This post is about memories of child sexual abuse and more that I knew were there but didn’t have access to. These memories are very detailed now and I need to get them out into the air where they can be looked at, remembered and finally removed from the depths of my psyche. I am healing. But if you’re pretty triggered, don’t read this. I don’t have many followers so there’s always that safety belt.

These are things that are so awful to me, they need to be said out loud.

Also, with this Ramsay Hunt crap, I can’t see very well so I don’t know how to fix the formatting here. But here we go. I am writing this letter to my own self:

LETTER TO DEBBIE:

Dear Debbie,

What in the hell is happening to me? I have Ramsey Hunt Syndrome. I’m in pain and the steroids are messing up my calm.Things are coming back to me, things that happened to me. Unspeakable things that I need to say out loud.

I was raised by a monster. Not just a child molester, not just a freak. An out and out psychotic monster.
I’ve seen things and I’ve buried them and now they’re popping up like moles in my garden. I don’t want them. Please I don’t want to know these things. I was doing fine, goddamit just fucking fine.

My first memory that came back: I was maybe two years old. I was wearing shorts so the weather must have been warm. He put me on his lap. He pulled out his pocket knife and ran it gently inside my thighs. No cuts, just a tickle.

Don’t tell.
Ok.

Other memories. Then he graduated. He did stuff to me. He would grab my young hand and place it over his erect penis and push my hand to pump on him. 4 years old.

Don’t tell.
Ok.

My mother’s mother was raised by Catholic nuns in the early 1900’s. I was trained from the time I could listen not to let others touch my private parts. Not even myself. It was dirty and a horrible sin and there would be nothing but shame on me if I touched myself.

But she didn’t mention my father. Or my uncle. Or my neighbor. Or the others.
I was raised to be a good girl. It was the 1950’s. Never raise a fuss, don’t complain and most of all:

Don’t tell.
Ok.

I’ve experienced things. It was my normal childhood. Because I was dirty and ashamed, I was quiet. I didn’t talk much and was painfully shy.There was no one to talk to because I was completely alone in the world, just me and my grimacing shame.

Memory: Our house had two doors to the bathroom. One in the kitchen and one through the back bedroom. Young and potty trained me in the bathroom and quietly the bedroom door would open and my uncle would come in. He showed me his greasy red penis, purple veins, pushing it into my face. He put his giant fingers inside my little girl’s body. His thick tongue on my face.

Don’t tell.
Ok.

I became afraid of the bathroom. When I had to pee, I would go find a quiet corner anywhere, squat down and squeeze with all my might until the need to urinate dissipated. I remember horrible back pain from this but it kept me out of the bathroom.

My mother was puzzled and asked if it would be better if the toilet was in the kitchen. I was so happy because I thought in my child brain that it was actually a possibility. It wasn’t.

Don’t tell.
Ok.

At night I slept on the top bunk of cheap metal bunk beds. I wet the bed constantly to the point that the saturated mattress dripped on my brother’s head sleeping below. I slept under a bare light bulb just inches from my face. But still the monsters came for me in the night. The atrocities.

And still, I was told, “Don’t tell.”
Ok.

These memories are flooding over me so quickly I am shaking. They’ve been buried for so long. I don’t want them to come out.

When I was newly married, my first husband wanted a child of his own. I had severe problems with fertility, from the years of abuse as well as a long lasting infection from an IUD. The doctor said the infection was because I wasn’t clean. Again, I’m dirty. Sinful. Except I was impulsively clean but he was a man and a doctor so I believed him.

I had one Fallopian tube, riddled with scar tissue. The surgery opened it up and a plastic tube was placed inside to keep it open in the hopes I could conceive. I was placed on bed rest for six weeks, given massive doses of steroids to slow down the healing. And because I was so obsessively busy, I was also given high doses of morphine. The combination of heavy drugs messed up my head.

I spent the majority of my time on the sofa. The drugs made me pretty goofy. I couldn’t sleep but would lie there at night in the darkness, dreaming, but being awake. I would get up and move items around the room because they would weird me out.

One night, I had an awake dream. I saw a portion of a kitchen. The old wood cabinets were painted a bright red but there were strips of paint missing, peeled away. The linoleum floor was grey and cracked. There was an aura of dirt. Sitting on the floor there was a little girl, a toddler really, maybe 18 months old, not quite two. She had dark curly hair and blue eyes. The eyes gave off an air of innocence and calm. She looked at me quietly. She was wearing a white frilly dress and it was filthy from the grime.

