Personal Narrative

I’m going to hide this post behind a cut because I plan to talk frankly about my past abuse and the fall out thereof. I haven’t talked about this in a while, and I believe that talking is vital to the support of other people out there who might be struggling with the same. However I also don’t want this to just be a recovery blog, nor do I want to thrust any “Surprise Bad Feelings” on anyone.

Working in the vet field has it bonuses. Besides just plain old feeling like a grown up job at last it also is great for my personal pets, lets me feel as if I’m actively improving lives, I am constantly learning new things and seeing new things that a lot of other people never will. Plus it’s always, always a boost when a very sick pet that you weren’t sure would make it gets to go home.

It has a lot of bittersweet moments too. In high school I planned to go pre-vet. I talked to a ton of vet schools about what classes I should take and looking for volunteer opportunities, etc. I took four years of Latin in high school, tried (and failed) to load up on science classes (advanced placement ended up in my way, not my science skills) and in my personal life I pursued a crazy path of pet ownership that I now know to be hoarding. No one person can have all the animals, after all. Not at once.

High school was an extremely influential time for me, as much as it is for other people. Definitely not the best years of my life, but important years. For one I encountered teachers who encouraged me and pushed me (whether I liked it or not) and those who were just there for me. I was one of those annoying kids who seemed to like the teachers that pushed me a little more than the nice ones who let me get away with something.

In my home life things were utter chaos. Between my freshman and sophomore year I shed a significant number of my pets. Down to just a dozen or so guinea pigs, but I also spent my own money to join the America Cavy Breeders Association and took a real interest in show guinea pigs. Did you know that was a thing? A cousin and her I-won’t-admit-she’s-my-girlfriend moved in with us, which gave me some support with personal beliefs, support taking better care of myself, my personal space and property and someone to confront my father on low level abuse that had been going on for a while. All wasn’t perfect though, and that situation led to some extremely inappropriate situations (like the girlfriend telling me how much fun it would be to molest me, and holding my down and trying to force me to engage orally with a male cat.)

In my junior year I landed a whole new circle of friend, which was pretty great because I really really needed some people on my side. My dad was slipping into alcoholism, drinking a box of wine a night, and beginning to stop even trying to do the supporting a family thing. In my junior year I also was in two classes with a teacher I really enjoyed who, as it turns out is a current client at my clinic.

I have to admit at this point that part of why I feel so ridiculously attached to her was that she created a firm safe place for me in her classroom. Not only did she teach two classes that I really enjoyed and wanted to work at (English and Humanities) but her zero tolerance for bs attitude applied not just to people who sometimes made fun of me, but also the the entire system of testing and essay writing instead of learning school and the school administration too. Being in the advanced program put some pretty crazy stress on me because it was outright expected that we’d all go to college and become Great People ™ and nothing less was worthy.

Meanwhile I’m putting my alcoholic dad to bed at night when I find him passed out on the toilet and trying to get him to do basic things like actually go to work and actually get food in the house so I can eat.

In my junior year we were all also pulled aside to be career counselled. When I said I planned to go into the vet field (because I knew I wanted to write then too, I also knew that wasn’t a stable career path) the counselor told me there was no way I could do that, that was way, way too much school and I should pick something else. This was near the end of the year, and keep in mind I had already been working toward this goal since eighth grade by taking Latin classes and volunteering all my vacation time at a stable. An experienced authority told me I was wasting my time and my dad was sliding from “We’ll get you through whatever school no matter what, however we can” to “Why aren’t you taking care of me when I need you, you must not love me”.

This last week I had one of those dubious endemic to the vet field honors when the son of my beloved teacher, who was dog sitting for her while she was out of town, came in with one of her dogs that was clearly approaching the end of his life. He couldn’t stand and hadn’t been eating for several days. We couldn’t reach the owner (she will always be “My Teacher” in my head) for permission to euthanize. So I did all I felt I could, I leaned over on the table to semi-cuddle with the pup and just kept stroking him. The son and I talked very briefly. It was clear that not a lot of the kids who had gone through her classes agreed with my favoriting her. I’m sure a lot of the kids didn’t need that safe space to hide, where nonsense was not permitted, while their lives were beginning to fall apart.

Then suddenly the pup sat up and turned toward me, he tried to lick my hand, then his eyes twitched in his head and he passed right there against me.

I am very glad I could be there for him, to comfort him, when his owner was not. Especially because of who his owner was to me. But so damn many memories of high school are churning around because of all of this. Not just because of this. They are always here. I can’t escape them. I dream about going back to school. I dream about being stuck back in that house taking care of my dad because they’re hiding my from my family now. Even when I feel I’m moving past the chaos of that time in my life, it comes back and haunts me.

