Once Upon a Time

**** It occurs to me, somewhat belatedly as I originally posted this entry yesterday, that I should warn you that this entry is a bit graphic and more than a bit of a downer. In other words, don't read it if you don't feel like having horrifying images put into your head. If you already read it and feel suitably grossed out, sorry I forgot to put this notice up first. ****

My apologies if this entry isn't up to the usual standards. It's been an unusual last few days and this morning I feel particularly strange. I have the weirdest feeling like I'm walking around in a dream and the air is as thick as water and it's hard to move. Even my eyelids are heavy. I've felt this way before, kind of... when I screw up and accidentally take my antidepressant twice the evening before. I wonder If I accidentally did that again? It's not dangerous or anything... I only take the half dose pill because the full dose makes me kinda lifeless and saps all of my energy. That's it... next time I go to CVS I'm investing in one of those day-of-the-week pill organizers so I don't have to worry about it anymore. At least my migraine is gone at last... it's been about three days this time. It was a nice little present to wake up without it today.

My son just tripped and fell over the little soup pot that I let him play with and hurt his knee a little. It felt good to cuddle him and kiss his ouchies away. I'm drinking my usual two cups of Earl Grey this morning and it's helping a bit with the sluggishness. I still feel off, though. I guess considering the circumstances, it's to be expected.

Last night I was finally able to say the words for the first time since that mind-blowing therapy session last Thursday. And now I'm about to type them for the first time. I was raped. There, I wrote it. What a mess this entry must be. My brain feels like it's filled with cobwebs and vegetable oil... if that makes any sense.

I couldn't help but laugh a bit as I re-read that last paragraph. Not exactly clear, is it? No, my therapist didn't rape me. What a thought. Actually, I'm extremely fond of my therapist, professionally speaking. I highly recommend him.

Geez, I feel like such a mess right now. Kinda numb, kinda half dead. I'm usually such a glass is half full kind of person. This is so lame.

I've spent the last eleven and a half years believing that what my then-stepfather did to me back then was all my fault. I allowed it to happen, after all. I put myself in that situation, I thought. He was dumb and animalistic... like an ape or a football player. Of course he would do that to me. Probably couldn't help himself. I let him. It was my fault. Only... it wasn't my fault. That's what my doctor says. That's what my friends say. That's what I'm both hopeful and afraid to believe. I confessed the events to my shrink about two weeks ago, braced and prepared for the judgement that would inevitably follow. He allowed me some time to let it sink in, let me try to see things with some more clarity. In the following session, on Thursday, I told him that I was beginning to accept that the situation wasn't entirely my fault... that I was set up to fail by numerous circumstances. He just kept saying "noooo..." in that expectant way he always does when he's trying to get me to realize something. After a while, I got frustrated and confused. "What do you want me to say?!" I complained. "What am I not doing right? I don't understand!" In the course of a couple minutes, my fragile confidence was shattered.

I didn't know what realization he was trying to lead me to. I couldn't imagine what it could be. I had admitted that I was at least partly to blame for what had happened to me... wasn't it enough? Was it... worse? Was it wishful thinking that I had believed he was trying to tell me it wasn't all my fault to begin with? Was he about to tell me that I had to accept responsibility for what had happened? It was the only thing I could guess. I cried then, surprised how suddenly and easily the tears came as I shook and shivered, leaning forward on the couch. I felt slumped and stiff at the same time. I was bracing myself for what he would say as best I could.

What he would say hit me in the forehead like a baseball bat. I could feel the impact of his words physically as well as mentally. He told me that it wasn't my fault at all. Not at all. Not at all? What? I didn't know what to think. In fact, I was having great difficulty thinking at all. In that moment, I felt as though any number of random, impossible things could start happening. Up was down, air was soup... would the coffee table and tissue box in front of me start levitating for no apparent reason? Was I dreaming? What?

He pretty much had to spell it out for me a bit at a time. I was raped and it wasn't my fault. Someone had taken gross advantage of me, had taken away my ability to say no by deceptively plying me with hard liquor and telling me that it would help me with my persistant, scary, asthma and bronchitis-induced coughing.

