As a child, I was abused. That’s a good place for a bent heart to start, but I don’t say that as necessarily a defining factor in my world. This means I am not going to lean heavily into the surviving/overcoming/triumphal-release trope, because the truth is I didn’t really survive it. I can’t speak for other “survivors’ but I don’t think it is as prevalent as it seems. What I know about that—and not just from this life-thread but others as well—the strong survivor thing is a construct that is more about people wanting to believe in the fundamental goodness and wholesomeness of life, so they are more than willing to cast “survivors” in a light that makes themselves feel better about their own place in the world, and to allow for some distance between their own happy existence and a world they don’t—or can’t—understand. At least now really
This entry is more of an overview than a revelation of the many details and fragments—pieces of me—that would take a lifetime to reassemble, even if some have yet to come together. There will be time enough for details.
I was abused by my brother: Emotionally, physically and sexually. He probably abused the little girls I played with too. It was at the dawn of my time on earth, so some memories are a little hazy, but some are as vivid as if they are occurring today. And they are.
How do I know he abused the little girls I played with? It goes back to this one fragment of a memory. One day when I was 5 or 6, I remember talking to a little girl and asking if she wanted to come over and play—what little kids did, especially back then. And she said this: “No. My mother says I can’t go to your house because of your brother.”
I mention that story right here for a reason. What did my parents do about this abuse? This question is not only relevant to me but also to that little girl. If that girl told her mother what was going on, wouldn’t her parents have said something to my parents about my brother abusing their daughter? I don’t have an answer to that question because it is possible that with the values that existed a long time ago, a parent could have told a child she can’t go to an abuser’s house and left it that that. But that question is also relevant when it comes to what my parent’s did to address the abuse that I know they knew about. Nothing.
They didn’t do a thing. In fact, my mother doted on that particular brother, and both of my parents wondered what the heck was wrong with me. I was the fourth and last in a family of all boys, and I was the defective one. I carried the mark of The Defective with me, sometimes wearing it proudly, sometime angrily, sometimes numb to it. I was never the sick one, but I was always the one who was treated, examined, ignored.
As the defective, I had a collection of maladies. I wet my bed until I was in middle school. I stuttered—badly. I was given to having nightmares. I was frequently moody, something my mother would call, in a note to the school, periods of low self-esteem. And on top of that, I would mysteriously get sick about once a month. This sickness gave me vertigo and I could not walk or stand without throwing up. The only remedy for it was to sleep—after sleeping, I would be reset. That happened at least monthly for the first twenty years of my life. At some point, they ran a series of physical tests on me: Blood tests, brain scans, ENT doctors. But I was not the person who needed the tests, was I? And because of all these things, I was socially awkward and isolated. {When I was at summer camp some of the other campers had a “fun” nickname for me: puke-a-matic.)
In future entries, I will talk more about the climate I was born into, but for now, let’s just say that my parents were obsessed with not drawing attention to themselves, with maintaining the status quo, with not making waves, with being the perfect family. This didn’t fit the narrative and so they did nothing.
My father was a doctor. He headed a department of a major university. My mother was trained as a nurse but lived her life as a doctor’s wife. Yeah, we’ll need to talk about them.