[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened during the summer of 1958. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]
I've slowed down on these memoirs lately because I'm entering territory that's less comfortable.
After my Mother and I moved back into the garage my Grandmother's house on Beacon Hill, there was an immediate escalation in the rapes and other forms of sexual abuse. I don't want to describe it all. But one incident might stand for several.
My Grandmother was in poor health. I didn't know it at the time, but she had already had a number of minor strokes. Actually, someone might have told me that, but it wouldn't have meant anything to me, because I didn't know what a stroke was. If I thought about it, I probably envisioned a fainting spell that would be over in a minute and have no lasting effect, so long as you didn't concuss yourself when you fell.
Sometime that summer she went to the hospital. The impression I was given was it was nothing special and she'd be back in a week or so, but meanwhile my Mother and I could house-sit.
So I slept on the couch in the living room while my Mother slept in a room that served as a guest bedroom.
My Mother was still forcing herself on me during baths. Most of the times the rapes were done under the cover of cleaning me. I had to be cleaned inside, too, she said.
But having the house to ourselves seemed to make my Mother want to be more overt. Maybe it was knowing that the noises I made would be less likely heard outside.
She walked in on me during a bath wearing only a bathrobe and threw it open and ordered me to fondle her genitals. That was impossible for me. I just froze. So she lost her temper and raped me anally for a long time. It was clearly not cleaning this time; it was punishment for disobeying her.
The rape continued so long that I disassociated. I had a kind of out of body experience. I returned to awareness to discover that I was losing control of my bodily functions.
When I did, my Mother became angrier than ever and started spanking me hard and that only made it worse.
I screamed so hard I lost my breath and choked for air, and then screamed more.
Then she said, "You clean it up."
Showing posts with label rape. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rape. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Very Bad Night, Part II
[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened the night of my Mother's birthday in February, 1958. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]
The house was quiet for about half an hour. I was still upset from all the screaming, and was lying awake in bed with the lights off, when I heard my Mother coming up the stairs, and then she opened the door to my room and asked me if I was awake. I tried pretending I was asleep, but she knew I wasn't and told me to get up and come to her bedroom.
On the way I could look over the railing and see my Father passed out on the floor of the living room.
In the bedroom my Mother first had me help her out of the dress she fought so hard to get into hours earlier. Then she told me she wanted me to lie down with her to keep her company. For a few minutes we just lay there, hugging each other, nothing else happening. I was still in my pajamas, she was in her underwear.
Then she insisted that it would be better if we both took our clothes off. I didn't see how it would be better at all, but she insisted she needed to be closer, to help her get over what she'd been through that night. I still resisted; she got me to agree finally by offering to turn the lights out right away.
So we got naked, she turned out the lights, and for a few minutes we were in bed hugging in the dark. Then she began fondling me and telling me she wanted me.
That was totally absurd. I was 8 and a half. Sure, I had been over-sexed following the first major head injury, but that effect had run its course at least three years before. Not to mention that I didn't know what intercourse was.
When she realized that I wasn't going to be physically able to have intercourse with her she acted as though it were a tragedy for me. her attitude was "You poor thing, I'll have to do something for you." It didn't make any sense to me. Just seconds before she was the one with the sexual need. Now I was supposed to be in need. It was so confusing I didn't know what to say.
She got out of bed, grabbed a swirled tapered candle off her dresser, and said, "I'll take care of you in the bathroom."
In the bathroom she pushed me down on my hands and knees and raped me with the candle.
It hurt and I begged her to stop. She laughed and kept at it. When I continued to cry and beg, she eventually became angry. "I know it doesn't hurt. Stop being a crybaby"
Finally she let me go and I ran to my bedroom and the imagined security of my own bed. She let me lie there in the dark by myself long enough for her to smoke a cigarette. Then she popped her head in and said, angrily, "I know it didn't hurt, you filthy liar." And she left, slamming the door.
It had hurt. It still hurt then. I didn't lie.
The house was quiet for about half an hour. I was still upset from all the screaming, and was lying awake in bed with the lights off, when I heard my Mother coming up the stairs, and then she opened the door to my room and asked me if I was awake. I tried pretending I was asleep, but she knew I wasn't and told me to get up and come to her bedroom.
On the way I could look over the railing and see my Father passed out on the floor of the living room.
In the bedroom my Mother first had me help her out of the dress she fought so hard to get into hours earlier. Then she told me she wanted me to lie down with her to keep her company. For a few minutes we just lay there, hugging each other, nothing else happening. I was still in my pajamas, she was in her underwear.
Then she insisted that it would be better if we both took our clothes off. I didn't see how it would be better at all, but she insisted she needed to be closer, to help her get over what she'd been through that night. I still resisted; she got me to agree finally by offering to turn the lights out right away.
So we got naked, she turned out the lights, and for a few minutes we were in bed hugging in the dark. Then she began fondling me and telling me she wanted me.
That was totally absurd. I was 8 and a half. Sure, I had been over-sexed following the first major head injury, but that effect had run its course at least three years before. Not to mention that I didn't know what intercourse was.
When she realized that I wasn't going to be physically able to have intercourse with her she acted as though it were a tragedy for me. her attitude was "You poor thing, I'll have to do something for you." It didn't make any sense to me. Just seconds before she was the one with the sexual need. Now I was supposed to be in need. It was so confusing I didn't know what to say.
She got out of bed, grabbed a swirled tapered candle off her dresser, and said, "I'll take care of you in the bathroom."In the bathroom she pushed me down on my hands and knees and raped me with the candle.
It hurt and I begged her to stop. She laughed and kept at it. When I continued to cry and beg, she eventually became angry. "I know it doesn't hurt. Stop being a crybaby"
Finally she let me go and I ran to my bedroom and the imagined security of my own bed. She let me lie there in the dark by myself long enough for her to smoke a cigarette. Then she popped her head in and said, angrily, "I know it didn't hurt, you filthy liar." And she left, slamming the door.
It had hurt. It still hurt then. I didn't lie.
Thursday, November 1, 2007
My First Phone Call
[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened in the spring of 1956, when I was 6 "going on 7". The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]
My clever plan worked. I started writing about the very bad chain of events, and the sheer act of writing about it broke the stupidity-lock that was preventing me from recalling the timing of the events.
I forgot about Spring vacations. My 1st grade school broke for Spring vacation. The next event in the chain happened around the third week of March.
My Mother was being especially sadistic because I had demonstrated an ability to recall things that happened to me even before I was one year old. Rape/tortures increased in frequency and severity. I was ready to do something desperate to get out of the situation.
I got the idea to try and get help from Aunt Alta.
Looking back on my childhood I am often pleased at how stupid the ideas I had then were. It would really annoy me now were I to have had amazingly brilliant ideas all the time as a kid. No one wants to be one-upped by their own 6-year old self. I'm glad that I was so ignorant when I was 6. It's because of that I've been able to show so much improvement over time.
Not only did I not know Aunt Alta very well, having only met her a few times when she came to visit during holidays, but she was my Aunt because she was the sister of the woman abusing me. So she was emotionally involved, and altogether the wrong person to seek out if the goal was sanctuary. Of course, the goal WAS sanctuary. I was not looking for her to use her influence to change my Mother's behavior. A plan like that wouldn't have occurred to me at 6 going-on 7. I didn't get that sophisticated until I was 9 or 10.
To ask her for help was a trick, because we lived in Fort Devens, Massachusetts, and she lived at the time in Washington, DC. Her phone number was in a flip-up record book on the table where the phone sat, but it wasn't a direct-dial number. Direct Distance Dialing, using area codes to call without the use of operators, began earlier than 1956, but people weren't using it much by then. If my parents knew the area code for Washington DC, they didn't bother with it, being satisfied to do things the way they always had. My Father actually would say Direct Dialing was "idiotic" -- there's no reason anyone should have to use numbers that long.
["1-206-725-5555" -- idiotic. "PA5-5555" -- silly. "Parkway 5, 5555" -- too many numbers. "Myrtle, could you connect me to Gertrude, please? You, know, Gertrude across the street from me? Thanks." -- genius.]
Fortunately my parents had taught me how to use a phone in case there was ever an emergency. There was one emergency number in those days. You dialed "0". An "operator" answered. She took care of it.
So one Saturday morning while my parents were out shopping I called the operator and told her I needed to talk to my Aunt Alta in Washington DC. It was my first phone call, ever.
I didn't know what a collect call was. I just gave the operator Alta's local number and said I wanted to talk to her. The operator asked how old I was, and I said 6 going-on 7. She said, "Do you have permission from your parents to make this call?" I said no. She said, "Well, then I shouldn't let you put the call through, until you get permission."
I wasn't prepared for that. I thought the operator was just supposed to put the call through. I thought phones were entirely a prepaid service. I didn't know each long distance call added to the bill. I broke down in tears and told her I couldn't get permission from my parents, that's why I had to make the call. I had to get away from my parents.
The operator said, "Why do you have to get away from your parents?" So I started to tell her. I told her my parents had wanted to kill me. I told her that my Mother had tried to smother me with a pillow two years earlier. The operator was concerned but said, "But that was a long time ago, right?" They're not hurting you now, are they?"
So I was forced to try to describe the recent abuse, which was mostly rape and verbal abuse.
No matter how severe verbal abuse is, no one thinks much of it until you act it out for them. Over the years I got really good at acting out my Father's verbal abuse, and I can now do it pretty well. When I do it now, it scares people, and they get it. But as a 6 year-old I didn't have the skill, the voice, and the sheer size to pull off an impression of my Father's abusive verbal attacks.
So that left the rapes. I was forced to find words to describe anal rape, over the phone, to a complete stranger, when the only vocabulary I had consisted of words that were forbidden to me.
