My Story 1

This post contains abuse, if abuse stories trigger you, this one might. This story is to encourage myself that what is past, happened, is past, and no longer has to affect me, and to encourage others that perhaps they are not as alone as they think. This is the first story in a series.

Fear. So tangible, so constant, the taste on my tongue, the feeling in my gut, the panic in my mind.

I watched as it happened again, I was running in circles, circles, circles, trying to get away, I couldn’t because someone was holding my hair while everything that could be hit was being hit with a dowel rod.  I was running because I was panicked I was running because I could not stop. Eventually, I collapsed onto the floor and I was thrown up onto the bed, and I was spanked, until I guess mom just couldn’t hit me anymore. I had to lay there and catch my breath before I could move, and even then I was limping. For once mom did not give me a lecture, I just limped out of the room. I told myself I wouldn’t cry ever again. I tried to fathom what I had done wrong, what had caused this spanking and I just couldn’t. I simply did not know what I had even done.

Spanking involved being repeatedly hit with a dowel rod or a paint stick or a carbon arrow, when mom was in control it involved being hit anywhere from 3 to 20 times, with slight pauses in between each blow. When she wasn’t in control, when she was just infuriated she would hit until she was tired. Most of the times when she was in control was when I was in trouble in a group context like, when my sister closest to me and I both did something wrong. Somehow I, above all the other kids could make her infuriated with me.  

I was walking through the house the hangers clanking on my arm, trying to get some fun out of the house work, when she yells at me, “Stop making so much unnecessary noise!” Quickly, quickly for a five year-old I stopped the hangers. She turned towards me infuriated, “I TOLD YOU TO STOP.  I GUESS YOU HAD TO JUST DO IT ONE MORE TIME.” Then more quietly, “Come on you’re getting a spanking.” It was the first spanking of the day, and for some reason that day sticks in my mind because I literally think I got spanked about every five minutes, and not once was I even aware I was doing something wrong, or I was actually trying to be helpful, like when I spilt the food on the floor because I was trying to move it for my oldest sister who was cooking.

I tried to figure out how to be a better child, and realized I was simply doomed to be a horrible person, no matter what I did, I was wrong and in trouble. I decided then to try to be invisible.

When I was 10, during George W. Bush’s first election counting I got caught for not doing math. I stopped doing math for at least a solid year. I hated math, I hated school for that matter. I’m not the type of child who can just learn from a book and teach themselves, I don’t learn that way, I need to be taught. My mother gave us our books, gave us our schedule, gave us our chores, and expected us to complete them. She spent her time either on the computer, or in her room on the phone. When she got a laptop she was pretty much inseparable from it. When she came to “check” our work, either our chores, or our school work she was always random, and we never knew when it would happen.

I got called into her room and asked to bring her my math book that hadn’t been checked in a year. I frantically tried to cover it up by changing the dates in my previous math book, but that didn’t work, I was in trouble and I knew it. I know that I got spanked by mom and I don’t remember it, at this point in my life anything that was traumatic to me seems to have been simply edited out. I have a vague knowledge that she was intensely angry, that she called me lazy, and that I was told I would never finish school, I don’t remember the spanking. Which means it wasn’t three swats on the backside, it was brutal enough to be removed from my memory. When my father got home he was told what happened and that I hadn’t been punished for it. So he spanked me too, I don’t remember that either, and it had dawned on me recently that I do not remember a single spanking my father gave me, not one, and I know he gave me quite a few.

From then on I was supposed to do twice the amount of math work every day so I could catch up, and I was supposed to do it in my mother’s room, and I got spanked for two weeks every time I was supposed to do math. Each time I was hit 20 times. To this day doing math causes me to feel panicky, and I have to talk myself through the entire process.

I don’t remember not being bruised, or having a hard time sitting for long periods of time because it just hurt, the entire time I was growing up. I once thought I wasn't afraid of anything, but now I realize, that I was always afraid, and fear just became a normal part of my life, and when something is normal enough you forget that it's even there.

Memory loss is something that became common after about five, I remember being three, and four pretty vividly, my mom taught first grade at a Christian school and I was kept by someone else most of the time I was four. From then on anything that was traumatic was simply just edited out. Now I know that I disassociate when I feel like I’m in a traumatic situation. So in essence these things did not happen to me, they happened to that little girl over there who is an idiot and who also happens to look a lot like me. To this day when I remember something happening, I don’t remember it from my perspective; I remember it as if I watched the entire thing, including me from the opposite corner of the room. In other words when I picture a memory I picture myself along with everyone else.

I just now am coming to the realization that to remember things like this is not normal.

Now that I’m an adult I’m trying to re-connect with the parts of me that hold the edited out memories. Now I have a confusing pile of cut out pictures, like someone cut a picture out of a book, and without the context of the page they don’t make any sense. In the telling of these stories, I am trying to put the cut outs back into the pages they came from in my story, the problem is some of them are simply so brutal and disturbing I’m not sure how they could have really happened, and some of them involve people in my life that everyone else, including my siblings still hold in high regard. So the question I am constantly faced with is Real, or not real? And the answer is becoming more and more often, real. I’m just desperately trying to remember that not only is it real, but also far in my past. 

An Old Story Never Told

I have spent countless hours reading a new website that I have found—Homeschoolers anonymous.

After reading their stories and being broken hearted over their lives I know it is time to tell my own story. I begin to realize that I am not alone that what I experienced was not a one-time experience, there are a lot of other people who experienced the same thing.

See I grew up in this great community of homeschoolers where everyone had great experiences and they all planned on homeschooling their own children one day. I just thought there was something wrong with me, I was flawed. Now I know that my experience was not the only one, and that even if for them homeschooling was a great experience and not a suffocating trap at home, for me it was never great.

Right after I wrote the last post on this blog promising to write more often, my life was bombarded with thoughts images and struggle. You see my memories are a stained glass, fragmented thoughts, if you’ve read the Hunger Games I feel a lot like Peeta unsure what is real and what is not real. I couldn’t write for fear of slandering someone in a way that wasn’t true.

I can’t not write anymore.

I’m going to write what I remember, leaving the fear of “disrespecting” and “not honoring my parents” out, I’m not sure how long it will take me to post the story or if anyone will read it, it will be what I remember, and it will be for me. I think it is high time I allowed myself to accept the memories and accept that they are all in the past. I’m writing not to hurt anyone, I am writing so that I might move on.

Here's to writing the past out so I can recognize that it has passed and move on.