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This has been keeping me awake at night the past couple of weeks, and so I finally decided to put it here so that it will hopefully stop tormenting me. I was sexually assaulted for the first time when I was five years old, then I was raped when I was 19 by the cable television installer, and when I told my parents, they did nothing about it, because they didn’t want to “…ruin the boy’s life,” then things went downhill from there.
This is the story of the first time my husband raped me. You don’t have to read it, but if you have been sexually assaulted, please know that you are not alone and if you need to talk about it, I’m here.
Way back in 1999, Mr. Control Freak, our best friend GD, our 10 month old son and I went camping together one warm late-Spring weekend. We had been given a camper van that we loaded up with food and supplies, and drove to a beautiful campground a couple of hours away.
We hooked up the electricity and water and set up our campsite and had an enjoyable evening of cooking, eating too much, laughing, and just spending time together while our infant son played in the baby jail we set up for him.
All too soon, it was time to put the cranky baby to sleep, so I took him inside the van and got him ready for bed, then stayed with him until he was asleep, then I went back out and sat with Mr. Control Freak and GD for a few more hours, until the camp fire had burned out and it had cooled down a bit inside the van, and we all decided that we should probably try to get some sleep.
GD decided that he would sleep sitting in the passenger side captain’s chair up at the front of the van, and Mr. Control Freak and I converted the table into a bed and climbed on.
He climbed into the bed first as I wanted to be closest to our son who was on the floor beside the bed, and when I climbed in beside him, he immediately grabbed my breast and started trying to get me to have sex with him.
I told him no, our best friend was just a few feet away, and I was not comfortable having sex with him sitting right there. He started trying to take my shirt off, and I fought him and managed to keep it on. After several minutes of struggle against him, he grabbed the inner seam of my shorts in both hands and literally ripped my shorts in half, then while I was trying to get him off of me, he did the same thing to my underpants, then he held my wrists above my head and raped me. I tried to fight him off, but he was much stronger than me, and I was so afraid. At least it was over quickly.
After he finished and rolled off of me, the only thing I could think of was getting away and getting cleaned up, so I carefully let myself out of the van and started walking through the pitch black night toward the shower house. I had only made it a short distance when he caught up to me and grabbed my elbow and demanded to know where I was going. I told him and he insisted on walking me there, waiting for me, then walking me back to the van. I guess he was afraid I wouldn’t make it back or something.
I wish I could say that was the only time he forced me to have sex against my will or do something that I didn’t want to do, but it isn’t.
I feel my will being crushed, my resolve faltering. My life is a stinking, fetid cesspool that I have fallen into and I don’t know if I have what I need to keep trying to fight my way out.
Realistically, I know my life is not as bad as a lot of other lives. Yes, we live with an abusive person, but at least we have a place to live. But sometimes, everything gets to be too much for me and I get a bit depressed. That is what is happening right now.
We ran out of food last night. I told Mr. Control Freak this morning that I needed to buy a bit of food to last until he gets paid on the 8th. He went ballistic and told me that we have to pay a car payment and so I can’t buy food. I told him that we have no food in the house and so we are all going to starve if I don’t buy something. He went off yelling at me that we don’t have any money for food so I need to go to the bread pantry and get a few loaves of bread and we can just eat dry bread until he gets paid.
After several minutes of being yelled at, I finally managed to convince him that we cannot live on dry bread and he changed his mind and decided that if I can somehow find the money, I can buy a jar of peanut butter, but that’s it.
The reason we have no money is because he keeps accepting credit card offers and then spending up to the maximum credit limit on all of them. He buys stuff that he doesn’t even need, like a third Raspberry Pi, a case to hold it, a keyboard and USB hub for it, and all kinds of other things like that. After he put the Pi in its case, he set it aside and hasn’t touched it since. And now, his paycheck is going to pay for his credit cards instead of to pay bills and buy food.
So, now I have to try to borrow a few dollars from someone so I can buy a jar of peanut butter.
I hate my life sometimes.
I have been sharing my old blog posts, some funny, some detailing abuse that I have endured, some just whining. I wanted to assure you that everything I write here is true. I have experienced all of this stuff, and so much more.
Today, though, I wanted to write about the more recent past.
I have been a cast member at our local Renaissance Festival for many years. Whenever we have moved, I always seek out the Ren Faire and join the cast. It’s something that helps me cope with all the crap that is going on. This matters because in 2015, about a week after the Ren Faire ended in October, my son and I moved out.