As luck would have it the operator was well-suited for her line of work. She was a good listener. Through the tears and my casting around for safe words she finally said, "Oh my God, I'll put you through collect right away."
Alta was reached and she accepted the charges. Now that I was finally talking to her I had to do it all over again. I had to tell her what was wrong and why she should come and take me away from my parents. She wasn't a total stranger, but, really, I knew her mainly as the Aunt who gave me shirts five times a year. I thought she would help because she was said to be a "Good Christian."
[Left: I had seen the family album many times by then, and had often seen this picture of Alta holding me in 1949. She looks happy to have me.]
I went through pretty much the same ordeal I went through with the operator. Like the operator she wanted to discount old news. Maybe neither of them believed I could have reliable memories that old. So I had to describe the rapes. Alta wasn't as good a listener as the operator, and I ended up spelling it out more. I told her my Mother was feeling inside me and making me hurt.
Finally, she said she was planning to come to visit soon anyway, she could just move her trip up. She asked me if I could manage for the two weeks it would take her to get there. I said yes, and she said, "Then it's settled. I'll come in two weeks, and I'll take care of everything. You don't have to worry about a thing."
Yep, she'd take care of everything. I was pretty psyched. Everything was going to be Hunky-Frikkin'-Dory.
My clever plan worked. I started writing about the very bad chain of events, and the sheer act of writing about it broke the stupidity-lock that was preventing me from recalling the timing of the events.
I forgot about Spring vacations. My 1st grade school broke for Spring vacation. The next event in the chain happened around the third week of March.
My Mother was being especially sadistic because I had demonstrated an ability to recall things that happened to me even before I was one year old. Rape/tortures increased in frequency and severity. I was ready to do something desperate to get out of the situation.
I got the idea to try and get help from Aunt Alta.
Looking back on my childhood I am often pleased at how stupid the ideas I had then were. It would really annoy me now were I to have had amazingly brilliant ideas all the time as a kid. No one wants to be one-upped by their own 6-year old self. I'm glad that I was so ignorant when I was 6. It's because of that I've been able to show so much improvement over time.
Not only did I not know Aunt Alta very well, having only met her a few times when she came to visit during holidays, but she was my Aunt because she was the sister of the woman abusing me. So she was emotionally involved, and altogether the wrong person to seek out if the goal was sanctuary. Of course, the goal WAS sanctuary. I was not looking for her to use her influence to change my Mother's behavior. A plan like that wouldn't have occurred to me at 6 going-on 7. I didn't get that sophisticated until I was 9 or 10.
To ask her for help was a trick, because we lived in Fort Devens, Massachusetts, and she lived at the time in Washington, DC. Her phone number was in a flip-up record book on the table where the phone sat, but it wasn't a direct-dial number. Direct Distance Dialing, using area codes to call without the use of operators, began earlier than 1956, but people weren't using it much by then. If my parents knew the area code for Washington DC, they didn't bother with it, being satisfied to do things the way they always had. My Father actually would say Direct Dialing was "idiotic" -- there's no reason anyone should have to use numbers that long.["1-206-725-5555" -- idiotic. "PA5-5555" -- silly. "Parkway 5, 5555" -- too many numbers. "Myrtle, could you connect me to Gertrude, please? You, know, Gertrude across the street from me? Thanks." -- genius.]
Fortunately my parents had taught me how to use a phone in case there was ever an emergency. There was one emergency number in those days. You dialed "0". An "operator" answered. She took care of it.
So one Saturday morning while my parents were out shopping I called the operator and told her I needed to talk to my Aunt Alta in Washington DC. It was my first phone call, ever.
I didn't know what a collect call was. I just gave the operator Alta's local number and said I wanted to talk to her. The operator asked how old I was, and I said 6 going-on 7. She said, "Do you have permission from your parents to make this call?" I said no. She said, "Well, then I shouldn't let you put the call through, until you get permission."
I wasn't prepared for that. I thought the operator was just supposed to put the call through. I thought phones were entirely a prepaid service. I didn't know each long distance call added to the bill. I broke down in tears and told her I couldn't get permission from my parents, that's why I had to make the call. I had to get away from my parents.
The operator said, "Why do you have to get away from your parents?" So I started to tell her. I told her my parents had wanted to kill me. I told her that my Mother had tried to smother me with a pillow two years earlier. The operator was concerned but said, "But that was a long time ago, right?" They're not hurting you now, are they?"
So I was forced to try to describe the recent abuse, which was mostly rape and verbal abuse.
No matter how severe verbal abuse is, no one thinks much of it until you act it out for them. Over the years I got really good at acting out my Father's verbal abuse, and I can now do it pretty well. When I do it now, it scares people, and they get it. But as a 6 year-old I didn't have the skill, the voice, and the sheer size to pull off an impression of my Father's abusive verbal attacks.
So that left the rapes. I was forced to find words to describe anal rape, over the phone, to a complete stranger, when the only vocabulary I had consisted of words that were forbidden to me.
As luck would have it the operator was well-suited for her line of work. She was a good listener. Through the tears and my casting around for safe words she finally said, "Oh my God, I'll put you through collect right away."
Alta was reached and she accepted the charges. Now that I was finally talking to her I had to do it all over again. I had to tell her what was wrong and why she should come and take me away from my parents. She wasn't a total stranger, but, really, I knew her mainly as the Aunt who gave me shirts five times a year. I thought she would help because she was said to be a "Good Christian."[Left: I had seen the family album many times by then, and had often seen this picture of Alta holding me in 1949. She looks happy to have me.]
I went through pretty much the same ordeal I went through with the operator. Like the operator she wanted to discount old news. Maybe neither of them believed I could have reliable memories that old. So I had to describe the rapes. Alta wasn't as good a listener as the operator, and I ended up spelling it out more. I told her my Mother was feeling inside me and making me hurt.
Finally, she said she was planning to come to visit soon anyway, she could just move her trip up. She asked me if I could manage for the two weeks it would take her to get there. I said yes, and she said, "Then it's settled. I'll come in two weeks, and I'll take care of everything. You don't have to worry about a thing."
Yep, she'd take care of everything. I was pretty psyched. Everything was going to be Hunky-Frikkin'-Dory.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
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.
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.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Abuse Goes On
[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened early 1955 and on, when I was 5. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]
Whenever we moved my Mother would ease up on the sexual molestation. I never understood it when I was a child, but I have a theory now. I think that it was a combination of two things. The move itself would be a distraction. Also, the novel surroundings made for better sex with my Father, so she didn't think of using me.
When the novelty wore off at Fort Devens she began something new, the nocturnal visit. I've alluded to it already. My Father would begin drinking as soon as he got home. By the time dinner was ready he was screaming at people who weren't in the room. Anyone at work who offended him in any slight way would be the subject of a screeching tirade.
Dinners were therefore unbearable.
But I'll talk about that more later. The point is, by my 7 PM bedtime, Dad would often already be too drunk to do anything but scream. I would go to bed, and lie awake for hours hearing the yelling. Finally I'd hear sounds from the hall that told me it was over. My Father would stagger to bed, colliding with the walls. I'd hear my Mother undressing him, to occasional giggles. I'd hear her talk seductively to him. I'd hear him start snoring.
Soon after the snoring started, not every night, but maybe twice a week, my Mother would walk into my bedroom. When the moon was out I could see her and see that she was naked. Without a word she'd climb into bed and under the covers with me. If I said anything she'd put a hand over my mouth and shush me. She'd turn me so I was lying on my side with my back to her, and she'd reach around me, pull down my pajama bottoms and fondle my genitals.
When that would finally elicit the kind of sexual response she wanted, she raped me anally with one hand and masturbated with the other.
By the time she was done I would usually be crying, and she would get up and say, "Oh stop it, I didn't hurt you one bit." Then she would say, "If you don't stop right now, I'll give you something to really cry about."
Whenever we moved my Mother would ease up on the sexual molestation. I never understood it when I was a child, but I have a theory now. I think that it was a combination of two things. The move itself would be a distraction. Also, the novel surroundings made for better sex with my Father, so she didn't think of using me.
When the novelty wore off at Fort Devens she began something new, the nocturnal visit. I've alluded to it already. My Father would begin drinking as soon as he got home. By the time dinner was ready he was screaming at people who weren't in the room. Anyone at work who offended him in any slight way would be the subject of a screeching tirade.
Dinners were therefore unbearable.
But I'll talk about that more later. The point is, by my 7 PM bedtime, Dad would often already be too drunk to do anything but scream. I would go to bed, and lie awake for hours hearing the yelling. Finally I'd hear sounds from the hall that told me it was over. My Father would stagger to bed, colliding with the walls. I'd hear my Mother undressing him, to occasional giggles. I'd hear her talk seductively to him. I'd hear him start snoring.
Soon after the snoring started, not every night, but maybe twice a week, my Mother would walk into my bedroom. When the moon was out I could see her and see that she was naked. Without a word she'd climb into bed and under the covers with me. If I said anything she'd put a hand over my mouth and shush me. She'd turn me so I was lying on my side with my back to her, and she'd reach around me, pull down my pajama bottoms and fondle my genitals.
When that would finally elicit the kind of sexual response she wanted, she raped me anally with one hand and masturbated with the other.
By the time she was done I would usually be crying, and she would get up and say, "Oh stop it, I didn't hurt you one bit." Then she would say, "If you don't stop right now, I'll give you something to really cry about."
Thursday, September 6, 2007
Opportunity and Temptation
One of the problems I've always had is a slow learning curve when it comes to complex motor skills. An example is riding a bicycle. I don't believe most people take two months learning that. Another is dancing set moves. I enjoy dancing, but when I say "dancing" I don't mean "choreographed." I have to be dancing by myself moving to the music. I can't dance a routine or match a partner.
