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I was also sexually abused when I was 13 years old.
But that's in the middle of the story, and in order to understand how I found myself in this situation, you must hear the story from the beginning. I was born in Portsmouth, VA on May 1, 1968. Our family moved into the Denver area by 1974. My first childhood memory was of getting in trouble for getting into the medicine cabinet and opening the pill onto the floor...literally. I had seen the old Contact commercial one too many times. I got punished for that...and it seems that the majority of my memories from that time forward were of punishment or abuse. Around 1975 sometime, I was placed in my first foster home. Had I known what was to come, I probably would've decided to stay with that family, but when my family moved from Denver, CO to Casper, WY I was returned to them.
From the time I moved to Casper, the cycle of abuse began again. I was told over and over that I was dumb and stupid, or some derivative of that. Punishments, when they happened were usually in the form of beatings that sometimes left serious black and blue marks anywhere from the back of my legs to the upper portion of my behind. One time, I was told that I was going to get 10 swats with a belt and I had my choice of splitting them up into 5s or taking them all at once. I chose to split them, but I think I only managed to extend the torture. One other time because I had not quite figured out how to wipe myself efficiently, I was ordered to wear underwear over my head while watching TV one evening. It was so embarrassing, that this is the first time I have mentioned this particular incident to anyone...I do so now to let you see how twisted some of the punishments got.
Then there was the abuse laid out against the entire family but my stepfather. He would fly into rages and basically beat the hell out of everyone, including mom. One time, he got ticked off and kicked all of us out of the house. We eventually got a hold of mom who was talking to my stepfather's dad, who went over to attempt to sort the situation out. We were told it was safe to head back, but when we got there, my stepfather had a gun pointed at us. Thankfully, that situation was resolved, but once again, this is just one of a number of abusive situations.
We moved to the north end of town and the abuse continued. By the time the first pivotal event occurred in the era of my life that I call "The War", I was 10 or 11 years old. I had lost a pair of shoes and mom told me not to come home until I found them. I spent the entire day looking for my shoes, and couldn't find them. I went home and started looking for my money, because I planned to run away. Mom found out that I was home and upon hearing that I was looking for my money, said, "That doesn't belong to you. You're working for me." With that, I was sent to empty out the water distiller. Mom went out the front door, and a short time later, I went out the back.
I ran to the school, where the counselor there contacted Guy Noe, then the supervisor of the DFS. Noe came out to the school and talked to me for a bit, then loaded me up in his car and went over to my house. Once we got there, we discovered the majority of my family was in a car and my mom and Noe squared off right in the middle of the street. They talked for a while, then Noe signaled for me to get out of the car. Once I joined them, Noe asked me one simple question: "Do you want to go home?" I said, "No."
The War began.
After a weekend in a temporary foster home, I was placed with Tom Berg. I had just wrecked the hegemony of a normal family, and the 2 years I spent with Tom Berg helped reassemble some of that. I can only wonder if my reliance on his example as a father set me up for what was to come. After destroying my own vision of a family in a single word, I so much wanted to have a normal family that perhaps I became willing to obey my foster parents, even if they were abusive. Such was not the case at first with Tom Berg. He was a nice man, at THAT time. Tom decided to get married, and the laws of Wyoming prohibit having foster children for a year after the marriage, so I was sent to the McNiel family. It was here that the sexual abuse occurred.
The home of John and Mary Lynn McNiel was almost like a dictatorship in microcosm. John McNiel ran the house with an iron hand, and so, with that in mind, and with the fact in mind that I was attempting on a subconscious level to rebuild the trust in the institution of "parents," you can see how I got into the situation of sexual abuse that occurred with John McNiel. I did what he wanted me to do because that was what was expected of me...that was what HE expected of me, and he was the father in the house.
The War continued during this time. I was placed in the permanent custody of the State, and while that was good, I also started feeling the effects of three years of not having an adequate release for my emotions regarding my mother, and it was my mother who I blamed primarily for the abuse within my family. Basically, I started striking out against people who ticked me off on the playground.
Once I was determined to be "socially unacceptable" by the McNiels, I was sent to St, Joesph's Children's Home, where I spent the next six months. I then returned to the home of Thomas Berg. However, things changed, and while Tom Berg was not actually abusive, the two of us no longer meshed the way we once had...what with his wife, a new child, and a failed attempt to bring another foster child into the family. After three months in the Youth Crisis Center, I was sent out to live with distant relatives in Pennsylvania.