By my senior year things were in full avalanche mode. My circle of friends found more to like about my brother than me. Some of them moved in, some of them just crashed with us because my dad indulged them like normal parents didn’t and they enabled his slide. I was caught watching, cleaning up after and occasionally battling (or trying to lose myself in) a cycle of…inappropriateness? Abuse? It was traumatizing, but so low level, so insidious that it doesn’t really fit the outright abuse category.

Things happened like drinking parties, funded by my dad. These started involving people locking themselves in rooms for sex. And my dad joining in the drinking then outright hitting on my brother’s female friends, or giving me long lectures on how much better of a lover he could be to these GIRLS WHO WERE YOUNGER THAN ME than their boyfriends were. At one point I was asked if I would lend him my tv/vcr. It was dragged downstairs where everyone in the house, including my 14 year old sister, my brother, my dad and many others, where encouraged to watch a porn about a girl celebrating her 18 year old birthday by having sex with everyone in her family.

This Duggar thing in news has me all emotionally churning too. I’ve read blog after blog–I don’t know why–about the adults covering up the crimes and Christian culture of “forgiveness” and “forgetting”. Actually I do know why I can’t look away from these blogs. Because they validate some of my trauma.

I feel that I have come to terms, very long ago with the core abuse that happened to me. It was after I’d moved out, after I dropped out of college because I had zero support and needed to focus on surviving, that I read a list of signs of sexual abuse and realized I had every single one of them expect actually remembering the abuse. But that’s okay because blocking out memories and a overwhelming fear of a certain place are also on the list. Those other ones I had in spades. It was in the reactions I had to certain people, certain places. I realized I had a desperate need for a safe space and had been drawn for a long time to anyone who was “on my side”. I’d been unconsciously trying to build a Team Me for this revelation.

My nightmares about my grandma’s basement and the basement of our church from when I was a kid made so much more sense, both of which I’d always shown a fear of to parents and relatives too, because I remember them making excuses to send me to those places to try to help me conquer my fear. Or outright asking me why it was so scary. Lots of nights dreaming that shadowy eyes were watching me from those places, waiting to pounce on me and hurt me suddenly made so. Much. Sense. And I’m not talking “Hey that’s a creepy place” I’m talking paralyzed with fear in real life when in those places, dreaming that a killer was chasing me and waking up in tears unable to let Jason touch or hold me to comfort me.

The real kicker was the indicator “physical signs; such as soreness, bruising, a rash, etc. particularly in the genital areas”. And it all came crashing back. I had completely forgotten it. When I was young, before my mom divorced my dad, but it continued after it too, I would randomly get this weird inflammation in my vaginal area. It hurt. I was really sore, red, it hurt to pee, to wipe after…My mom was convinced I just wasn’t wiping right and would make me use witch hazel wipes to make sure I was cleaning that area right. But it would flare back up a few weeks or a few month later.

And again I was told it was my fault, I wasn’t “clean” and threatened with discipline despite this being a MAJOR sign of molestation. The guilt I felt. How I tried to hide it when it happened until I literally hurt so bad I couldn’t hide it.

Now it makes me so mad. If one of my kids had that issue the doctor is the first place I’d go. If the symptoms of sexual abuse clicked into place for anyone that way they did to me how would my life be different? Would any intervention, by my mom, any other relatives, even school teachers had helped at all?

Which brings me back to the Duggars, and the Christian purity/forgiveness/forgetting mess.

My mom was very religious. Very. She was the black sheep of the family with her fervor. She tried to grind into us the same fear of God and moral code that the Duggars go by. She divorced my dad when he cheated on her for a third time (and I have been told it was with a very much younger woman) and yet divorcing him was what she considered the biggest mistake of her life. She considered being married more important than her own well being and that of us kids. Maybe that’s not what she meant to do, but that’s how I’ve grown to see it.

She idealized the Christian wife stereotype and wished desperately for me to fill it. Her greatest wish for me was to be a missionary with my husband. Not a doctor, or president, or even happy. She wanted me to be what she hadn’t be able to be, a happily married off loyal wifey.

My stomach rolls. No, it actually does at the thought of the level of passiveness and non-personness she tried to force me into. Guilt me into. She loved me, and wanted what she thought was the best for me. I understand that. But that best was a pillow that would have smothered me to death. Her ability to completely ignore who I was for who she wanted me to be was what also led her to ignore my trauma.