I have tried to learn to type with all my fingers several times. I have never been able to type faster than 11 words per minute using ten fingers. That's exactly how fast I type with 2 fingers. So why use ten? Anyway, I don't care, because I also think at 11 words per minute. So it suits my needs. I'm not a scribe copying other people's writings, I'm composing this stuff as I go along.
[Right: Even in my dreams I don't do the kind of dancing that guy's doing.]
I have long suspected that my difficulty learning motor skills is a leftover symptom of brain damage, from one of the 1950 or the 1953 head injuries. There were later head injuries I'll be getting to, but I'm sure they aren't responsible for the learning disability, because the disability preceded them.
The first sign I had of it was in 1953-54 when my Mother was trying to teach me to dress myself and tie my own shoes. She got nowhere. My Father blamed her genes.
As I came to have more contact with other children my slowness became a social challenge. The first inkling I had that I was comparatively slow this way was when another couple visited with a girl my age in tow. The girl was astonished that I needed help tying my shoes still.
Fortunately, this girl, whose name was Kathy, decided that not being able to tie shoes didn't make me a pathetic wretch, and I fell in love with her, and she agreed to marry me. So I was engaged to be married before the age of 5 to a beautiful curly haired freckle factory. It wasn't just a one day affair, either. We got together a great deal in the next few years. Whenever we did there was mass kissing. We never had sex, because she wanted to save herself for marriage.
Anyway, back to the House in Shirley and 1954. My Mother, therefore, had to dress me and tie my shoes, all the time.
She made matters worse than they had to be by insisting that I sit down to pee. Her feeling was that doing it standing up was "nasty" and spread germs (because of stray drops.) Great, but that meant my pants had to come down, and back up, each time, and that put Mom in the driver's seat. So to speak.
All of this had an impact on her sexual abuse of me. The more physical involvement she had to have with me during the day, the more opportunities and temptations there were for molestation.
Sometime in February or early March, 1954, my Father had to engage in a couple of weeks of war games. So he didn't come home for two weeks. His absence also added to the opportunity and temptation to molest. The abuse increased during that period. It was a pattern that repeated many times in years to come.
One vivid memory from this time is hearing the phrase, "I'll make you black and blue where it won't show" in connection with rape. It didn't refer to beating me where my pants would cover the signs. It referred to the intention to cause internal bruising of the rectum. It was a form of punishment she came up with that was sure to never be caught, because I would always be too shy to tell people where it hurt.
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
Punctuated Routines
[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened from September, 1953, to March, 1954. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]
The next six months at the House in Shirley, through Fall and most of Winter, were mostly uneventful. Or the events of one day were like the events of every other day with only a few exceptions.
I spent much of the time in a dream-like state, similar to the dream-state I experienced walking around Schofield Barracks when I was two and a half. Alex sang chants while Kona played, for hours each day. Indoors, because the weather turned cold.
The play was mainly ritual enactment, over and over again, of the Primary Rotating Dramatic Triangle. I'd have three stuffed toys. One would be the Villain. One would be the Victim. The Villain would attack the Victim. The third would be the Rescuer and saved the Victim. But in saving the Victim, the Rescuer would get carried away, and overdo it. So the old Rescuer would be the new Villain. The old Villain would be the new Victim. The old Victim would then become angry, and assume the role of Rescuer, and save the new Victim that had just before been his/her attacker. The triangle would have rotated 120 degrees. Then, the new Rescuer would overdo it, and the roles would rotate another 120 degrees. And then another.
Each rotation would take about ten minutes. All would go on mechanically, without comments, accompanied by Hawaiian chants. If a psychologist had got a chance to watch it I bet I would have been a famous case study. If I'd been filmed, I could have seen myself in Psych 101 doing that, with a voiceover telling me what a clear case of whatever it was my problem would be called. Maybe they'd have made up a special name for it. If the psychologist's name was Robert G Bozo, my behavior would have been called Bozo Disorder, or Bozo Syndrome.
That accounted for about 8 hours a day. There were a few other routines. My Mother taught me new words every day for a while. Then, out of the blue, I told her I wanted to learn numbers, too. She liked that. It made a lot of points with her. So she started me on counting, then adding, then subtracting.
One of the ways I practiced my counting was to count up the number of Hawaiian chants Alex could still remember at that time. Of the songs remembered in their entirety, the count was 12. One dozen exactly. I also remembered enough fragments of songs that I could guess that I had forgotten about an equal number. That inventory is what I'm drawing on when I say that I probably knew two dozen songs at one time.
My Mother let up on the rapes during this period. She made it a daily practice to fondle me to keep me from fondling myself. That was statutory rape, but didn't bother me at all. I didn't even interpret the genital fondling as sexual. I regarded it as physical maintenance, just like what she said it was. I hope people don't misunderstand that as an endorsement of her behavior. Just because it didn't bother me at the time doesn't mean it was justifiable. Later on, as I learned more about sex, I understood how I had been exploited by her, and the subsequent pain of betrayal has been very severe. I've been in therapy for over 20 years, and the hardest parts of my Mother's treatment of me to deal with has been the parts that caused the least distress at the time.
She still raped me anally, but it happened less often. I could avoid much of it by avoiding her. She would be set off by irritation and stress. My presence could add to that. I could prevent an incident by not adding to her irritation.
One day she broke from routine by dragging me around the house and raping me in every room. She was mildly angry, and mildly drunk. She told me the purpose of it was to show me that she was the boss of me everywhere in the house. It was her way of telling me that there were no safe places.
Another break in the routine: My, and Koko's, first big snow. We had a Massachusetts blizzard around the end of November. It was a lot of fun for both of us. Dad swore a lot, having to dig the car out of a foot and a half of snow, chain it, drive it the 800 feet to the highway, only to find that the plows had left an 8 foot wall of snow at the entrance of our driveway when they cleared the highway. He came up with some sort of theory to the effect that the transportation department had no right to do that, and screamed it at my Mother and me for hours.
Then there was an odd excursion to Fort Devens. My parents went to an officer's Christmas party, and left me with a simultaneous children's party that was held at the enlisted men's gym. There were a hundred or more children there, all left there by their parents for the same reason as me, so their parents could go to the same officer's party.
They started with a Punch and Judy puppet show, something like this video. I thought the violence was sickening. Too close to home?
Then there was a magic show, in which a women volunteered to have her head put in a box so that the magician could pretend to make her head vanish. It was obviously a trick of mirrors, but to me it was sick anyway to think that making someone's head disappear was a worthy activity.
Then there was a couple of hours of cartoons. I had never seen cartoons before and, again, I was grossed out by the violence. I was amazed that the other kids laughed and enjoyed it.
The next six months at the House in Shirley, through Fall and most of Winter, were mostly uneventful. Or the events of one day were like the events of every other day with only a few exceptions.
I spent much of the time in a dream-like state, similar to the dream-state I experienced walking around Schofield Barracks when I was two and a half. Alex sang chants while Kona played, for hours each day. Indoors, because the weather turned cold.
The play was mainly ritual enactment, over and over again, of the Primary Rotating Dramatic Triangle. I'd have three stuffed toys. One would be the Villain. One would be the Victim. The Villain would attack the Victim. The third would be the Rescuer and saved the Victim. But in saving the Victim, the Rescuer would get carried away, and overdo it. So the old Rescuer would be the new Villain. The old Villain would be the new Victim. The old Victim would then become angry, and assume the role of Rescuer, and save the new Victim that had just before been his/her attacker. The triangle would have rotated 120 degrees. Then, the new Rescuer would overdo it, and the roles would rotate another 120 degrees. And then another.
Each rotation would take about ten minutes. All would go on mechanically, without comments, accompanied by Hawaiian chants. If a psychologist had got a chance to watch it I bet I would have been a famous case study. If I'd been filmed, I could have seen myself in Psych 101 doing that, with a voiceover telling me what a clear case of whatever it was my problem would be called. Maybe they'd have made up a special name for it. If the psychologist's name was Robert G Bozo, my behavior would have been called Bozo Disorder, or Bozo Syndrome.
That accounted for about 8 hours a day. There were a few other routines. My Mother taught me new words every day for a while. Then, out of the blue, I told her I wanted to learn numbers, too. She liked that. It made a lot of points with her. So she started me on counting, then adding, then subtracting.
One of the ways I practiced my counting was to count up the number of Hawaiian chants Alex could still remember at that time. Of the songs remembered in their entirety, the count was 12. One dozen exactly. I also remembered enough fragments of songs that I could guess that I had forgotten about an equal number. That inventory is what I'm drawing on when I say that I probably knew two dozen songs at one time.
My Mother let up on the rapes during this period. She made it a daily practice to fondle me to keep me from fondling myself. That was statutory rape, but didn't bother me at all. I didn't even interpret the genital fondling as sexual. I regarded it as physical maintenance, just like what she said it was. I hope people don't misunderstand that as an endorsement of her behavior. Just because it didn't bother me at the time doesn't mean it was justifiable. Later on, as I learned more about sex, I understood how I had been exploited by her, and the subsequent pain of betrayal has been very severe. I've been in therapy for over 20 years, and the hardest parts of my Mother's treatment of me to deal with has been the parts that caused the least distress at the time.
She still raped me anally, but it happened less often. I could avoid much of it by avoiding her. She would be set off by irritation and stress. My presence could add to that. I could prevent an incident by not adding to her irritation.
One day she broke from routine by dragging me around the house and raping me in every room. She was mildly angry, and mildly drunk. She told me the purpose of it was to show me that she was the boss of me everywhere in the house. It was her way of telling me that there were no safe places.
