My Own Story

Last night as I lay sleeping in my bed, I awoke to see a lonely figure of a woman hovering over me. I was not afraid. Often she comes to visit me in the night. Once I sat upright in bed and screamed, "Who are you? Who are you?" As if I didn't know. She is my mother. She tells me stories about my childhood, stories I do not want to hear and often can't remember.

I am a survivor of incest long past. Somehow it is all too easy to forget those things that traumatized the soul. The phantom woman in the night reminds me. Everything I do in life revolves around working out the problems created by that woman in the night who long ago terrorized an innocent child.

How did she terrorize? If it had been done with knives and loaded guns, it would be easier to deal with. No, she took my affection for her and turned it into a sordid relationship involving sex. My first recollections of our interaction, when I was three, involve me sitting happily between her legs in a bathtub, both of us naked. I also remember her standing in front of me rubbing her breasts. At other times, she would fret over whether my bowels were all right. A regular ritual was a cleansing enema of sudsy water made with laundry detergent. I still recall the feel of the tile bathroom floor as I lay there on my left side while she administered the preparation. "Breathe deeply," she said while we waited for her brew to work.

Where was my father while all this was going on? you may ask. He was always away on business. To me he was as much a phantom as the woman who visits me in the night. My mother wept and wailed over his sexual dalliances, but then she turned to me. I became the sexual replacement for my father, who deprived my mother of affection. My mother spent much of my childhood in bed, horribly depressed and trancelike. The only thing about me she was interested in was my bodily functions. Cleaning my genitals became an obsession. I remember lying rag-doll across the bed, my mother carefully removing my clothes. To me it was a loving act.

Although I had sisters, I was isolated and lonely as a child. I wandered through wide expanses of prairies without any supervision. A farm boy took me into a cornfield when I was five and showed me his penis. A teenager molested me when I was eight. At 10, I felt the groping fingers of a man reaching up my leg in the theater where I was watching a movie. By the time I was 18, I was pregnant. In my 23rd year, a psychiatrist was putting his tongue deep into my mouth. My mother opened the door, and everybody else walked through.

I didn't know the difference between consensual sex and rape. I didn't know that when my husband wanted sex, I could say no. I didn't know that when a psychiatrist sticks his finger in your vagina, it isn't therapy. How could I not know these things? you ask.