Let me back up a little. My lungs were filled with a lot of fluid at the time and I was having a lot of trouble breathing. I was very scared as I had never been so sick before and thought I might even be dying. Years later, after many such episodes, I would come to understand that this recurring condition is just a severely unpleasant (though potentially fatal, if unchecked) consequence of my ashtma. If I get a cold, it often settles dangerously in my chest and lingers there for weeks, if not months. Sometimes I have to to to the hospital for a breathing treatment and a healthy dose of steroids. At the time, however, seventeen years old and clueless, I had no idea what was happening to me. It was so hard to breathe... I remember deliberately not breathing several times for as long as possible just to let my body rest for a moment. Taking the next breath was such a painful chore... I wasn't sure if I even wanted to keep on trying.

To make matters worse, I was alone. I was living at my grandparent's house at the time and they had decided to go spend a couple of days with the extended family in Kentucky. Although my grandfather was in the early stages of alzheimer's and thus unable to understand the severity of the situation, I remember feeling that my grandmother was in denial (as she often is) about how serious my illness had gotten. I was so disappointed in her. It certainly didn't inspire me to want to fight my illness any more. Although she expressed concern, she wasn't about to let it interfere with her chance to go "down home" for a couple of days. She wasn't about to walk all the way back upstairs to check on me again on account of her bad knee and stultifying laziness. It wasn't the first time she had let me down... goodness knows it wouldn't be the last.

So I was in the house alone. I was scared and bereft of anyone to care for me. Although I was used to both fear and emotional deprivation due to an absent father and years of emotional abuse by my alcoholic, mentally unstable mother, I was totally unprepared for just how desperate and lonely I would feel. This was new and, though I'd been contemplating suicide since the ripe old age of nine or so thanks to Mom's constant assurances that I was nothing but a "little shit" and a thankless burden, I didn't want to die for some strange reason. Especially alone. Not like that... it was just too sudden and scary and helpless.

I stumbled out of bed and made my way carefully down the dark staircase. I felt very weak and tired. I made my way to the phone and called the only number that I knew would reach someone available right then... my friends and boyfriend were all working at the time. That left my mother's house. Any port in a storm, I guessed. My stepfather answered. My mother was out doing something at the time, it seemed, though I can't recall what. She never did get out much, preferring instead to sit around the kitchen drinking Milwakee's Best Light until the garbage overflowed with spent cans. To this day, whenever I hear the sound of an empty can rattling around, I have a flashback of living in that house. On one occasion, I asked her about it... why she was drinking so many beers. She made her usual defiant reply that she had only drank two of them. When I pointed out that the now-stuffed trash can had been practically empty that morning, she got very angry and proceeded to change the topic to what a bad person I was. She just loved regaling me with observations on that topic... I've spent many a four-hour time slot being baraged with manic assertions of my own wickedness alternating with crazed, tearful tellings and retellings of the physical abuse she endured at the hands of various husbands and boyfriends. I hate that goddamn kitchen table. My childhood was slowly murdered at it. Over the course of several years, I was forced to sit there and try to comfort my abuser in the barren hope that she would cheer up and leave me alone or at the very least not take her hatred of life out on me. It almost never worked. She vacillated between states of misery and rage wildly and with little to no provocation. As a child growing up alone in that house, I did the best I could to learn from and adapt to her chaotic moodswings, attempting to pick up on the subtle hints of body language that signaled a coming shift from one state to the other. It rarely helped, but on the occasions that it did, the relief was such that all my efforts felt worth it. What I wouldn't give, after all, for a single hour's reprieve from the terrible onslaught that awaited me every evening at the hands of that madwoman. I was completely helpless in that house and, though I hated what she did to me, I couldn't help but pity her for her suffering. I couldn't help but be hurt by her plain-to-see hatred of me and her jealous wrath when anything seemed to go right in my life. I still wanted to be loved so badly, to be told that I wasn't so bad. I learned to hate not only life, but myself, deep inside. She constantly reminded me that life is a malevolent, painful thing and insisted that the rug would be pulled out from under me every time things seemed to be going well. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy; not only did she make damn sure that I suffered for all of my sucesses, she railed at me until I was mistrustful of them as well. She planted a seed of doubt and pessimism that she tirelessly nurtured with her constant negativity.