Another break in the routine: My, and Koko's, first big snow. We had a Massachusetts blizzard around the end of November. It was a lot of fun for both of us. Dad swore a lot, having to dig the car out of a foot and a half of snow, chain it, drive it the 800 feet to the highway, only to find that the plows had left an 8 foot wall of snow at the entrance of our driveway when they cleared the highway. He came up with some sort of theory to the effect that the transportation department had no right to do that, and screamed it at my Mother and me for hours.
Then there was an odd excursion to Fort Devens. My parents went to an officer's Christmas party, and left me with a simultaneous children's party that was held at the enlisted men's gym. There were a hundred or more children there, all left there by their parents for the same reason as me, so their parents could go to the same officer's party.
They started with a Punch and Judy puppet show, something like this video. I thought the violence was sickening. Too close to home?
Then there was a magic show, in which a women volunteered to have her head put in a box so that the magician could pretend to make her head vanish. It was obviously a trick of mirrors, but to me it was sick anyway to think that making someone's head disappear was a worthy activity.
Then there was a couple of hours of cartoons. I had never seen cartoons before and, again, I was grossed out by the violence. I was amazed that the other kids laughed and enjoyed it.
Friday, August 24, 2007
The Unforgivable Rapes
Some few weeks into the re-toilet training ordeal I reached the point where I recover enough function that I could signal my Mother that it was time for me to go soon enough that she could get me to the training potty without accident. I really don't believe that my Mother's training had anything to do with it, I just improved control naturally. If anything her efforts were a distracting sideshow.
But she was convinced that her meanness and pointless punishments had motivated me. Now that I was doing better she decided, in her words at the time, to "use a little carrot with the stick."
My Mother's idea of the carrot was to come up with a new way of raping me. She actually asked me to tell her how I liked it best.
Mind you, I wasn't given the option of not being raped. "Do you like it more when I do this with my fingers, or this?" She went so far as to say, "Why did you cry just then? I didn't hurt you! What are you crying about?" and then, when the answer back was, "it's gone on too long," she actually stopped. She said, "I understand, honey, it's better when it comes in smaller portions, isn't it?"
My Mother used what she learned to offer rape-lite as rewards for good toilet performances.
It's very hard for me to explain to people why the violent rapes were the easiest to deal with emotionally when all this came up in therapy years later, and the rape-lite has been the hardest.
The soft and gentle anal violation that even at times felt good created a jumble of mixed feelings. There was still the feeling of being violated. It was still not possible to say no. There was still the feeling of humiliation, of being subjugated and having my will and my needs made insignificant. But there was also sexual arousal and physical sexual feelings which gave rise to incestual feelings and shaming sexual displays. All those feelings plus confusion about whether my Mother really WAS doing me a favor (isn't toilet training nurturing?) and maybe this really IS how I'm supposed to be loved, jumbled together, created a labyrinth of contradictory emotions that overwhelmed me.
I was 4 YEARS OLD! 4 year olds shouldn't have to find their way through that kind of tangle!
It's hard enough for forty and fifty year olds. After twenty plus years of therapy, the rape-lite still hurts the most. I could have forgiven the rest.
But she was convinced that her meanness and pointless punishments had motivated me. Now that I was doing better she decided, in her words at the time, to "use a little carrot with the stick."
My Mother's idea of the carrot was to come up with a new way of raping me. She actually asked me to tell her how I liked it best.
Mind you, I wasn't given the option of not being raped. "Do you like it more when I do this with my fingers, or this?" She went so far as to say, "Why did you cry just then? I didn't hurt you! What are you crying about?" and then, when the answer back was, "it's gone on too long," she actually stopped. She said, "I understand, honey, it's better when it comes in smaller portions, isn't it?"
My Mother used what she learned to offer rape-lite as rewards for good toilet performances.
It's very hard for me to explain to people why the violent rapes were the easiest to deal with emotionally when all this came up in therapy years later, and the rape-lite has been the hardest.
The soft and gentle anal violation that even at times felt good created a jumble of mixed feelings. There was still the feeling of being violated. It was still not possible to say no. There was still the feeling of humiliation, of being subjugated and having my will and my needs made insignificant. But there was also sexual arousal and physical sexual feelings which gave rise to incestual feelings and shaming sexual displays. All those feelings plus confusion about whether my Mother really WAS doing me a favor (isn't toilet training nurturing?) and maybe this really IS how I'm supposed to be loved, jumbled together, created a labyrinth of contradictory emotions that overwhelmed me.
I was 4 YEARS OLD! 4 year olds shouldn't have to find their way through that kind of tangle!
It's hard enough for forty and fifty year olds. After twenty plus years of therapy, the rape-lite still hurts the most. I could have forgiven the rest.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
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.
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.
Sunday, August 12, 2007
No Escape
[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. Today I'm relating events that happened the day of my fourth birthday, July 9, 1953. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]
I regained consciousness on the porch. My Mother was talking to herself loudly and excitedly. She cursed my Father for driving off with the only car and ditching her with me. She cursed me for bleeding. She cursed me most for waking up. "Why doesn't he ever die?"
She said, "What am I going to do? If I take him inside he'll bleed all over everything! I don't want him bleeding all over everything!" This was the argument that prompted her to get rags from the kitchen and wrap my head with them. It would be nice to think that some mothering instinct was at work but it's very hard to say.
Once I was wrapped up she dragged me in to the kitchen. She complained that my rags were already soaked with blood. I was fading in and out. Sometimes she seemed distant. My vision occasionally blurred and doubled. My head was pounding. She took off the first set of rags, lifted me up and rinsed my head under the faucet, and then wrapped me in fresh rags.
By now, her running monologue was veering into a new subject: what sort of permanent damage might have been done. She started to say things like, "What if he can't speak anymore? What if he can't speak Hawaiian anymore? That was the only chance he had of being useful! What good would he be then?" She interrupted her conversation with herself to demand me to speak.
"Talk to me! Say something! Damn it, say something right now, or I'll take you and bury you in the woods out back right now!"
I managed to say something like, "I can talk, Mommy, I'm OK, don't worry about me."
She laughed and said, "You're the one who'd better be doing the worrying if you can't still speak Hawaiian!"
Then she took me by one arm and half dragged me and half made me walk up the stairs and around to the bathroom next to the master bedroom. She stripped me and made me stand in the tub, and began raping me anally with her fingers. She said, "I want to hear Hawaiian! Now!"
It always worked before. Whenever she raped me, Alaka'i would come to Kona's rescue. Kona never had to bear being raped. Alaka'i was the "older" personality. He was the one there for the first birthday. He was experienced with horror, so he would bear it and shield Kona from it. Then, he would curse my Mother out in Hawaiian, which she would think was beautiful because she didn't know one word he was saying. Maybe I get my xenomania from Mother. Everything is connected to everything else.
It didn't work this time. I was there as Kona. Alaka'i didn't arrive. That rape was my first as Kona. As Kona, I didn't speak Hawaiian.
It went on for a long time. I don't know how long. Maybe an hour. Maybe only half an hour. She raped me until after I lost control of my bladder and bowels. She washed me with water, then raped me some more. I would have spoken Hawaiian to make it stop if I could.
During the raping I became light-headed and felt my consciousness fading, only to be screamed at, "You're not going to faint on me!" and have cold water splashed in my face and up my nose. There was no escape.
Finally she gave up and took me in and laid me out on her bed. I was glad that the raping was over for the moment, but I was in a panic about Alaka'i. It suddenly occurred to me that when I was in the driveway and thought I was dying, it could be that just one of us was dying, and that the other one would have to go on without any help.
But my Mother's monologue was now all about killing me. Her speech was racing. She paced back and forth in front of me at the foot of the bed. She was saying that my Father was probably gone for good, and there was no way she was going to take care of me by herself. She discussed with herself, as if I wasn't in the room, how she could finish me without being charged with murder. The discussion was frantic and chopped, with different refrains mixed together, repeated over and over again.
"John was the one who punched him. He's the one they'll convict," was one refrain. Another was, "I can smash his head with a shovel, and bury him so far in the woods they'd never find where I did it." Another was, "I don't have to smash his head, if I bury him he'll die soon enough anyway. Just so long as the police can't hear him making noise when they come looking for him."
Finally she decided she wanted to "get it [my dying] over with." She said I'd be easier to bury that way. She took the pillow out from under my head and put it over my face. As Kona, I felt relief again that I might be able to join Alaka'i in the ultimate escape. But I struggled anyway, because you can't help it. When someone's smothering you, the panic and fear and struggling just happens.
I regained consciousness on the porch. My Mother was talking to herself loudly and excitedly. She cursed my Father for driving off with the only car and ditching her with me. She cursed me for bleeding. She cursed me most for waking up. "Why doesn't he ever die?"
She said, "What am I going to do? If I take him inside he'll bleed all over everything! I don't want him bleeding all over everything!" This was the argument that prompted her to get rags from the kitchen and wrap my head with them. It would be nice to think that some mothering instinct was at work but it's very hard to say.
Once I was wrapped up she dragged me in to the kitchen. She complained that my rags were already soaked with blood. I was fading in and out. Sometimes she seemed distant. My vision occasionally blurred and doubled. My head was pounding. She took off the first set of rags, lifted me up and rinsed my head under the faucet, and then wrapped me in fresh rags.
By now, her running monologue was veering into a new subject: what sort of permanent damage might have been done. She started to say things like, "What if he can't speak anymore? What if he can't speak Hawaiian anymore? That was the only chance he had of being useful! What good would he be then?" She interrupted her conversation with herself to demand me to speak.
"Talk to me! Say something! Damn it, say something right now, or I'll take you and bury you in the woods out back right now!"
