i can only describe as uncleanness.

I watched the house get dirtier and dirtier, until there were used dishes covered in molding food all over the house, including the floors, and yes, even the bathtub, where they were also covered with stinking scummy water, like the ones that filled every sink.

I watched my siblings get dirtier and dirtier, until their eyes, which looked unnaturally large against the pulled masks of their starving faces, seemed to fairly glow. I watched them climb through piles of unwashed laundry that were stacked higher than they themselves stood, looking to find the least filthy item to wear to school.

And i watched my mother. I watched her take food out of her children’s mouths to fill her own gargantuan appetite. I watched her swell from an incredibly beautiful woman who would be called “thick” today, to a mass of heavy, unwashed flesh that topped out somewhere over 600lbs. I watched her stop caring about what she wore, until she simply wore nothing at all. Moving from room to room completely naked. When someone came to the door i had to beg her to drape a blanket over herself. And i was privy to her abandonment of all attempts at personal hygiene, until her stench would fill the room so pungently, that i would involuntarily heave.

I tried to help stem the tide of garbage and odour and clutter and spoiled food, but i was living a life almost completely dissociated from what was going on around me. My room was a sty, too. I would be beaten for it regularly, and it would be clean for a while, but it wasn’t long before it looked much as it had at my last beating. My environment was a reflection of what was going on inside me, just as it was with my mother. I was also terrified of cleaning the house. If i did so under her watchful eye, i’d get criticised, screamed at, and beaten. If i tried to get a bunch of cleaning done when she wasn’t around, i almost never did it right, and she’d beat me when she got home. She even told me once, after my best friend and i had come home for a visit to an empty home full of trash that one had to actually wade through in places, and spent over a day cleaning, that she would have preferred i’d done nothing.

(To this day i hate cleaning the house when other people are around, it makes me terribly anxious and i avoid it as much as possible.)

After i left home, nothing really changed except that my portion of abuse was redistributed among my siblings. I know she beat them until the day she was in the car accident that would eventually kill her. I know that some religious folks who’d been trying to help her went to her home while she was in hospital, to clean it up in anticipation of her return and were pretty grossed out by what they found. I know that i visited her in hospital and begged her forgiveness for all the trouble i’d been to her and she magnanimously forgave me. I know that she seemed to be recovering, but because of her massive girth and doctors’ relative inexperience with the super morbidly obese back then, they missed a small tear in her cecum, which leaked slowly into her guts for nearly 6wks following the accident, causing her to die from multiple organ failure due to sepsis.

And i know it was years before i even began to unravel, examine, and otherwise dissect the relationship i’d had with my mother. I’ve spent years and tears and not a little money in an attempt to learn the extent of the damage she wrought in my life, and to find ways to counteract it all. For a very long time all i could do was stem the flow. I was like her, thinking i was getting better and then i’d find another source of infection that was keeping me sick. And like in our literal lives, sometimes the antibiotic wouldn’t work, or it would stop working, and i’d have to search for something else – something stronger, or something else altogether.

END PART ONE

*Maybe. I cannot verify this as fact, but i have included it because, after years of study and contemplation, i accept that it is probably true.