Doing my usual rounds yesterday, I read Greg's most recent entry about Rape, Abuse and Incest. It's interesting that I happened to read it yesterday, after having just experienced a huge realization on the same subject the night before. While watching What's Love Got to Do with It (a movie I've seen a hundred times before) on Wednesday night, I saw something in Tina Turner's story that I'd never identified with before. For the first time in my life, I saw myself in her misery.
It's strange. I had no idea before that I was one of those girls, the same as the ones you see in films, who 'yes sir, no sir', get beaten halfway to death and then cry themselves to sleep in a locked bathroom. It's like I've been asleep for the last 16 years or so, having completely blocked out all recollections of the things I had been through with my father. As I watched that night, though, and noticed my internal commentary on her actions in the movie, a wave of revelation hit me. All of a sudden, my memory had been restored. And now I remember. I remember the way I used to look at myself in that bathroom mirror, hair a mess and face ridden with self-hatred, telling myself it was all my fault. I'd cry and cry for hours, and my family would look away and continue believing that there was nothing wrong going on because I had no scars to prove any of it.
Since then it's like I've unlocked the door to all these unwanted memories. Scenes keep flashing in front of my eyes of the multiple-hour long yelling fits and rage sessions where he would sit there and scream at me for being a disgrace, a disappointment and a good for nothing, poor excuse for a daughter, while all I was allowed to do was cry. And he would beat each topic to death like I just couldn't hurt enough for him. I couldn't just get in trouble for ditching school with my friends one day; I was a terrible person for it and I had to sit there and be told all the reasons why I was a terrible person. For hours. Sometimes days.
I remember the time I got in trouble for one thing or another, and my mom wouldn't let me come back to her house until he'd had his turn with me, so I deliberately slept for an entire day, just dreading what he was going to do and say. I'd wake up, notice the time, tremble and cry for a bit, and then force myself to sleep for another few hours.
I remember the time he called me dirty, which was right after I got raped the first time (though he didn't know) and I was acting out because I had no idea how to deal with the consequent feelings. I remember wearing an extra large Silverchair shirt and these dingy, beat up burgundy corduroys around everywhere, because I didn't want to see my form. And I had just started using pot, which helped me bury some of that anxiety. I had gotten in trouble for something small, I seem to remember, but he beat me like a horse for it; he would be wound up abusing me for a few hours and would break intermittently for jokes with the rest of the family. He said I was disgusting and he made me take a shower. He wasn't satisfied with the first shower, and he smelled my fucking hair, telling me it wasn't clean enough, and when I washed it again he still wasn't satisfied. He eventually made my grandmother wash my hair and then comb it and put it up. I was fucking thirteen years old. I remember sitting there in that chair with grandma's hands in my hair, watching him tell jokes about my stepmom's dad to the rest of the family, and after half an hour of sitting there, my eyes finally dried up, I cracked a grin at some asinine thing he said. And I remember him looking at me and being like, "Nuh uh, don't you dare laugh. I'm not done with you yet. You disgust me."
And I remember the time he said he wished I wasn't a part of his family, when he was driving me home from his house, and the complete powerlessness I resented bearing as he dropped me off and then told me to give him a kiss goodbye.
I remember the way he stood there and watched when my stepmom beat me with shoes and with belts and with whatever the fuck else she could find, and the way he didn't care to defend me from her wrath. I remember trying to explain myself the first time she beat me (I had gotten in trouble for talking back to her, and I think all I really said was, "don't worry, sister, we can show dad your dance when he gets home"), and the way she asserted that I was a liar on top of being a fucking brat.
And then I fast forward to being 18, after the second rape happened, and I remember picking up the phone when my stepmom called to say she was sorry to hear about what I'd been through. After a couple minutes she passed the phone to my father, who spoke coldly and sternly when he bluntly told me that that's what I get for going to parties.
Rape, he said, was what I deserved for going to parties.
Some of these memories I remember pretty well, and I've told a few key people about them when it's been appropriate. But some of these I'd completely blocked out of all knowledge, and I'm only now really seeing them as real, serious abuse.
For some reason, I've known intellectually the meaning of emotional abuse, and I've known that it's applied to me and my situation, but it never actually sunk in that I've been dealing with an abuser; it never actually occurred to me that it isn't that we just "have a strained relationship" or even that my father is just a giant dillhole, but that I was actually abused growing up, and that that puts him in a completely different light.
This doesn't seem like good news, but oh my god it is. First, it's just the acknowledgement that it is NOT this relationship that I have to salvage or repair; I do NOT have to find a common ground with this man. Rather, I have to defeat the hell out of him and what his abuse means for who I've become. I have to refute this idea that I am partially to blame for our dysfunction and that he's right because he's older which seems to be what everyone in my family believes (hell, I've lost the support of absolutely everyone in my family because of him and the way he either fools or scares them into submission). And secondly, it means that now that I know what I'm working with I have so much more to gain.
I have a lot to explore now, with regards to the two rapes. But this is heavy enough, and a giant step in the direction of reconciliation and peace.
As personal and as scary as this is, it's important for me to write it here. Very few of us have any voice at all, and even fewer are aware that emotional abuse is still abuse. Those of us who didn't have scars to hide and wished we did, both so that it'd weigh on our hearts a little less, and so that people would believe us when we said it hurt, need a voice too.
It took me 26 years to be able to identify with someone who had been abused. It's my hope that the more stories like these that are told, the more young women and men will be saved from the dangerous route to self-discovery that I took.
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A big thank you to Greg for being courageous enough to share her story and for inspiring me to talk about mine.