I managed to say something like, "I can talk, Mommy, I'm OK, don't worry about me."
She laughed and said, "You're the one who'd better be doing the worrying if you can't still speak Hawaiian!"
Then she took me by one arm and half dragged me and half made me walk up the stairs and around to the bathroom next to the master bedroom. She stripped me and made me stand in the tub, and began raping me anally with her fingers. She said, "I want to hear Hawaiian! Now!"
It always worked before. Whenever she raped me, Alaka'i would come to Kona's rescue. Kona never had to bear being raped. Alaka'i was the "older" personality. He was the one there for the first birthday. He was experienced with horror, so he would bear it and shield Kona from it. Then, he would curse my Mother out in Hawaiian, which she would think was beautiful because she didn't know one word he was saying. Maybe I get my xenomania from Mother. Everything is connected to everything else.
It didn't work this time. I was there as Kona. Alaka'i didn't arrive. That rape was my first as Kona. As Kona, I didn't speak Hawaiian.
It went on for a long time. I don't know how long. Maybe an hour. Maybe only half an hour. She raped me until after I lost control of my bladder and bowels. She washed me with water, then raped me some more. I would have spoken Hawaiian to make it stop if I could.
During the raping I became light-headed and felt my consciousness fading, only to be screamed at, "You're not going to faint on me!" and have cold water splashed in my face and up my nose. There was no escape.
Finally she gave up and took me in and laid me out on her bed. I was glad that the raping was over for the moment, but I was in a panic about Alaka'i. It suddenly occurred to me that when I was in the driveway and thought I was dying, it could be that just one of us was dying, and that the other one would have to go on without any help.
But my Mother's monologue was now all about killing me. Her speech was racing. She paced back and forth in front of me at the foot of the bed. She was saying that my Father was probably gone for good, and there was no way she was going to take care of me by herself. She discussed with herself, as if I wasn't in the room, how she could finish me without being charged with murder. The discussion was frantic and chopped, with different refrains mixed together, repeated over and over again.
"John was the one who punched him. He's the one they'll convict," was one refrain. Another was, "I can smash his head with a shovel, and bury him so far in the woods they'd never find where I did it." Another was, "I don't have to smash his head, if I bury him he'll die soon enough anyway. Just so long as the police can't hear him making noise when they come looking for him."
Finally she decided she wanted to "get it [my dying] over with." She said I'd be easier to bury that way. She took the pillow out from under my head and put it over my face. As Kona, I felt relief again that I might be able to join Alaka'i in the ultimate escape. But I struggled anyway, because you can't help it. When someone's smothering you, the panic and fear and struggling just happens.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Umoja, Kenya
Video Find of the Day
I first learned about the existence of domestic violence refuges when I was driving cab in the 80s. Cabs were needed sometimes and it wasn't always possible to line up women drivers. I was called in on a few occasions, after promising never to reveal the location of the refuge or the identities of the passengers.
In Africa, in Kenya, there's a whole village that's been established by women who have been raped and "dishonored" and become homeless. It's called Umoja, which means "Unity" in Swahili. The video embedded below is a documentary about it.
If deciphering the on-screen French is a problem, there's an English version here, but you may have to wait longer for it to load.
In 2005, the Washington Post ran an article about Umoja.
See how the previous post referenced the City of Refuge in Hawai'i, and we ended up in Umoja? There's a madness to my method.
I first learned about the existence of domestic violence refuges when I was driving cab in the 80s. Cabs were needed sometimes and it wasn't always possible to line up women drivers. I was called in on a few occasions, after promising never to reveal the location of the refuge or the identities of the passengers.
In Africa, in Kenya, there's a whole village that's been established by women who have been raped and "dishonored" and become homeless. It's called Umoja, which means "Unity" in Swahili. The video embedded below is a documentary about it.
If deciphering the on-screen French is a problem, there's an English version here, but you may have to wait longer for it to load.
In 2005, the Washington Post ran an article about Umoja.
See how the previous post referenced the City of Refuge in Hawai'i, and we ended up in Umoja? There's a madness to my method.
Friday, June 29, 2007
Keiki Kona
It was days after my Mother arrived home from the mental ward before she spoke to me. She was drunk a lot of the time. She kept in her bedroom. Finally she came out and I tried to say the nicest thing I could think of saying. I asked about the baby that was due.
I think it was Lani's mention of a younger brother that made want to know when mine would come. I wanted a younger brother to do things for, too.
Anyway, it was altogether the wrong question. If the word miscarriage had been used I wouldn't have known what it meant. Maybe my eidetic memory was slipping, but I don't think the word was used anyway. I think that as usual my Father couldn't talk about it, and my Mother hadn't been talking.
She screamed at me, blaming me for killing the baby. She said, "What do you think happened that day? Because of you my head was slammed into that wall! You think the baby was gonna live through that? What do you think happened!"
Then she raped me anally, screaming, "Let's hear you speak Hawaiian now! If I'm stuck with you, you little filth, you'd better entertain me!"
Later I had to deal with the idea that I killed the baby. If I did, I did it by taking revenge on my Mother. Taking revenge on her was proper, but I shouldn't have let my revenge cause the baby to die.
In order to correct the harm I'd done I had to give my Mother something equivalent to what I'd taken away from her. It didn't matter that I hated her. The law is, give back as you're given.
I remember the vision of the dog cut apart and put back together, and reanimating, and I thought, maybe I could make a little brother out of myself. It should be a little brother she could love. It occurred to me that since my parents were always wanting me to speak English around the house that the new baby should speak English. Why not begin with the English speaking part of me?
So I imagined separating off the English speaking part of me, and I started to call him Keiki Kona, my little one.
Keiki Kona didn't come to life right away. It took time. But when he did it was all at once. Suddenly I found myself in my body, but being moved by another person, who was younger and who didn't know my Mother raped me and didn't speak Hawaiian so he didn't know what 'ilio wahine 'ino meant. He was innocent and could make a fresh start with my Mother.
To make sure that my little brother stayed innocent and able to love Mother, I was determined to step in and take over whenever she was mean to us. So little brother would never have to know what having a vicious evil Mother was like. He would never even feel hated by her.
I told Lani and Lono about Keiki Kona a week or so before my 3rd birthday. The name was confusing to them. They wondered why I was giving him a Hawaiian name. They thought I was talking about a real new baby. Lani said that just Kona would make a fine name, by itself, because besides meaning "my" it can also mean "the leeward" side, i.e. the calm side, and that was a good name.
So I called little brother Kona.
When they asked why I didn't bring Kona to see them, I told them he's too young to go that far, and besides, he doesn't know any Hawaiian.
I think it was Lani's mention of a younger brother that made want to know when mine would come. I wanted a younger brother to do things for, too.
Anyway, it was altogether the wrong question. If the word miscarriage had been used I wouldn't have known what it meant. Maybe my eidetic memory was slipping, but I don't think the word was used anyway. I think that as usual my Father couldn't talk about it, and my Mother hadn't been talking.
She screamed at me, blaming me for killing the baby. She said, "What do you think happened that day? Because of you my head was slammed into that wall! You think the baby was gonna live through that? What do you think happened!"
Then she raped me anally, screaming, "Let's hear you speak Hawaiian now! If I'm stuck with you, you little filth, you'd better entertain me!"
Later I had to deal with the idea that I killed the baby. If I did, I did it by taking revenge on my Mother. Taking revenge on her was proper, but I shouldn't have let my revenge cause the baby to die.
In order to correct the harm I'd done I had to give my Mother something equivalent to what I'd taken away from her. It didn't matter that I hated her. The law is, give back as you're given.
I remember the vision of the dog cut apart and put back together, and reanimating, and I thought, maybe I could make a little brother out of myself. It should be a little brother she could love. It occurred to me that since my parents were always wanting me to speak English around the house that the new baby should speak English. Why not begin with the English speaking part of me?
So I imagined separating off the English speaking part of me, and I started to call him Keiki Kona, my little one.
Keiki Kona didn't come to life right away. It took time. But when he did it was all at once. Suddenly I found myself in my body, but being moved by another person, who was younger and who didn't know my Mother raped me and didn't speak Hawaiian so he didn't know what 'ilio wahine 'ino meant. He was innocent and could make a fresh start with my Mother.
To make sure that my little brother stayed innocent and able to love Mother, I was determined to step in and take over whenever she was mean to us. So little brother would never have to know what having a vicious evil Mother was like. He would never even feel hated by her.
I told Lani and Lono about Keiki Kona a week or so before my 3rd birthday. The name was confusing to them. They wondered why I was giving him a Hawaiian name. They thought I was talking about a real new baby. Lani said that just Kona would make a fine name, by itself, because besides meaning "my" it can also mean "the leeward" side, i.e. the calm side, and that was a good name.
So I called little brother Kona.
When they asked why I didn't bring Kona to see them, I told them he's too young to go that far, and besides, he doesn't know any Hawaiian.
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Ignorance, Greed, & Cruelty
While my Father kept the search up for proof that I could not be speaking Hawaiian, my Mother was thoroughly convinced and had moved on, and was fantasizing how to exploit it.
Mother's ignorance was conscious and deliberate. She rationalized that smart people didn't have to know, smart people controlled those who know. She knew me. I knew Hawaiian. She could use that.
Like my Father, one of the facts in life my Mother had never fully grasped was that language learning was something toddlers were universally geniuses at. She actually thought the fact that I was speaking Hawaiian meant that I was an idiot savant. She thought it was on a par with being able to recite thousands of digits of π, or multiplying six digit numbers in my head, when really the only remarkable thing about it was that I had found people willing to speak to me in Hawaiian.
