Fight, Flight, or Freeze

I can remember my father, who thought he was this great martial arts master, making me kick a tree until my legs were sore and I just wanted to cry.  I could swing nunchucks like a pro as a toddler, even had my own set.  It was red with white stripes.  I remember thinking it looked like candy canes.  I learned how to punch on a heavy bag that was three times my size before I learned how to ride a two-wheeler.  And even as fighting was programmed into me from the time I could walk, the fight response isn’t one that generally took control when I was being abused, except when I was fighting him personally.  I fought against my father with everything inside my young body.  I’m pretty sure that even as I loved him for being my father, I hated him with a passion that would have overwhelmed me had I acknowledged it.

My father had not yet turned physically violent with me at the time we left for good.  He’d tried to spank me once by putting me over his knee.  But I remember the fight or flight instinct taking over and as I couldn’t run, I fought him.  I squirmed and moved and he was unable to hold me still to even swat me one time.  I remember getting the better of him with great relish because I wasn’t afraid as much as I was determined he wasn’t going to do it. 

My intense fear of spiders came from his misguided stupidity in trying to get me over my fear.  It’s one of my first memories.  I was about five years old and anything with more than four legs and two eyes terrified me.  I can remember him telling me that they weren’t going to hurt me and holding my chubby little hand in a death grip while extending my arm.  He then grabbed the daddy-long-legs that was making me scream and put it on my bare arm.  He held me there until it reached my shoulder.  I don’t remember making a sound when he did that.  I was completely petrified, literally.  I could not move, I could not react, I could not fight.  Ever since even the smallest spider has sent me running.  I couldn’t even kill them.  THANKS FOR THE PHOBIA YOU FUCKING MANIAC!  I do want to note that since having children of my own I have battled this fear enough to kill spiders.  The damnable things aren’t getting near my babies.

Everyone Has Scars

I think the most often told lie is that someone had a great childhood.  I’m trying with my kids, but I know at some point (if I haven’t already) I’m going to screw up.  My only hope is that I don’t hurt them in ways that leave scars that fester like mine do.  If people were really honest though, I feel sure most would find that they have been abused emotionally if not physically and sexually.  The hell of it is, a good portion of the time it’s the people who should be taking care of us who are abusing us.

My abuse began as early as the womb, at least from what I’m told.  This wasn’t abuse directly aimed at me, but when someone is forcing pills down the throat of a pregnant fifteen year old girl…well the fetus inside her is not only getting the effects of the pills, but suffering from the emotional roller coaster she’s on as well.  It’s amazing I’m even alive.  My father, and I use the term loosely, was a brutal man who took advantage of and brutally abused a young girl who was an easy target because of sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather and the subsequent emotional abuse at the hands of her mother.  My mother was also given pills at an early age, uppers to help her be able to do housework or whatever, and then downers to make her sleep.  But, this isn’t about my mother, it’s about me.  So let is suffice to say that my mother was a child when she got pregnant with me and the abuse she suffered both before and during her pregnancy was a catalyst to my own abuse.  Her home life made her vulnerable to my father, a man almost five years older who had already been to jail, not to mention an habitual drug user and later discovered to be a paranoid schizophrenic.

My mother moved back home before I was born and was divorced by the time I was two.  That did not stop us from going back and forth between my father’s house and my grandparent’s house until I was seven.  We would live with my father until he beat my mother badly enough that she would run for her life and then when things started grinding on her at my grandparent’s house we would go back and start the cycle over again.  And while I don’t remember seeing or experiencing what she went through until the last day, I know that it effected me. 

 Thus my first scars, formed even before my first breath was drawn, grew as I grew until I feel like they’ve overtaken me.