by Band Back Together | Nov 9, 2010 | Anger, Blended Families, Breakups, Coping With Divorce, Divorce, Emotional Abuse, Infidelity, Psychological Manipulation, Suicide |
Fourteen years ago, I was a carefree college student. I was content with life, was climbing the proverbial ladder as if there were no obstacles in my way, but I longed to be in a relationship. I spent much of my time kissing frogs and drinking far more than my share of tequila. Six months later, I found you.
I should have seen the warning signs early on in the relationship, but I forged ahead. Six months turned into a year. One year turned into five. And by our seventh year together, we had a child, a mortgage and a blended family of sorts. A yours & ours. I was happy, the kids were happy. You were not, and you had an affair.
Again, I should have seen the signs. We argued, I fought for the relationship, you blamed me for the affair. We worked through “our” issues, I thought.
We added a child, lost family members, added a house and then the ugly monster reared it’s head. You were not happy again. And again it was my fault. There was no affair – just a threat of suicide. I talked you out of it. I thought we worked through “our” issues and we forged ahead.
Eight months later, you were unhappy again, you were suicidal again. And again you felt it was my fault.
You came home because you had no where else to go, but you tricked me into thinking that you wanted to be here. You insisted you wanted a “normal family”. But when push came to shove, you finally admitted that you really never wanted to come home, never wanted to be with me, you just had no where else to go, no job and no family.
So you have decided that you are done with me, you don’t want to have the “stress” of owning a house (or two). You say you want nothing, but refuse to leave until your “name is off the house”. You say you need no one, and that you can do it all on your own. Yet we all know you are wrong. You know you are wrong.
Your anger and your blame has nothing to do with me. It has to do with whatever it is that you are hiding from. You need to find help, we need you to find help.
Help doesn’t mean you have to stay with me and your family. Help means fixing you, and whatever it is that is making you unhappy. Because fixing you is fixing our children. Because when you are broken, it breaks them.
You deciding that we are not going to be “us” anymore is probably the best decision you have made for all of us. Because I can no longer take the blame for your shortcomings and insecurities. I have my own, and I need to be the best example I can be for our children. I know I am not strong enough to leave you on my own and I still want to “fix” you/us.
So while you waver in the wind and deny you need help, I’m going to get help for myself, my children and my own well being. I will seek out legal advise and I will seek out counseling for me and for our children. I will find my way from here.
But, I hope someday you will realize how much you are loved, how much you have hurt us and how badly you need to be fixed. I hope that you make the choice of life and that you realize your kids need you, not a “replacement daddy”, as you like to say. I hope you that you make the choice to fix you, so that they too can be fixed.
by Band Back Together | Nov 9, 2010 | Anger, Bullying, Childhood Bullying, Coping With Bullying, Gender Nonconformity, How To Heal From Being Bullied, Intersexed, Transgender |
Get out! You’re a girl!”
The shout rang out from the men’s room in the Chicago airport, and I heard it all the way in the women’s room next door. My husband had taken our son, Sam, who is seven, to the bathroom between flights. It was not the first time I’d heard such a shout. I ran out with my daughter to find out what was happening to Sam.
Sam looks like a girl. Even that day—wearing khaki pants, a blue t-shirt, and grey sneakers—his long hair and pretty face trumped his boyish clothes. People inevitably think he’s a tomboy. His natural femininity makes boys in restrooms across America feel justified in screaming at him, believing that their knowledge of his gender is greater than his own, lunging, as one boy did at a New York airport, ready to strike until my husband stepped in. Kids in his own California elementary school tell him he’s in the wrong bathroom, ask him if he’s lost or stupid, and, if he stands up for himself and says he really is a boy, tell him to drop his pants and prove it.
A few years ago I read an article by New York Times writer Patricia Leigh Brown. Brown wrote about adult transgender and gender-nonconforming people who face discrimination when they try to use gendered public bathrooms. I had no idea that it would one day be relevant for my own child
by Band Back Together | Nov 7, 2010 | Abuse, Child Abuse, Child Sexual Abuse, Incest, Trauma |
My daughter will be 6 this winter. She’s dying to have a sleepover at our house, she wants to go to one even more. She asks me weekly when she will be old enough. And I want to say never.
When I was 8 a new family moved in next door. I was thrilled because the family had a daughter who was 9. We quickly became friends. She had a brother who was 11. He creeped me out.