My, what a digression. And just when I was getting to the good part... well, I suppose it's best to release these things in the order in which they well up. I have a lot of pain to work through before I can truly see things clearly.

For years, I carried this... "thing" around in my chest. It felt like a physical object, a shard of glass or something, was lodged in there. When something would hit me just the right way, it would crack through my carefully constructed shell and I would start bleeding inside all over again. I mention all this to illustrate the circumstances that led to me being sick and alone at my grandparent's house that night. I was utterly miserable both inside and out... and so alone. So, when my stepfather offered to come over and keep me company, I said sure. Why not? He might make the same old suggestive comments as ever, groping me whenever he felt like it, but at least I wouldn't be alone. My mother and grandmother both knew about the groping and the comments... I had told them about it several times. I remember that it was hard to do because not only was it embarassing, but I had the unshakable impression that I was "ratting someone out." What if he found out about it and got angry? What if he really didn't mean anything by it, despite how uncomfortable it made me? I was seventeen and very jaded, but still a child.

My family's response? Grandma: "Well, it isn't really hurting anything. Sucks that you dislike it. What would you like for dinner?" Mom: "You're such a prude. What's wrong with you?"

Yeah. I fell through so many cracks I still can't believe it. In high school, I inevitably began exhibiting several symptoms of depression. A teacher finally noticed and pulled me aside to give me some advice... yay, right? Wrong. Her advice? "You wear your heart on your sleeve. You shouldn't act like that in front of people." Gee thanks, teach. So much for having anyone in my corner. To be fair, my boyfriend at the time tried his best to be supportive, but he was a real marshmallow. What's a teenage boy supposed to do with all this baggage and craziness in a world where every adult seemed to have it in for me? Plus I was a wreck. My physics teacher was both a moron and a pervert and no girl who didn't stay after school regularly to be "tutored" i.e., get a nice, creepy shoulder massage, had a chance. At first, I taught myself physics from the textbook, but when my answers were the same as the ones as the back of the book and they were still "wrong," I talked to my mother about it. What a waste of time. She totally pulled a grandma and did nothing about it, saying that the guy was old so he probably had tenure and couldn't be fired. Without even trying. Oh, well... at least she gave me permission to fail the class. Thanks so much, Mom. Jesus.

I also had another student in my class that was tirelessly hitting on me. It was disgusting... he was disgusting. Not only unattractive, but just plain creepy. When I couldn't take any more of his gross, persistant attempts to get in my pants, I told my boyfriend, the marshmallow. Unfortunately, he was the type of person who wouldn't stand up to a flea and only offered moral support. Marshmallow! Anyway, when that wasn't good enough, I gathered up my courage and had a nice little chat about it with one of my teachers, who happened to be a priest. Guess how that went? Oh, just guess. Ding, ding, we have a winner! "So he hasn't actually touched you? Sorry, can't help you." Lovely.

Fortunately the last two situations eventually resolved themselves as I gradually became a grumpy husk of a person that no one wanted to hit on. Well, no one except my stepfather.

Do you get the sense that I'm going out of my way to avoid the topic du jour? So do I... though I don't consciously mean to. Well, let's get to it, then. The point is that at this time I had an established pattern of being victimized and told that there was nothing that could be done about it. I was alone in my corner, sick and tired... literally. Just so worn down emotionally. When my stepfather came over, I was already feeling a little bit better from getting up and moving around. Previously, I had been laying on my back, which was a dangerous mistake. I didn't know it, but I had making my condition worse by forcing the congestion to settle into my lungs. Now I know better and I try to sleep sitting up if I'm sick like that.

Anyway, I was feeling a bit better the more I made myself get up and move around. After my stepfather came over and we chatted for a bit, he suggested that perhaps a bit of "grandpa's cough medicine" would help. In other words, whiskey. Really? I wondered. He said that it could help me to work up some of the stuff in my lungs. Well, that sure sounded nice. Miserable as I was, I also thought it might be nice to cop a bit of a buzz to make myself feel better. Now I'd had alcohol before... liquor even, in small amounts. Nothing extreme... just raiding the liquor cabinet to try some things at a friend's house, drinking just enough to feel the effects. That kind of thing. I'd never been really drunk before. I'd never had the means. My stepfather graciously offered to drive us up to the local Marathon station and buy us some alcohol. I wasn't sure about leaving the house, even for a little while, but I was starting to think that the fresh air might do me even more good. God knows grandma wouldn't lift a finger to dust her own house and it was quite stuffy in there. Okay, why not. Sure, let's do it.

