Letter to my big brother

Brother,

When I was a little boy, you were my hero, my rock, my guiding light. When I scraped my knees and our mother couldn't be bothered to pay attention, you cleaned them for me. When my father beat me, you read me stories until I stopped crying. When he was screaming at my mother in the kitchen, you taught me to put my hands over my ears and sing. When my mother couldn't be bothered to give us something to eat, you showed me where she kept the bread. You beat up any bully who as much as looked at us. You walked us home from school. You helped me with my homework.

And you made me suck you penis.

You were a lost child. You mother, for reasons I will never understand, took you from your dad and delivered you into the hands of a monster. Your step father, my father, beat you. He used you for an ashtray. He raped you. I don't know how old you were when he started abusing you, but I remember the first time he raped you, because that was the day I saw you die before my six-year-old eyes. Still, you found it in yourself to try to protect me, the child of your abuser.

Things I have learned in 2012

2012 was a year of many lessons. Here are some of the lessons I learned:

• Chewing gum cannot be removed from hair. You have to cut it out.
• Earthworms can be pets.
• It's fun to put pet-earthworms to work in a worm-farm.
• I-messages are wonderfully effective.
• So is active listening.
• So is EMDR.
• It is ok to be vulnerable sometimes, even for men. Even for dads.
• In life, you have to gamble sometimes. Perhaps you will win, perhaps not. But if you don't try, you lose anyway.

To the boy in the picture...

Yesterday, for the first time in perhaps my entire life, I looked at a photo of myself, age 15. It was an incredibly emotional experience. Last night, in an effort to understand the emotions this experience evoked, I wrote this:

To the boy in the picture,

This morning, for possibly the first time ever, I looked into your eyes.

What I saw there ripped off a giant scab and left my soul bleeding a river of pain. It shocked, saddened and angered me.

Relax, don't be afraid!

This time, I'm not angry at you. I'm angry at all the people who had looked into those eyes before me and saw nothing wrong. I am furious at the the people who saw the hurt in your eyes and turned their backs, deciding that it would be too much effort to determine the cause of your suffering and do something about it.

I think I finally know what parenting is about

I had an epiphany today, about what the priorities of a parent should be.

For the last week or so, I've been on a quest to hunt down photos of myself from the period in which I was abused (age 4-16). My first port of call was my family members, but none of them have any photos from that period in their possession. I finally managed to ascertain that my old school still have copies of year books that should contain photos of me. I will go look at them tomorrow.

While I was dealing with this, an old friend asked me to send her a recent photo of my daughter. I started up my laptop last night, but I couldn't get past the long list of folders containing hundreds of photos of my daughter. The contrast was too much to bear. Sitting there, staring at the screen with tears running down my face, I saw the photos as a metaphor for a parent's love.

No one ever cared enough to want to preserve memories of my childhood.

No one ever loved me like I love my daughter.

Essay, written by a 17 year old survivor

In a quest to re-connect with my younger self, I have been looking for clues of who I was age 4-16. I looked for photos, but none seem to exist. Then I remember a piece of writing, an essay I wrote for a school assignment at 17, but never handed it because it was simply too raw.

The class was English creative writing. We were to write an essay entitled "me". This is what I wrote:

Gratitude

It was Thanksgiving in the US, so I thought it would be appropriate to post a happy post. Even considering everything I've been through in my life, I have a lot to be grateful for. And as my late wife always used to say - it is not humanly possibly to be thankful and depressed at the same time. So here goes:

Why tell my story?

Today is exactly one year since I started writing down my story. And what a year it has been!

I started off very motivated. I wrote in blog-format, completing at least one post a day, some days more than one. I dissected all the horrors of my childhood in the minutest detail, recalling sights, sounds and smells, going back to old journals to verify dates, reliving everything as I sought to inject the appropriate emotions into my writing.

It all proved to be too much. By January of this year, I was sinking into a deep depression. Continuing to write through the pain, I eventually crashed back onto the bathroom floor with a paring knife, my tears mixing with the blood dripping from my arm.

The next day, frightened into action by my self-inflicted wound, I made two decisions:
1. I needed to stop the recall, to stop writing.
2. I needed to go back to therapy.

Visiting my father's grave, redefining "me"

My father, my abuser, died last year.

His sister called me and asked me to the funeral. I didn't go. I have never felt anything but fear and hatred for him. I had no desire to spend the day surrounded by people who had loved him, who thought he was a good man.

This weekend, I went to visit his grave for the first time.

I expected to be angry. I expected to be overcome with a desire to vandalise his head-stone. To piss on his grave, so to speak. Instead, I stood quietly, devoid of any raging emotion. I read his name on the head-stone, and I felt that it was a stranger's name. The surname is the same as mine, but that was where the connection ended. The inscription didn't even mention me. It said only "beloved brother..."

Fitting, I suppose, since he disowned me years ago.

Alone

The purpose of this blog was not to share my personal struggles. It was meant to be an educational blog. It was meant to be a place full of information and full of hope. But today the loneliness is too much to carry. I'm not sure if anyone will be able to learn anything from this post, but I need to talk to someone and this is the only place I have left.

I need to bleed.

Now, it would be a simple thing to take a blade and draw blood from any convenient vein. But I'm not yet far enough gone to loose sight of the fact that doing this would only compound the weight that I'm carrying today. It would create another secret. More shame. More to hide.

It would isolate me further.

I have a confession to make

*** May Trigger - Self Injury ***

In the epilogue to my story, I say that the last time I cut myself was in the spring of 2000.

That isn't strictly true. I did go many years without cutting after that, but it wasn't the last time.

The last time I cut was the beginning of this year. 2012. I can't remember the date, but I think it was a Thursday.

I had just started writing down my story, and I was very, very vulnerable. I was getting nightmares again, and that terrible, unbearable feeling of emptiness was back. I wanted so badly to feel... anything. But the only time I felt anything was when the memories came flooding back and made the scars on my soul ache until I wished I could be numb again.