Love Shouldn't Hurt

I had a post in mind today about being poor and how tired I was of never having enough money. Then I read Granny's newest post and found this:


My father is friendly, charismatic, funny, helpful, and entertaining. He is also an abuser. People who have met him often can't believe that he could be capable of some of the things he has done. So often people believe that they would know an abusive person if they saw one. The sad truth is that no, you can't. People like that are very good at hiding that part of themselves from the outside world.

As he was a trucker, we didn't see him often until he hurt his back when I was about 10, so I think there was much less of it before then. I'm not sure whether it had to do with it being pre-accident, or just that we didn't live with him on a daily basis. I suspect it was a little of both. I think that I saved my brothers from a lot of it growing up. I was always trying to protect them. I was the oldest, I felt it was my responsibility to keep them safe. My mom had it much worse than we did, though. I probably don't know the half of it, but the things I do know make me sick.

He was both emotionally and physically abusive. Especially after he hurt his back. He was on medication that made him hallucinate and paranoid. He believed my mother was cheating on him with a multitude of other guys while she was at work. He saw phantom numbers written everywhere- on the walls, under the mattress, on his power tools, in chalk on the sidewalk. He would show my brothers and me the numbers he thought he saw, and threatened to punish us if we "lied" and said we didn't see them.

I was constantly telling him no, daddy, there were no numbers. He was imagining things. He didn't believe me and I would get in trouble. I tried so hard to protect my brothers from that, but I couldn't be there all the time. They weren't as strong as I was, and so he would get them alone, they would agree with whatever he said. They were too afraid not to.

Once, when I was about 11, I did something bad (I can't for the life of me remember what), and he instructed me to go out to one of the trees in the back yard and cut off a switch. Then he had me stand on a chair in front of the dinner table where my brothers were eating dinner, had me pull down my pants, and beat me with it until all the leaves came off. It's funny, even now I cringe at using the word "beat". I know I didn't deserve it, and I never felt as if the abuse was my fault, but I still feel some bizarre need to protect him, to make light of it.

There are other incidents that I can think of, but this is the one that always stands out in my mind. Not even so much for the pain, but the sheer humiliation. I couldn't look my brothers in the eye for days afterward. There was name calling, being belittled for mistakes, being told I was fat.

I so wanted to be perfect. I wanted to make my dad proud. I did the best I could in school because I knew I could and because it was one area where I excelled. I was daddy's little helper, I was always there to help him out. I wanted to be useful. It hurts, to think of the stark contrast between the man who beat me with the switch and the man who taught me to use power tools and let me design and help build an easel for my birthday present. How could they be the same person? How could that kind, funny, charming man that was my father turn into the raving, angry asshole who would hit his wife and his kids?

I hate that I have experienced this. The worst part of it all is that I know I am capable of it. I have a violent temper and when I'm angry my words are like daggers. I try so hard to avoid getting angry, because I hate the person I become. The meds have helped, but I still see the tendency and it comes out far too often for my liking. I have such a hard time talking about it, admitting that I could do something like this. I don't want my son to grow up ever knowing that kind of pain. Love shouldn't hurt. Mommy and daddy should be the embodiment of safety and happiness for a child. It's so hard to say something like that about yourself, though. When I am in public, talking to a stranger, even a counselor or psychiatrist, I change. I am suddenly happy, charming, friendly, wouldn't-hurt-a-fly. It's effortless. It's also why my bipolar went undiagnosed for so long. And digging beneath that, showing someone the black marks on my soul is just about the hardest thing I can imagine doing.

I have been a victim of domestic abuse. I don't really talk about it often, but occasionally something happens to remind me. Yesterday my brother and I were talking and he casually mentioned a time my dad beat him. It occurred to me that normal families don't have those kinds of conversations. It made me so sad to hear him say that. We need to find a way to stop this-- to protect those weaker than ourselves from those that would hurt them. Sometimes we even need to protect them from ourselves. We need to stop the cycle. Every victim is a potential future abuser-- how's that for irony?

--Dragon Read more!

Myself and Someone Like Me... Not Alone After All

This is in response to Thordora's August Pulsate Olympics. You can see the original post here.

This is the story of my first real friend.

I've moved more times in my life than some people two and three times my age. Most of the moves happened before I even turned 13. We were always on the move-- looking back, it's almost as if we were running from something. We never stayed long enough for me to make friends; when I did, we moved and I had to start all over. Eventually I just stopped trying. After my mom and dad divorced, however, the constant moving stopped. Then my mom married my stepdad, Russ, and we moved to a little town about 30 miles from Chico.

After we moved I was enrolled in the local junior high. It was all the same to me. One school was like any other-- a place filled with strangers I would never know. After a few weeks, people started to try and befriend me. I would smile and laugh with them, but I didn't bother getting too attached. One girl, Carleigh, was a lot of fun to be around, if you could get her away from her best friend, Amy, and her boyfriend. I had never met anyone more irritating in my life than this guy. His name was Matt. Anytime I would be talking to Carleigh he would appear out of thin air and interrupt the conversation. I absolutely could not stand him.

I hated riding the bus with the other kids, so I would catch a ride to school from my mom or Russ on their way to work every morning. This meant that I ended up getting to school around 6am. Most people didn't start arriving until about 7:30. That is, except one other person... Matt. We would sit on opposite sides of the cafeteria and refuse to look in the direction of the other person. It was like some sort of private feud.

The school we went to was adjacent to and shared a cafeteria with an elementary school. They had a teacher who would wait in the cafeteria for any kids who got dropped off early and provided activities to keep them busy until school started. I would talk to her sometimes about different things like books or school projects I was working on. On the day before the science fair, I brought in my science fair project. It was something involving using color and black and white film to take photographs. One was a black and white photo of my shadow on a creek.

We were talking about it and Matt came over and started commenting on my project. Wonder of wonders-- he really liked it. Eventually the teacher got busy setting up projects for the elementary school kids, and Matt and I continued talking. The conversation shifted from the science fair project to other things. We just kept talking and talking until the bell rang, and we were startled to find that we would be late to class. At some point during this conversation, we each realized that the other was not, in fact, a total nusiance. And so we became friends.

Every morning after that we would meet in the morning and spend the rest of the time until school started walking around talking or playing basket ball or tag when no one was around to laugh at us for being childish. We found out how much we had in common and how isolated we always felt compared to the other kids. But not anymore. For the first time in my life I had someone to talk to. And so, it seemed, did he.

The best part of this story: we are still friends today. In fact, he still has the picture of my shadow over the creek.

This is a picture of Matt last year in Iraq:



--Dragon Read more!