The Cerebral Mum

The October edition of the Blog Carnival Against Child Abuse has been posted over at Survivors Can Thrive and I read all of it today. One of the posts which particularly caught my interest was Weaknesses and Submission for Survival. The writer, Austin, talks about the barriers between her and her sister as they grew up in an abusive household, exacerbated by their different ways of coping.

I relate to this strongly. It may seem to those of you who have been reading this blog for a while now, that Big Sis and I have a wonderful relationship. And we do. But it is not always an easy one, and it is something that both of us have worked very hard to obtain. One of the many, many things that those who have not experienced an abusive family environment often do not understand is the way in which it damages all the family relationships. It is simple. The rule is this:

Divide and Conquer.

Often, I hear people who are shocked and disgusted by the lack of support individual victims receive from the other members of their family. It seems so unnatural to them. Mothers who remain with the partners who have abused their children, for example, are vilified. Unfortunately, more often than not it is unnatural, but not because these mothers lack maternal instincts, not because they are as heinous as the abuser themselves, but because they are victims as well. It is a vicious cycle. We should celebrate when someone, anyone!, breaks it, but we should ache as well for all those who can’t.

I would like everyone, next time they read a story in the newspaper or see a story on TV to wonder not at the inhumanity of these people, but at what they must have gone through themselves to be so incapable of defending their loved ones. I do not say this to give everyone a free pass - not everyone deserves one - but it is indeed possible that they deserve as much sympathy as the primary victim. (From strangers, anyway: A victim’s anger towards those in their life who were blind or who enabled their abuser is always justified. If they rediscover their relationships, that’s fine. If they don’t, well, they have no obligation for forgiveness. Their most important role is to find a way to heal themselves.)

So, divided and conquered they stand. Abusers are often subtle. Abuse is often subtle. Often, the things we perceive as stolen from children when they are raped and tortured have been taken long before, in painful increments which erode the child’s sense of self-worth along with their connection to the people around them. Their connection to the people they could tell. As they know less and less safety in their lives, the abuser becomes more and more secure. And so more is permitted.

And what is safety, to a child? Safety is home, it is family. It is that thing they are sure of; the haven which allows them to venture out into the world, knowing always that there is a place, and its people, to return to. If someone in the family wants to abuse a child, that place must be stripped bare of inhabitants.

…the mother made certain my sister and I stayed divided. With my sister’s cunning plans and my thinking ability to see it through we would have been unstoppable. The mother couldn’t have that now could she? Two kids who put their heads together to overthrow a tyrant, two kids completely different putting young resources together to survive that tyrant would have been something to contend with. There was no way in hell the mother could afford for us to be friends. _AUSTIN

There was no way in hell my adoptive father could afford for my sister and I to be friends. There is no way he could afford for us to trust each other, to see each other clearly. Together, we would have found the words to tell our mother, to make explicit that thing none of us alone could face.

Looking back, it is difficult to determine precisely the causes of the wedge between us. We are very different. Our minds work differently. Perhaps we would have disliked each other for those differences anyway. Perhaps we would have gone through a normal sibling rivalry. But what I remember most is this:

The way in which he ridiculed her, the way he made direct attacks upon her self-esteem. The way she never spoke back to him. The way she existed in the world outside our family, popular, talkative, confident and loving. The way all the good things about her became her mask instead of herself. The way she fulfilled every prophecy of failure he gave to her. The way he told her she was fat and ugly and stupid and the awful way she believed him.

The way he told me constantly how clever I was, how I was destined to be somebody. The way I argued passionately with him while my family, craving peace, left the room. The way I lived with fairies. The way the world inside my head was more real to me than daily things. The way he was proud of me, the way he bragged about me. And the awful way this separated me from my sister.

Picture this: In late primary school, I go to my mother crying. I ask her not why is he so mean to Big Sis, but why doesn’t he treat me the same way he treats her. I am crying because I am singled out. I cannot understand why. I do not want to be singled out. I do not want to be different, separate, from my sister. But how could I comprehend that then?

In many ways, abusers are smart. They are perceptive. They recognise the weaknesses they can exploit. My sister’s weaknesses and mine were different: I loved thinking, my sister loved people. For both of us, the other was the image we were battered with. Our mere presence was enough to hurt each other for a long, long time.

