The Cerebral Mum

Ahh, counselling. Not my favourite idea. I’ve tried it twice in the past. Or tried to try it, anyway.

In a crisis frame of mind when I first started dealing with the child sexual abuse, I found a counsellor. I wanted to talk about it. I hadn’t really talked about it before. After a few weeks of talking about my toilet training, and my juvenile medical problems, I was no longer in a crisis state of mind, and had no patience for it. The psychologist was nice, and I think I understood her need to build a fuller picture of the person she was dealing with. Maybe she was gathering useful information. But it wasn’t useful to me. If it had the potential to be, well, it wasn’t quick enough. Or cheap enough.

My second attempt was for an eating disorder. I started throwing up between the end of high school and the beginning of university. That gap meant I had no Austudy - Australia’s income support for students. I had no income. And I had nowhere to live. I had been living in a school funded apartment with another “homeless” student, and once I graduated I had to move out.

The people at what was then the Dept of Employmen, Education and Training were very helpful. They wanted me to go on unemployment benefits, but that required me to sign a statement that I was seeking a permanent full time position, and I wasn’t because I was waiting to get into University. The officer I dealt with pulled strings, and the Department put me on the dole without me signing the paper. I found somewhere to live. And then I found a temporary job. Goodbye dole, and hello waiting a month for my first paycheck.

I walked for nearly three hours every day to get to that job. Each way. With the money I had, I bought rice and popcorn to eat. Popcorn is the cheapest food there is when you have no money. A 90 cent packet makes a lot of popcorn. Sometimes, I would pinch a little of my housemate’s tomato sauce to flavour my rice.

I guess the exercise and the limited diet triggered the problem, but when I had a little money again for food and the bus, I would buy a packet of biscuits, eat them all, and throw up. then I would run on the spot until my calves were so tense I could barely walk. This behaviour settled down then flared up every so often over the next few years. And then it got really bad. I couldn’t eat so much as a lettuce leaf without feeling an overwhelming urge to purge myself of it. I would eat in secret ten times a day and throw up ten times a day. I was getting very sick. My hair started to fall out.

I didn’t mean to meander back through the past so much. Counselling.

When it got bad, I tried every related helpline I could find. Every single one was disconnected. So I tried unrelated helplines and eventually got put through to the Eating Disorder unit of the closest Psych ward. Where I was asked to leave a message for the one doctor who was qualified to talk to me. I didn’t want to leave a message. I tried again every day that week, but could never reach anyone. So I quit my day job and spent the summer at the beach and got better by myself.

So much for my counselling experience.

But this weekend (ie; crisis point) I noticed over at Life In The Country, a post entitled Combat Strategies: Fighting Depression so I clicked through and followed the link to Lifeline and searched there for my local health service. I tried the email link. The email was returned undelivered. I went to their homepage and used the email address there. It was returned undelivered. I sent an email, in the end, to their PR Department, asking them to forward my details to someone appropriate.

(Let me just say, this is a pretty sorry state of affairs and I often wonder what the experience is like for people whose lives are actually on the line.)

Anyway, that email went through and yesterday I got a reply back from the PR department that simply said…

>Thankyou for your e-mail which has just been passed on to our Community Health Service. Someone will follow you up early next week. Regards.

It made me cry. There is something shocking and confronting about the possibility of being helped. Later that day I got a phone number to call and spoke briefly on the phone with someone who has put me on the waiting list. That made me cry too and afterwards I went outside and paced in figure eights on the driveway, the paving warm on my bare feet.

Unexpected offers of help are stressful. I don’t know why. I don’t even think counselling is helpful. The fact is that the hard work can only be done by me. The most I expect really, is a place away from my responsibilities, where Caspar can not see me, where I might give myself some room to really cry. But soon enough, I expect, I will become frustrated with talking to someone who wants to help, but does not know me. Who wants to help, but has a procedure which doesn’t respond to me. Who wants to help, but cannot help me.

I am the only one that can do it. Other peoples opinions and perceptions and perspectives are great too, but it hasn’t been my experience that counsellors give you those. It is such a synthetic process and psychologists seem so blank. If I am going to talk to a wall, I think I would rather it was made of paper and it spoke back to me with my own pen. I know many people have found counselling so helpful and perhaps that’s why, when it feels like a crisis, I call. But I just can’t imagine it working with me.

I’ll try it anyway.

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.

Yes, she is. And I don’t like the sound of her voice. She’s a nag.

Three nights in a row I have fallen asleep on the couch after putting Caspar to bed at 7pm. I think Sleep is trying to tell me something. But I hate sleeping. I always have. It’s not something I have ever been good at. As a child, I had an early bedtimes. Today it seems like children don’t have bedtimes at all but back in the day… So I went to bed. But not to sleep.