I realized at that moment that I was looking at myself. Goddammit! I was just a tiny little fucking innocent baby and not one thing that was done to me was my fault. This dream changed my life. It freed me from the life long guilt and shame. It wasn’t my fucking fault. It just was not my fucking fault at all. I wasn’t given a choice, I was preyed upon by malicious sick monsters. God damn it why was that so hard to understand? I was freed from the guilt that had imprisoned me for so long.

Why are victims blaming themselves? It’s because we’re groomed to feel guilty and ashamed. It’s how these perverts keep us in line. And you know what? First of all if you’ve never had this experience, you’re fucking lucky. You won the baby lotto. A victim can go through years of therapy and your brain will say, yes, I was just a child, not my fault, not my fault. But you go on and the guilt and blame just sit there, they get no more attention because your brain knows it wasn’t your fault. But it’s still there, haunting you deep inside. Until you can feel that innocence in your heart like I did, it won’t go away. It changed my life. I was proud to be a survivor.

And I don’t know if there is a drug around that can fix that shit.
Where was my mother? Why didn’t she protect me? How is it even possible that she didn’t know? All the indications were there, almost slapping her in the face. I peed the bed until I was 12, I sucked my finger until I was 12. I was unable to look at people. I was weird. I was quiet.

And my mom was busy. She had seven kids, I was number two and the first daughter so helped her with the babies.

My mother suffered from severe depression hidden by a wicked sense of humor (Robin Williams, hello). When she gave birth to me in New York, they put her in a sanitarium for six weeks and gave her shock treatments. My aunt took care of me back then. I was a very quiet baby she said. I was no trouble.

My father’s family talked them into moving to Washington where they could “get help” for her. It didn’t work out that way. These women (they weren’t even his family, he had been kidnapped) were hillbilly assholes who treated my mom with outright disdain. They made fun of her accent, her inability to cook and they made sure all of us kids followed suit.

Memory: When I was six I had to babysit my baby brother (he was an infant) while he took my mother out for the evening. The baby cried almost all night. Daylight came and he came home alone. He told me that mom had spent the night somewhere.

Later that day she came home. She was covered in blood and strange clothing. On her deathbed, she told me he had drugged her and left her in the woods, and he had done unspeakable things to her. She had no memory of what had happened except she was naked and knocked on someone’s door for help. They brought her home. But she knew things had happened to her.

No consequences.

Memories pouring out that I can’t stop: He, taking young me aside and showing me pictures of my mother, obviously drugged, in poses with animals. He showed me pictures of things that were so perverted and so bad, I immediately hid them away so I didn’t have to know them.

Don’t tell.
Ok.

So many more of these. I can’t stop them anymore and I can’t stop shaking. I’ve fought for a normal life all my life and I am a happy person. I have my soul mate husband, I have my children, my dogs, my art and some amazing friends that mean so much to me I could weep with gratitude. But fuck the perverts who robbed me of my childhood and my innocence.

How can I get this nightmare to stop? My mother died of colon cancer at 45. I took care of her. Before she died she spoke of the things that happened but I tuned her out. I told my counselor later that of course she died, what other options were left to her?

Enough for now. I’m despondent. I need these memories to stop.

But right now besides all the emotion, I am so very angry. Why do people hurt babies? I’m intelligent. I was tested in high school and my IQ scored well above average. The counselors couldn’t understand why I skipped school, hung out with the drug crowd, why I didn’t care. Why I kept punishing myself.

But what could I have been? What if I had been treated like a child instead of a sex toy for perverts?
Oh the ignorance of my parents. We had no books. My brother, one year older, was allowed to go to kindergarten. He brought home books. He didn’t learn, typical boy, but I taught myself to read his books. The family was so surprised: She’s so smart, look at her read, and they would pass a newspaper to me where I would quietly sound out the words.

But that was it. No encouragement. No books. I was just an aside kid afraid of the dark.

In first grade, Richard, my classmate sat with me, handing me crayons and telling me the colors. It was simple. Hell, my two year old grandson knows all his colors.

Ok, I’m exhausted. Maybe it’ll be enough for now. I need to grieve for the baby and young adult that was me. I’m so sad for what she had to go through.

Thanks for letting this out, Debbie. Maybe you can heal now.

Also, Don’t Tell.

Fuck you I’m telling.

Love,
Debbie