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 | 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 | Nov 2, 2010 | Anger, Coping With Divorce, Divorce, Help With Relationships, Loneliness, Romantic Relationships, Single Parenting |
The life of a single mother is not all that glamorous. Sometimes I act like it is. Life is just great being alone and raising 3 kids.
Truth be told, it is hard! I don’t have someone to sit down with at night and talk to about problems I am having with the kids. I don’t have someone who is raising them right alongside of me, someone who knows everything I do. It is a very lonely life.
Pretty much I have been single for the last 2 years. There have been a few small relationships, though. I have watched my friends find men that love them unconditionally. I have watched them be happy and in love. I go to dinner or go to hang out and all of a sudden I am the odd one out. I am the fifth wheel. Bonfires where everyone is cuddling close to their significant other, I am sitting alone trying to keep warm and keep from crying all the lonely tears that are bottled inside of me.
I was hurt really bad. It did more damage than even I like to admit. I know I have faults, and I even know what they are. But I just don’t see a point in trying to fix them if I continually get judged based on them. I am a lot better than before. My faults aren’t nearly as large.
When someone loves you…aren’t they supposed to love you unconditionally? Despite your faults? Aren’t they supposed to help you to better yourself and not judge you and leave you? That can’t be true love can it?
I want someone to stand beside me. I want someone to love me for me. I am a good person. I am a good mother. I am a good friend. I am kind. I am caring. I am loving and trusting and trustworthy.
Can one trivial thing ruin that in every single relationship I try to make work? Is it really that bad? Is being unorganized, and maybe a little chaotic and messy really a reason to stop loving someone? I don’t think so but I guess I am wrong because I have lost the one thing I want most in this life because of it. And in trying to find it again I get told the same thing over and over.
by Band Back Together | Nov 1, 2010 | Anxiety, Cirrhosis, Hepatitis, Liver Disease, Stress, Trauma |
The day I got the phone call, I felt the wholeness of my little world, my security, bodily health, relationship, and peace of mind break apart, red hot, and scatter in every direction around me. That phone call was an atom bomb. My life blew to pieces and then rained down all about me. Everything burned.
Three words changed my life: “you tested positive.”
The blood ran from my face into my feet as I hung up the phone. Although my eyes were open, in a spell of synesthesia, I saw nothing but the sound of the blood beating at my temples. I was delivered my test results in a department store, without my shoes on, and in jeans that weren’t even my own. My skin grew cold and foreign.
I don’t remember peeling the denim from my legs, pulling my coat around my body, or stumbling into the November air of the parking lot. Minutes tick by and I have no recollection of their existence. In the following weeks, I find that whole chucks of my life go missing. I am thankful for those disappeared hours… the sound of my own keening and wailing, all animal, would have later haunted my dreams.
I sat in the car as the sobs ripped through me and left no part of my body untouched. They pulsed through my fingertips, clung to my ribs, drew my thighs toward my chest. They puffed into little clouds of steam in the cold, dispersed, and were replaced by more tiny clouds. I cried all the way home, bent double, called my lover, begged forgiveness. He talked me down. Said I had nothing to be sorry for. He went on with life as usual and by doing so, pulled me through all of my darkest days.
I owe him everything.
You would think that I’d have more to say about the details of this day, but it’s grown flat. I remember the back drop of grey clouds and little else.
I wavered between periods of eerie silence that sounded almost like peace and inconsolable mourning. One moment I was calm, while in the next I swore I could feel the tiny, organic machines sliding through my blood, dismembering my liver. During those first weeks, I read all I could about viruses in fascinated horror. In this, I found a strange comfort.
I lived through the nightmare of half a dozen doctors visits, a battery of tests, and waiting for more phone calls that once hung up leave me sobbing into my shaking hands. My bilirubin was so high, I was only a hairsbreadth away from jaundice, a second antibody test came back positive.
