All Day Rapes

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. Some posts specifically relate instances of sexual abuse conducted by my Mother. I am talking about it because I am tired of being silent about it. People need to know that things like this happen. Today I'm relating events that happened following my fourth birthday in 1953. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

Of course my Mother was furious that I couldn't control my bodily functions. There was a long screaming interrogation which ended with me telling her what I understood of it, which was just that Alex (my Mother's name for Alaka'i) had gone away and left me. She asked, "Why did he go away?" and I said, "Because you tried to kill him."

That made her more angry. She started to say that it wasn't Alex she wanted dead, it was me. It was the first time I remember her making the distinction. As time went on she would be more clear about. She still believed that I had a dual personality, but she also believed that if she were clever about it she could kill one of the personalities while leaving the other one alive.

The idea that she could do that was based on a naive interpretation of the psychiatrists' assertion that the right and left sides of the brain had slightly different functions. This was years before Psychology Today and before popular articles asking "Are You Right Brained, Or Are You Left Brained" trotted out split-brain studies as evidence that the two halves could operate independently, and before Roger Sperry convinced us that the hemispheres specialized more than a little. My Mother was quite capable of coming up with the notion of independently functioning hemispheres simply on the basis of being told that the different sides specialize differently, a fact which was related to her by the doctors who treated me on my 1st birthday.

[Below: A video describing later split-brain studies. My Mother thought my hemispheres operated separately without the need for any severing of brain connections.]



My Mother thought, all she had to do was figure out which hemisphere Alex lived in, and kill the other one.

My Mother preferred Alex to Kona because Alex was aggressive. Kona was originally created to be passive, precisely because aggressive Alex/Alaka'i could not avoid sparking my Mother's temper by lashing back against her cruel behavior. But my Mother preferred Alex to Kona, even though Kona didn't cause her to lose her temper as much, because she believed that Alex would be more likely to be able to make money for her.

The fact that as soon as Alex was "gone" I had to be toilet trained all over again confirmed her theory that aggressive Alex was the competent side of me and that Kona would have to be taken care of forever.

Finally she demanded to know what happened to the Hawaiian. I told her what Alex told me, it was lost when she held the pillow to my face.

She hit the roof. Instead of accepting her own responsibility for having caused the loss, she shrieked at me for having the gall to try to make her feel guilty. She said the Hawaiian wasn't lost by what she did, but because the wrong personality had died. It was my fault, for not having died as Kona instead of as Alex. She yelled at me as if I were the coffee table and I had maliciously stubbed her toe.

There was an afternoon of rapes and beatings. The beatings were to the buttocks so the black and blue marks wouldn't show when my Father got home. By then she had got the cloth diapers out of storage and put me in them.

My Mother told my Father none of what I told her. She said my loss of function was a delayed symptom of the concussion he gave him. Dad's reaction was first to deny that he had anything to do with it and to say there had to be something wrong with "her" son, and then to get drunk and pass out in the living room.

In the immediate weeks that followed my Mother came up with a new way to sexually abuse me. Up to this time the rapes were strictly either physical punishments or meant to aid her in her masturbations. Now she began to take a more deliberately psychological approach looking for ways to torture me with extreme humiliation and intimidation.

When she found that I couldn't tell her soon enough that a bowel movement was about to happen, she came up with the idea that she could check for herself when one was on it's way. She had me stand naked from the waist down on a high chair next to the dining room table. She put a jar of vaseline and rubber gloves on a shelf behind me. I had to remain standing that way all day long, so that I would be available for a rectal exam every half hour.

If the exam turned up fecal matter I'd be hauled to the training toilet and sit there until the bowel movement was done. If the exam turned up nothing she'd "reward" me for being clean with a rape lasting 5 minutes or so. Just long enough to induce wide-eyed fear and distress. Then she'd warn me not to get down while she went back to housework or reading or whatever she'd been doing, until the next exam.

The exams would start before noon and last until just before my Father was due to come home from the base around 5 PM. The dining room had a big picture window that looked out at the driveway. I remember how one day my Mother lost track of time and was raping me as my Father drove up. She got me back in diapers just in time as he walked in.