We all used to play together a lot, many imaginary games involving us all owning stores. One time, another little girl and I went to the brother’s (let’s call him T-Bone) store. It was in his room, but we couldn’t see him. We opened the closet and found him on the floor with his sister. He was kissing her and had his hand up her shirt. The girl and I ran away and never spoke of it.
Sometimes I feel bad, like maybe we should have told somebody. But we hadn’t heard of bad touching, or incest or anything like that. T-Bone made me uncomfortable whenever we played, his “character” always said suggestive things to my characters. He was always trying to get me to be alone with him.
When I was a bit older and made a point of avoiding him, T-Bone started calling me “Jezebel.” Adults heard him and thought it was cute but it made me scared. I remained friends with his sister and when I was 10 I agreed to sleep over at her house. T-Bone wasn’t supposed to be home for most of the evening, I think, and the sister and I were to sleep on a pull-out couch in the TV room, which was next to the parents’ room.
Looking back, I don’t know why no one thought it strange that they’d moved the sister’s room from next to her brother’s to the floor below, across from the parents. Or that the grandmother’s room was moved up to the 3rd floor. I don’t know why I didn’t blink when we were told to sleep in the T.V. room. I don’t know why I didn’t fake an illness when I found out her parents were going out but T and is friend were staying in. I was 10. I just wanted to stay up late and watch movies with my friend.
We did that. And then we went to sleep. At some point T-Bone and his friend came into the room and jumped on top of us. T-bone pushed my nightgown up and started clutching at my non-existent breasts. I thought, at first, that they were trying to wrestle with us. But then T-Bone starting calling me “whore”.
When he went for my underwear I started scratching and kicking. He slapped me across the face, then suggested to his friend that they “trade.”His friend was like, “But that’s your sister!” The friend went up the stairs. T-Bone followed, snarling all the while.
The sister tried to make it sound like they were wrestling and we had beaten them. I didn’t feel like a winner. I felt dirty.
It didn’t help that T-Bone called me those names whenever he saw me from then on. Jezebel. Whore. Slut. I never went to that house again, but it didn’t really matter. We lived next door in an era where kids played outside unsupervised all the time. He called me those names in front of the other kids. He called me those names after I kicked him in the balls. He called me those names after he tried to lock me in a play house.
He called me those names when he chased me. He called me those names until I was 16 and he had me backed into a corner at the neighborhood 4th of July barbecue. By then he’d been away at college and I hadn’t had to run or kick in a long while. I was so stunned that he was there and that he would still call me those names that I just stared at him. I like to think I would have let him have it, especially since no one was near us, but another neighbor came up then. He was my age but he was a lot bigger than T-Bone. He told T-Bone to leave me alone or else.
I will be grateful to that guy until the day I die. Of course, even though T-Bone stopped calling me those names, it took me a lot longer to stop hearing them. I still can’t stand to be touched when I’m sleeping.
Do I think it’s likely that the same thing will happen to my daughter at a sleepover?
No, I don’t…
…but that doesn’t mean I don’t have nightmares about it.
by Band Back Together | Nov 3, 2010 | Bullying, Childhood Bullying, Coping With Bullying, Gay Is Okay, Gender Nonconformity, How To Heal From Being Bullied, Teen Bullying, Transgender |
This post originally appeared on my blog on October 17, 2010
A while back, I was Facebook-friended by someone with whom I’d gone to elementary school, a woman I hadn’t seen in 15 years. In that same week, I was friended by another schoolmate, a man I hadn’t seen in 25 years. I’ll call these two people, who are not Facebook friends with each other, Leia and Mork.
I was happy to be back in touch with Leia and Mork. Leia and I, and Mork and I, in separate sets of messages, chatted in the way that long-lost friends do, telling each other where we live, how many kids we have, what we do for work. We exchanged several messages. A few messages in, both Mork and Leia asked me what sort of writing I did. And so I told them, as simply as I could: I write, under a pen name, about my son, who likes to wear a dress.
And you know what? Both Leia and Mork never wrote back.
Maybe it was a coincidence. Maybe the conversations just dropped off in the way conversations eventually do, and it just happened to be after I dropped the pink-bomb on each of them. Maybe they both got busy, sick, or their computers went on the fritz.
Or maybe they got freaked out.
Because people sometimes do.
I notice that the tomboy in Sam’s grade who plays on the boys’ soccer team is cool and socially in demand, while Sam doesn’t get invited to many birthday parties. Sometimes people look at us strangely when we disclose that Sam, the long-haired kid they’ve taken for a girl, is a boy. Sam’s school administration can talk eloquently about diversity and acceptance up and down, except when it comes to gender, when they get all panicky and quiet.
