The lack of distractions means I am alone with my thoughts. This is not pleasant. I have been feeling terrified that my parents are going to show up and make my life a living hell for daring to 'abandon' them and 'the family'. I have been having a lot of traumatic stuff coming up over the last few days and some weird nightmares (despite my medication to make it where the nightmares don't happen). I should probably be writing more about this in my therapy journal but I'm afraid to write it down in there because the kid part of me insists that my writings are going to be found and used against me. Because that was a thing that Mom did. She'd rifle through my room and go through my journal. When I had a locking journal, she picked the lock to read it. As such, I didn't use it very much. I hid my notebooks among my school stuff, in weird places around the room, and literally between the mattress and box spring of my bed.
I got beaten for writing 'lies' when I initially started keeping a journal in third grade. I was writing down things that happened in my daily life. Including stuff about the beatings and the psychological abuse. Mom took that journal and threw it on the burn pile, telling me that she was going to burn everything I've ever written or was going to write if I wrote 'lies' again. I stopped writing and focused on sketching from third grade to fifth grade. My parents mocked me about my dream of being an author or they would tell me what kind of author I should be. It became apparent that I had some talent for writing in middle school when I made the honor roll. Suddenly, they backed off on mocking me and started talking about what I should publish.
High school came along and I wrote my first novel. My parents told me to pitch it to a predatory press that required a fee for submission and such. It was the first thing they saw and they seized on it as an opportunity to make money. They saw my prodigious writing as a chance to make some easy money. After all, they weren't doing the work. Mom planned on managing my writing career, giving me a line of bullshit about how I needed a buisness degree to make it anywhere in writing. She tried to push me to write children's lit, which is not my strong suit. At one point she threatened to revoke my access to the computer if I didn't write what she wanted me to. In a rare show of boldness against her, I said, "Fine, I'll get a typewriter from Grandma and do it the old fashioned way." And Mom knew that my grandmother would happily loan me a typewriter.
Mom still rifled through my stuff in high school. She successfully found one of my journals in the midst of a pile of poetry notebooks. She screamed at me but didn't burn it. By then, they didn't have a burn pile going and the physical abuse had stopped. All she really had was psychological torture to use on me and in that particular instance, I just spaced out and the screaming was just noise at a distance. Being able to dissociate at will was a survival mechanism.
I was raised in a household with a weird cult like organization. My place was always at the bottom of the social ladder. At the same time, if my parents were fighting, I had to ferry messages between them and get in trouble for meddling at the same time. I was taught that I was essentially subhuman and a blight upon the family line because I was born female. And yet, I was expected to uphold the 'honor' of the family where as no such expectations were placed on my brothers. I was expected to be silent until spoken to. I was expected to keep my opinions on anything to myself until I was asked them (which rarely happened). I was expected to keep the house clean and do the lion's share of the chores whereas my brothers were assigned chores and could slack off. I was frequently doing my brothers' work. Mom would give the room a white glove test to make sure there wasn't a speck of dust anywhere. If she didn't approve of the job done, I had to clean everything all over again.
I was regularly told that I wasn't going to find a husband because I was a "poor housekeeper and a bad cook." I was regularly told that "they" didn't actually care about me and that the only people who cared and loved me was my family. They didn't love-bomb me as much as they treated me like a person from time to time instead of like a bit of unwanted furniature. For the formative years of my life, this was what I got. When I started dating N- my parents decided that he was a good prospect for me because he was going right from high school into the military. They were indifferent when I broke things off with him, deciding that I was going to be marrying someone else that they could count on having enough surplus funds to take care of them. I was their retirement plan. I didn't realize that until Beloved came into the picture and they hated him. Mom regularly was telling me about wealthy men she had contact with via her job in phone sales who were looking for a wife who could cook. She was shopping around for a husband for me. She kept telling me that Beloved wasn't good enough for me and that he didn't really care for me.