She imagined that if she could find the right reporter to write it up and publicize it, my freakish idiot savant talent could bring in money somehow. There might be a book. She assumed I could learn other languages by means of my freak talent. Who knows, maybe I could learn dozens of them. They might be able to charge people admission to see me do a show, where I'd converse with experts in what my Mother imagined as especially hard languages, that only geniuses could learn, like well, you know, the African ones that sound like babble, or the ones the Arabs speak. Of course it's no feat for an African or an Arab to speak one of those if they were born to it. The feat was for a white person to learn those crazy languages.
It would take time, of course. I'd have to be trained. There'd need to be publicity. In the meantime she found a way to savor the cash cow.
She discovered that when she raped me long enough I would invariably spew forth a stream of Hawaiian. She said it was beautiful. She said, if only she could do it in front of my Father, he'd be convinced finally. She railed at me for not speaking so much except when I was being raped.
She never guessed that the beautiful Hawaiian coming out of me during rapes was all about what an evil bitch she was.
Mother's ignorance was conscious and deliberate. She rationalized that smart people didn't have to know, smart people controlled those who know. She knew me. I knew Hawaiian. She could use that.
Like my Father, one of the facts in life my Mother had never fully grasped was that language learning was something toddlers were universally geniuses at. She actually thought the fact that I was speaking Hawaiian meant that I was an idiot savant. She thought it was on a par with being able to recite thousands of digits of π, or multiplying six digit numbers in my head, when really the only remarkable thing about it was that I had found people willing to speak to me in Hawaiian.
She imagined that if she could find the right reporter to write it up and publicize it, my freakish idiot savant talent could bring in money somehow. There might be a book. She assumed I could learn other languages by means of my freak talent. Who knows, maybe I could learn dozens of them. They might be able to charge people admission to see me do a show, where I'd converse with experts in what my Mother imagined as especially hard languages, that only geniuses could learn, like well, you know, the African ones that sound like babble, or the ones the Arabs speak. Of course it's no feat for an African or an Arab to speak one of those if they were born to it. The feat was for a white person to learn those crazy languages.
It would take time, of course. I'd have to be trained. There'd need to be publicity. In the meantime she found a way to savor the cash cow.
She discovered that when she raped me long enough I would invariably spew forth a stream of Hawaiian. She said it was beautiful. She said, if only she could do it in front of my Father, he'd be convinced finally. She railed at me for not speaking so much except when I was being raped.
She never guessed that the beautiful Hawaiian coming out of me during rapes was all about what an evil bitch she was.
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Rape by Fritos
One of the problems that child sexual abuse survivors have is dealing with feelings of guilt for possibly having led the perpetrator on. It's very hard to see things in perspective and recognize the enormous power imbalance that was involved, because you're dealing with memories of your own earliest best efforts at coping with life. You're blind to the power that was being wielded over you.
I was 35 years old, in therapy, telling my therapist that my Mother routinely fondled my genitals to discourage me from masturbating. The theory Mother presented was that if I knew she would do it for me every few days, then I wouldn't do it myself and risk becoming "sick." I told my therapist I started getting suspicious about this when I was 8 or 9 and she couldn't be specific about the sort of sickness that would result, the bit about blindness and hairy palms being too absurd even for her to repeat.
Then suddenly it dawned on me. Even the fondling was rape. It was easy to understand the anal violations as rape because they had been so often frightening and distressing. But somehow I had convinced myself that the fondling was brought on by my own desire.
But I wasn't in control! She set the whole situation up, manufactured the need, and exploited my trust in my own Mother not to exploit me to convince me the need was legitimate.
It doesn't matter if I took pleasure from some of it. It is part of the betrayal I experienced, that my childhood ability to take pleasure from so much, my polymorphous perversity, as Freud called it, was used to satisfy HER needs at the expense of my emotional health.
I should have seen it before I was 35. My Father gave me a lesson in the principle well before that. We got a beagle when I was 19 or 20. My Father was nuts about Peanuts, so he had to have a beagle, name it Snoopy, and imagine it AS Snoopy. As it happens the beagle was neurotic as all hell when we got him, thanks to a very poorly run kennel. The dog was an over-eater.
In order to satisfy his own emotional needs my Father completely caved to the dog's over-eating. My Father would feed the dog all the time, throwing Fritos one at a time into his mouth, all the while talking about how I would be a decent son if I was only half as good as the dog.
"Snoop" literally died of obesity at the age of 7. The picture is one I took of him at his thinnest as an adult, when he was not yet two years old. I don't have any later pictures. You'll have to take my word for it that he was twice as wide as this when he died. His stomach dragged on the ground.
My Father never made a real emotional connection with any one in his life, least of all with that dog. It was rape by Fritos, really.
I was 35 years old, in therapy, telling my therapist that my Mother routinely fondled my genitals to discourage me from masturbating. The theory Mother presented was that if I knew she would do it for me every few days, then I wouldn't do it myself and risk becoming "sick." I told my therapist I started getting suspicious about this when I was 8 or 9 and she couldn't be specific about the sort of sickness that would result, the bit about blindness and hairy palms being too absurd even for her to repeat.
Then suddenly it dawned on me. Even the fondling was rape. It was easy to understand the anal violations as rape because they had been so often frightening and distressing. But somehow I had convinced myself that the fondling was brought on by my own desire.
But I wasn't in control! She set the whole situation up, manufactured the need, and exploited my trust in my own Mother not to exploit me to convince me the need was legitimate.
It doesn't matter if I took pleasure from some of it. It is part of the betrayal I experienced, that my childhood ability to take pleasure from so much, my polymorphous perversity, as Freud called it, was used to satisfy HER needs at the expense of my emotional health.
I should have seen it before I was 35. My Father gave me a lesson in the principle well before that. We got a beagle when I was 19 or 20. My Father was nuts about Peanuts, so he had to have a beagle, name it Snoopy, and imagine it AS Snoopy. As it happens the beagle was neurotic as all hell when we got him, thanks to a very poorly run kennel. The dog was an over-eater.
In order to satisfy his own emotional needs my Father completely caved to the dog's over-eating. My Father would feed the dog all the time, throwing Fritos one at a time into his mouth, all the while talking about how I would be a decent son if I was only half as good as the dog.
"Snoop" literally died of obesity at the age of 7. The picture is one I took of him at his thinnest as an adult, when he was not yet two years old. I don't have any later pictures. You'll have to take my word for it that he was twice as wide as this when he died. His stomach dragged on the ground.
My Father never made a real emotional connection with any one in his life, least of all with that dog. It was rape by Fritos, really.
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
Anti-Anti-Porn Rant
The previous post puts me in the mood for this.
One of the things that really burns me is the way pornography is blamed for rape. I take that kind of thinking very personally. My Mother, as it happened, grew up to religion-based sexually repression. She used the Biblical story of Onan to justify beating me if my hand touched my genitals even during peeing. She considered pornographic magazines and movies disgusting. Yet she raped me hundreds of times and even masturbated to my distress as often as she had the urge.
She didn't start with dirty pictures and then advance step by step to rape, the way anti-porn fanatics will tell you it always happens. She went straight for the rape. I know that she tried to groom other children for molestation, both boys and girls. She later justified her own masturbation to me by pointing out that Onan was a man. It's different for women, she said.
By contrast, my Father was constantly using pornography. My Mother disapproved at first, then learned to shut up and tolerate it, because, she later told me, it made him more interested in her. My Father never molested me sexually in any way, and he never displayed any interest in other kids either. Or other wives, for that matter.
I'm certain the porn-as-gateway-to-rape scenario happens. But I'm also sure that for every person who follows that route there are ten people who become rapists because they are severely sexually repressed, hate the sexuality of others and use rape initially to punish others for being sexual. And that if they could be introduced to porn to gradually, say, starting with the easy stuff, like Sears underwear ads, and working up to old early Playboys or Cosmos, their hatred of sexuality might be overcome and their impulse to rape dramatically reduced.
My Mother started raping me and torturing me when I dared have erections in front of her as an innocent 16 month-old. Her gateway to rape was a fear and hatred of a toddler's sexuality. Her hatred of pornography was only another symptom of the hatred that made her a rapist.
One of the reasons people can keep justifying anti-pornography is the fact that in many countries when pornography is outlawed rape statistics are also unbelievably low. You have countries where if a woman reports a rape she's charged and executed for adultery, or a victim of an honor killing, and instead of seeing that as the factor that keeps rape reports down, these fools say, "Look, there's a country that doesn't allow pornography, and they don't have rapes!" Bullshit.
My own experience as a child and now also bears that out. I asked for help repeatedly back then and was told I was being lewd. The sexual repressiveness of the Fifties prevented me from being a statistic. Since then pornography has become much more available. Almost exactly the same time, it became possible for children to report sexual abuse. So now there seems to be more than ever. Because of pornography? OF COURSE NOT. It's because kids going through what I was going through can now talk about it, because society is less sexually repressed.
If anything pornography deserves credit for being at least a small factor in freeing people to speak out about the crimes committed against them.
One of the things that really burns me is the way pornography is blamed for rape. I take that kind of thinking very personally. My Mother, as it happened, grew up to religion-based sexually repression. She used the Biblical story of Onan to justify beating me if my hand touched my genitals even during peeing. She considered pornographic magazines and movies disgusting. Yet she raped me hundreds of times and even masturbated to my distress as often as she had the urge.
She didn't start with dirty pictures and then advance step by step to rape, the way anti-porn fanatics will tell you it always happens. She went straight for the rape. I know that she tried to groom other children for molestation, both boys and girls. She later justified her own masturbation to me by pointing out that Onan was a man. It's different for women, she said.