Growing up in north east Victoria we had long, hot summers, hot enough to melt the roads and it seemed like the sun never went down. I would read and read and read, squinting at the pages in the half-light until I had to admit defeat, no longer able to make out the words. Then I used a torch, which was confiscated from me regularly. I recall one night waiting until my parents were asleep before going outside to crawl under the house and retrieve it from it’s hiding place. And I remember hours spent overnight in the toilet with a book, working on the theory that if my parents awoke and discovered me, I had an excuse at hand.

I also remember waking early, around 4am, and reading some more. I would leave the house before 7am, still reading as I walked the 15 minute walk to school. School didn’t start until 9am.

So I didn’t sleep but I spent a lot of time in bed. With my books. In 40°+ heat ( that’s 104+ in fahrenheit for my American friends) I would be snuggled under the doona with Enid Blyton or Judy Blume or Jane Austen. Lost in their worlds, I had no concept of time or what was going on outside. The day I read R.D. Blackmore’s Lorna Doone, in the year of the Ash Wednesday fires which wiped out half the state (I was nearly 11), it was hot, really hot. When I finished it, in bed with my electric blanket on in the middle of the day at the height of summer, I was surprised to look outside and see it wasn’t snowing. That the air, sweltering, was a burning jewel.

After leaving home, there was no longer any bedtime and my sleepless nights continued. Sometimes, I worked late at a McDonald’s in the city, a 17 year old girl working her way through her last year at high school. Occasionally I went out to a club, stumbling from the early tram into my school-funded apartment for a long bath before classes. But mostly I read, now grown into Plath and Sartre and Camus. And I wrote.

As an adult, I succumbed briefly to the 9 to 5 life but continued living without sleep, spending dark hours at the computer working on my novel. Sleep is boring, I would say. I started working nights on top of my day job, just to stay awake, before doing away with the day job altogether and surrendering once more to my vampire life. I closed my eyes only when I could keep them open no longer.

Now I am not working at all and I am unable to sleep whenever my body wins its battle with me because of that small, warm, perfect boy now peacefully snuffle-snoring in my room. Still, I find myself again and again at my computer at 3am, writing this blog. My body is fighting me for its time; it’s time to recuperate, to rejuvenate my mind, to replenish itself, rebuild itself. It is not winning. It is ten minutes to one and after a restless nap on the sofa, I am here writing.

I confess, O nagging Sleep, that it is my bedtime. I will submit to that much.

But I am taking a book with me.

The 12th assignment from 30 poems in 30 days:

“Write a poem using syllabic verse. You can assign length ether by line or stanza. If you are stuck for a way to begin, start with this two-word ten-syllable line:

Incompatible Participation”

I wrote two, using set forms.

Summer Cinquain

Sunshine,
Lure me again
to Lych Gate; December
cherries; dense green shade; picnic lace
and words.

Winter Tanka

So long were the nights
of our grey stolen season.
Cold glitter of stars,
in the mist corporeal,
broken by morning’s bright frost.

It’s been interesting experimenting with formal structures as I have previously written most of my poetry without them, although I have used syllabics often in the past without realising that constituted an “official” technique. (Incidentally, I used them for the last three lines in each stanza of Barcelona.) I chose to use recognised forms here, without rhyme, as I did with Sapphics on the Deep in order to keep my focus on the specifics of the assignment.

But isn’t it odd what you pick up via osmosis. I remember in my first year of Professional Writing & Editing taking a long, complicated poem I wrote to my grammar teacher, the adored, illustrious Captain Slusher, and asking him to check it for me. He told me I could do it myself. I told him I hadn’t learned enough grammar yet and he said, Not consciously…

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.

The first assignment from the 30 Poems in 30 Days project.

“Write a poem about your childhood. Explore an actual event that had some emotional significance to you. Avoid using any description of how you felt about the event then or how you feel about it now. Instead, try to make the emotion of the event come through in your descriptions of what happened.”

Drought

every day is summer
violent, unrelenting
barefoot and I am running
black tar, the road is melting
dry heat, the air is shaking
burnt skin and I am flying
down the road, the tar is sticking

every day is summer

passed the pubs, the men are drinking
passed the shops, shopkeepers idling
passed the town, the road is widening
through dry fields, tobacco dying
along dirt tracks, the dust is moting
then the shade, the trees are standing
by the river, water calling
water cool and dark and greening

every day is summer

I slide in and I am smiling
and the days are never ending
until the rain comes, then the flooding

every day is summer

I thought I’d keep my commentary until after the poem. I never read the introduction first. I like to make up my own mind.

All I have to say, really, is that I found this extraordinarily hard. My childhood memories are nebulous so trying to find a subject which I could limit to pure description was a challenge. It’s been a long time and I’m sure this won’t win any prizes but I don’t feel as though I have to apologise for it.

I like it. I like the rhythm and I like that, to me at least, it conveys something about growing up in Australia.

So, that’s one down. 29 to go.

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.