My First Life - Chapter 1

Chapter 1

I promised you I would spare you the details of my earliest life. I wanted to spare you the ugliness and filth. More than that, I really don't want your sympathy - after all, I survived - I even thrived due in part to this trial by fire.

All of that is true - but the real reason is that I am a coward. To rummage through the attic that was my childhood means climbing into a vat of muck and acid that will cause me pain. Each memory that I hold up and examine sears me - there is no good in this life. There are no redeeming memories, no important life lessons, nothing enlightening or ennobling to the human spirit. Truly - it is just an unrelenting tale of foulness - something to be endured and gotten through, and then best forgotten.

However, it is who we were who makes us who we become. Also, because of who I am, if it frightens me, I must do it. Not out of any thrill I get, but because this fear and the facing of it may have something to teach me.

To begin:

Once upon a time a child was born. Even in the womb she was tiny - a mite, a fairy - she emerged so small that she was dressed for 6 months in doll clothes. She was not born to be herself, but to replace an angel daughter who had died. A large burden to place upon a small and unformed human.

Or perhaps this child was switched at birth... Stolen from the hospital to replace this dead angelic sister. This was what she later chose to believe. These people could not be her real family - certainly, somewhere there were people who truly wanted her - if only she could find them.

You see? I cannot even write this story in the first person. Let me try again:

I was born in a place called Kenosha Wisconsin - a rust belt town in the Midwest. I was born very tiny and underweight - and was, indeed dressed in doll clothes until I was 6 months old. It could very well be that my mother drank alcohol throughout her pregnancy (who knew in those days?) and she certainly did not stop smoking.

I really was born as a replacement child for a dead sister. My mother was to tell me, on numerous occasions, that she married my father because he was so weak and spineless that it was obvious that he could only father a girl. With this opinion of girls, it is strange that my mother wanted another - but my sister was her first child, and it was the death of this child, I am sure, that caused her to be insane.

The problem was that I was never really good at being a girl. I liked to be dirty, I eschewed frilly dresses, I hated girls. I was a disappointment all the way around.

My earliest memories (actually most of my childhood memories) ae fuzzy. I remember fragments... Pieces - I lack a good chronology. My earliest memories are of ambulances and suicide attempts, of alcoholic rages and being taken from my mother time and again. I remember a conversation where my parents decided to divorce - and I remember living in a horrible apartment where the ambulances came for my mother. I remember a rage where my mother broke all my toys over my crib because I refused to nap. I remember home perms, and being dressed like a doll. I remember not talking for the longest time - as if I somehow knew that being any more than a baby doll would end whatever love my mother held for me.

Then came the evil stepfather. No, I am not making this up - he really was a central casting sociopath. But I loved him. My father had abandoned me - he would show up now and then for a few hours here and there, out of duty, but not out of love.

Early life with the stepfather consisted of warmed breakfast pastry covered in butter, and a lap to sit in. It consisted of a beating with a coathanger when I was three for not cleaning my room. There were police and arrests, and again - a removal from the home due to child neglect. There were times when my mom and stepfather would vanish for days at a time... And my brothers would steal food for us to eat. Worse, there were times where we were loaded into the backseat of the car for drunken barhopping trips - the three of us being raised in roadside taverns and sleeping in the backseat of the car.

Eventually, the drinking stopped, and my parents aspired to the middle class. I was 5 or so - and we moved into a real house. I had my own room. My mother made the room all pink for me, a girls paradise... And I wish that I could have been the girl she wanted. There were alcoholic relapses, of course, but there was an occasional sense of what passed for normalcy - my mother went to college, there were family picnics, fireworks, pets. There was still violence on occasion, beatings and the like... But we began at least to look like everyone else.

It was around this time that they got married. It was around this time that my stepfather decided I was a spoiled brat and needed more punishment and discipline, and he became cruel to me... And the warmed breakfast pastries stopped. It was around this time that I started sexually aggressing against other children. I knew, by this time, what a cock was, and I knew that it was put in your mouth and that fingers went into your down there. I have no idea where I learned this thing. I only acted out on other little girls, and I was always the man. I never wanted to be the girl.

Around second grade we moved... To the country. A new school, a new life, no more drinking. Sometimes, I had the perfect mother... Cookies and crafts and stories. But then there would be these rages.... Mostly directed against me. She would come into my very girlie bedroom, and see that it was a mess. The fists would fly. I would be picked up by the hair and thrown into the walls. I was not allowed to protect myself, or to do anything but cower as I and my bedroom were torn to pieces. You never knew when these rages would begin - but a look would come over her, and it didn't really matter if you'd been good or not.

It was also around this time where I was hospitalized, repeatedly, for urinary tract problems. Something was wrong with my urethra - it closed up. Twice it had to be reopened... Scar tissue kept forming there for no apparent reason.

When I was 9, I lost my oldest brother. He went into the marines, never to return. He was my hero, my protector, and how I loved him. He was always in my mind a man... My earliest memories of him were of love - his name was my first word. To this day the loss of him is the hardest loss I had ever suffered... To this day I cherish in my heart my earliest love for him and after all these years I still mourn for him. My other brother, 4 years my senior, was simply another torturer to me... But Eddie was my idol.

After he left, I have the distinct impression of my father (for though he was my stepfather, I had never known another) becoming nice to me again. When my mother was out (how I lived in fear those nights) he would be affectionate and loving - he would treat me like his little wife, giving me backrubs, holding me in his arms, letting me sit on his lap. I was 10. I still wet the bed every night. I did not stop wetting the bed until I was a teenager, and no amount of beatings stopped me.

We appeared to all outside views a normal family. But the violence never really stopped, even though the drinking had. My parents used to fight all night, screaming horrible fights that left me alone and terrified. I remember a night when my mother dragged me out of bed so she could buy a gun to shoot him with - School was a nightmare. Children smell it when something is wrong... It unsettles them, and they will punish you for it. I was so unhappy, so lonely, so used to living in fear. I was still agressing in secret against other children...The very few friends I was allowed to have (no one was allowed to visit my home). I am so sorry to all my victims.... I pray that they were not harmed.

We moved again. This time to northern Minnesota. No one told my birth father - he later claimed I had abandoned him and had I wanted him I could have called. I dreamed a new start would give me a new chance at friends, but still the children smelled that there was something wrong with me. And, to be honest, I had no social skills. I was insufferable in my toughness and disregard at this point. I simply pretended not to care. I had a speech impediment. I was, at 11, the size of a second grader. I still wet the bed. My only friends were animals. I did not know how to bathe, how to dress... How to pass as normal.

This is when I became aware of the nighttime visits. Freed from neighbors, extended family, observation, my father became bolder... My oldest brother was gone, and I was his. He felt free to comment on my body now, to tell me that he had been in my room and that I was beginning to become a woman. I think that these nighttime visits had gone on all my life... But I only became aware of it when he began to tell me about it...

The child's mind is a wondrous thing.