.. that I was not like the others?  Birth?  Well, perhaps not that early. But my life was never like the others, and it didn’t take long for me to realize I was not like the others.

TRIGGER AREA AHEAD 
Abuse. Craziness. The beginning of the bipolar roller coaster. The root of C-PTSD. Yuk. Head off elsewhere if you’re not in a place where you can cope with the graphic stuff.

Seriously.

 The abbreviated story of me.

I had a white german shepherd for a baby sitter when I was 18 months or so. I remember that dog. I remember the farm, which we left before I was 2, and the dog at the farm.  I used to ride her like a pony. She wouldn’t let me off the blanket, which was probably good as I might have ended up in the pond if she neglected her duties.  I don’t remember where my mother was.  Off somewhere, I guess, since she’s told me since that she used to leave me with the dog.

Was I normal then?  I don’t know. But my life surely wasn’t.

The dog babysitter gave way to the evil great aunt babysitter.  A spoonful of honey in one hand and a whack on the ass for being bad in the other.  ”It’s for your own good.”  Then the grandmother… omg hot sauce on the fingers of a little kid trying to figure out just what rubbing her crotch felt like.  ”You’ll learn not to do THAT ever again.”  The lesson not to touch the stove by sticking my hand on it.  What the hell could I have done by then to need such treatment?  Nothing, I’m sure now.  But back then, I didn’t know.  I knew then that I was not normal, I was not good.  I just knew I was bad and needed to learn.

I was around two and a half to three when the sexual abuse started.  It started with a pink hairbrush with white bristles, over the arm of a red patent leather armchair.  I don’t know what on earth I’d done to get spanked. The spanking turned quickly into something infinitely worse, though.  I can still see the hairs on the back of his hand, holding that brush.  ”You be good or I’ll kill your mother and your brother when they get home.”  Yessir.  I was bad, and bad meant hell punishement, and isolation and reponsibility.  Hell went on and on and on.

Around the hairbrush time I had a dream.  A nightmare. Remember, this is a 3 year old me, dreaming this. Laying on my belly, wheeled in to an operating theater on a gurney. (My brother had required surgery recently.) I didn’t know what I’d done wrong, what was wrong with me, I tried so hard, but I was tied down, naked to that gurney.  And my family was there, in the gallery to watch: my father, my mother, my grandmother, my Uncle J, my great-aunts, my grandfather.  I was cold. They laughed at me. The doctor came in to cut me open, to cut out whatever wrongness I had in me.  But my laughing family started throwing things at me.  My grandmother’s huge beefsteak tomatoes. Silverware. Books. Some hitting me, some not.  The doctor could not cut out my badness, fix me, with my family throwing things at me. He threw his hands in the air and left. Left me with nothing but my family’s derision for company. I woke up screaming. That nightmare still affects me today and I’m unable to sleep lying on my stomach. 

That three year old girl, me, was not normal.  She knew she, and only she, was responsible for her family’s life. If she screwed up, her mother and brother would die. And she herself would find many kinds of hell visited upon her. She tried to protect her brother from her father’s abuse, and ultimately failed.  Scorched soul of a small child.  I wasn’t normal. Who could be in the midst of all that?

By the age of four I’d decided to learn everything. If I just learned everything I could find a way to be free of the punishment.  No more hot stoves. No more hot sauce.  No more pink hairbrushes and fucks up the ass. At least, that was the dream.

Abuse continued.  My father escalated with his abusive sexual madness.  Sex with a small child. Ugh. But I loved him, oh how I loved him.  I came to wait quietly for the abuse, to be “loved” for a little while, to be able to yet again save my family. It all got tangled in my head.

And my grandmother, my father’s mother… one thing after another. She never listened. She tortured me and terrified me. For my own good, of course.  ”You aren’t the Immi I love.” And where was my mother? The one whose life I was trying to save? I don’t know. She’s a faded vision who worshipped the ground they walked on. They could do no wrong.  So the little girl screaming in the bathroom at night trying to stop the pain of her crotch with talcum powder was ignored. Me. I try not to think of it. But mostly I try not to relive it over and over and over.

“Have you had a BM today?”  That’s how I learned to lie.

My quest for escape led me to learn all I could in a kindergarten where they didn’t teach us to read. But the alphabet, I got that. I wanted to read. If I could just read I could learn anything, do anything, get away from it all. I quit school the first day because they didn’t teach me to read.  Why should I bother with it then?  I’d learn some other way.  

Then we moved from the house where I got yelled at for trying to set my white dog free, and got bitten by another dog for breathing, and learned that storms were the only time I could be sure daddy wouldn’t abuse me but would just hug me.  I loved storms.  And in the new house, I learned to read.  And math. And geography.  I wanted it all.  

By six years old I was flying up and dropping down.  One night I’d sit up all night and do an entire year’s worth of math work.  Then a week or so later I’d be so low I could barely drag my way through school.  A few weeks later I’d memorize all the spelling words for the rest of the year.  I didn’t care much about making friends.  People were dangerous anyway.  I had one or two and that was enough. But the roller coaster took me up to maniacally, frantically struggle to learn everything before it took me down to barely breathing.  (”She’s just tired. Get her up. She shouldn’t be so lazy.”) Lying on the floor just made sense, since I could hardly move.  Then my energy would just come back. I drew pictures. I made sculpture. (”Get that mud out of my kitchen.”) I painted.  And I read. Little kid with nose in a book, me.  As long as  I was quiet, reading, studying, no matter how wild I felt,  they might not notice me or might leave me alone. In between being so hopeless and morose I could hardly get out of bed I was a wild thing learning everything I could.  I still wonder why no one noticed.  (”She’s got an artistic temperment.”)

I prayed my father would die one minute. I sat watching him from the doorway of his office wishing he’d love me the next.  He didn’t die.  He did break his back stepping off a curb.  He never touched me after that.  And I stood in the doorway of his bedroom watching him scream in pain.  I thought that was wonderful.  But it also killed me inside that he ignored me. For the next dozen years. That year I also peed in my pants in class (”If you really had to go and couldn’t get my attention, you should have just gone to the bathroom.”  ”But you said not to leave the room for anything.”) and kissed my first boy.

She’s a little artist. So creative. So smart. Just a little shy. “I’m so proud of her.”  ”You’re not the Immi I love.”  ”Why would she do that to you? You must be lying.”

By third grade I had a fantasy world that I can remember disappearing into. Just not there any more. If I wasn’t learning, I was there.  The real world sucked too much to stay.  

Fourth grade, parents divorced, we moved.  Playing with kites with my mother. She crashed my kite to the ground before I ever got to fly it. Screaming and throwing myself at the ground, screaming at her for being a fucked up idiot. Throwing the boys down the hill at school onto the rocks.  Then nothing. Gone into my head and unable to do more than slug through the day like a nearly dead thing.  Next the scent of pine needles and feeling alive again.  Read read read, cram a whole year into a night, why not, I can’t sleep. Slipping into the closet so I could read comic books at all hours, with the door cracked so I could see dawn come and creep back to bed to pretend sleep.  Going going going then crash. 

Starting to forget not to talk to my fantasy friends in public. Not often, but some. Started seeing ghosts and auras around things.  Is that nuts, I wondered.  I never asked.  I couldn’t afford to draw attention to myself. (”Just sit there while we….”)

…. to be continued some day

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 at 8:42 am and is filed under bipolar, c-ptsd, days of a weird life, depression, mental illness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.