Monday, September 24, 2012

HOME IS WHERE YOU ARE NEVER YOURSELF #incest #child sexual abuse

"Home. Define home. Home is where your mother rarely smiles, your father rules, and both mother and child have no say about anything at all. Home is where both mother and child wait on father hand and foot, where each thinks carefully before saying something that might bring on father's rage. Home is where you lie about your activities and dreams and keep your thoughts to yourself because to tell the truth will bring a sudden blinding vicious blow to the head or ears or an onslaught of filthy, denigrating words or a volley of hard kicks to your backside. Home is where who you are, is who your father wants you to be, not who you are:  Home is where you are never yourself. Home is where you no longer know who you are. Home is the last place on earth you want to be. 

I hated coming home from school. Any sense of freedom I had during the day disappeared the instant I stepped inside the duplex, even though my father wouldn't yet be home for a couple of hours. I'd get stuck into my homework immediately: it had to all be done by the time he arrived so I could take my place beside him on that hated unfolded bed chesterfield in front of the T.V. for the rest of the evening. Mom would arrive home shortly after I did, smelling as she had for years of sweet biscuit dust and furiously rubbing her itchy nose while she bashed the meat with a meat hammer. Though she never said it, every  bang of that hammer was a release of her own deep seated anger, a hopeless rebellion against her life. Every blow echoed through my own helplessness. We were two women held captive by fear, ashamed of our weakness and disgusted by our own inability to change our lives.  As dad's arrival time approached, we both sensed the tension mounting in each other, but we never talked about it. We both knew talking about our lives would most likely be a waste of time: neither of us had the courage to do anything about them."



For the first time dear reader, I'm sharing with you a tiny segment from my book, "Coming Out From Under".  How am I doing? I'm now more than half-way through my true story of "incest in the first degree", my words for how I see sexual abuse of a child by his/her biological parent. 

Incest in the first degree is not quite the same, for me, as incest by a step-parent. I carry my father's genes within me. Yes, there is no difference in how much the victim suffers, or the key role a step-parent has in a child's life,  but the biological parent gave the victim life in the first place. Now that same parent, sometimes for years,  murders that same child. It's a slow form of filicide (i.e killing one's own child).

According to another victim of incest, I have forgiven him as I cannot quite bring myself to hate him. I never did, though I got close enough to want to kill him.  But I valued my own life more and I think that's what sustained me, carried me through the 11 years of sexual abuse and finally away from it. 

But even as I write my story, I still cannot understand, and never will, why the biological parent is attracted sexually to his/her own child. I certainly never, at any point, found my father sexually attractive. From the get-go, the idea of dad sticking his penis in me, touching my breasts, slobbering me with lascivious kisses was utterly abhorrent and repulsive, as I'm sure it is to any who don't want and never invited such activity. And by the time it had ended, it amazed me, and still does, that he never really saw anything wrong with it. For him, "loving" me this way was no different from any other kind of love. In desperation, I'd say to him that this isn't the kind of "love" a father gives a child. He'd just brush it off and say "Love is love. A father loves everything about his child. What's the difference?" And as I write in the excerpt above, I felt weak, powerless, bereft of words to fight incest in the first degree. He was so much stronger and smarter than I was in every way.

Well that's all want to share today. I've taken the first step in giving you a peek into my book. Much of it is a lot nittier and grittier than that.  But other sections will make you forget temporarily that you are reading a true story of incest. For me, and I think for the reader, those segments are needed. We can only handle so much bad news at one time, don't you think?

So now, I'll ask again as I did in my last post ... but got no response: how am I doing? Am I on the right track? Will YOU want to read my book when I'm done? I hope to hear from you this time. Thanks for subscribing, reading and commenting. Your thoughts and reactions are needed to keep me coming out from under. 

6 comments:

  1. I think this is amazing! Your words carried me back to my own life @ home of living hell, even though I was fortunate enough for it to stop just shy of touching or incest. Your thoughts & memories of details are what drew me in & made me want to keep reading. Can't wait to read more!

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  2. Ah thanks so much Kim. Somehow I knew you'd take time to respond. The way you care for the members of your own group and promote others on FB is awesome. And now, you give me what I most need: support for my efforts here. REally appreciate that so much. This is so necessary when you're writing such a personal account. The questions are always there: how much is too much? what will make readers keep reading? what will turn them off? If they are victim/survivors too, will they identify and relate to my own story? Will what I write trigger memories they don't want to deal with ... etc etc. But in the end, I can really only write it as I feel it if I'm to be honest with myself and my readers.

    So, I thank you for your feedback Kim. I intend to share bits and pieces here from time to time but not all of it. I want it to be a book folks are wanting to read ... ALL of it LOL. Certainly don't want to put it all in my blog or some nefarious person will steal it and tell the world it's theirs!

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  3. It's hard stuff to read and to write . . . well-written, evocative. I suggest that you mix the hard stuff in with either present tense safe times or times in the past that weren't occasions for abuse. That is at least what I do in my own writings. xoxo

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  4. Thanks El. And that's EXACTLY what I'm doing. Like I said, I need the relief to handle the grief and so does the reader. There's plenty of lighter moments, even funny ones, in my tale. And those are being shared too. The book is, in the end, positive .. a true story with an almost fairy tale ending :))

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  5. What I just read sounds & feels familiar to me & could have come from my own childhood. I will read your book.

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    1. Thanks Patricia. I'm really beginning to look forward to sharing the full story with you and others in my SPEAK OUT FROM UNDER group. I'm sure many will identify, if not as much with the sexual abuse I suffered, then with the emotions and insecurity I felt and still suffer from, though less, today.

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