I knew the truth. Beloved and I had loved each other for a long time before we started dating. I knew he wasn't going to cheat on me or abandon me. I knew that if by some happenstance I wound up pregnant, he'd step up and be a father for our children. My mother all but called me a whore when Beloved and I began to have a physically intimate relationship. She threatened to throw me out of the house but my father, in a rare moment of sanity, stopped her. All through out the time I was in contact with my parents, my mother had hyper-critical things about my marriage, how I was raising my children, and that I "settled". The evening before my wedding, she said that I would have been better off marrying N- because she was sure that he had, by then, secured an officer's position and we'd have a fancy military wedding. I had an immediate gibbering panic attack over the mere thought of N-. Mom called Beloved over with the statement, "I've never seen her like this before."
I think the only reason why she didn't smack me across the face to make me 'snap out of it' was because the wedding was the next day and the handprint would still be obvious despite the makeup. That was her approach to mental health issues. My father called them weakness of character and that they were all made up because the person wanted attention. Beloved had seen me have panic attacks, he had talked me out of them plenty of times. He had me calmed down in about 5 minutes. Mom realized then that there was no way for her to talk me out of marrying him.
She denied the prospect that the marriage was the union of two families into one with the comment "This isn't a marrying of clans." She wore black to my wedding and tried to upstage me with her form fitting rhinestone off the rack evening gown. And even after the wedding, she mentioned these wealthy men she knew were looking for wives. Basically telling me to divorce Beloved and marry for the money so that they could be taken care of in their 'golden years'. It was part of the reason why I stopped talking to her.
Now, I have the stuff from my early childhood and the cult like mentality that "family is everything" going through my head. And the implication that the family that I was born into was my real family and the family that I have with my husband is just "playing house" keeps troubling me. I find myself afraid that they're going to show up and physically force me to leave with them and make me stay at the farm. I find myself afraid, again, that my days are full of delusion and that I am actually still living on the farm as a kid. And I have the massive guilt rolling over me for cutting ties that I have broken frith with my ancestors and my descendants by walking away from them. I know logically that they wouldn't want me to go back to someone who hurts me deliberately and would be a danger for my children. Emoitonally, I am petrified that they're going to rip me out of my life and make me their chattle again.
People read stories and are titilated by the details of things like a submissive person getting a funishment of kneeling on rice for a while until it gets uncomfortable. I have an indifferent reaction to it because I lived that. My mother dumped part of a jar of rice on the floor and had me pick it up by hand, whilst kneeling in it. I was seven and it was in the middle of the summer. When I got done, my knees were killing me and I had imprints of rice on them. I wasn't allowed to use a broom and a dust pan and for some reason, my mother decided that it was my fault that she spilled the rice because I 'surprised her' by walking into the room. They read stories and get titilated by the details of a switching but I've experienced that and am indifferent. Almost all of the 'torture' scenes from Kushiel's Dart, I experienced. There was no titilation for me. Just, a mental commentary on how well written it was and how close to reality it came. The joke about drill sergeants making recruits scrub things with their own toothbrush wasn't a joke in my case. My mother decided that I hadn't adequately cleaned the bathroom and made me scrub the toilet with my toothbrush and a paste of baking soda. My father found me sobbing and had me stop, got me a new toothbrush to use for myself and threw the old one away. It had only been about two hours.
Sorry for the rambling here. I'm just typing things out as they go through my head. I should really be writing this in my therapy journal. Gods help me, I'm terrified right now. I've projects to work on that I'm afraid to because of the lies that my parents told me about what the results of said projects would be for me. They said that if I wrote anything about the occult that people would come and assault my family and lynch me. They said that if I wrote about anything religious, the same thing would happen. I've the beginnings of a career writing about religious and occult topics. Nothing horrible has happened to me. At the same time, however, the stories they told me to scare me off of those topics are ringing in my head. And I'm somewhat paralysed from my emotions to be working on my housework because I'm afraid that it's not going to be good enough and Beloved is going to leave me for it.
I'm a bit of a mess right now.
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