This is where we come back to the Duggars, and their attempts to solve the Josh “problem” internally. By hiding it. Oh, plenty of people say that’s not what happened, and there is some small thing to be said of someone admitting their sins and asking forgiveness and, hopefully, moving on. It’s brave to admit your short comings and a lot of people can’t do it. But punishment for crime does not stop at admitting what you did was wrong and asking for forgiveness and then pretending everything is okay again.

This is what my family taught me. That somehow I caused my molestation. That I should forgive the people who damaged me, like a good girl, and go back to letting them in my life, pretending that nothing happened. I have been confronted by various family members about this too. And I find this idea as insidious and dangerous, to me and potentially other people, as the idea of the passive, compliant Christian woman.

Guess what, I cannot be that person. I have my own wants and dreams and goals. I have my own long list of things that make me happy, and that put me in a place to better support others. Being a simpering house frau is not one of those things. The ideal of a good Christian woman terrifies me because it requires going back into that headspace, where I am supposed to suffer. Where if my husband beats me or rapes my children it’s my fault for not being a good enough Christian. I absolutely, completely and with every shadow of my soul reject that and maintain that people need to be responsible for their actions. We must be allowed to stand up for our own mental and physical well being. Silencing us because it makes you uncomfortable, or it hurts, or you feel attacked is NOT RIGHT. You do not make the trauma go away if someone just stops talking about it. Instead yo just make them feel like their emotions are less important than yours.

I feel genuine fear for those girls that Josh Duggar sexual assaulted. The family has said that he was forgive by his victims. I can only remember what has happened to me, when my family encouraged me to forgive my dad for behavior they didn’t even want to hear about. Forgiveness, this forgiveness any way, is a way of forcing the victim to let their attacker have access to them again. Those poor girls had their trauma, their well being, hijacked into an emotional pit where they no longer had any right to their own pain and recovery. Instead it has become all about HIS pain and recovery. And the pressure put on them…on me to just forget that pain, forget the slow crumbling of your self For.The.Well.Being.Of.Your.Attacker. is so utterly mountainous that I cannot escape it.

I can face up to the face that I was broken. Damaged. That some man thought my body was there for his pleasure and took that, whatever it could have been, away from me. But what I constantly struggle with in my recovery is the attitude of the people who were supposed to help me, defend me, fuck, even just believe me, who instead of doing any of those things, shamed me into silence, taught me that I was dirty, and then continue to try to chip away at the wall I build for my safety and shove more guilt for “not forgiving” inside.

It’s not that I was molested any more, its that my family (and by this I mean the ones that were there through all of this, not the ones whom my dad cut off contact with after my mom’s death) overwhelmingly has told me that I am not deserving of love or protection because I must have done something so dirty, so terrible as to either deserve this as a punishment from God, or as a direct punishment from my attacker.

Yes, that is what you have taught me. I am now and will always be unworthy of love, because I am broken, I am dirty, I am wrong and I will continue to be punished and you will continue to be complacent because you will not question God, or because it makes you feel scared, or because you cannot face your own contributions, your own failings and you are completely willing to blame all those feelings on me because clearly I am the one making you feel bad. So I must be punished, and am being punished, which makes me unworthy.

There’s a pervasive trend out there to forgive and forget, especially those related to you by blood. I reject this. I am under zero obligation to put myself back in that cycle of blame. I am incredibly lucky to have escaped to the degree I have. But there are still people out there, like the kids Josh Duggar abused, who are stuck in this horrible cycle. It’s no wonder so many people break.

Part of me needs someone from my blood family, because I do still love them, and I do still desperately wish they do the right thing, to respond to this missive with an “I’m so sorry” or a “I never knew and I’m going to try to stop contributing to this right now.” I really, really want to believe it can happen.

But why would they start now?

Part of me would also very much like to line many of them up and choke them and slap them silly and scream, “Why didn’t you help me? Why didn’t you at least tell me it wasn’t my fault??” Why weren’t they on my side?

But I don’t ask anymore. I will never get the answers I need, so it’s better to just fight the trauma, the learned emotional responses instead.

Just in the writing of this blog I’ve cried for over half an hour and had an hour long conversation with Jason to help ground the emotional overload. I feel a little sick, but also like a wound has been lanced.

But I still wonder if I’ll ever reach a point where this doesn’t haunt me. A night where I don’t dream of eyes watching me in the dark of a basement, or of my dad kidnapping me and keeping me from my kids and family. Where I don’t look at certain people and want to cry or scream. When I can talk to certain people without breaking down afterward. Hell, when some story of people I’ve never met and will never know doesn’t bother me so much I have to info dump on whatever forum I can find to get it out. Will I ever be able to function without all this hanging over me?

Will I ever not feel like a failure because I’m not what I was raised to believe I was supposed to be?