#they all seem to start with some kind of feast and kay being a dick

[sickfreaksirkay]

i stand by my cancelled wife literally what did kay do wrong here to merit arthur saying he was BORN TO BE UNPLEASANT ?????

[sadcyfsc-ptsd-blog]

My mum is in love with Jesus.

When I was 1 or 2 or 3 and my mum was busy working or busy cooking or just busy, I would follow my older brother Liam outside to play. He was my first real father figure – my biological father was maaad abusive, as in, beat my mum and break her nose abusive. Liam never use to beat me. He’d try to ditch me a couple times when cousins came around, other boys who were just as big as he was, but he never hit me.

We both wore opshop hand me downs, baggy hoodies, baggy shorts with the drawstring pulled super tight and bunching at the waist with scuffed sneakers or jandals. I was too young to care while he was too busy trying to taste childhood in a family where he was mum’s second in command, her son and my big brother.

The first time mum told me he use to play with me I didn’t really get it, or I did, but I didn’t really get why it was bad. Or maybe I got that it was bad, but it was so long ago that it didn’t seem to matter. That even if my body remembered in the way that my vagina refused to work normally, or that I felt so emotionally detached around boys or men when I fucked them, that there was no use getting worked up about it because he was my brother and he’d changed.

And he was dead.

But then mum told me more stories – stories that were more vivid, stories that made me feel scared as if that little girl was still inside me just waiting to spill out. Stories of 2 or 3 year old me shoving a bar of soap up my vagina and crying, trying to wash out what the boys had put inside me, trying to wash away the pain and the empty. Wash away the rape.

See the thing is I knew my brother had raped me, but from the other stories apparently, I’d been raped by others too. Cousins, boys not even 10, had pinned me down and shoved pieces of themselves inside of me again and again and again.

The worst part is that even now a part of me asks if I’d liked it. If no one had found out until after the marae accident because I wanted them to keep doing it.

 When Dad came in to our lives I saw the opportunity for a better life. It was written all over his salvation army rep smile and the second hand goods he would drop off for mum. I use to grab his hand and pull him inside telling him to stay for dinner. After a while he would stay to tuck my brother and I into bed and I’d grab hold of his beard, making sure he wouldn’t leave.

Not even a year later they got married, mum and dad, and my brother and I actually got a real family with nice cousins and a stepbrother! They would hang out all the time and climb up in to the tree hut which was too high for me, so I’d cry until my brother helped me up. On the weekends we’d go out to a farm and climb hay bails below the huge trees that were at the back of the property. There’s a photo in our house of us all sitting up in the bales and I’m grinning so hard my eyes disappear.

Our marae is just outside of Longston and naturally, like typical maaori, there has to be a feast to celebrate mum and dad’s wedding. Us kids all line up for kisses and hongis, then its kai, then we’re allowed to play. My brother’s job was always to look after me on the marae, I was small and couldn’t look after myself. 

I don’t know what happened, I was too young to remember, but mum says Dad was the one who found me in the mattress cupboard. She says Dad disassociated and barely got words out to her when he brought me over – but mum knew, she always knew. Mum never talked about family rape or sexual assault as rape or assault, she always coined it as being “dealt to”, as if the person being raped or assaulted deserved the hands holding them down, as if it was some punishment for being born in to this family of sexual abuse as well as being born a woman.

The craziest part of this entire thing? My brother was the one who got beat, even though he was nowhere near the mattress cupboard. Mum lay in to him like her life depended on it, beating him within an inch of his life, because it was his fault that I’d been “dealt to”, because he’d been in charge of looking after me. That wasn’t the crazy part by the way. No – what was crazy was that after she’d run out of steam beating him, she went and handed herself in to the police.

Throughout my teen years when I would have arguments with her so bad I’d end up in tears or being locked out of the house, Dad would tell me it was MY fault that my brother and I had ended up in CYFs care. But looking back on it, it was theirs. Mum knew what the family was like, what kind of sick shit happened at that marae – she’d experienced it herself, but she still let us go there. “It’s tradition!” And Dad, Dad let mum beat up my brother and then turn herself in. It was that shit that started everything and what’s more is they were the adults, not me and not my brother.

That’s when shit really hit the fan. My brother and I were carted to a social worker who looked after us while mum and dad were investigated. Good ol’ soshie put my brother and I in a bath together and whoopla – she walked in on 3 year old me playing with my brothers dick. After that, my brother and I were questioned too. I wasn’t one to lie, didn’t know why I should lie. So I told them everything. Then the next set of hell began.