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3:47:00 PM EDT
Feeling Quiet
DUST IN THE WIND
The beginnings of a Dissociative Personality (click for more information)
Dust specks danced in the light beam that angled sharply into the poorly furnished room. Wind blew through the open window causing the cheap plastic curtains to curl their lips away from the wall with a clack, fraying even more. I tried to catch the bits of light dust with my hands as the television played the afternoon soap opera.
My mother stood in the dining room that was part of the living room and she was ironing my father's shirts, standing barefoot on a wooden slatted floor that I remember so well, painted chocolate brown with nails that always had to be hammered back down into the planks. My mother wore another black eye from the fight her and my Dad had the night before. He wasn't home that day, either at work or at his girlfriend's house. I didn't know as I was still too young to understand anything except the terror of the fighting and my mother's darkness.
My baby brother lay crying in the playpen beside the television. His diaper smelled of strong ammonia, because it was heavy with urine and his bottle hadn't been changed in so long that the milk that was once in it had now become solid. His cries became hiccupping sniffles and tapered off to an occasional complaint. I rocked and played with the dust in the wind hoping that she would make him stop crying. She seemed to not see or hear much of anything, robotically ironing back and forth staring into space in a housedress that she'd worn several days in a row. Her hair looked as if she'd been surprised by an electric shock, as she hadn't brushed it in quiet awhile.
A gray, two level side table with a lamp on it was beside a hard pillowed couch that was also dark brown, upholstered with a terry cloth that felt like today's velcro. My Mother had made a pitcher of sweettea and her glass of it was in a coaster on that table. She wasn't drinking it and I was so thirsty. I'd asked for something to drink but she didn't hear me, or maybe couldn't. The fight that they had last night was so bad that today her left eye was swollen shut and closed. Her bottom lip was big and looked like it hurt alot. All I remember about their fight was her screaming for him not to kill her, over and over. I lay in my bed with the cover over my head, petting my chest with my hand saying it's going to be alright to calm myself until I went to sleep.
The first time she spoke to me was when I reached for her tea. Condensation clung to the glass and dripped slowly onto the table, making a ring of water around the coaster. I could tell it was going to be cold and I just wanted a sip.
"Don't touch that!", she said sharply, startling me so badly that I bumped the glass. In what felt like slow motion, I watched the glass tip and fall, hitting the bottom level of the table before hitting the floor and shattering. Glass shards and sweet liquid sprayed up in the air, with some tiny particles sticking on me. Fear wrapped itself around my heart like a boa constrictor. I knew I was in trouble.
"Now look what you've done!", she said accusingly, the tea making it's liquid river trail across the slanted floor. She took two steps toward me, both feet booming on the floor like some female giant.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry." I cried. Please, oh God, don't hurt me. What was she going to do this time. I was so afraid I thought I would wet my pants. My cries started my baby brother's up again. She lifted me by one arm and it happened so fast. The pain in my back from something that burned through my clothes was louder than what she was saying about teaching me to listen, something about teaching me to mind her. I screamed and screamed until I couldn't hear myself anymore.
With the pain came this smell and that was the first time I saw the snow fall all around me when I was terrified. I couldn't and didn't understand it or accept it. She'd hurt me. She'd used her iron and she hurt me with it. I knew that's what she'd done but I didn't want to believe it. I hurt so much that I couldn't think or talk. I didn't even cry anymore, my sounds stopped as if someone flipped a switch as I was just that stunned.