So we went. Sure enough, the fresh air did help and I felt a little bit better still. Still very shitty, but hopeful and relieved. I remember that I was intimidated by the thought of whiskey for some reason and asked him if he thought a bottle of long island iced tea would help instead. Somehow it sounded less daunting. He shrugged that he didn't see why not. Cool... except that we all know how the story ends. I was so excited to have a possible means of feeling better and so utterly clueless about how to drink responsibly that I drank way too much too fast and ended up getting quite intoxicated. I remember thinking that the drink sure couldn't have much iced tea in it because it was really strong and didn't taste good at all. Ah, what an innocent kid. To this day I have no idea what was in that pre-made mixed drink because I've never wanted to drink it again, but wikipedia assures me that it usually consists of equal parts vodka, gin, tequila, and rum, among other things. Jesus, no wonder I got so trashed. I probably hadn't eaten anything in a long time, either. Eating's hard when you're fighting for every breath.

Anyway, the point is that I was pretty messed up and certainly not in a clear-thinking state of mind... not that I'd been before the addition of the alcohol, but still. It was a new sensation: the numbness and false sense of cheer was making me feel even better, though it was clearly artificial. It was then that my stepfather started being his usual, lecherous self again. Less concern, more lewd comments and such. He leered at me suggestively from across the table. Gross. Suddenly, I had an idea. It was a strange one, but it just might work. Since I knew from previous experience that resistance of any kind was worthless... maybe if I let him... ick... have his way with me, just once, he would have what he wanted and leave me alone for good. Maybe I had finally found a way out, I thought. Maybe then it could finally stop! Of course, I would have to pretend to like it -- gross -- but I thought I could manage that, thanks to the alcohol. Maybe I'd get lucky and not even remember it. Suddenly the whole thing seemed like too good a deal to pass up. Besides, I remember thinking, I can't stand myself anyway and I probably deserve this, if not worse. Maybe if I'm lucky, I'll die of exertion or shame. That would be nice. Fuck it.

So that's how it happened. It wasn't easy to pretend that I was actually enjoying the nastiness that followed. I had to ask him to do me from behind just because I couldn't stand looking at him. Even then, I still had to beg him to finish... but I was careful to do so as if it was what I wanted. I had to keep my pain inside, where it belonged. Maybe it would finally do me in. No such luck.

Afterwards, he put the nail in the coffin by thanking me. You know, in the warm, sincere way that you would thank someone for letting you borrow some money or use their car or something. He said that it was his dream come true. I wish he'd just smacked me instead. It was like rubbing salt in a wound... those words have haunted me for years now. I couldn't kick him out fast enough. I needed to be alone after that.

He didn't want to leave, but I insisted that I had friends coming over and it might not look good if he was still hanging around my grandparent's house. Thankfully, he saw the sense in that. I called my friends and boyfriend (not the marshmallow one, he was out of the picture by then), who were free by then, and asked them to come over and hang out because I had the place to myself. I also took a bath. I sat there, feeling shocked and numb, staring at a few smallish bruises on my legs and wondering how they'd gotten there. I didn't even know. My mind had been on vacation for the last hour or so. Someplace lovely and dark where I could wrap my self-loathing around myself like a warm blanket.

