You ever remember a moment in your life, and the memory is too much? So much that your brain begins to shut down a little. Throwing up a subconscious STOP sign. Warning you to go no further. This didn’t happen to you. It’s not real. Your brain is protecting you, trying to convince you that it must be made up. It can’t be real.
But it is real. And it did happen. The lack of ANYONE ever acknowledging the things that happened to me used to make me question my sanity. It drove me to the literal edge of where my rational brain ends, and crazy takes over. I’ve been told it was all a lie. I made it up. That my imagination just runs wild.
But I want to yell, I want to scream, tell them that I promise, my little girl imagination was NOT envisioning being tortured and terrified every night when mom went to work. That’s not the stuff little girls lay around and imagine up. It’s not the daydream we get lost in. It was the nightmare I survived.
Closets and tight spaces. They are still a trigger for me. Because I spent so much time locked in one. Not the figurative closets of poems. The real ones. The dark ones. The ones with doors that lock from the outside, and carpet that was stained with piss. My piss. Because he left me in there sometimes until I urinated on myself. While I begged and cried to be let out so I could go to the bathroom.
Duct tape. I sometimes see a roll of duct tape and smile sadly. Because it amuses me that most people use it for holding things together. Mending what is broken. Duct tape can fix it all! It can fix what is broken, but I know it can also bind your hands to your tucked knees and block the cries from your throat. It can leave your skin raw where it held you in place for hours…
I am maybe five or six years old. She leaves me with him again. Him, and this house. This rancid house of horrors. Him, and his nephews. Him and his duct tape. Him and his evil smirk that comes across his face when he knows I’ve been left at his mercy again. I cry. I scream. I lock myself around her legs, and she still leaves me again.
I try to be small. Be quiet. Be invisible. If I can hide long enough, he will get high or drunk, he will pass out before he remembers his entertainment. But I am never quiet enough. I can still remember his mocking chant “come out, come out, wherever you are… we just want to play. It’s all in funnnnnn”. I can 100%, without a doubt, hear his voice in my mind.
He remembered I am here. He always remembers. Before I can stop it, I’m held down, duct tape is slapped across my mouth. Muffling my cries of “daddy, please stop”. That’s right, she let me believe this piece of trash was my father. Add that to my torture. I thought this was what daddy’s do to their little girls.
Next are my legs and hands. The usual, tuck my knees up, wrap my hands around them, duct tape my arms and hands to my legs wrapping the tape all the way around my back. I was 100% helpless against a grown man and two teenage boys. But I sure gave them hell. I fought. Every time. Even when I knew how it would end. Even when I knew I was helpless. I fought.
Then his real fun started. The mental torture. How long could I stay in the closet, duct taped, before I lost my mind. I remember beating my head against the wall. It was the only part of me I could still move. It became a running joke. I was called “ding ding” because he said the amount of times I beat my head on the wall made me “dingy”.
They kept me in the closet for hours. Then took turns visiting me. Each visit brought more disgusting forms of torture. Sometimes they would bring dog shit in the closet. Smushed up in a napkin, and leave it in there with me. Closing me in with the scent and no way to escape it. The smell would make me gag. But I knew I couldn’t throw up, I would choke. The duct tape on my mouth preventing the vomit from coming out. So I held it in.
Then another would come back to the closet, pretend he was going to pee on me or maybe fart on my head while sitting on it. Sometimes they just sat on my head. Forcing my already cramped body into panic when I truly couldn’t breathe. It was all one sick sadistic game they “played”. Until they tired of it, got bored, and decided they would be done with me.
They would eventually take me out of the closet, and tell me that if I could break myself free from the tape, I could be done. They watched me struggle to get free. Straining my little body against the tape. Trying like hell to pull my hands and arms away from my legs as tears streamed down my face. I remember my body ached with the pain of being cramped in that position so long. But I still fought to get free. To make it be over. Occasionally, when my body was literally too weak to fight the tape any longer, one of the teenagers would feel bad for me and make a “cut” in the duct tape giving me a little bit of help to break free.
I would eventually get free, rip the tape from my face and body, ignoring the pain that caused, and yell at them all that I was telling my mom! And they laughed. I can also 100%, without a doubt, still hear his laugh in my head. They laughed because they knew I would tell her, and they laughed because they knew she would leave me there again.
I told my mom, and other family members knew what took place in that house, and nobody made it stop. Nobody came to rescue me. I was just a little girl, and thought that the things done to me were just what daddy’s did. I didn’t know to ask for help from someone outside my family. I just knew that I told my mom, and she continued to let it happen. So it must be okay.
Everything about this memory is far from okay. I can speak about it, write about it, and dissociate myself from it far enough to not let it consume me. But that doesn’t excuse it, and it doesn’t mean it never happened.
A few years ago, I confronted my mom about the things she let happen to me as a child. Her response was that she didn’t LET anything happen to me because she was at work and not there when it took place. So even though she walked out the door while I screamed her name and begged for her not to leave me with them again, she didn’t let it happen. She was just going to work. When that excuse didn’t go over like she planned, then it was that I was just lying. Making it all up. After that was debunked by my sister confirming that some of the things were done to her also, then it was “well if it was that bad, and you were so abused, why didn’t you do anything about it?”. Why didn’t I, at 5/6 years old, do anything to save myself. That is all the acknowledgment I got. That IF it happened (she still refuses to give truth to the things she KNOWS happened), then I should have saved myself.
What she doesn’t know is, even though I couldn’t then, I save myself every day now. Every time I think about the times I spent in that closet, and I don’t let those feelings shatter my soul, I save myself. Every time I meet the needs of my own children with love, dry their tears, hold them when they are scared, stay longer in the bed with them when they’ve had a bad dream and ask me not to go yet, protect them… I save myself. Every time I spend a moment with my mother, giving her Grace instead of the words I could say… I save myself.
A Time For Peace 