I woke up yesterday morning, made breakfast for me and the kids and turned on Mickey Mouse in the kitchen. I took my coffee and toast into the living room and turned on the news. Christine Blasey Ford was giving her opening statement. I didn’t know it was going to be on live TV. Her words hit me like a sledge hammer in the gut. Almost eighteen hours later I am still raw. I’m trying not to cry. I can’t describe exactly how I’m feeling. I’m just flooded with memories and emotions about what happened to me at 15 and how I never told anyone. I can feel that shaken feeling you get after an attack. The soreness on your arms, I imagined what the bruises looked like, as I sat in the bath yesterday. I remember crying softly so my mom couldn’t hear me. I had the door locked. My mom was right outside, I could have told her what happened to me, the trauma I just endured. I never did. Yesterday Christine Blassey Ford gave me permission to acknowledge that what happened to me was wrong and not my fault. And I feel pain in that. What happened to me, when I was fifteen altered me. When I talk to parents now about their teenagers, I always preface that, I was a bad teenage, I was always in trouble, I did bad things. In our Being Human Residency, we had already been talking about the stages of development in our kids and ourselves as kids. My stinky, bloody, dark, teenage box had already been pried open. My years of sexual trauma is intertwined with myself as a child. Being taken advantage of. I want to run from it. I get scared, I might get in trouble for being depressed about this stuff. For being triggered like this. One night, when I was sixteen, my mom told another mom, “It wasn’t your daughters’ fault, my daughter’s the ring leader here, she’s a bad seed”. I think my mom may have even been grabbing my hair and shoving me in the car. I have been taught it’s my fault I was sexually assaulted. I thought it wasn’t important because it happened when I was a kid. That anything in High School didn’t count. Never talk about it. I don’t really know what steps to take to work my way out of this, I don’t know how much I should try to bury it again, pretend it didn’t happen, or write about it, or talk about it, or cry about it. I still feel ashamed by it. I feel uncomfortable.
Tag: introspection
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The little cracks that open into hurricanes, inequality, smokey skies, and loss. The children continue to grow. Part of their being swells space between the walls of my home, their essence, the questions they ask, the answers they have.
I become more me- each day, each hour, I become truer to myself. My children and I pull apart and grow closer with equal tension.
We learn to see each other, both sides going through moments of, “who are you?”. We want to know. My children can’t understand that there was a moment when they were no where. They ask if they were in my moms stomach before mine. They ask, “who took care of us?”
I don’t know how to explain. I say, “another time, I’ll explain. I’m too tired right now”
It’s always almost time to get up or almost time to go to sleep.
I found some time to stop time. I came to my studio today. Painted and worked in my notebooks.
I needed to be in my studio this afternoon.
I am overwhelmed by how many things I have in my mind to think about worry about at anyone time.
From the basic-food, clothes, sleep, exercise, to the cerebral-learning sign language, teaching my children right from wrong, my new book project I’m behind schedule writing, worrying about the government and the world and thinking I’ve given way too much of my time reading about the president. He’s a life sucker. I worry about the biggest hurricanes, the largest wildfires in history.
That’s when I can only work in my studio or write.
I am distracted lately. Not sleeping well.
But I still put paint to paper.
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Sitting outside, in the back yard, Jack and Fiona are at Costco with my husband. I have to take a break, reflect on what I wrote this morning. It’s almost spring and flowers are beginning to dominate bare branches, I love winter flowering trees. I love the moist ground, still wet from winter rains, the decaying leaves, the new bugs and spiders, old webs that didn’t get knocked down in the winter winds, and the sun feeling closer than it has in months. I think of fertility and my experience. I wonder why I clung to beauty and that it was the goal for so long. I have judged myself daily, comparing myself to an unrealistic idea of what is beautiful? Fertility is beautiful. Being born into a beautiful new thing. I am so far from that sweet smell newborn babies have. I am so far from that beauty because I was not fertile. The image of healthy, glowing, pregnant woman? Or that sweetness of just having given birth sweet smell of placenta, baby poop, an open vagina, all bloody, sweat, and the image of the beautiful woman and her beautiful baby lying on her chest? I wanted that. I wanted to be that woman, just like a flowering winter tree, bringing new, undamaged life into the world. Natural and unscathed, “it happened so quickly, we barely tried” I would say. After the birth I would be glowing, my picture would get 1000 likes on Facebook. I would have taken the naked pictures when I was pregnant, and I would be allowed to share them on Facebook because I covered just the right spots and a naked pregnant woman is a subliminal message that propels mankind. This post would get 2000 likes. I would be a Goddess. Why are we obsessed about this? About being this? Why was I? Why was I ashamed that I could never be that goddess, my uterus broken, I was up in age, I shouldn’t even be trying to have children, “It’s not fair to the children for women to have IVF at 39, they won’t live a long enough for the child.” I read this once on Face Book. I was so upset by it and it became my truth. I was disgusting.
Dirty Laundry Blog by Jennifer Hynes 