***Trigger Warning – contains potentially distressing material pertaining to sexual assault
Home
Now that I was back home from visiting my aunt for the summer, I had to readjust to life with my parents and siblings. It was not easy. I felt very awkward, and I knew that I was being watched by everyone. My parents were very silent around me because I was now physically different. I was not a little girl anymore even though I was 10. My siblings were also different around me. They never knew what to say to me. Yet, it never occurred to me that I was different even though I aware I was different.
I felt different because I no longer felt like me. The original me was gone. Pieces of that original me had died the day of the sexual assault against me. My mind had shut that part of me down so that I could cope. The only way I knew to cope was through a sea of anger as a form of expression. The anger was silent and waiting. I was living my life as fragments of myself. Those fragments refused to participate together so that I could make sense of my emotions. I just knew I was angry, but I did not recall a reason.
Thinking back to this time in my life, I believe that the anger I harbored was more visible to others than it was visible to me. The anger had changed my countenance. I was often termed as a very moody child. I had a low tolerance for certain people and certain things, and my family were not the only ones to take note of this either. Other family members and friends of the family took note of the changes in me too, but it was more or less the physical changes with my body that stood out the most.
Nevertheless, I was home, and at first, it was very awkward for me to be home. Although I wanted to be home, home did not feel like home to me anymore. I spent the first days or weeks reacclimating myself back to life with my family, but I really missed my aunt, and I strangely missed the life I had with her too. When she called the day that I arrived home, I remember speaking to her briefly. I remember feeling happy to hear from her, and I remember wishing that I was still there with her.
The first few nights of sleep without her presence was difficult. Throughout the first night back at home as I attempted my first sleep back in my own bed, things felt very different for me. I felt lost. I felt out of touch. I felt like I was outside of my body. I felt afraid. I remember thinking how much better it would have been for me to hear the street life all around me outside the window as I tried to fall asleep. Now, I was facing a new type of terror. Things were silent in the dark at home – too silent. I remember vividly not being able to go to sleep. So I listened to Prince on my Walkman, and I cried silently in the dark for my aunt.
Where The Madness Begins
I remember snippets of the next day after first arriving home, and things were still just as awkward for me and my family. I remember my dad reacting towards me in a distant manner which I did not understand. It was as if he were handling me very carefully. I do not think he knew how to handle my obvious change. He treated me as if he did not know me anymore, but it was clear that I was not the same. For the first few weeks, he seemed to avoid me, and his avoidance created a gulf between him and me that would be almost irreparable in the future.
Nevertheless, as the days went on, life fell back into the normal routines. Yet, I remember some of the routines I had learned while living with my aunt had stuck with me. I remember taking a bath and going about the normal routine I had used to get myself ready (as I had done with my aunt for nearly three months). I had formed habits that were logical to me but were different than the habits I had before I left home. These habits seemed strange and out of place at home now.
My mother took immediate note of my habitual changes, and during one bath time she burst in on me while I was in the tub. Unlike before when I was still very much a child and unaware of my nakedness, I hardly ever flinched when my mother came into the bathroom while I was bathing in the tub. Yet, this time around when she burst in, I remember covering myself as I sat staring a hole into her. I was in utter shock and disbelief that she would burst in without knocking first, and I felt infringed upon and violated as her eyes scanned me. Her eyes seemed to silently suggest that I had done something wrong.
Without a word, my mother sat on the side of the tub near me and began to talk. Almost instantaneously, I felt a blanket of shame position itself above me. My skin shivered and waited for this blanket’s hot darkness to cover me. I barely glanced up at my mother who was now looking at me with eyes of condescension. The tone of her voice was not comforting at all but rather seeking and prying for a wound to tear open. Her eyes were, in fact, the normal eyes of a narcissist which scans its victim for a weakness to break down. I was cornered and had no where to go. This is when I realized that I was really home.
My mother: You’re all grown up now. Your body has changed. You are so different. I should have been there with you when you got your first bra. The mother is supposed to do that.