I make it my business to talk to as many people as I can about Sam (while being careful of his privacy and his safety), to make gender nonconformity something that gets talked about, not something swept under the rug. Because when we hide something, we make it shameful. So I open my mouth, maybe even more than I should, and occasionally I lose an audience member or two, like Leia and Mork.
But maybe the next time they hear about someone’s son who wears a dress, they’ll remember that the woman they kind of liked back in elementary school mentioned something about her son wearing a dress, and maybe that will make it a little bit more OK.
by Band Back Together | Nov 3, 2010 | Adoption, Estrangement, Healing From A Rape or Sexual Asault, Rape/Sexual Assault, Trauma |
A 30-year family secret is no longer a secret. My sister was the victim of a violent rape, the perpetrator never known or charged. She hid her pregnancy, and the rape, for seven months. When the family found out we all rallied around her, but the decision was hers to give the baby up for adoption.
After the trauma of rape, birth and recovery, that was that. It was never spoken of again. Until last month when my sister tells us she’s been in touch with her birth daughter. We are all delighted to welcome this new niece, cousin, and granddaughter into our lives, but my sister is not so sure. The re-discovery of her daughter has brought back 30 years of repressed memories of the rape. The daughter can’t wait to meet her birth mother (she initiated the contact), but my sister can’t separate the daughter from the rape. I understand, and respect my sister’s decision to never meet her birth daughter.
I have friends and even a cousin who re-discovered their birth families after 20 or more years, and all their stories have happy endings.
But none of them sprung from a rape.
This is all made more difficult by the fact that the girl grew up just a few counties away, and her two families (birth and adoptive) have crossed paths before, albeit unknowingly.
Given the circumstances, it would have been best for my sister to never have found her daughter. But it’s too late to unlearn the truth, and we’re left wondering where to go from here.
There are many resources out there for birth parents reuniting with long-lost children, but I can’t find anything that deals with women who were victims of rape reuniting with their adopted children.
If anyone out there has a similar story to share, my sister could really use the support.
by Band Back Together | Oct 29, 2010 | Healing From A Rape or Sexual Asault, How To Help A Loved One Who Self-Injures, Rape/Sexual Assault, Self Injury, Statutory Rape |
signed up with a fake name, but I am Stephanie.
In 1995, when I was 15, there was an attempted sexual assault on me by some 20-something-ish guy who was a bouncer at a local bar. At the time, my best friend was having sex and knew lots of her older brother’s friends. She was able to get us into the bar. It felt so cool to be doing that at 15.
We were going to hang out with the same bouncer guy, who was friends with her current “boyfriend” the next weekend. I thought it was so neat that a decent looking older guy thought I was pretty and attractive enough to buy drinks for. I was so bloody naive.
It was fall. I remember them picking us up at her house, then driving around to random places (a trailer park somewhere looking for liquor, then someone’s house). We ended up at the local park. It was dark by then. While my friend went off into the dark park to have sex with her boyfriend (just after having an abortion), I was left with this guy who had bought me drinks at the bar the weekend before, who gave me a kiss on the lips, who I thought was cool.
He tried forcefully yanking up my shirt, trying to get my bra off. Kissing me hard. He was scaring the shit out of me and I didn’t know what to do. I think he tried undoing my pants. He kept telling me that I owed it to him. That I was a tease. I remember eventually running a short distance away from the playground equipment to a picnic table, where I told him, terrified, that I was on my period. He was angry and called me a liar. I took an unopened tampon from my pocket and threw it in his direction.
He proceeded to tell me he would hurt my family if I said anything. I had to tell him everyone’s names and where I lived and my phone number. I sat in terror, unsure if he was going to rape me, until I finally heard my friend coming back to where we were. He told me to “walk like you’ve just been fucked.”
I’ll never forget those words. I wish I had stood up to him and told him off. But I was afraid. And had no phone. Wasn’t within walking distance even to a pay phone. I had no ride home. I had no idea what I would say to my parents.
I was a virgin and didn’t even know what that was, so I tried to walk slowly and limp a little while he and his friend snickered on the way back to the truck. I felt humiliated, stupid, foolish, scared. My father was a cop. Why the fuck did I allow myself to be left alone in a dark park at night with a guy I had met once before? I was so stupid. And I felt so exposed, having told him all kinds of details about my family when we were sitting in the park.
I didn’t tell anyone until I told my mother, many months later. I made her promise not to tell my father. I was put on anti-depressants that summer.
