dreamworldzine

[dreamworldzine]

EVERYONE KNOWS WHATS HAPPENING EVEN THOUGH NOTHING IS HAPPENING

INCEST IN OTHER PEOPLES FAMILIES

I can't get rid of this gnawing terror: WHAT HAPPENED TO ME. Nothing (that I remember) from my life explains this feeling. Feeling like there must always be something secret and worse that I just don't remember. I had a therapist once tell me she was concerned I had unrecovered memories of severe sexual abuse. I hungrily read everything Clementine Morrigan writes. My eyes stick on the word: INCEST. That didn't happen to me. I am trying. Trying so fucking hard. Sifting through all my childhood memories. I read her writing about incest over and over. More than any other topic. It makes my heart race. I feel my eyes come into focus as if for the first time in many years. But I'm confused. I feel like an imposter. I feel crazy. I pick through interactions with my family, my dad's friends. Trying to find it and I don't.

And it makes sense. It's hard to see. Even my therapist missed it-- thinking that I could have repressed memories of sexual abuse of a level of seriousness similar to incest, but not seeing the actual incest that I experienced. One morning when I was reading The writing is a lightning strike that illuminates everything, I finally saw it. It did come to me in a lightning strike. And I immediately stopped reading and began desperately writing everything that came up. That piece of writing is what finally cracked open the abyss and allowed me to see in.

When I was 13, I became involved in the incestuous dynamic of another child's family. This wasn't repressed. I have always remembered the events of this particular year and worked with therapists to process some of the more overt abuse. But even my therapist missed it: the mother of this child was an incest perpetrator.

I'm writing it all down to turn it into something solid, touchable, that I can refer back to. Once it's all here, it can never vaporize back into the shapeless terror of WHAT HAPPENED TO ME. I'm writing it all down for incest survivors. Clementine Morrigan wrote that it isn't fair to make incest survivors carry it alone and she's right. So this is what I have to offer:

I befriended a boy my age and spent extensive amounts of time with his family. He and his mother were deeply enmeshed. She was heavily involved in every aspect of his life, but especially his friendships, relationships, and sexuality. The first time I was around his mother, I was immediately aware that I was the next in line, chosen to be his girlfriend. The last girl was still his friend and I was unwillingly placed into competition with her. From the first time we met, his mother told me stories of other girls who had come before me and all their terrible acts of noncompliance which resulted in their removal from their role as his girlfriend, his saviour, his Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and their premature descent into the role of fallen woman--whore, wild and dangerous.

Anyway, I was aware of this right away and deeply disturbed by it. I told my mother. She found it a little odd, but more amusing than concerning. Just benign crazy people. They're everywhere. She never asked me if I wanted to be his girlfriend or if the controlling, and frankly terrifying, energy radiating off of his mother made me uncomfortable. She drove me to his house over and over. They never once came to pick me up, she took me there every single time.

I spent the better part of a year being groomed, manipulated, and coerced into a sexual relationship with this boy. He was an active participant. Constantly touching me. Discouraging me from talking to other people. Meltdowns if I rejected his advances. Threatening to hurt himself. But of course I don't blame him. It was and is obvious that he was under insane pressure from his mother to get me to be his "girlfriend".

His mother wanted us to pretend that she was our peer, one of the group. Simultaneously and paradoxically, she expected us to comply with her every demand. To bend and contort ourselves to act out the predetermined friendships and sexual experiences that she wanted her son to have. If we didn't, there would be consequences. I remember talking to the other kids: we all knew it was crazy, she was crazy. We all knew his relationship with his mom was Super Fucking Weird. What were we all doing there?

There was one stand out sexual assault. It was at a co-ed sleepover at another family's house, in a room we were sleeping in with two of his other friends (both male). I don't know if they were awake or not.

In the morning, I woke up to one of the other friends fully naked, in the middle of changing clothes. He was mortified when I woke up, got dressed quickly, and apologized. I don't think he meant anything malicious. But I bring it up because it speaks to the strange lack of boundaries that crept into this friend group. I don't think any of the other kids were experiencing incest from their own families. But the magic spell of compliance, enmeshment, and lack of boundaries still made it's way into their minds, just like it made it's way into mine. This was all fine and normal. Fun, in fact.

Looking back, I can see tones of parental detachment, with varying degrees of severity, in all the children who were close friends with this boy. Adults allowed everything to happen, but also, to them, nothing did happen. The more clear it became that my parents wouldn't become involved, the more sharply the abuse ramped up.

Perpetrators of abuse look for victims who will not be protected. Denial is a powerful tool of non-protection: that didn't happen because it can't have happened. I didn’t fail to protect you because there was nothing to protect you from. When his mother saw my own mother's denial or obliviousness of the situation, she saw that she could act on me with impunity. When people say that abuse as a child puts you at risk for further abuse, this is what they're talking about. No matter what happened to me at her house, my parents would never be outraged, because it could have just as easily happened at their house.

Is allowing your child to become involved in the incestuous dynamics of another family itself an expression of incest? Or is it just neglect? This isn't a rhetorical question. It feels insanely taboo to ask it, but we need to talk about it. Even survivors of incest who were raped by members of their family face extreme stigmatization when it comes to actually naming incest. I literally can't even fucking imagine how difficult it would be to accuse a family member of emotional incest. I'm not trying to claim trauma that isn't mine. I'm saying: for real, it would help survivors if we made space to ask these questions. And that includes asking if you experienced incest and ultimately concluding that you did not.

My mother wasn't ignorant of the unhealthy relationship my friend had with his mom. She wasn't ignorant of the constant "drama" between me and them. She wasn't ignorant of the way his mother meddled in his friendships, imposed herself into relationships with his friends. And my mother wasn't passive in allowing my involvement with him-- she, quite literally, delivered me to them on a silver platter, at great personal inconvenience. Is that neglect? I'm sure she would say that she had no idea and that she was trying to be a good mom by taking me to see my friend. Is it really possible she didn't know? Or was it that it seemed normal to her? Certainly, I was sexually abused by an incest perpetrator and her family. But it wasn't my family. As much as she tried to change this, I wasn't hers. I didn't belong to her. I wouldn't have to fight the law in order to be separated from her. In many respects, I was free to go. (WHY didn't I just go? It's complicated.) This sounds exactly like domestic abuse. Is it that simple?

I don't know. This is what I know:

I witnessed incest. I witnessed that woman sexually abuse her son. I was a child and powerless to stop it but I am no longer powerless. I can say: incest is utterly normal. Countless adults knew about the relationship she had with her son but they were at most, slightly off-put. It happens all the time. Everyone knows what's happening even though nothing is happening. Sometimes kids don't know. But here's the thing: I knew. I fucking knew the whole time. Even though I didn't have the words. I would have saved him if I knew how. If I had access to any adult who was willing to see what was going on. I would have gotten him the fuck out of there. He was my friend.