There is one thing that unites an abusive family, and that is silence. They show one face - one family face - to the world but within their own walls there are no real words between them. To speak would be to shatter the masks, and the masks are what holds the individuals together while holding the people apart. Our psyches can only take so much before our defence mechanisms kick in. That may sound like jargon but it is an accurate description. They are mechanisms, like breathing. They are not conscious and they override what would have been our normal functioning. My sister lost herself in a world of people, hiding from the fact that she felt worthy of none of them. I lost myself in the world of my imagination, hiding from the imperfection of my life.

When we grew to adulthood, I remained the image she was battered with. She remained, to my mind of pictures, less real than me. It took a lot of years, a lot of talking and a lot of arduous respect to learn each other’s language and find the things we shared. It took a lot of years to learn the other was not what we despised, and not the thing we should have been.

There are worse childhoods than mine. I come from a cycle which has been broken. By all of us: My mother, my Big Sis and me. I have the gift of an extraordinarily strong family which will never be taken for granted. Not all victims of abuse are so fortunate. Please feel for them. All of them.

I admit I’m an addict.

I told myself and told myself that I was not going to post this weekend. I was not going to turn on my computer. And yet here I am.

I actually have a lot of posts in my head right now, but they require too much work with links and research to get them exactly right so this is my filler.

I’m going to write about my mother. And, yes, she is the best mother.

While succesfully avoiding my blog for the last couple of days, I haven’t avoided my computer. In my list of ten random things, I mentioned my mother’s blog. If you visited it, you would have seen that it isn’t very pretty and hasn’t been touched for a while. So I have been building her a new one. Adding many of her old Chronicles (her monthly newsletters to friends and family and even some strangers who just wanted to be added to her mailing list) necessitated a lot of reading so she has been at the forefront of my mind over the weekend.

She is 55. She lives a life that many envy and some do not understand. For the last 10 years she has worked as a teacher in many countries, some of them not likely to top anyone’s “dream holiday” list. She was in Pakistan when September 11 happened. She was in Qatar when the war on Iraq was launched from there. She was in Indonesia when the Australian Embassy was attacked only a few buildings away from where she sat in her office. She was in Afghanistan when, well, when it was as it is now: a military quagmire. She is currently teaching in Sudan.

To fill out her resume, add Nicaragua, Thailand, Mozambique, Estonia and Algeria to that list.

Are you one of those who envies her or asks yourself, Why? I know which one I am.

To paint a picture for you, I could tell you some anecdotes. How in Jakarta, when she heard the explosion and her building shook, the other teachers rushed to the windows asking, What the hell was that?, she said, It was a bomb, and kept typing. How in Kabul, when there were riots and her security detail had her and the other teachers confined to a safe house all day she said to me on the phone, Security won’t be able to keep me here if I run out of cigarettes.

She is a sanguine woman. With my disorderly passions, I am not like her at all.

Except I am.

She has the courage to live a life of her own choosing. She is generous with her love and her love is unconditional. She is staunchly independent, probably to a fault. She carries her own burdens and expects nothing from anyone. (As I said… to a fault.) She works hard and she quietly does what needs to be done.

She is always, and has ever been, just who she is.

In some ways, she has that very old-fashioned woman’s strength. A Portrait of a Lady type, who gracefully accepts the things she cannot change. In other ways, she is still the youthful, hopeful mother of my childhood. Age closes no doors for her. Life remains full of possibilities.

I always considered myself fortunate because my mother was young. (She had married, had two kids and divorced by the time she was 21.) I knew nothing else, so how could I compare, but watching the way my friends could not communicate with their parents, seeing some have to deal with heart attacks and death before they even finished high school, I thought her age was a wonderful thing. I now realise that it was her character more than her age I was fortunate in.

Many people who have young mothers talk about the ways in which their relationship was more like a friendship. I never had that. There was always a line and I think that line was a good thing. She was always a mother. But there was also no gap between us; no subject was taboo and there was nothing in my life I could not trust her with. She never cried in front of my sister and me when we were children. I never knew there might be things she could not handle.

I think that there is an obligation of dishonesty in parenthood in this respect. To a point only, but it is still an obligation. My mother was the rock of my childhood, and my childhood was not easy. I needed a mother like my mother.

Reading back over what I have written, and knowing that I have only described her goodness and not her greys, I still recognise her as my safe harbour. Even though I am grown and I know that she is human. Even though learning she was human was hard - a kind of disillusionment - I am grateful I did not have to face that fact before I was ready to.

