Lessons Learned

I sit here halfway through my thirty sixth year, dredging through the memories for what feels like the eight hundredth time in the past few weeks. Each time exacts a little price, but it also teaches me a new lesson. Tonight I approach this story with a mix of dread and expectation. Maybe I will just recall the pain of the memories, but maybe I learn something amazing. As well, maybe, just maybe, what I have been through might help someone else see that there is life after a truly horrible childhood.

My earliest memory is the sound of my father's feet racing down the basement steps of our home. The next thing I knew, I flew through the air and crashed into a wall over and over again. My father thought that I was hurting my brother who was actually laughing and squealing because the puppy was licking his face. I had been playing with my barbie a few feet away. That was when it started. That day of my fifth year began twelve years of slaps, pounding, and assorted other physical abuse. Twelve years of living in terror.

I don't really remember very much of my childhood, and what I do remember has very little emotion tied to it, not even the twice that Dad grabbed me by the throat, and I believed that I was going to die. What I do remember is the churning dread I felt in my stomach when I heard our dog start to bark, announcing Dad's arrival home. As soon as he drove in the lane, I would run downstairs to my room. There I would lean against my door and listen to hear what Dad did when he came in the house. If he said nothing and just headed up to the kitchen, it was a fairly safe night depending on what Mom made for supper. If he started yelling about someone's shoes not being straight enough... it was time to head for the barn, to hide out until bedtime.

I hid out for years, spending my time riding my horse, doing my chores and writing my stories. They were the things that saved my childhood from being completely unhappy. I lived inside my head most of the time, divorcing myself from a real world that was just too painful to accept.

The physical abuse, though painful and damaging, was no where near as destructive as the constant verbal abuse, specifically that I was useless, lazy, and stupid. I was an embarrassment who had to behave perfectly in public and uphold my father's dignity at all times or else when we got home, the beating began. In Grade Ten, I had a crush on a boy in my drama class. The night of our big performance, he told me to shove off because he would never be attracted to someone like me. I was devastated, and spent the entire night upset. When I got home, I was beaten for being sad in public.

My entire childhood, I was a little overweight, so my father found me particularly embarrassing and kept me on starvation rations my entire life at home. He took away my chocolate at Easter and gave it to the neighbors, and made sure that I did not get desserts and treats. Well, he tried. I stole what I was not allowed to have and kept the weight on.

Beyond the physical and verbal abuse, there was The Game. It was not perpetrated by my father, and I will not identify the person who created it. The Game meant that I got a signal to go into the closet of my bedroom, remove my clothes, pull something in front of my face and wait for the other party to enter the other side. I became body parts to be used for their gratification, body parts I began to despise as I grew up, matured early and gained more attention for them. When I was still in elementary school, the high school boys used to chase me around asking to feel my breasts. At home, The Game went on for nearly six years until I hit puberty and pregnancy became a risk.

For two years I caught a bit of a break. Dad was still a problem, and being tormented at school by kids who could sense my frail prsonality. They preyed on my weakness, making my life miserable. After the sexual abuse stopped, I must have felt that punishment missing from my life because I began abusing myself. Knives, pins, anything that could cause pain and wound those parts of me that I hated so much became my friends, helping release the internal pain of rage and shame.

During these years I also became bulimic and finally lost the few pounds that had kept me as the fat kid my whole life. I looked good. I didn't feel very good about myself, but I knew that I looked pretty fine. I hoped that looking the way I did, I could attract the notice of a young man on whom I had a crush. Just before Christmas of my fourteenth year, I attracted his notice, but not in the way I had anticipated.

That young man, his much older brother, and their sister, one of my best friends, took turns holding me down and raping me. My parents were upstairs and heard me screaming, but didn't bother to check out the ruckus. That was the last thin day of my life.

The day after high school graduation, I left home. For ten years I ran from one place to the next, hoping to escape myself and the pain that I kept bottled up inside, but it never worked. I cut myself, I abused myself terribly, and one day when I was twenty four, I nearly killed myself.

I was downstairs chopping wood for a fire, because I couldn't afford to buy oil for the furnace. I had been living in two rooms of a delapidated old farmhouse for nearly a year, eating Cheez Whiz sandwiches and whatever good spots I could find in the rotten potatoes in the cold cellar. That day, I hit my leg with the backside of the axe head and completely lost control of the rage. I started beating everything around me with the axe, and then very nearly took it to myself. Luckily, I threw it aside, ran upstairs and sat sobbing on the couch for three days.

At the end of three days without food or sleep, I got up and called my doctor. He sent me to a community therapy clinic. The counselors there decided that I had Multiple Personality Disorder even though I had never experienced any of the symptoms, except for the fact that I am a little dissociative... I stare into space and daydream a lot. I left there and moved on to a counselor who told me that I was just an overly sexual child. The next one was the most outrageous; he claimed my problems stemmed from eating too many products that contained yeast. I stopped looking to the mental health community for help.

Years passed, and I kept moving, kept searching for a way out of the darkness and the self-abuse. In 1995, I lived out in the bush for a year and finally started figuring out the lessons I needed to learn to be able to heal. The first lesson was that I needed to forgive. I did not say that what people had done to me was okay, but just made an acknowledgment that hating them and myself wasn't hurting them. They were somewhere else, feeling little or no remorse for what they had done. The only person being hurt by hanging on to the rage was me.

I wrote letters telling people that what they had done was despicable, but I was not going to let them ruin any more of my life. I was not going to let them hold that power over me any longer. They had been responsible for my past, but only I was responsible for my future from that moment on. I wanted a future filled with happiness and love, not one darkened by self-hatred, shame and distrust. After this, my life began to change. My self-abuse began to be replaced by meditation, self-acceptance and then love.

Over the years, I have learned to love myself, to truly feel my own worth, and that the most important lesson of all is that we all need to take care of each other and love each other. I learned to not turn away if I think someone needs my help. I have learned to not fear my sexuality, and very recently that I don't have to be strong all the time in order to be safe. I can trust other people to support me and keep me safe sometimes. Perhaps if someone, anyone, had stepped forward to help me when I was a child, or even when I so needed the help as an adult, I would have learned this lesson a lot earlier. I have also learned how to love, deeply and without distrust or reservation -- what a precious lesson.

It has been a long road, but I wouldn't trade it. The love I feel now, and the lessons I have learned have made me into an exceptional person, a person I can feel proud to be most of the time. That makes my unhappy childhood worth every second.

*This story is dedicated to the only person I have ever trusted completely. Thank you my dear, I hope one day I will be able to show you how much your support and friendship have meant to me.