By the time my friends showed up, I was a freakin' wreck. Still drunk, artificially exhuberant, and probably more than a little crazed-looking. I didn't tell them what had just happened, of course. I was embarassed and I knew that they wouldn't understand. How could they? "Yeah, hey, nice to see you. Don't mind the dissheveled appearance and the drunkenness, I just gave my nasty old stepdad free reign to rut on me like the town whore. Oh, don't worry, it's okay because that's how I'm going to get him to stop hitting on me." Yeah, right. Even though I was still drunk, it was starting to make a lot less sense. In fact, I immediately grabbed my boyfriend and without explaining myself pretty much demanded that he sleep with me right then. I badly needed to put as much distance between myself and that last encounter as I possibly could -- starting NOW. Unsurprisingly, he didn't question it much and I practically threw him into the bedroom and proceeded to try and forget all about what I had just been through. Messed up, huh? Well, strange as it sounds, I genuinely hadn't been expecting to survive what I had just been through. I didn't know what to do now that it looked like I wasn't going to die from it. I tried to erase it the only way I knew how. What a mess.

My friends were no doubt very confused, but it wasn't entirely unlike me to go to extremes of behavior since I was more than a little unstable at the time, both before and after the rape. The event had done so much worse than kill me, it had tainted me somehow. Now I really was as terrible and wretched as my mother had always told me I was. If I'd had any chance at redemption, I had destroyed it with this one foolish act. This choice. Look what I had allowed to happen! Look what I had done! It didn't matter that I had been seriously ill, emotionally abused, sexually harassed, and utterly wasted. Those were excuses, I told myself. It was easy to believe it. I already hated myself. Accepting was just the next logical step. I watched as my last surviving scrap of dignity burned into nothingness. I did this to myself, I thought.

True to form, things got much worse before they got better. Much worse. To begin with, of course my stepfather didn't stop hitting on me. Of course not. That only got worse... ickier. I was grateful that the alcohol had shielded me from the bulk of the memories, but what remained was all too clear. I had to see it in his eyes. Every time he looked at me, I could see it. Yes, it was so much worse. I felt very grateful to be living at my grandparents' house so that I didn't have to see him too often after that. I was still living in the house where it had happened though, so even then there was no escape.

Not to mention the fact that I had to see him at work several times a week. Oh, guess what... I forgot to mention that thanks to my mother's wheedling, I had quit my old job several months ago and gone to work for the same goddamn market research business that my stepfather worked for. So I had to look at his creepyass face several times a week from across the room in the call center. To make matters worse, I could tell beyond a shadow of a doubt that he had told one of his coworkers about it. The coworker clearly blamed me for what had happened... I sometimes caught him giving me disapproving glares when he thought I wasn't looking. Who knew what he'd told our coworker? Who knew what the guy thought of me, only having heard my stepfather's side of the story? I'm sure it wasn't flattering, as I often saw him trying very hard not to show his disgust when he was required to talk to me. It was such a sudden shift of attitude for him that it was obvious he must know something. Though I burned with shame every day, I dared say nothing. I did my best to act as if nothing was different by day and got as stoned as I could manage by night. Pot helped me disconnect from reality and numbed the pain nicely.

It took me six years to dig myself out of my pot-induced stagnation. After a while, it had just become a habit, anyway. I don't have a problem with occasional pot use, I just don't care for using it to duck out from life. Not for me, anyway. I'm done with all that. I think it's been four or five years now since I've smoked it at all. Funny to think of that now... the person I was then. Now I'm a wife and mother... a housewife and mother, thank you very much. I love my job. I'm pretty damn good at it, I think. Not today, though. Today I wrote a longass blog and let the dishes pile up in the sink. Christ, there's still half-eaten apple slices from lunch sitting on my son's highchair. You know what? My husband can take care of that today. Mama's taking the day off... because life is good right now, despite a really bad start. And I deserve it.

It's taken over eleven years for me to get to this point. I can start to believe, with the help of some loving friends and a medical professional, that what that man did to me was, in fact, rape. I just have to keep reminding myself that it what it was for so many reasons... because he took away my ability to say no to him through the deceptive use of alcohol... because even wasted as I was, I never wanted it, so it wasn't truly consensual (saith my doctor)... and because the state of Ohio says that there is no such thing as consensual sex between a stepparent and child, due to the nature of the family unit and the state's interest in protecting it. So it looks like I'm cleared socially, medically, and even legally. And I never even expected it... wow.

This will take a while to fully sink in. It's a real roller coaster. Pro: It's not my fault. Con: I got raped.

That's it, I'm ordering a pizza tonight. I am so not cooking dinner.