We had secured an apartment in a HUD funded apartment complex about an hour away from where we lived with our abuser-my husband-and that day, we enlisted the help of a friend, and moved a few of our belongings to the apartment. We did all of this covertly and Mr. Control Freak didn’t have a clue what was going on. I texted him that morning before we left and told him we needed to talk, but he ignored me as he so often does, and so we just moved out without telling him.
The apartment was a nice size, and had a kitchen island with the cooktop on it, but many of the people that lived there were horrible. The people upstairs, screamed and shrieked and stomped around at all hours of the day and night. One night they took a gun out onto their balcony and started shooting random things, including my balcony. The person who lived next door to us had robbed the gas station a couple of blocks away, and had shot the clerk and left him for dead, and was awaiting trial for that. He wasn’t supposed to be living there at all, but the manager couldn’t get him to leave the apartment. The man across the hall was mentally unstable and we found him outside several times wearing nothing but a single sock.
One of our neighbors stole the antenna off my car, and someone kept parking so close to my car that I couldn’t get the driver’s door open. The apartment was not well maintained and the flooring had holes under the carpet, the carpet was stained and old, the ceiling was collapsing in my living room. It was a mess, and we were afraid for our safety, but it was at least away from Mr. Control Freak.
We lived there for ten days, then I learned of a house that was sitting empty and had been for six months. I contacted the owner and she said that rather than let it sit empty any more, we could live in it rent free as long as I put the utilities in my name. I did that, and we moved in there a week later.
I was job hunting and had been applying for every job I found, but was having no luck. The house we were staying in had no heat and just bare sub-flooring in the master bedroom, and we were cold, but the owner stepped up and replaced the furnace and put carpet in the bedroom a couple of months later. I didn’t ask her to do it, she did it herself, but then a month after that, she told me that I was going to have to start paying $950/month in rent if I wanted to continue to stay in the house. I told her that I was looking for a job and asked if I could start paying her as soon as I found something. She agreed to that.
So, a couple of months later, (it was March by this time) I was hired by a company that performs retail espionage and was told that I was to be on a special team that traveled to the states closest to where I lived, and I would be contacted to fill out paperwork and complete my training.
I was contacted and asked to complete the standard new-hire paperwork, and was told again that I would be contacted to complete the training once the rest of my team had been hired. I never heard back. I called and emailed and got no responses from anyone, so I continued my job search.
Another month passed and I was hired by a company based in Ireland and started working. During these months, my son and I had been super happy. We were thoroughly enjoying the freedom and lack of abuse that we had never had before. It was liberating and amazing.
Several more months pass and my landlady comes to talk to me about buying the house we were living in. I told her that I would be happy to buy the house and set about getting financing. We had dinner one night and I told her that everything was ready for me to buy the house from her and she was happy. Then the next day, she texted me and said that she had decided to give the house to her daughter instead, but her daughter might let us continue to rent it.
Two weeks went by and I got a certified letter in the mail from the daughter, telling me that I had three business days from the receipt of the letter to get out of the house. She also came over the next night to inform me of this in person. I told her that was not legal and after much arguing, she agreed to give me til the end of the month, about three weeks.
I was scrambling to get everything packed and find some place to go that I could afford and that was safe while still working. My husband had been informed of all of this that was going on and he suggested that we move back into his house temporarily. He said he would clean out the office and I could use it as my room and our son could have his old bedroom back since it still had most of his stuff in it. I asked where I would be staying until the office was cleaned out and was told that I could sleep on the sofa if I wanted to.
We had found several possible places to move, but every time we looked at one, it was rented out from under us, so after the 10th or 11th time that happened, I finally reluctantly agreed to temporarily move back into my husband’s house. I didn’t want to. My son and I and been on our own for a year and we were actually happy and I didn’t want to give that up, but I didn’t see any other option except to be homeless.
So we moved back in here in October of last year and for the first week or so, things were awkward, but Mr. Control Freak was making a bit of an effort not to be completely horrible, but he has since given up, and has become awful again. He never got the office cleaned out, and he won’t allow me to sleep on the sofa, he does whatever he possibly can to try to force me to sleep in the bedroom with him, and he is as bad as ever with the bullying, controlling and emotional abuse.
I quit looking for a place to go because the week before Christmas, the company I was working for cancelled the project I was assigned to and I have been unable to find more work yet. I am trying desperately to come up with $2,700 so I can get some training and have an almost guaranteed job at the end, one that pays enough to allow us to move back out of here so we can get on with our lives again, but I can’t get the money, so I am again stuck.
Life has been happening, as it often does. I will try to get something written about what has been going on, but for now, here is another old post from my old blog.