On the anniversary of the day, I honestly cut myself to shreds with a razor blade in the shower. I don’t remember what I said, but I remember my father being on duty and having to take me to the emergency room at the hospital in the back of his squad car. I was destroyed. I was a mess. And I managed to humiliate my poor father (and mother) by being taken to the small town hospital like that.
I ended up being admitted and evaluated in the psych. ward for 2 weeks. My first true love, my first real boyfriend, came to visit me. We got caught fooling around in the hospital by my mom. Yet another reason to feel humiliated, dirty and wrong. I was 16.
My boyfriend’s parents were upstanding PTA-type parents who were very cognizant of appearances and perceptions and wanted him to have nothing to do with me. I remember a counselor at the hospital telling me I should break up with him (but I have no idea why… if anything, I was the bad influence). But being in the mental hospital doesn’t make you look that great at 16. I lost the first love of my life because some asshole tried to steal something from me. He didn’t get my virginity, but he took my pride and the majority of my self-worth. I lost my first love, my sense of security, my sense of self-worth, and I humiliated my parents.
Every time I hear “Glycerine”, by the band Bush, I think of my first love, and how I lost him despite pleading on the phone. His parents wouldn’t let me talk to him after that. And “Don’t Speak” by No Doubt. It still makes me tear up now.
While in the hospital, the counselors strongly urged me to press charges. It had been a year since the incident had occurred. My own father was a cop on the force. How ridiculously stupid would I look if I admitted to being in a bar underage the weekend before, then intentionally walking into a dark park with someone who was essentially a stranger? I wasn’t even sure of his last name.
Most of the process was blocked out in my mind, but I will never forget sitting on the witness stand, in front of a room full of people. In front of my mom. And my dad, who looked at the ground the entire time, while the lawyers, officers, and judge all sat there listening to the stupid choices his daughter made, trying to not be a wuss. I remember the female officer who interviewed me was sisters with my co-worker at the mall. I was so afraid people would find out and just assume I was a lying little slut.
When my friend took the stand, she was about 7 months pregnant. When his friend took the stand, he swore under oath and confirmed his birth date (that was incorrect). The asshole never took the stand. But he sat there, and I was scared, while his girlfriend and child sat behind him to support him. In the few instances I met her eyes, she gave me hateful glances and made nasty comments. I felt ill.
Despite the lawyers having their jobs to do, the judge personally grilled me with many many more questions as to how I could be so foolish to do what I did. I wanted to curl up and hide. He kept telling me to raise my voice. He threatened me with something that I don’t remember, if I didn’t keep my voice at a reasonable level. The humiliation never stopped.
From the moment the asshole ripped up my shirt, it felt like the intelligent, wise 15 year old started to die inside. I certainly know things could have ended much much worse. And, in fact, as I type this I am thinking that probably a lot of readers will wonder what the big deal was.
I didn’t go to the sentencing, because I knew my legs would give out and I would give up then and there if he got off free and no one believed me. My parents went and said that the judge praised me for my testimony, being articulate and explaining why an otherwise bright girl would make such poor choices. The asshole got 3 months house arrest. The whole thing was written up in the paper and I was made to look a complete fool.
I remember my father being displeased that the asshole’s lawyer even took the case, since my dad knew the lawyer well. I actually remember my sister being very angry at the way the newspaper portrayed me. That was the last time I remember her caring about that kind of thing.
It was a big deal to me. I lost my first love over the trauma. I was broken at 15, humiliated, embarrassed for my parents, deeply anorexic, depressed and a shadow of the girl I once was. I lost her that day. I wonder who she would be now if that night didn’t happen. Instead, I have me.
I longed for my first love for the rest of my high school days. As we got older, if we ever had a chance to spend time, hang out or be near each other, I always went. My best friend dated him our last year of high school. It crushed me.
Once we went on to college, I had no self-esteem and would actually cave to any booty call from my first boyfriend. I needed his “love” and acceptance so badly, I allowed myself to be treated like dirt. And the worst part? I still feel like I am somehow sub-par without his acceptance. That I was never good enough and will never be, 14 years later. Even though I know that is messed up and I am in a wonderful, healthy long-term relationship with a great guy now.
I remember snippets of all these things, images in my mind and sentences here and there, but the emotion and the fear is still so fresh. The stamp of failure feels firmly affixed to my forehead.
This experience changed me for the worse, and left me feeling helpless, stupid and useless. Then, 6 years later, I was raped. It destroyed the little part of me that I had left.
I am working on that post now.