At this point, it is important to understand The War. Especially from this point on, I considered myself to be at war with my mother. More and more from this point forward, my life became dominated by one thing...revenge against mother for the past. The emotions that I kept hidden...and thus, the emotions that would boil over every so often grew and grew...then I got a piece of news that made the well of anger bottomless...
My sister was attending classes at Dean Morgan Junior High school. After one of her classes, she was sexually assaulted by a teacher. Once I found this out, I deduced that if I were still living at home, I would be attending the same school, perhaps even some of the same classes. With that situation, there was a chance I could have stopped that incident from ever happening. Why was I not able to do so? Mother...
Everything in my life became centered on the war. I had very few friends. Those I did have, I had because of my association with AD&D. Relations within the family and myself became more and more tense as I went through adolescence and went thorough natural rebellious streaks on top of everything else that was going on. I've told people that the repressed emotions spun themselves off into a whole other personality, and I believe this to this day. Imagine if you will, a personality completely made up of rage, anger, revenge...and imagine what such a personality could do.
My education became a refutation of mother's insistence that I was stupid. My favorite music was music that could easily be turned into battle anthems. My life outside the gaming universe was either chaotic or dedicated to the destruction of a person I had made into my arch-nemesis.
By the time I was 21, my aunt had had enough of me, and the feeling was mutual. Besides, the family simply did not have the money to continue supporting me. So, I was sent back out to Wyoming. I returned to Casper with a plan to destroy mother completely. My grandmother took me in and informed me that mother wanted nothing to do with me. That was fine with me. I wanted nothing to do with her either. Mother was in a difficult labor situation with my youngest brother. Grandmother said that she might die. I didn't care.
Then my brother was born. Everything changed within the space of a day.
Grandmother told me that mother agreed to let me back into her life, to receive me as a son. I took that opportunity to start to attempt to heal over the wounds of the past, although at the same time, I celebrated (and still do) my brother Kyle's birthday as Victory Day.
Despite some hard times, and some times that reminded me very much of the abusive times before I ran away, I felt that I had basically rebuilt the relationship with my mom...if not on a mother/son basis, then at least as a relationship between two adults.
Then my mother's declining health put her in the hospital last November. The hospital refused to release her, instead, they placed her in a nursing home. As part of this process, mother underwent some counseling sessions. The doctor's observations were made part of the court record in mom's case, and I got a copy. At some point in mom's records, she is asked about her family. The following is from the record: "She mentions that she has a 28 year old son, who is "completely useless." The War, it seems has never ended.
I am now in a situation where I simply do not trust mother NOT to lie to me again. Therefore, I do not want to ever see her again. Six years of attempting to build a relationship were destroyed with one sentence. What was worse, was the thinking that even if mother was under the influence of a medicine when she said what she said, I have said that perhaps any such influence merely made it easier for her to say what she really feels. If that is the case, how can I trust that anything she says in the future will not simply be what she thinks I want to hear. It is unfortunate, because there is a very big chance that mother will not live to see the next year, but even if I were sure she is still in town, I can not resolve the conflict over what she said in the hospital's report enough to go see her, and I doubt I will.
Friends tell me that there is more of a chance that I will regret not seeing mother than there is a chance of me regretting seeing her. That may be possible, but there is a certainty that anything she would say would be second-guessed in light of the hospital report, and I simply do not want to go out to the nursing home to be lied to. As far as I am concerned, my mother is already dead, and I have had the final victory.
I am left however, with unresolved feelings of rage and anger, which can now never be fully dealt with. I deal with them the best I can. I have a city that I am continuously planning...an off-shoot of my map collecting hobby. The city is called Deborahville, named after my first girlfriend. Suburbs around the city are named for other girlfriends I have had in the past. Victory Day is celebrated in Deborahville like July 4th is celebrated here. The day I get the news of my mother's death, fireworks will again go off in the skies of this fictional city in tribute to my final victory. The seventh Victory Day celebration is on June 1st.
I am still attempting to deal with the repressed emotions by seeing counselors. I am pretty sure that I will probably be seeing counselors for as long as I am alive. My music continues to be comprised of either music for my role-playing universe, or musical anthems...patriotic songs in a war effort that will continue until mother is laid to rest.