mainsqueeze's Diaryland Diary

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trying hard or hardly trying?

Lately, I�ve been thinking a lot about how I�ve spent the better part of my life feeling dirty. Not dirty like sexual dirty, but dirty in a whole different way. Molu once wrote about growing up poor and feeling, even as a financially-stable adult, that it had left her marked in some way-- I think that I kind of agree. I mean, I do agree.
This whole internal discourse was spurred into action by my sudden realization that Ben, the awesomely adorable guy that I currently have a major crush on, is Clean. Clean like, you know, he didn�t suffer an abusive childhood, and he wasn�t poor, and he wasn�t the driver in a car accident that killed his big brother. As far as I know, anyhow-- the really absurd part of all of this is that those things very well could have happened to him. I don�t actually know, but I do know that there is some huge, intangible difference between our lives. He�s Clean. I�m Dirty.
So, yeah, I feel dirty. In Women�s Studies last semester, the professor asked those of us who had suffered abuse to stand. It was voluntary, of course, and I voluntarily kept my ass firmly planted in my seat because there is a very determined part of me that still feels vaguely nasty and tainted by the things that happened to me when I was a kid. I still feel ashamed, and I know I shouldn�t, but I do. I don�t talk about it very often, even in this journal. It embarrasses me, makes me feel like the people that I chose to tell are secretly clucking with pity and just, you know, judging me.
I want to spill it. It does still hurt, no matter how much I deny it. I once told a close friend that I was glad that I suffered child abuse because it made me the person I am: strong, tough, and totally intolerant of any violence whatsoever, but the bulk of that statement is a total lie. Going through what I did made me tough on the outside, sure, but trying to unlearn the things that my stepfather taught me about myself-- that I was ugly, fat, lazy, stupid, useless, selfish, et cetera--has not been an easy task.
My Mother married my stepfather, Dave, when I was six years old. They were too poor for a proper honeymoon so we stayed at an aunt�s house in Arizona. I remember that during the honeymoon, my stepfather slapped my mother on her thigh and left a huge red handprint that stayed for at least a few days. Shortly after the �honeymoon,� we moved to a small duplex in Bullhead City, Arizona, and things only got worse. One of my most vivid childhood memories is of my stepfather holding an iron above my mom�s head and clutching her throat with the other, screaming so loud that his face was beet red. He asked me if I wanted him to kill my mother. I ran next door and called the police. Dave was held for one night and came home early the next morning. That same day I went to school with a fat lip and a black eye, which I was supposed to tell people was because I bumped into a wall. He told us that if we ever left, he would find us and kill us both. So we stayed.
My childhood was riddled with weird rules and rituals, all designed to avoid making Dave angry and getting myself or my mother into trouble. Nobody was allowed to call our house before 11am or after 6pm. Showers were to be taken before bed because the sound of the water running woke him up in the morning. The cordless phone had to be placed back on the charger immediately after use. No television or radio while he was sleeping. The smallest things could snowball way out of control-- I once left the cap off of the toothpaste tube and was punished by having two fingers on my right hand broken. Anything could set him off. There were never enough rules, and we couldn�t follow them close enough. We found out about new rules the hard way.
His abuse was not limited to the physical variety, either. When I was nine, I was put on a six-hundred calorie a day diet because I was �too fat.� If I did not practice the piano for an hour after school, I got the shit beat out of me, which inevitably led to my mother being beaten in some way for defending me. My mom was a whore, a slut, a bitch, and a cunt. I was a fat, lazy, selfish, stupid little bitch. My mom�s family was crazy, delusional, nosy, and hell-bound. In Dave�s mind, he didn�t hit us because he was an insane, abusive piece of shit but because we deserved it. We were asking for it. We needed it.
The worst came after my mother became pregnant with my sister. Dave had been convinced he was infertile and beat my pregnant mother regularly, screaming about how she was a filthy, cheating whore. When my sister was born, she looked just like him. At age two my cherubic little sister began parroting her father and telling my mother that he was going to kill her, throw her out the window, beat her face in. My run-ins with Dave had been fairly infrequent until I turned eleven or so. Shortly after I turned twelve, I stayed out five minutes after my curfew, 6pm, and Dave spit on my face and choked me until I lost consciousness. It must have scared him because when I woke up, he was rocking me in his arms and crying.
I became intensely protective of my sister and began locking both of us in the closest room when he started beating our mother. When I was fourteen, I apparently crossed the line when I refused to unlock the bathroom door to give him access to my sister after he had left our mom bleeding on the kitchen floor. Dave kicked the bathroom door down, snatched my sobbing sister, and drove away with her. They were gone for three days. The police did nothing. When he came back, I was immediately targeted as the source of his rage. After a day or two of frightening silence he cornered me against a sliding glass door after I came home from school and began punching my face and stomach. He then began choking me, and right before I lost consciousness, I managed to grab a random aerosol can off of the counter and I sprayed him in the eyes. It was the only time I remember fighting back.
Shortly after this incident, Dave and I had our last encounter. I was babysitting my sister and a friend of hers, and they were in the bathtub off of the master bedroom. I was lying on the floor, watching a movie. When Dave came home, he discovered that I had broken one of the oldest rules and I had left the cordless phone off of the charger. Not only that, but I had eaten some vanilla ice cream that was apparently his and left the spoon in the sink. I don�t actually remember what happened very clearly. I said something to him, some sort of excuse about why the phone was off the hook, and the next thing I knew, I was suspended in the air by my neck. I don�t know how much time passed before I woke up, but when I did, the girls were screaming in the bathtub, my stepfather was bleeding heavily from the arm, and our family dog was standing over me with his hackles raised, growling at Dave. The dog, Riley, had ripped a massive chunk from his arm and would not leave my side. Dave devoted the next several days not to apologizing to me, but to trying to regain the trust of the dog.
When she came home from work that night, I told my mother that I couldn�t do it anymore. If she didn�t leave him, I was moving to Michigan with my father. We went to the police station a few days later and they took pictures of my body, the palm-shaped bruises on my back, thighs, and upper arms, and the black fingerprints around my neck. My lower lip had been punctured by my teeth. Both eyes were swollen and purple. A restraining order was filed, police protection was (finally) given, and the divorce process began. We were divorced of him.
And the thing is, he didn�t really leave us, not yet. When I was fifteen I attacked my mother and did the same thing he had, left her with a black eye, crying on the kitchen floor. I must have squelched that memory pretty well because I didn�t remember it at all until my mom mentioned it several years later. We had been so well-trained to follow all of Dave�s completely random rules that it took at least two years before I realized that I could take showers before school in the morning. I had a violent phase, got over it, developed bulimia because I was a fat, ugly, disgusting slob, and I am still getting over that one. My sister, until she was about six or so, would run to strange men in the park or at the gas station and ask them to be her dad. We are so much better now, but we still feel it every once in awhile. I feel it a lot: dirty.
How do you really get over that? I guess I�ve done fairly well. If a man makes a sudden movement, I no longer flinch. I leave my phone off the charger all the fucking time, ha ha. Getting better has been hard, and that feeling of shame still lingers.
So that�s how I�m dirty. My closest friends are dirty, too-- Zach because his father beat him growing up, Ed because he was the driver in the car accident that killed his brother, Erika because her strict Mormon parents alternated between ignoring her and doling out physical punishment for minor misdeeds. And every once in awhile, I meet a clean person, and I am reminded of how I became so fucking filthy in the first place. I know it wasn�t my fault, and I�m getting over the shame, but it never really rinses off. I am hoping that if I open up about it, I can really get over it, forever. I�m trying. I really am.

5:04 a.m. - 2007-01-20

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