When it rains it pours…
June 8, 2009
I had decided back in April that I wanted to study Respiratory Therapy and searched high and low for a training program. Finally I found one, got all the information about the school and program, went through the application process, secured financial aid and passed my two required interviews with flying colors. Everything was all set for me to start school today, when all hell broke loose.
The whole mess started on June 1st actually. My husband’s girlfriend lives with us (this is a source of much stress and unhappiness for me, but at present there is nothing I can do about it) and she drives a car that technically belongs to a dead guy. The license plates on the car expired at the end of May, and when she went to get the car licensed in her name, she was told that before John died, he signed the title over to her, but he signed it in the wrong place, so she cannot get the car licensed. She needs a death certificate and proof of his funeral and the whole thing is now tied up in probate, and who knows when it will be resolved.
She can’t drive the car now, since it has expired plates, so I became responsible for taking her back and forth to work every day (the trip to drop her off and come back home and then go pick her up and bring her back home takes two hours). My husband and I only have one car, so wasting so much time taking her to work makes it difficult to get anything else done since we both need the car.
Anyway, last Wednesday, my husband set out to go do something and managed to get about two blocks from the house when the car died and would not restart. We had to have it towed to the shop and the next day we found out that in order to fix everything that is wrong with it is going to cost around $1,000. Two problems with that–we don’t have that much money and the car is not worth putting that much money into. So, the girlfriend has to ride the bus to work now, my husband is bumming rides to work with co-workers and I missed my mandatory orientation for school.
My husband got paid on Friday and with the little bit of money that we had in our savings account, we will have enough money to replace the fuel pump, the main problem with the car, so that it will run again, but who knows when we will be getting the car back. So that is one problem solved, but we are still without a car.
Then, out of the blue, Saturday night at work, my husband broke one of his teeth. Fantastic. That’s more money we have to come up with now because it hurts him and it needs to come out, but we have no way for him to get to the dentist as we don’t have a car, and we don’t have the money right now. Crap.
Wait, it gets better. 
Sunday morning, my son was in bed reading when the ear piece fell off his glasses. It is broken beyond repair. We tried electrical tape and super glue and the ear piece will not stay on the frame, so now we have to have his eyes examined and buy him a new pair of glasses which takes money that we don’t have because of the dang car and my husbands tooth. So my son is without glasses right now, my husband is in pain, we are flat broke, and we still don’t have a car. Oh, and since I was not able to make the orientation for school, I am not going to be able to go, which since I don’t have any way to get there anyway, I guess it’s okay, just upsetting. Every time I think something is going to finally work out for me, everything falls apart. Life sucks sometimes.
Sorry for the whining here. I’m just frustrated and upset.
Copied from my old blog.
Christmas disaster
December 27, 2008
We always spend Christmas morning with my husband’s’ step-father, his current wife and her family. We get together, have breakfast, open presents and chat with people we only see twice a year. Then, around 1:00 pm, we go home, use the toilet, gather more stuff together and head down to my mothers’ apartment and spend the afternoon with my mother, her mother, my brother and his wife.
There are always cameras present at these gatherings, no matter whose home we are in, there are cameras. Grandparents like to take photo’s of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The opening of gifts is the perfect time to take candid photos.
Every year, there are numerous photo’s taken at breakfast and then at the opening of the gifts at my husband’s’ family gathering. Neither one of us like to have our picture taken, but we both tolerate it in the name of making grandparents happy.
Except this year. There was no camera at the breakfast gathering this year as a family member had been buried just two days before, so the celebration was a bit more subdued than usual, and no one thought to take pictures this time. That was fine with me.
After driving an hour to my mother’s apartment, we went in, sat down chatted for about 10 minutes, and my grandmother grabbed her camera and tried to take a picture of my husband. He got this horrible expression on his face and covered his head with his jacket. My grandmother said that she just wanted to take one picture of him and he got angry and said that he didn’t like having his picture taken and he didn’t want his picture taken. Grandma said that she would just wait and try to get a shot of him when he wasn’t expecting it, so my husband got extremely angry and got up and left. He went outside and spent the next two hours huddled in the car. He only decided to come back inside after everyone had left and it was getting dark–the time that I was ready to start back home.
Today he says that he was coming back inside to chat with everyone and that he didn’t realize that everyone else had already left. So now my family thinks my husband is an asshole because he had to have a temper tantrum about having his picture taken. He never acts that way at his own family gatherings.
I guess it’s different when it’s your own family doing things to you? I don’t know. I do know that I was embarrassed, and kind of humiliated and felt it necessary to apologize repeatedly for my husband doing his best to ruin the fun for everyone else.