By contrast, my Father was constantly using pornography. My Mother disapproved at first, then learned to shut up and tolerate it, because, she later told me, it made him more interested in her. My Father never molested me sexually in any way, and he never displayed any interest in other kids either. Or other wives, for that matter.
I'm certain the porn-as-gateway-to-rape scenario happens. But I'm also sure that for every person who follows that route there are ten people who become rapists because they are severely sexually repressed, hate the sexuality of others and use rape initially to punish others for being sexual. And that if they could be introduced to porn to gradually, say, starting with the easy stuff, like Sears underwear ads, and working up to old early Playboys or Cosmos, their hatred of sexuality might be overcome and their impulse to rape dramatically reduced.
My Mother started raping me and torturing me when I dared have erections in front of her as an innocent 16 month-old. Her gateway to rape was a fear and hatred of a toddler's sexuality. Her hatred of pornography was only another symptom of the hatred that made her a rapist.
One of the reasons people can keep justifying anti-pornography is the fact that in many countries when pornography is outlawed rape statistics are also unbelievably low. You have countries where if a woman reports a rape she's charged and executed for adultery, or a victim of an honor killing, and instead of seeing that as the factor that keeps rape reports down, these fools say, "Look, there's a country that doesn't allow pornography, and they don't have rapes!" Bullshit.
My own experience as a child and now also bears that out. I asked for help repeatedly back then and was told I was being lewd. The sexual repressiveness of the Fifties prevented me from being a statistic. Since then pornography has become much more available. Almost exactly the same time, it became possible for children to report sexual abuse. So now there seems to be more than ever. Because of pornography? OF COURSE NOT. It's because kids going through what I was going through can now talk about it, because society is less sexually repressed.
If anything pornography deserves credit for being at least a small factor in freeing people to speak out about the crimes committed against them.
More Loose Ends
Besides the day Robert was born and died the hardest event of Hawaii to place in time is my Father's second stint in Korea. I am so confused about it that I wonder if there wasn't a third. What is certain is he went back. There was talk about how active duty in a combat zone would help him get promoted. Also that being shot at the first trip out was a fluke. It was just because the Army was caught off guard. My Father kept saying there was no danger because his work usually put him far from the actual battles. He worked with a typewriter not a rifle. I remember that it wasn't a whole six months the second time. It was cut short for some reason.
But when? One clue to timing the memory of the second stint was that when he first heard me speaking Hawaiian around the house it was a surprise to him, and my Mother said, "He started doing it when you were gone."
Also there was a change in the rapes that had a bearing on the timing.
Before the change, the rapes were entirely vicious in nature. She was enjoying seeing me suffer, but not using the rapes to get sexual pleasure. At some point, the rapes tended to take place more often in the bath than in diaper changing, maybe just because my toilet-training at home was progressing. Then she started occasionally pulling her own pants down during the rapes and rubbing herself. She was using her anal raping of me as a form of live pornography to masturbate to.
Later on I found that she used rape in that way on a regular basis when my Father was unavailable sexually. So it always happened when he went on active duty. It also happened when he got onto drinking jags, when he would get drunk within an hour of arriving home every night. But that didn't go on so much until I was 8.
So, putting it all together, I think the second stint in Korea took place around the time I was meeting Lani and Lono and learning Hawaiian from them, up to and just past my first Hawaiian words. Roughly Autumn, 1951.
But when? One clue to timing the memory of the second stint was that when he first heard me speaking Hawaiian around the house it was a surprise to him, and my Mother said, "He started doing it when you were gone."
Also there was a change in the rapes that had a bearing on the timing.
Before the change, the rapes were entirely vicious in nature. She was enjoying seeing me suffer, but not using the rapes to get sexual pleasure. At some point, the rapes tended to take place more often in the bath than in diaper changing, maybe just because my toilet-training at home was progressing. Then she started occasionally pulling her own pants down during the rapes and rubbing herself. She was using her anal raping of me as a form of live pornography to masturbate to.
Later on I found that she used rape in that way on a regular basis when my Father was unavailable sexually. So it always happened when he went on active duty. It also happened when he got onto drinking jags, when he would get drunk within an hour of arriving home every night. But that didn't go on so much until I was 8.
So, putting it all together, I think the second stint in Korea took place around the time I was meeting Lani and Lono and learning Hawaiian from them, up to and just past my first Hawaiian words. Roughly Autumn, 1951.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
My First Rapes
It will probably be hours before I can get all the Tahitian dance and drum videos loaded. So meanwhile, back to the story of my horrid childhood.
Good place for a warning. I am going to try to avoid salacious language, but there is no way to talk about child sexual abuse without some sick creep thinking you're trying to turn him or her on. So if you start to think I'm trying to help you get off, stop reading here and go browse real porn. Or scroll down to things I've posted that were deliberately erotic, like Sex, Art, Sex.
It was probably November, 1950, when I was brought home from the hospital. I was 1 year and four months, or I was a week old, depending on what you or I mean by "I". At first the daily routine was alternately boring and stressful. There was almost no joy. When both my parents were home and sober, there was silence or argument. Often the argument was about me.
My Mother repeatedly called me the Freak. She said I'd never speak or understand English, even though I was already understanding it. She couldn't tell. My Father sometimes seemed to agree with her by not challenging her about it. Other times they would get into heated arguments about it, which neither one could win. Only I could ever win.
They'd usually be drunk within two hours of my Father arriving home from work. After that the arguments would be about whose fault it was that it all happened. On weekends my Father would hold off getting drunk until the evenings. Otherwise the ritual was pretty much the same.
They rarely spoke directly to me for an entire year. I just learned words by listening to them talk to each other. My Mother tried to teach me simple commands, like "come" and "go", as if I were a dog.
Maybe once a week, or every other week, my parents would put me in the care of one of usually two other families. There was a family on one side that had a couple of little girls that would take me while my parents went out together. There was another one down the street in the other direction, who happened to be black. I remember that my Mother had no problems leaving me with the black family, or even visiting with them to socialize, but she wouldn't let my Father have them to our house as guests.
When my Father was out and I was home with my Mother, I was mostly neglected. She wouldn't feed me for the entire time my Father was away at work. If the weather kept me in the house she would keep me in diapers but rarely change them.
It was when she changed my diapers that the sexual abuse started. She would set me on the changing table and remove the dirty diaper. As she did I'd invariably get an erection. She'd clean me and then start playing with it. That was fine. I had no sense that it was inappropriate. But then she would get mean. She always had a lit cigarette, she was a chain smoker. She would wait until I was giggling, then lean forward and blow smoke in my face from an inch away, and laugh at my coughing. Then she'd drop glowing ashes onto my genitals.
In the 40s and early 50s there were pediatricians writing books advising the use of soap suppositories as a way to get your baby regular and on a schedule convenient for you. The people who came up with that were flakes in the tradition of John Harvey Kellogg, who deserves a whole post of his own. He's very relevant.
It may be because my Mother had read about the soap suppositories that she started cleaning my rectum with soap and then raping me with pieces of it. The progression from cleaning and nurturing to following quack advice to rape needs to be noted. One of the reasons Mothers don't get caught often enough raping their children is because they can arrange the scene so even if you walk in and catch them in the act, they can pass it off as care-taking. At the worst they get accused of using bad judgment. Malicious intent is almost always impossible to prove.
But I remember the way my Mother leered at me when she raped me, and I remember how she laughed when I cried and screamed. The malicious intent was obvious to me.
Good place for a warning. I am going to try to avoid salacious language, but there is no way to talk about child sexual abuse without some sick creep thinking you're trying to turn him or her on. So if you start to think I'm trying to help you get off, stop reading here and go browse real porn. Or scroll down to things I've posted that were deliberately erotic, like Sex, Art, Sex.
It was probably November, 1950, when I was brought home from the hospital. I was 1 year and four months, or I was a week old, depending on what you or I mean by "I". At first the daily routine was alternately boring and stressful. There was almost no joy. When both my parents were home and sober, there was silence or argument. Often the argument was about me.
My Mother repeatedly called me the Freak. She said I'd never speak or understand English, even though I was already understanding it. She couldn't tell. My Father sometimes seemed to agree with her by not challenging her about it. Other times they would get into heated arguments about it, which neither one could win. Only I could ever win.
They'd usually be drunk within two hours of my Father arriving home from work. After that the arguments would be about whose fault it was that it all happened. On weekends my Father would hold off getting drunk until the evenings. Otherwise the ritual was pretty much the same.
They rarely spoke directly to me for an entire year. I just learned words by listening to them talk to each other. My Mother tried to teach me simple commands, like "come" and "go", as if I were a dog.
Maybe once a week, or every other week, my parents would put me in the care of one of usually two other families. There was a family on one side that had a couple of little girls that would take me while my parents went out together. There was another one down the street in the other direction, who happened to be black. I remember that my Mother had no problems leaving me with the black family, or even visiting with them to socialize, but she wouldn't let my Father have them to our house as guests.
When my Father was out and I was home with my Mother, I was mostly neglected. She wouldn't feed me for the entire time my Father was away at work. If the weather kept me in the house she would keep me in diapers but rarely change them.
It was when she changed my diapers that the sexual abuse started. She would set me on the changing table and remove the dirty diaper. As she did I'd invariably get an erection. She'd clean me and then start playing with it. That was fine. I had no sense that it was inappropriate. But then she would get mean. She always had a lit cigarette, she was a chain smoker. She would wait until I was giggling, then lean forward and blow smoke in my face from an inch away, and laugh at my coughing. Then she'd drop glowing ashes onto my genitals.
In the 40s and early 50s there were pediatricians writing books advising the use of soap suppositories as a way to get your baby regular and on a schedule convenient for you. The people who came up with that were flakes in the tradition of John Harvey Kellogg, who deserves a whole post of his own. He's very relevant.