And I am grateful that, despite our very different characters, I can see her strengths in me; not so well-formed, not so steadfast, and speaking in a different language, but there nonetheless.

It is passed midnight now and I have not even begun to do her justice. You cannot write about your mother as a filler. So I will end here, with the gratitude I cannot express fully and a song I wrote years ago, during that time when I was learning she was human, when I was learning to stand alone as she did.

Mother

somewhere
there’s someone
who means
something

maybe
she’s not all of you
maybe
she’s who you used to be
maybe
she’s not real at all
maybe
I’m just greedy, I just wanted…

woman woman
child me baby mine

last night
a roof fell
I saw
a shadow

wendy
sew her back on me
she said
that love is always free
it was
my own choice to leave
I know
I am stronger, I just wanted…

woman woman
child me baby mine

last night
a chain broke
I heard
a cock crow

this time
I have lost the game
it feels like
I have missed the last train
once more
life won’t stay the same
I know
you can’t help this, I just wanted…

woman woman
child me baby mine (x2)

somewhere
there’s some word
which means
something

maybe
she’s not all of you
maybe
she’s who you used to be
maybe
she’s not real at all

mother

sometimes I’m greedy, I just wanted…
sometimes I’m needy, I just wanted…
sometimes I’m greedy, I just want you all

Thank you, Mum, for being my rock, and for teaching me to be one.

There is something I hinted in The fable my tattoo tells me… which I never intended to talk about in detail here. It isn’t what this blog is about. I’m thirty four and my history is history. I don’t know whether the subject will come up again but it has today so I’m writing it. I don’t know if you will want to read it.

But I’m writing it.

As a child I was sexually abused by my adoptive father. This information is for “back story” only. It is not something I feel the need to get off my chest. To be specific about the nature of that abuse; I was not raped. The majority of the abuse was what, as adults, we might call sexual harassment. Groping and sexual comments made to appear as jokes but with a real intention to intimidate and shame. My memories are sketchy but these are a few.

In Grade 3, I ask him if he would like a cup of coffee. He says, “No, but you can give me a head job.”

In Grade 5, being punished for something, I am made to take off all my clothes and stand against the wall. I stand there for an hour, waiting to be smacked. He just looks.

16 years old. My mother is away. He has been drinking and comes home. I have a male friend visiting. My friend leaves. I go to my bed. He comes into my room. For six hours he sits on my bed in the dark, talking about sex. The conversation begins as a warning against being seduced. It becomes a conversation about how wonderful it is to be seduced. He says, “I am sexually attracted to you.”

Not long after that, I leave home.

Perhaps this doesn’t seem particularly abusive to you in the scheme of things. There was no bruising. I have no scars. It is difficult to describe the pall over our house, the tension that arose in all of us when it was nearing the time he would be home.

Every day, he would play with himself on the couch while we watched TV. He would masturbate the dog.

He was an alcoholic; unpredicatable, irrational, aggressive and insecure and there were sexual overtones in everything he did. I lived in sexual fear throughout my childhood. That threat hung over me before I could even understand what it was.

The reason why I have written this is because a few days ago while looking for Australian blog carnivals as a way to promote my site, I came across a blog about child protection called Imaginif.

I didn’t want to read it.

I said earlier that my history is history but it never as simple as that. In my life I have spent a lot of time thinking about child sexual abuse, studying child sexual abuse, talking about child sexual abuse. I have spent a lot of time getting angry and getting better. I understood all that could be understood. I was done with it.

I don’t consider myself a survivor. That term reduces me to circumstance and traps me in the past. The events of your childhood, good or bad, provide the language through which you understand the world. They are like a desert wash, a dry stream bed, and when it rains, when life happens, the water naturally flows there and the channels deepen. If you listen to the currents, your childhood is the symbolic key to the map of your present self.

Tonight, I found out something about a young girl I know, which I cannot discuss here, and my stream bed flooded. I felt sick and voiceless and trapped and I was forced to travel through the physical memories of my past again. I recognised the echoes of my own pain and I reclaimed my anger.

I have spoken a lot here about not knowing who I am, about being nobody. There are many pressures in this world for us to reduce ourselves, to not feel too largely, to live passionlessly. To deny everything.

Not wanting to read that blog on a subject I was once passionate about, one that everyone would be passionate about if it wasn’t so unseemly, was just such a denial and I am voiceless because of it.

