My Hideousness

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened when I was 6, 1955-56. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

My Mother's nocturnal visits continued. I'd estimate there were around four or five of those a month. Sometimes, as Alex, I would get up after one of the nocturnal rapes and go to sneak out of the house, to find my Father passed out on the living room floor. I'd go back to my bedroom for fear of encountering him when I returned.

One day they did catch me trying to sneak back in at dawn. I expected trouble, but I tried the obvious lie, telling them I'd only let myself out an hour earlier. Rather than the truth, that I'd been out since 1 AM. I was surprised when they bought it. They were prepared to believe that they hadn't noticed my leaving. They knew they weren't all that observant. I learned I could exploit their knowledge of their own weaknesses.

One form of inappropriate contact that increased was the way my Mother rewarded me. Other kids got cookies or candy for rewards, and grew up with eating disorders. I got my bottom petted and grew up sexually confused.

One time there was a drunken party in the Sun Porch, with twenty or more officers and their wives packed in, and it was my bedtime. I was able to undress myself by then and get into pajamas by myself. I came in to see my Mother in my pajamas and told her I was ready to be tucked in. She said she was too drunk to get up and go to my bedroom, and then she turned me around and pulled my pajama bottoms down in front of everyone at the party and pet me. Everyone in front of me dropped jaws seeing this, and I was too young and clueless to know why. I thought they were disgusted by my body. I had no idea that they were shocked by my Mother's behavior. I went to bed thinking I was hideously deformed. No one said anything to my Mother about it, that I could hear.

Another ongoing inappropriate practice was the genital fondling. My Mother continued to insist that I needed my genitals fondled on a regular basis, about once every three days, in order to keep me healthy. How she arrived at three days I don't know, but all the evidence points to that as being how often she herself liked to have sex, so she was probably projecting her desires on to me.

The fondling didn't bother me at the time, and I in fact liked it. She even got me to remind her whenever she missed a session. One time I had just gotten up and was still in my pajamas when I remembered it had been four days since the last fondling. I told her as she was vacuuming the Sun Porch, and she cheerfully stopped and took care of my "need."

If the object really was to eliminate my need for sex she did it all wrong. She always stopped a half minute or so after I began to show signs of arousal, saying that was enough. The effect wasn't to produce any relief but to tease me and make me think about sex constantly.

That's in fact what I did. I spent hours every day day dreaming about rolling around naked with girls my own age. My plan to kiss all of the girls in first grade was supposed to be stage one of a prolonged systematic plan to get a room full of girls to take all their clothes off, form a pile, and let me dive in. A lot of this day dreaming was probably driven by my desire to distance my sexual desires from my Mother, by diverting them elsewhere.

One other form of sexual molestation that I did NOT enjoy started up that year.

My Mother claimed to have a bad headache one afternoon. School was out that day but my Father was at work. The weather was bad so I had to be indoors. She told me she would reward me if I played quietly by myself for three hours. At the end of three hours she had me go with her to her bedroom for a "special" reward. The reward started out the normal reward. She took my pants down and petted my rear. Then she gave me enemas. Not one but many, so many that I lost count.

At first they would just be uncomfortable and embarrassing. But after the fourth or fifth enema I'd have involuntary physical/sexual responses that I couldn't interpret at that age, that were terrifying to me. As they continued they became more extreme and I became delirious and lost control of my bladder, at which point my Mother screamed and beat me, as if it were MY fault.

It was just the first time she resorted to multiple enemas. She used it later sometimes to get herself off on my responses and my distress, other times simply as a torture technique, as she began to at least acknowledge that I hated it.

I'm sure most people would understand how the enema sessions could have been traumatic for me and therefore fueled my later symptoms of PTSD. Actually though, the inappropriate touching that DIDN'T cause severe trauma at the time has been harder to deal with over the years.

Most public discussion of PTSD misses the key point that trauma can be delayed as well as the reactions to it. It's possible for an event to be meaningless to the child to be meaningful and disturbing to the adult who remembers it, and that later disturbance can result in the stress disorder.

Even though I believed it was totally wrong for a mother to fondle her son's genitals when I was 20, It wasn't until I was 35 that it suddenly occurred to me, while I was talking about it to a therapist, that it was wrong when my Mother did it to me, too. Before that, it was just a general rule that I'd never applied to her. I hadn't repressed any memories of it, I had just walled off the part my mind that knew it was a betrayal, because I couldn't face that conscious awareness of that much betrayal.

Whereas I had by then been well used to facing the betrayals represented by the enemas. That was old by then.