It may be because my Mother had read about the soap suppositories that she started cleaning my rectum with soap and then raping me with pieces of it. The progression from cleaning and nurturing to following quack advice to rape needs to be noted. One of the reasons Mothers don't get caught often enough raping their children is because they can arrange the scene so even if you walk in and catch them in the act, they can pass it off as care-taking. At the worst they get accused of using bad judgment. Malicious intent is almost always impossible to prove.
But I remember the way my Mother leered at me when she raped me, and I remember how she laughed when I cried and screamed. The malicious intent was obvious to me.
Friday, May 18, 2007
Rare Serious Poem
[Real Change published this poem soon after I decided I had finished it in 1995. It was illustrated on my Speakeasy website until I cleaned that up recently, along with a Part II, which I might post here later on.]
My Childhood Study of Christianity
OR Gloria in Excelsis Deo Part I:
Why I'll Be a Pagan 'Til Kingdom Come
I'll begin with a little pre-history -
My mother called me wild sometimes, sometimes a freak.
She often raped and beat and tortured me.
While my father just got drunk and shrieked.
At six I came to understand
that my parents were Christian
and that Good Christians are persecuted, not persecuting.
I further learned at seven
that Christ would bless Good Christians
and support them in their suffering,
buffering them, so to speak,
presumably from the
persecutions of the BAD Christians.
I had questions to ask of suitable authority.
Christianity itself was promising.
Somewhere in Christ and Christianity
there should be answers! (There'd better be.)
I learned to read, to speed my way to the grace
by which I would escape my tormenters,
or at least to face their torment.
Abraham, Isaac, and Joseph.
Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Josiah.
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,
666, Whore of Babylon
Paul aka Saul and all and all...
Shadrach Meschach Abednego
Gloria in Excelsis Deo
Plain of desolation
Mustard seed, Transfiguration
Michael, you row your boat ashore
Now Noah got no shore to row to.
Adam and Eve and Lilith makes three
days and three nights and the
burning lake was three times around
the walls of Jericho burning
incense, the Temple WAS rent
body and bread, blood and wine
Daniel in the den of lions
A generation of vipers
that gets only one sign
Captivity, Ecclesiastes
King Cyrus, Maccabes
Peter, get thee behind me
For it is right and meet
with all the angels to sing
Eli, Eli, lama Sabachtani
Melchizedek, priest-king
Kiss the ring! Kiss the ring!
Job was promising - you know the guy:
"Sorry Life! Woe and Strife! Teeth do Gnash!
Ain't got no Wife! Ain't got no Cash!
The Lord gave Ear
To Satan I Fear
So here I Stand, all covered in Rash."
But THEN God the Old-Testament-Lout steps out.
"I made Heaven and Earth," he says, "what are YOU worth?"
And Job shakes and quakes and begs for mercy, and just happens to get it.
None of which did anything for me, or managed to answer my questions -
- namely -
WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?
AND HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO DEAL WITH THEM?
Then there were Psalms.
Psalms, Canaanite Songs
in the Court of King David
"O sing praise to the almighty deity
Who makes sky, pie, and hairy flies alike..."
No, they don't say He makes pie
Mother makes pie and I don't care
Mother makes me cry and I don't care
Mother wants me to die and I don't care
The Psalms say God made the sky so I should shout Hallelujah.
How about I fart at His sky and cry out what's it to ya?
He who hath created me hath in addition created TOO MUCH SHIT!
But THEN, Psalm 23 was promising.
"Verily, though I walk blah blah blah
I shall fear no evil".
How's that work?
"The Lord is my shepherd?"
Framed on my Aunt's dresser.
The Sunday School Teacher Aunt.
HEY, maybe SHE'S the GOOD CHRISTIAN.
An operator lets me make the long distance call.
And I beg her to take me away from them all.
Four hours later I'm tortured by mother more than ever before -
raped by enema and beat an hour and a half and "Clean up the mess,
YOU made it" and HOW could I have made anything I'm not the same person I
was two hours ago. THEN there were two of me now there's one, twice.
"One against you, one against Aunt Snitch."
The Aunt who would have been a Good German in '41,
the one who verily fears no evil because
she hands over to it whatever it wants.
She DOES need a shepherd for a Lord.
So I quit Psalms until the age of ten.
Then one Sunday almost asleep in my pew,
Ready to give up entirely on Christianity,
The Psalm reader began Psalm 22:
"Lord, Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?"
Like it's a question? So I grabbed my Psalm book?
So I could look for myself and read along?
It's no question he read it wrong.
It's: LORD!
LORD!
WHY hast THOU FORSAKEN me?!
It's an accusation, backed up by the facts.
And it demands that THE Lord act NOW!
Why the reader couldn't read it right,
Why the Chaplain couldn't give it light,
No matter I knew it meant something
I'd find out for sure
I'd ask the Chaplain
on my way out the church -
Tell me what it means I said
It prefigures Christ he said
His words on the cross he said
The casting of lots he said
No,
Tell me what it means.
It's not just about
Christ,
It's about ALL people
What-does-it-mean!
After a wary glance at my parents
He bent down to whisper in my ear
"I believe you know too well what it means.
May God help you and forgive us all."
Yes, I did know what it meant -
I just wanted to know I wasn't alone
before my gods called me home
and stood the world upright again.
My Childhood Study of Christianity
OR Gloria in Excelsis Deo Part I:
Why I'll Be a Pagan 'Til Kingdom Come
I'll begin with a little pre-history -
My mother called me wild sometimes, sometimes a freak.
She often raped and beat and tortured me.
While my father just got drunk and shrieked.
At six I came to understand
that my parents were Christian
and that Good Christians are persecuted, not persecuting.
I further learned at seven
that Christ would bless Good Christians
and support them in their suffering,
buffering them, so to speak,
presumably from the
persecutions of the BAD Christians.
I had questions to ask of suitable authority.
Christianity itself was promising.
Somewhere in Christ and Christianity
there should be answers! (There'd better be.)
I learned to read, to speed my way to the grace
by which I would escape my tormenters,
or at least to face their torment.
Abraham, Isaac, and Joseph.Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Josiah.
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,
666, Whore of Babylon
Paul aka Saul and all and all...
Shadrach Meschach Abednego
Gloria in Excelsis Deo
Plain of desolation
Mustard seed, Transfiguration
Michael, you row your boat ashore
Now Noah got no shore to row to.
Adam and Eve and Lilith makes three
days and three nights and the
burning lake was three times around
the walls of Jericho burning
incense, the Temple WAS rent
body and bread, blood and wine
Daniel in the den of lions
A generation of vipers
that gets only one sign
Captivity, Ecclesiastes
King Cyrus, Maccabes
Peter, get thee behind me
For it is right and meet
with all the angels to sing
Eli, Eli, lama Sabachtani
Melchizedek, priest-king
Kiss the ring! Kiss the ring!
Job was promising - you know the guy:
"Sorry Life! Woe and Strife! Teeth do Gnash!
Ain't got no Wife! Ain't got no Cash!
The Lord gave Ear
To Satan I Fear
So here I Stand, all covered in Rash."
But THEN God the Old-Testament-Lout steps out.
"I made Heaven and Earth," he says, "what are YOU worth?"
And Job shakes and quakes and begs for mercy, and just happens to get it.
None of which did anything for me, or managed to answer my questions -- namely -
WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?
AND HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO DEAL WITH THEM?
Then there were Psalms.
Psalms, Canaanite Songs
in the Court of King David
"O sing praise to the almighty deity
Who makes sky, pie, and hairy flies alike..."
No, they don't say He makes pie
Mother makes pie and I don't care
Mother makes me cry and I don't care
Mother wants me to die and I don't care
The Psalms say God made the sky so I should shout Hallelujah.
How about I fart at His sky and cry out what's it to ya?
He who hath created me hath in addition created TOO MUCH SHIT!
But THEN, Psalm 23 was promising.
"Verily, though I walk blah blah blah
I shall fear no evil".
How's that work?
"The Lord is my shepherd?"
Framed on my Aunt's dresser.
The Sunday School Teacher Aunt.
HEY, maybe SHE'S the GOOD CHRISTIAN.
An operator lets me make the long distance call.
And I beg her to take me away from them all.
Four hours later I'm tortured by mother more than ever before -raped by enema and beat an hour and a half and "Clean up the mess,
YOU made it" and HOW could I have made anything I'm not the same person I
was two hours ago. THEN there were two of me now there's one, twice.
"One against you, one against Aunt Snitch."
The Aunt who would have been a Good German in '41,
the one who verily fears no evil because
she hands over to it whatever it wants.
She DOES need a shepherd for a Lord.
So I quit Psalms until the age of ten.
Then one Sunday almost asleep in my pew,
Ready to give up entirely on Christianity,
The Psalm reader began Psalm 22:
"Lord, Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?"
Like it's a question? So I grabbed my Psalm book?
So I could look for myself and read along?
It's no question he read it wrong.
It's: LORD!
LORD!
WHY hast THOU FORSAKEN me?!
It's an accusation, backed up by the facts.
And it demands that THE Lord act NOW!
Why the reader couldn't read it right,
Why the Chaplain couldn't give it light,
No matter I knew it meant something
I'd find out for sure
I'd ask the Chaplain
on my way out the church -
Tell me what it means I said
It prefigures Christ he said
His words on the cross he said
The casting of lots he said
No,
Tell me what it means.
It's not just about
Christ,
It's about ALL people
What-does-it-mean!
After a wary glance at my parents
He bent down to whisper in my ear
"I believe you know too well what it means.
May God help you and forgive us all."
Yes, I did know what it meant -
I just wanted to know I wasn't alone
before my gods called me home
and stood the world upright again.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
