Abnormal, But Okay

It seems like I’m always staring out the window, watching other kids living their lives and having fun and wishing I was one of them. It’s been like that my whole life, and it’s only gotten worse as I’ve gotten older.

It started when I was five. That was the year the physical and sexual abuse started. I would sit in the block corner in my kindergarten classroom and watch the other kid happily build castles and chatter about anything that came to their minds. There was no way I could talk to them, because what if I joined in on the mindless chatter I might let slip one of the secrets that Russell, a family “friend” and my abuser, made me swear not to tell.

“If you ever tell I’ll kill your family,” he’d told me.

I didn’t talk or play with the other kids. The lives of my parents and brother rested on the weight of my five-year-old shoulders. Instead of playing with the other kids, I would stiffly sit on the side of the block shelves and try to get in the least uncomfortable position. It was hard to find a way to sit that didn’t hurt my all ready sore privates. An adult’s manhood is not supposed to be shoved into a five-year-old little girl’s body after all.

The torture that was happening at the hand of Russell was too much for me to handle. I felt alone, scared, hurt, confused, and vulnerable and had no way to express any of that without giving away the horrible secrets. Because I had no other way to express my pain and discomfort, the feelings would explode out in violent temper tantrums. Up until third grade my parents wrote off the tantrums as normal little kid behavior, but by third grade it was obvious that something was wrong. I was no longer such a little kid and the tantrums had gotten out of control and violent. Almost everyday something would set me off and I’d be screaming, hitting my parents, and throwing things.

On the way home from a family vacation I screamed for two and a half hours straight because my dad wouldn’t turn the air conditioner up. My dad finally got so frustrated with me that he threatened to stop the car and leave me by the side of the road. I was so used to having horrible things happen to me that I thought he really would follow through. Fear threatened to suffocate my insides, and I desperately tried to stop my sobs, but the explosive feelings inside me refused to be quieted.

My dad couldn’t take it anymore, he had passed the boiling point. Despite the fact that we were in the middle of the highway, he pulled the car over opened the door and removed my squirming eight-year-old body from the car and deposited me on the side of the highway. He then got back in the car and started to drive a couple feet. I don’t know how he expected me to react. I guess that in his angry state he expected me to get so scared I’d get whipped into state. What he didn’t know was that by then the abuse had taught me that adults were mean people that could turn on you any second and do horrible things. My previous experience told me that my dad was planning on driving off and leaving me at the side of the road forever. I didn’t know what else to do, so I climbed over the guardrail and started running into the woods by the side of the highway. My dad was horrified, he immediately jumped back out of the car and began chasing me. Terrified, I ran faster. Fortunately for my dad, he was much faster then me, and caught up to me apologizing profusely. He explained he would never leave me anywhere because he loved me.

It was at that point that my dad realized our family needed professional help. Soon I was sitting in a therapist’s office for family therapy. I would stare out that window and watch the kids in a playground near by and wonder why I couldn’t be one of them.

At the age of ten I stopped eating. The stress of the abuse that was still going on, was just too much. My parents had me back in therapy, but the therapist just didn’t understand me. Soon I was so underweight that I had to see the doctor every other day. I no longer what to school like other kids. I was too weak from my self-induced starvation. When I wasn’t at the doctor or therapist’s office I was lying in bed at home. From inside my room I could hear the other kids coming home from school and laughing and giggling as they roller bladed up and down the streets. I wished I could be one of them. At that point though, the abuse had stopped, I couldn’t even get out of bed for that long so there was no way for Russell to reach me. After I realized that I had a way of stopping the abuse I knew that no amount of anyone’s coaxing and cajoling could get me to start eating again.

Soon I was on the verge of organ failure. One day on the way home from the doctor’s office, I passed out and wouldn’t wake up. My dad rushed me to the ER where they resuscitated me and admitted me to the pediatric intensive care unit. I was in the hospital for another six months. Two more weeks in the ICU, several months on the regular pediatric floor, and then two months on a children’s psychiatric unit. Even on the psych unit I was different then the other kids. I had a feeding tube snaking out of my nose.

I was finally discharged from the hospital a couple weeks before my eleventh birthday. In the hospital I’d finally disclosed the abuse that had been happening silently for the past five years. I thought things would get better. I thought I’d never have to be in the hospital again.

No such luck, it’s been five, almost six years since my abuse stopped and I’ve been in and out of the hospital seventeen or eighteen times. I’ve started hearing and seeing things that don’t exist in anyone else’s reality, I’ve tried to kill myself many times, I’ve had problems with self-injury, and with an eating disorder. Right now I live at a residential treatment program for kids with mental health issues. I walk down the street and see other teens hanging out and wish I could trade lives with them. I can’t, and anyway, everything I’ve been through has made me who I am.

I’m strong, I’m resourceful, I’m creative, I’m smart, I’m experienced, I’m powerful. I’m me.

So maybe I can’t be like other normal kids. Maybe I’ll never be “normal”. Maybe that’s okay.