Some parts of my life suck sometimes.
It has recently come to my attention that I am getting older. We all are, though some days it doesn’t feel like it. Some days I am still 18. Some days I can tell that I have not been 18 for a long time. I know most of us are like that, though, and I try to enjoy those young days as much as possible when they come around.
This post is not about those days, however. This post is about wondering. I am finally a senior in college. I have about three more semesters (including a summer term) and then I will graduate. I will be very relieved to be done with college, but then will have a bunch of student loans to pay back and no real skills with which to find a job.
I have been wondering lately what it really is that I want to do when I grow up. I was reluctant to go back to school because I will be so much older than most of my classmates when we graduate, and that makes me feel somewhat uncomfortable. But, I want to do this. I want to finish my BS, even if it is useless, no matter what age I will be at the time. Age doesn’t really matter so much in the pursuit of what we want to do. We are going to be 45 or 55 or 85 anyway, shouldn’t we be doing something that makes us happy?
As is usually the case with me, thinking about that question brought up a whole other set of questions and thoughts.
Why do we settle for doing things that don’t make us happy? Yes, I know there is the societal pressure that we all feel to “grow up and get a job,” but why are the jobs we so often get something that we have merely settled for? Are we hoping that this job will only be temporary, but it winds up sucking us in like quicksand and before we realize it, we are so deep in that we can’t get out?
There is also the pressure that is placed upon us by our families and friends. They expect us to get jobs as soon as we either turn 18 or graduate from college, and to become independent and autonomous–little islands of self-sufficiency bobbing around in an already overcrowded stream. Just because we have turned 18 does not mean we are “grown up”.
Lately I have been wondering: why do we stop growing up? Someone somewhere decided that once we hit the age of 18 we were adults and therefore done growing up. But that’s not true. Isn’t growing up about acquiring the wisdom we need to survive? About experiencing changes and learning about ourselves? Is that growth not something that continues to happen to us our entire lives? If we all stopped gaining knowledge and wisdom at the age of 18, there are so many things that would never have been accomplished. I think that “growing up” should be a life-long process. Something that we never quite finish doing, not something that ends once we reach a certain age.
This is an old post from my previous blog.
Where do we draw the line?
March 9, 2009
I threw a small birthday party for my husband this past weekend. I invited six people, four adults and two kids (in addition to the three adults and one kid that live in our house). Someone asked me if it was okay for the adults to bring alcoholic beverages to be consumed after the kids had gone to bed.
As I am not a complete prude, I said that yes, that was fine. When everyone showed up, they had several bags of alcohol, and were intent on getting totally drunk. Okay, that was fine. I have carpeted floors for people to crash on if necessary, and a nice futon that is really the most comfortable piece of furniture in the house, and that is available for sleeping on as well.
The party progresses, we eat lots of food, devour most of a half-sheet cake, and then people started drinking. I cannot drink because of a medication I am on, so I was the designated driver–driving out to fetch things from the store as needed. After several hours of drinking, one person excused herself to go to bed. The kids were already all asleep in my bed, and it was starting to get late. I mean around 2:30 am late, not 10:00 pm late. I went to the kitchen to put the leftover food away and when I went back to the living room, the remaining four adults had paired off with each other and were kissing very deeply. I stood there for a moment, surprised by this turn, then went over and stroked my cat who was curled up on the recliner. No one noticed that I was even in the room. I decided to go use the bathroom and brush my teeth and start getting ready for bed.
When I was done in the bathroom a few minutes later, I went back to the living room, where things had not changed much except that now, there was some heavy petting going on in addition to the kissing. Not being the jealous type necessarily, I decided to go on and go to bed, though I was slightly miffed at their behavior and the fact that no one had cared that there were children in the house that could have come out of the bedroom and watched their little orgy.
Anyway, I went into my sons bedroom and crawled into bed with him. Then I proceeded to lay there, listening to the increasingly loud sounds coming from the living room, and after a while, there were obvious orgasms happening.
Over and over and over and over, for the next hour and a half. At one point, they were so loud that they woke up my son and he went out of his room to get a drink. The living room is visible from the bathroom, so I have no idea what he saw…
They finally shut up, and I finally managed to get to sleep, and slept for all of three hours.
Around 7:00 am, my husband came into our sons room and asked me if I would like to go sleep in our bed. I asked if everyone was gone and he said they were, so I extracted myself from my son’s death grip and went to lay down in my bed.