Tonight I remember the language of my childhood and I remember why I should never stop speaking.

Shrinking yourself to an inoffensive nothing is not just self-harm. If we do that, who will speak for those unable to? Who will cry for those who cannot? Who will guide those who are drowning in their childhood to safety?

__________________________________________

This post, Imagine if…, has received a Perfect Post Award. My humble gratitude to Musing Woman who nominated it. If you would like to read the other award winning posts for September ‘07, click here.

I’m still struggling through packing up my house but after months of procrastination I’m finally on the move.

I’ve become ruthless. After laboriously sorting through every tiny item and trying to decide what to keep, what to recycle and what to toss, I’ve had enough. 12 industrial strength garbage bags of clothes for goodwill. That’s enough. I’m throwing it all out the window.

Literally.

There is a huge pile of garbage on my back patio just waiting to be bagged and binned. I may never quite be Zen, but how on earth - Why on earth? - did I amass all that stuff? No wonder I feel so weighed down by the whole process.

There is one small joy in stripping all that clutter away though. The memories. Those odd little scraps amidst all the debris that make you recall things you thought you had forgotten.

That film script I started but never finished, entitled Triptych: A Road Movie which is almost a cross between Female Perversions and The Wizard of Oz.

That poor, bedraggled porcelain doll I named Molly in primary school, which my Opa bought for me on his one and only visit to Australia, a country he swore he would never set foot in. But that’s another story. I had the most wonderful Opa.

The longneck beer coolers from the Grand Final Party at La La Land. I didn’t work that night, and I loathe football, but we hung out there all day, drinking and talking. A sunny afternoon in a dark bar, with musicians and cocktail waitresses, bartenders and actors, sprawled over the sofas and the floor, surrounded by red walls, passionate about everything.

A price list from Little Matchgirl Muffins, my tiny business selling baked goods to the cafe next to my office. Up at4am making chocolate éclairs and passionfruit tarts and caramel and almond fudge before settling in to do data entry for nine hours, my clothes smelling like cookies.

That fax with the phone number that just said, For things to do with Baileys after a car accident… And more recollections of life in bars after closing.

Those scribbled notes on the back of the Tranny Bingo list from my 30th birthday, especially the one that simply read, Happy Birthday Rayette…, a reference to Five Easy Pieces, one of my favourite movies, from one of my favourite boys who is now a man I respect so, so much.

And there is a box of love letters and trinkets still waiting to be explored. I haven’t opened it yet. There is only so much you can fit into a smile and mine will already last all day. It is slightly Mona Lisa but I can feel it.

In my eyes.

Motherbumper wanted to hear more stories about people’s body art. So this is mine.

Unlike Girl’s Gone Child, I do not “remember what I was wearing, feeling, and why I walked through the door,” but I do remember where I was in my life. These are the memories which return to me as I contemplate my tattoo:

I remember the beautiful arrogance of my youth, the arrogance of a girl who had left home at a time of her own choosing.

And I remember that boy, not yet a man, with the chocolate curls and the gloriously old fashioned name who often climbed in through my bedroom window to read Keats and listen to me speak although I would never let him touch me.

I remember throwing teacups and crying huddled in my closet.

I remember that party when the bed was moved into the back yard with the living room rug thrown over it, when the living room was cleared for dancing and we made a foam-room by lining the bathroom walls with black garbage bags and filling the tub up to the jets with litres of bubble bath.

I remember a girl named Lisa saying, “Thank-you,” after my friend and I had told the stories of our childhoods, the stories no child should ever have to tell.

I remember the first song lyrics I ever wrote.

when the shadow falls away i try to face all the pain
when the child comes out to play i try to turn her away
because the lover starts in again
i open my limbs to him
he opens the wound

insane

I remember reading everything I ever wrote to anyone who would listen.

I remember that power I had which I did not yet fully understand, which I used brutally against that boy with the chocolate curls after a night sitting on the floor in a corner of the uni bar talking to a girl who had far worse stories to tell than mine and a tattoo of the same comic book character. I remember pushing him hard up against a brick wall after we had left, crushing him with my body and kissing him deeply before turning and walking away.

Just because I could.

I remember my righteous anger.

I remember feeling fully justified and sure about everything I did.

I remember peeling back all my flesh, word by word, and exposing myself literally and figuratively to a world which could never contain me.