My heart pounded as I read domestic magazines in waiting rooms. The insides of my elbows turned the color of plums with bruises that bloom in the wake of one blood draw after another. I dropped ten pounds in a few weeks. The nurses looked at me with chiding eyes and said, “you really need to eat, you know. You can’t lose any more weight.”
But food turned to sand in my mouth. I had been hollowed out and couldn’t seem to fill myself again.
During all this, my one respite was sleep… plagued night after night by nightmares all my life, the dreams I had at that point were more beautiful than any I had ever assumed possible. My sleeping mind drew images in the dark that blotted out my suffering: my beloved dead showed up, smiling; an evening was lit up bright as day with my mind’s fireworks; a door set into the floorboards swung open to blue sky.
My dreams provided me with a much needed unremembereing. Waking up was the hard part; the sweet flesh of night gave way to the hard light of morning. Really, the relearning of your life as you wake up is the hardest part of this disease, next to liver failure.
This is not to say that there is no hope.
Treatment is long and brutal, similar in its side effects to chemo, but at a success rate of 50%, worth the hair loss, headaches, nausea, anemia, and sleeplessness for the chance to have my health back and a glass of chilled white zinfandel. I did my research and found I was ready to wander 48 weeks in that desert of treatment at the chance of being delivered from my suffering.
It was then I decided that I wasn’t going to mourn any more, I was only going to fight.
by Band Back Together | Oct 29, 2010 | Brain Cancer, Cancer and Neoplasia, Chronic Pediatric Illness, Coping With Cancer, Fear |
*Of course, no one can fight cancer alone. Or should. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t sometimes feel alone. Even if you aren’t the one who has the cancer.
I still remember walking with my son on his way to the OR. Trying not to fall to pieces. Wanting to believe that the neurosurgeon I had hardly met more than 24 hours before would fix my son. That his hands would be steady as he worked to remove the tumor that was slowly taking over my son’s brain. That the tumor really was “just” benign as he had thought.
Oh, how I wanted someone to promise me that my son would be okay.
The constant plea in my head… just please let my son be okay. Just please let him live.
Oh, dear God… my son was going to have brain surgery. My two-year old son. Brain surgery.
Then the bright white room, people moving about as if on a mission, my eyes locked onto my son.
“Time out!”
Me wondering, “What the hell?” and “What did we do wrong?” Only to realize that they are trying to verify that they have the correct patient and the correct procedure. I try to regain what little composure I have left. I can’t lose it completely in front of my son.
Then the anesthesiologist telling me to kiss my son as it’s time for me to go.
My son is howling as if betrayed. “How dare you leave me with these people?” scream his eyes. Then the medicine starts to take an effect and the life seems to fade from those same eyes as his body goes limp.
I walk out of the OR. Without my son.
I had never been more terrified in my life.
That was four years ago.
In the last few days, I’ve been teaching that son to Rollerblade. The one who before the diagnosis had problems with balance and motor skills. Now on rollerblades.
It’s one of the most beautiful things ever.
But he didn’t make it to this point alone. Nor did I.
Nearly a year after our son’s surgery, my husband learned of a program called Hero Beads offered by a local childhood cancer support group called Capital Candlelighters (soon to be renamed Badger Cancer Support Network). This string of beads documents the diagnoses, treatments, milestones, etc. along a child’s journey.
It’s almost indescribable seeing your child’s medical history as a string of beads. And regardless of outcome, there are always too many beads.
And while I treasure those beads, Capital Candlelighters offers kids and their families so many more concrete means of support. From financial aid to support groups to sharing information… anything that they can do to make the hell that is childhood cancer easier for children and their families.
Over time my family has begun to participate in events either sponsored by or to benefit Capital Candlelighters. We recently walked in our second Suzy’s Run. It’s a highly emotional experience. Seeing the families and kids who are still fighting or have beaten cancer. Seeing the families whose kids have lost.
So it’s time for me to do more, to give back. Because doing good feels good. But I’m not done yet.
“…because kids can’t fight cancer alone!” (Capital Candlelighters motto)
(I’ll be damned if I don’t tear up every time I read that motto.)