I managed to pry the details out of Mr. Control Freak later that day. He and the other people at the party had gotten drunk and started making out. Soon, they were all naked except for their socks and performing oral sex on each other, with the two women switching back and forth between my husband and the other guy. The two men had no sexual contact with each other. The other guy and his wife had sex with each other, but Mr. Control Freak swears that he only exchanged oral sex with the two women. I’m not sure I believe him.
When confronted with my anger, the three other people involved all claimed that the entire situation was my husband’s fault for not telling them that it was not okay for them to do that. Hello!?!? They should have asked if it was okay, not just assumed… so now I have three less “friends” than I had before. If they are not willing to take responsibility for themselves and acknowledge that they should have asked rather than just assuming and then are willing to pin all the blame on someone else, I don’t need them for friends.
My husband is to blame for it, too. Don’t get me wrong, I am not excusing him here. He is as much to blame as the other three, but my point is that there were four adults in the living room, and I was available, and no one asked if it were okay. So now, I don’t know what to do. My son may have seen them in their little orgy, and that is unacceptable to me. This is not the first time my husband has done something like this, and I am sure he will do it again in the future.
Part of me thinks I should just call it good and leave, but I have no car, I have no real job skills, no income, and no money for living on. I don’t know where I would go or what I would do or how I would support my son. Life is scary sometimes, and I don’t know what to do.
I am fairly certain that we are not totally in control of ourselves and what happens to us. I think we are characters in a giant game of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (AD&D), and the person playing me (my player) is actually a 15 year old boy who has no idea what adult women are really supposed to be like.
I have thought this for a while now, but here recently it has really been on my mind a lot.
I feel that we have players for several reasons. How many times have we gotten up from what we were doing and before even standing all the way up, we forget what we were going to do? It’s because our players changed their minds about what they were about to have us do. “Okay, I want her to go brush her teeth.” “Are you sure?” “Yeah, yeah I’m sure.” “Okay, she is getting up.” “NO! Wait, I want her to go pay the electric bill instead!” “The electric bill? Really?” “Um, no. Hang on. I need to check one of her stats.” So we stand there confused for a moment, then either sit back down or wander off to do whatever thing our player finally decided they wanted us to do.
Have you ever done something, but not been able to explain why you did it? It’s not that you can’t find the right words to describe it, it’s that you just don’t know why? It’s because your teenage player decided it would be totally hilarious for you to holler out “I smell bacon” when the officer arrives at your car window to ask for your license.
I will be headed down the hall to do something of vital importance, and will forget what I was going to do. A few nights ago, I went into the kitchen to rinse something sticky off my hands and get a drink, but after rinsing my hands, I accidentally flicked water on the cats face and she was mad about it, so I decided to give her a treat to apologize to her. While getting her treat, one of our other cats came tearing in to get a treat too, so I had to dole out treats for him as well. While giving the other cat his treats, my cat knocked one of her treats off the desk so I grabbed her treats and her and carried them to the other room, then I came back to my computer and sat down. I had been working on my last blog post for several minutes before I realized I had never gotten the drink I went to the kitchen for in the first place.
I think that we have at least some degree of free will. Sometimes we manage to do something that our players don’t expect and it takes them by surprise, making them unable to control us again for a short time. They are sitting there, mouths hanging open, unable to believe that we actually just did that. At those times, chaos seems to reign in our lives more than at other times.
Sometimes, though, I think our players are actually trying to do something specific and they fumble their die roll and get a one instead of the 20 they were hoping for. Rolling a one is a critical fumble. Those are the times that we are trying to walk down the basement stairs and manage to trip and fall. Or we are walking across the carpet in the library and we trip over the line where the carpet changes from plain to patterned. Or we are stirring noodles in a pot full of boiling water and manage to accidentally splash enough boiling water onto us that we wind up with a second degree burn on our stomachs. Yes, I did that last week. Yes, I was wearing a shirt.
A favorite author of mine, Terry Pratchett, describes in his book “Interesting Times” how Fate and Lady Luck play a game with the lives of the humans that live in his world. The board they use for their game is the world. At one time, I almost thought that Mr. Pratchett could be on to something with that. It often seemed that Fate and Luck (and a god or two sometimes) were playing games with my life. Then I realized that it made more sense to me that we might all be the characters in a giant game of AD&D.
Or, perhaps we are the characters in a role playing game, but our players are not teenage boys, our players are actually the gods themselves, and the game masters are Fate and Luck, and they are just making up the story as the gods bumble along, trying to figure out what it really means to be human.
What do you think? Are we pawns in a game being played by the gods, are we characters in a role playing game, being controlled by a bunch of hormonal teenage boys, or by a bunch of gods who have no idea what it’s really like to be human?
Brain Droppings 