The next thing I remember is being in the bathroom with my Mom and she was trying to get the shirt off of me and it was stuck between my shoulder blades. Stuck onto me. The more she pulled on it the more it hurt and I cried again. She finally had to pull it hard to get it off. I screamed again. She was running a bath and wanted me to get into it. I remember it being so cold. So cold, I just shivered uncontrollably. She explained to me that she was sorry but she just had to do it. I had to be a good little girl for her and listen to her when she tells me to do something. I was quiet and I was shivering so hard my body was shaking. The coldness hurt down to my bones and I didn't want to sit down. My feet were numb and I couldn't feel my toes while standing there, naked and small. Sitting my bottom down in the cold water was always the hardest part. She firmly pushed on my shoulder to get me to sit down faster and get it over with and as her hand came toward me, I shrunk away making her angry again. The water was still filling up the tub and it was getting deeper and deeper as the seconds passed. My little legs floated around on the bottom once I was seated. My back hurt so badly. I was sobbing again, cold, afraid and in pain. She wouldn't turn off the water. It was deeper than any bath I'd ever had. I was getting very afraid.
"Stop all that crying. You ain't hurt that bad!" she told me. Scaring me more, I cried even that much harder.
She pursed her lips together and said, "You're just going to be that hard headed aren't you? I told you to shut up. Didn't I? Didn't I? OK. I warned you."
The more she spoke the more I screamed. The snow that I had seen earlier fell harder between me and her so that I couldn't hardly see her. Maybe I would become invisible. In one quick movement, she pushed me down in the water and onto my back. When the faucet is running it sounds like everything in the world at once when you're underneath it; music and thunder. Kicking hard, fighting and trying to turn on my side, to get away from underneath her hand over my face, I clawed at her arm desparately to let me go, to let me up. Panic over rode me and I inhaled and flailed and choked.
At that moment, the water then seemed warm and so did the air as she pulled me up and into her arms and wrapped me into a towel. I inhaled with a wheeze and choked, then threw up all over myself. She wiped my face lovingly and held me close in her arms and rocked me gently. She sung to me a lullaby, "Hush Little Baby, Don't say a word, Momma's going to buy you a mockingbird... ". She crooned an adoring tune to her first born child who was about three years old.
I stopped crying like she wanted and in fact I didn't cry anymore at all. I just watched her from far away as she sang and cried, and rocked, sang and cried some more with her messed up hair, looking at me with her one good eye. I watched everything from deep within myself. She held me closely and tenderly but her eyes were far from me. They stared far away to some place I didn't know about. Her singing was like from another room even though she was right there, yet at the same time I could hear the sound of the water draining from the tub.
The front door opened and I heard my Dad call out, "Where is everybody?"
"We're in here," my Mother answered from the bathroom floor where we sat rocking. "I had to give her a bath." Then she looked down into my eyes, frightened person to frightened person, and putting her finger to her lips, she said, "Shh. Don't say a word."
And for a very, very long time, I didn't.
Written by standsbyriver Blog about this entry |
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Why is it that such painful memories are always the clearest? Why do we feel the need to re-visit them? I would like to say that this public sharing will bring relief and I hope it does. I would also like to say - find new, good memories to write over the pain. These memories do not have to define you. As long as you live you are never the finished article. Do some defining of your own.
That all seems too easy for me to say - but I will pray for you.
God Bless
http://journals.aol.co.uk/mairiegelling/word-in-the-hand/ -
i had to come back to this after reading it over and over. I am so dumbfounded by the expert way you weave the story and horrified beyond words. I am speechless.
my anger is very real as i sit and want your mom to explain as to why she thought she had the right to abuse you? How dare SHE!!!!!
hugs, lisa -
I have come by way of blogplugs. I have never read a story as bad as yours, Honey. I did read one in a book called "A Boy Named Dave", but yours seems even worse. I just feel like crying for you. I definitely can understand how you got disassociative. Gee. Are you still? I am going to go read your All About Me section and see what it says. If it is not in there, perhaps you could do another entry and answer that for us. It might help us to know how you are doing, for awareness sake of child abuse, and what happens to those who are abused. We need to help children in situations like yours. And we really care about YOU.
Krissy
http://journals.aol.com/fisherkristina/SometimesIThink -
Hi; I came to your journal from blogplugs; I am so sorry for the pain you suffered and endured in your life
betty
7/4/08 10:15 AM
My heart aches for that little you, and the children alters who saved your life.
sending you <safe> hugs,
Gwynn