Fear of a Name

That last post was really difficult.  I felt off-balance and emotional for days afterwards. So I decided that today's post needed to be less stressful. I've always loved to read. Books can be a fun escape from reality. We can learn so much by reading and sometimes a passage or quote can have a profound meaning for the reader.

This quote from JK Rowling's Harry Potter books has a lot of meaning for me. I would imagine it has a lot of meaning for any who has survived abuse.  Hearing the name of your abuser can be a stressful trigger. It can take years to be able to hear the name without feeling a sense of panic. It's especially hard when the name is a very common one like Jim or Frank. There was a guy I worked with at Target named Frank who was head over heels in love with me. I tried going out with him after Brad and I broke up but I just couldn't do it. I'm afraid I may have broken his heart. I do know a couple of guys named Jim now and they're good guys.

I no longer panic when I hear these names. It took me a long time to get this point. I've had to remind myself of this quote many times. I hope others have been helped by it as I have.

His name was Jim

I've been putting this story off because it's a really hard one to tell. When I was 11 years old I slept over at a friend's house.  Her mother had a new boyfriend/husband(?) named Jim. While we were playing we went into a den room and I remember there was a porno playing on the television. We left that room pretty quickly and played elsewhere in the house.

That night we were up really late talking and giggling the way little girls do. Jim came into the room to tell us we needed to be quiet and go to sleep. He laid down on the bed between us. He lay on his back and I was on my back. He put his arm on top of my body effectively pinning me down. He flipped up my nightgown and rubbed his hand up and down on top of my panties. I was so scared I couldn't move. He had to have felt my heart hammering under his bicep.

After a few minutes he got up and left. He winked at me as he was leaving and placed his finger on his lips in a shushing motion. For years afterward I would panic if a man winked at me, even if I knew he was someone safe. After he was gone I asked my friend about it, and she told me she'd pushed his hand away. I was stunned, had that really been an option?

We couldn't go to sleep and ended up going to the living room to watch TV. We found a late night movie. About halfway through the movie he came out of his bedroom and headed for the bathroom. The hallway was directly across from the couch and he was naked. He looked shocked to see us and covered his junk pretty fast. He was wearing a robe on his way back to his room and didn't stop to tell us to go to bed.

I felt so guilty and so sick about what he did. I felt like I should have stopped him the way my friend claimed she did. I've often wondered over the years if she was telling me the truth and what all she may have gone through. It took me five years before I could tell anyone what happened. The person I finally broke down and told was Frank. My parents had known something was wrong and had been trying to get me to talk for quite a while. Frank called my mom to brag he had been the one to get me to talk.

Mom did take me to counseling but it wasn't helpful.  The counselor was mostly focused on problems we were having at home. It was less than a year after that when I moved to Frank's house. I still had a lot of unresolved issues and Frank should have kept me in counseling.

Things He Said to Me

A couple of months ago I talked about how I felt as though Frank had manipulated me. Here are some of the crazy things he said.

"It's your fault I'm horny. Now you have to fix it."
If I yawned it made him horny.

"If you tell your mom, I'll kill myself."
I eventually told her. He didn't kill himself.

"If you get pregnant, I'll take you to Mexico for an abortion."
This really messed my head up.

"I want to take you away some where no one knows us and get married. "
This one was terrifying, I was afraid I'd wake up 1000 miles from home with a ring on my finger and no memory of how I got there. He also tried to convince me to change my last name back to his. I'd had Earl's last name since he adopted me at the age of 2.

"If you call me 'Dad' it will make it easier for me to stop."
I just couldn't do it. Earl is my dad.

"Your stepmom knows, she's seen us."
I have no idea how much she knew.

"You're just itching for more."
This was his answer when I told him I was having a problem with itching.

"I've been parking across the shopping center and watching you with your boyfriend when you leave work.
Yes, I had a boyfriend. I was desperately trying to be a normal teenager. We worked together at Target. We'd hang out by our cars after work and talk. We'd kiss goodbye before leaving.  Frank claimed to watch until he was sure I was leaving then race home so I wouldn't know.

I didn't see his words for what they where then. I understand so much more now. I've learned a lot about people and a lot about myself. Sometimes I've wished I'd been smarter. I have to remind myself that I was just a kid and I already had a past abuse that made me easy to manipulate. I'm not that dumb kid anymore but she taught me a lot.

Lola

A few months ago my Aunt Lola passed away from cancer. She is my father's little sister. She not only believed when she found out, she wholeheartedly supported what I had to say. She backed me up and helped me by finding me a counselor.

When my sister died from cancer, Lola and her cousin Ginny both came to Tonya's funeral. Their being there was a suprise, but it meant a lot to me. While we were visiting after the service Lola apologized to me, she felt she had wronged me. She told me that I had been over at her house and she sensed that I was ready to talk and she guessed what it was I was going to say. The problem was that they had other company and it wasn't a good time. I remember that day and I wasn't about to talk then when there were others at her house. I told her there was no need to apologize to me for that. She also apologized to me for the way other members of the family had treated me. I told he she was not responsible for their behavior.

I wish I had had the courage to start writing this blog before her death so she could have seen it. I will miss her very much and I hope she knew how much her support meant to me.

Writing

I knew going into this project that writing all of this down was going to be really hard. It's even harder to push the "Publish" button. I have several posts written or partially written, but the thought of finishing them and posting them is almost paralyzing. I made the decision to do this because I realized that no one really knows what I went through. All the things he did and the things he said. Even now, there are members of his side of the family who believe him when he says I'm making it up. They also claim that I stabbed him in the back when I left Amarillo(I still don't know what that means exactly). Those who do believe me have never heard the full story. They know only one fact: Frank abused me. That one simple sentence does not even begin to cover all that I went through during that time in my life. Putting it all out there is scary as hell, but I feel that people should know what he did. What kind of man he really is.

I'm setting a goal to publish a post every other Saturday. I know I'm not a great writer but I'm going to do my best and hopefully it'll readable.

The Teddy Bear

When I was 14 I had to have my tonsils taken out. My mom and dad brought me a pink carnation and white teddy bear. I loved that bear. I always slept with it. One night I accidentally tossed it out of bed and it landed with its head against a space heater. I woke up and rescued it before it started a fire, but it has a toasted brown strip across the top of its head. The summer I was 16 I spent the entire summer with Frank and Linda. It drove my stepmother nuts that I continued to sleep with a teddy bear at that age. I slept on a folding bed in their living room. One morning when Linda left for work, she took the bear out of my arms and set it on the fireplace across the room. She thought I was asleep, but the moment she was out the door, I got up and retrieved my bear. Frank teased me about the bear constantly. He called it Fuzzy, even though I told him over and over that wasn't it's name, and said his brain had been fried on drugs. He also insisted it was a boy, but I said it was girl. He would hide it from me. He'd put it on a shelf up above the fridge, or in his gun safe, or sometimes he'd put it in his bed under the covers. I had to search for it so many times. This was just one of his ways of messing with my head. I had this idea that because mom and dad had given me that bear that Frank had no right to touch it. I eventually stopped sleeping with it and stashed it away. I ended up throwing it away a few years later, because it just had too much negativity attached to it.

Gaslighted

Several years ago I saw a movie called "Gaslight". It was made in 1944 and it's about a woman whose husband manipulates her into thinking she's crazy. The little things he did to push her to doubt herself and question her own feelings and intelligence felt so familiar.  As I watched the movie I began to see my father in the character of the husband. I understood more about how he'd manipulated me to get what he wanted. My teddy bear became one of the best tools he used to unbalance me.