I sat saying nothing. I could not even look at her. Her words made me feel dirty, but I could not understand the reason I as searched for that reason in silence.
My mother: What did those boys do?
For a moment, I looked at her not understanding her question. Yet, when I took hold of the glance coming at me from her eyes, I saw a sinister grin appear on her face. The blanket of shame was then thrust upon me forcefully as if to suffocate me and take my breath away. Something in my brain clicked, and my body reacted. I was then thrown into a panic. I remember wanting to run for cover, but I was trapped in the tub. So I covered myself even more and felt myself hyperventilating. My breathing became deeper as I fought the urge to cry out.
My reaction obviously caught my mother off guard. She did not know how to respond. “What’s the matter?” is all I heard her say. Then I remember her turning her glance towards the bathroom door. Then she shushed me because she did not want my dad to hear the commotion. I do not know how my mother was with me as a baby, and I do not recall her being very soothing with my siblings either, but in this instance she frantically tried to soothe me.
I could tell by my mother’s facial expression that soothing me took a lot of effort to do. It was as if doing so actually pained her. I will never forget the expression on her face. It was as if she were flatly annoyed that she even had to soothe me because she really did not know how. I do not remember the method of her soothing, but usually when she attempted to correct something that she knew was wrong in her response and did not want to be exposed for it, she would simply say “Uh-oh”, and there was always a flat affect. Her voice was always monotone – almost robotic.
My mother’s “Uh-oh” was the soothe all to help her change the subject. Her changing of the subject was even worse, however. What she said next sent my mind into a tailspin. “You look just like [my aunt’s name]. You have breasts just like hers.” It was strange to hear her say this, and I immediately felt self-conscious and tried to cower myself down lower into the tub. Just as quickly as my mother clicked into another mode of attack feigned as a compliment to me, I quickly felt my emotions go from shame to confusion and then to embarrassment. I was confused about what she was saying to me in that moment because my aunt, also her sister, was dying of breast cancer.
For whatever reason, my mother’s words always remained lodged within my mind even long after that time in the tub. Throughout the years I wondered if my own mother was cursing me with an ailment or if she were simply making a remark. Her remark made no sense to me unless she was just expressing comparisons, but it was indeed strange for me to hear and odd for her to say. For years, I never could shake her words. I pondered over them because the way and the tone in which she said them were “off”. She sounded so sinister with an edge of nicety.
For the most part, I always thought this experience with my mother was weird, but I also know that families of narcissists have love-hate relationships with each other. For instance, I knew that my mother was often envious of her sister for being so care-free and living a life that she did not live. Yet, at the same time, my aunt was also envious of my mother for having a life that my aunt perceived as a good family life with a nice home. I always thought their closeness was strange but their distance with each other even stranger. They had the same type of relationship with their mother. Yet, this is not a relationship with either of them that I would ever come to find.
When my mother had voiced her words about my physical appearance while I was sitting in the tub, I felt her words’ impact upon me. In fact, I felt an instant anger arise within me. In response to her words, I lashed out and told her to “leave me alone or I’ll tell”. I was never quite sure what I was going to tell, but I believe it was more so telling my father the way my mother had spoken to me because my brain allowed me very little recall of the sexual assault.
However, the very mention of “those boys” always put my body into a trigger mode of reaction. It was clear that my body and mind refused to cooperate with each other to help me remember what “those boys” meant to me and who “those boys” were in reference to me, and for the time being, that lack of cooperation between my body and mind had to be okay because I honestly do not believe I could have handled it any other way.
When I lashed out at my mother to “leave me alone”, I remember feeling hot liquid anger release in small amounts. There was far more anger to come. My madness was only just beginning to surface. There was a huge tidal wave of rage that was being held back like the receding waves that occur just before a tsunami. No one was ready for those waves of rage to come crashing in to destroy everything in their path – not even me.
Stay tuned for the next post as my story continues.
My Voice Unchained 