It’s in the final stages of recovery programs, when the coaches start talking about sharing your recovery story.
Your sharing might be the words someone else needs to hear. To start their healing process. To stop un-healed issues from interfering and disrupting life.
In 2018 when invited to train to be a child advocate for CASA of Ky, (https://www.kentuckycasanetwork.org/) I knew I couldn’t.
My “inner wounded child” was still MUTE.
No one
No where
…..at any point in my life
has been “safe enough” to share the whole story.
Not even my dear grandmother.
Some of what happened to my body was too horrible to re-tell.
I’d visit my grandmother for the summer while school was out.
The story was: My father was a teacher and did not get paid if he didn’t teach summer school. I was “sent off to relatives.” I thought it was “all the kids” were sent off. My eldest went to the other grandmother. (The scary one for me, abomination and all.) Now I am not so sure if the enforcer-bully-tox sis was sent off… I thought she was sent to the aunt I share a name with as it was “out in the country” and that sister had a lot of “energy.” I don’t know if my brother was sent off at all.
From six years old until twelve years old, I got to go home for 3 months a year. Then I was sent back to my abusers’ (plural and possessive) house.
My grandmother had a whole process: washing everything I arrived with Immediately, including what I was wearing, rinsing my hair with lice/flea/tick treatment, followed by a shower in the garage, and a long soak in the bath to loosen dirt and scabs. Then an iodine treatment on all the surface wounds. She would fuss over how I got taller, and worry over how I didn’t gain much weight, finding the silver lining that last summer’s clothes would still fit.
Fact: I was malnourished. Fact: My mother was morbidly obese.
Clearly food was coming into the house.
The child services work differently back than. Much was explained away by my mother. She would coach the kids on what to say and remind us of the punishment to come if we “made her look bad.”
Pitting the child’s safety and well being against ruining her social reputation.
Telling children they will be responsible fortearing apart the whole family.
This is psychologically bludgeoning.
These are IMPOSSIBLE positions.
Beyond, double binds, beyond cognitive dissonance.
Hard enough for adults to be there, but for a developing child this is mind warping.
My dear grandmother comes from a harder time and place than my generation.
Born in 1901 Married in 1926, Great Depression in 1929 (for a decade) during that time she had 5 children (lost the 6th.) Widowed in summer of 1976. Professional Homemaker. She never learned to drive.
From six years old until twelve years old, I got to go home for 3 months a year.
She moved into a new(er) house than the one her husband had built for her to raise her family in. (That went to my eldest half brother.) 1950’s ranch with built in features like phone nook, knickknack shelves bracketing the kitchen window and edge of cupboard, and a tall thin closet for brooms and mobs with a fold out iron board. The room I stayed in was referred to as my room, even when I wasn’t there. Even after I joined the Navy and got sent to the other side of the country. Her room, her sewing room, and my room. It was real wood paneled, and the door had decals of retro toys, bears, trucks, and building blocks. “Boys” room. I had the bottom drawer of the dresser for my toys, coloring books and such, and two above that for my clothes.
At six, my grandmother started teaching me; manners, how to pray, read, hygiene and housekeeping, .. bath regularly, brush teeth and hair, make my bed, (actual wooden frame bed off the floor) how to hold eating utensils, (feral) wash dishes, sweep, the vacuum, mop, rake… wait, that’s yard keeping. I had the whole back yard to myself, the trees (tangerine, navel, grapefruit, magnolia) were short, but sturdy enough. My art stayed on her garage door, since I brought it home from school. Still there when I visited her with my infant son in the late 90’s.
At some point, cousins and enforcer-tox-sis got ENVYOUS of my “special time” with grandma and wanted as much as a week alone with her too. She tried for a bit, but stopped it, she was too old and fragile to keep up with wild and demanding children.
She probably said it with more sensitivity.
The evidence was there, my bottom drawer was treated like a community toybox. Every page of every coloring book scribbled over, even the ones I had finished. All the paper dolls I had made were ripped in half. Every crayon broken, every handmade puppet’s button eyes ripped out.
My grandmother’s puzzle collection got disrespected as well. She’d arrange her puzzles on ¼ inch boards and stack them under her bed, selecting from the different boards to work on for a bit then storing it when she had enough. Ofc there were kid puzzles, but after the first summer I could put them together from the cardboard side, so she let me advance to something more complicated, until I was skilled enough to sit across from her and work on the other side of her huge puzzles.
After the other grandkids had special grandma week, none of the kid puzzles had all the pieces anymore. And the ones under the bed got shoved and mixed together during a “hide-and-seek.”
[In her room. Under her bed. These kids did not know or respect this woman.]
We spent that summer unmixing all of them, One box at a time.
Then I’d have to go back to my family… with school year starting and all.
From six years old until twelve years old, I got to go home for 3 months a year. Then I was sent back to my abusers’ (plural and possessive) house.
The current era cultural automatic assumption is this abuse was from the males, my father and brother.
No. Those men were hardworking, studious, and largely unavailable.
It was the females. Mother (her parents; matriarch and pedophile) and my toxic sisters.
A pack/pact tactics, campaigns, torture sessions, teaching me, correcting me, because I was a “problem.”
My word against theirs.
My mother would flip the narrative. Get this…
My grandmother teaching me hygiene and housekeeping was an ATTACK on my mother,
“That woman thinks I’m an unfit mother!” wailing “That woman doesn’t think I’m clean enough.” gnashing!
Then it became about religion and patriarch, blah blah blah. Victim-mentality… no one suffered more than my mother.
I would get tormented and knocked around every time I cleaned. I had to share the bedroom with my enforcer-tox-sis. My most brutal abuser. Hair-trigger mood swings, erratic violent outburst, transference, beating-boy, degradation, verbal abuse. I had no privacy, not even in the restroom, where I would get “caught” doing personal hygiene, ridiculed and body shamed. It was very bonding for the in-group. Hen-pecking and heckling. Aren’t they soooo cute. Tee Hee!
I had to LEARN preserve those quiet peaceful summers, TO ENDURE through the following nine months.
To get home again.
Traveler Chimiru 
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