Inspired by Reading Some Other Blogs

I've spent a lot of time reading some blogs about sexual abuse, and they have been heavy. Sometimes the pain has been so raw I could practically see it on the screen, but the truth was just as clear, too. And it pains me that sexual abuse is so common. So many of us have suffered. The devastation that it causes, the absolute changes in our souls and in our hearts--that damage alone should be a crime, in addition to the crime of invading our bodies and our boundaries and our minds.

I've seen a common thread in the attitudes we had to develop to protect ourselves emotionally. I hated the bad attitude I had to adopt at home as a teenager, but it was my cloak. It came in handy to try to keep some sense of self and to deflect the BS with which I was regularly served. "I deserved it", she would tell me, although she would not admit what "it" was. The bruises and handprints/fingerprints? Or the other?

My mother's cruel mouth was also my teacher. The horrible things she said--OMG, inside I would cringe at them and even now, a totally different lifetime later, I am horrified at the memories. But I no longer own the shame of those words. She was incredibly cruel about my walk; "Shake it, don't break it!"she would say loudly to me in public. One time she caught me glancing (glancing, mind you) at a cute boy (I was about 13 at the time), she told me that I was humiliating her by acting like a bitch in heat just wanting him to fuck me. Isn't that what every shy and sexually abused 13-y/o girl wants to hear from her mother? Interesting how I could glance at a boy in public and humiliate her but my own father grabbing my ass and admiring it in front of her wasn't embarrassing for anyone? And when I would get mad at his grabbing me and try to get his hands off me, they both would laugh at my anger and he would keep describing its "perfect shape." But apparently that didn't bother her, or didn't bother her enough to ever say, "Stop it" or "That's not funny." No, that she could tolerate.

Wow, I thought I had completely locked those thoughts away and put them in a "nightmare" box. Really, to know me today, you would have no idea the household into which I was born. My love of reading enabled me to educate myself at a very early age about abuse and its cycle, about what was "normal", etc. I wonder if the librarian thought anything at the time about a child checking out a book entitled "Breaking the Cycle of Abuse"? Maybe she thought it was for a school project.


After I left home, I cleaned up my language, dropped the attitude I had had to assume in order to survive that environment and tried to forget everything ugly that I had had to endure. I much prefer the decency and civility of my current life. I try to be the best person I can be for my husband, and I expect the same. It hurts to remember the armor I used to have to carry when I was a child and I do not intend on living in a household like that again.