This may ramble a bit…
I was born. (No sh*t Sherlock)
I was sent to live with my Grandparents (my “Parents” for all intense purposes). Which in reflection was a good thing.
My biological mother, for one reason or another, could not care for me. There are conflicting stories as to why she couldn’t care for me, but that was then, and I have no way to validate those stories for myself, so I’ve just accepted it as what it is; I lived with my Grandparents until the approximate age of 8-ish.
Then the shit-storm began…as I like to call it.
My Mother showed up at my Grandparents house, and said that I was going to come back and live with her and her boyfriend. (Please keep in mind that these are my perceptions, from what fragments of memory I have not blocked out…mostly feeling driven I’m sure.) Um.. OK.
(Young child (Me) feels alone, scared, anxious. I did not have words for these feelings at the time.)
Living with Mom was…different. Completely opposite of living with my Grandparents. Totally opposite to be exact. Mom was free, loud, laughed loud a lot, and slept a lot. I remember enrolling myself into grade school one time. Which really wasn’t doing anything because staff could see that I clearly couldn’t “enroll myself”. (In reflection).
“Why”…should I live.
I remember we lived in Silver Spring, Maryland. I went to Connecticut Park Elementary School. I was allowed to walk everywhere, for the most part. One time I remember living in a “green house with a huge yard” and we had a really pretty Irish Setter named Seamus. (My mom’s bf was born in Belfast Northing Ireland..and he could speak Gaelic.) We would go to “CB breaks.(???)” at this local establishment that was located in a strip mall about three minutes from our house. We kids would run around and play…(not sure what, I can’t remember) and the adults would do the adulting. One day, ( I have no dates..just these memories) my mom somehow heard the sirens, or maybe she heard it on the HUGE ham radio we had down in the basement…anyway, she heard there was a shooting in the establishment we used to go to for the CB Breaks. So she put me in the car and we drove to the strip mall and she marched right up there to the police and whoever else was there, and started talking to them. She told me to stay put, on the other side of the firetruck. I remember her telling me someone had gotten shot. I also remember thinking that inherently I knew there was a body on the other side of the firetruck, and did I want to see it?? I did. So I knelt down on my hands and knees and peeked under the firetruck so I could see the body of the man that had been shot. They had him covered with a white sheet, but in my memory I could see his long grey hair and boots, and an arm sticking out. He was dead. (Clearly, duh). Anyway, I digress.
Most weekends I spent with my Grandparents much to my happiness. (I’ve only found out in the recent years that I was only allowed to go visit them if they paid my Mom some money. I don’t know if this was every weekend, but that is what I was told.) On the weekends I went with my Grandparents I would go to the stables and spend all day there. My patient Grandfather would bring his lawn chair and sit while I did whatever I wanted with my horse and the other kids that were there. So many many fond memories there at Shadybrook Stables in McClean,Virginia. I LOVED it there. Then Sunday would arrive and I would have to go back to my Mom’s house and I remember feeling physically sick on those days. Literally. I know now it was anxiety, but at the time all I know is that I felt horrible.
So I went to a junior high called…something. I can’t remember. Wheaton?? Hold up, let me check Google. Holy crap….it was Belt Junior High in Silver Spring, Maryland. Wheaton would have been the high school I went to if we had stayed in Maryland. Upon my Google search…I found that my grade school (Connecticut Park Elemetary) had been turned into an adult learning center, and there was a proposal to reopen it as a grade school in 2006. That’s just a sidenote..I found while searching for my junior high…again…I digress.
So to get back on track….I went to visit my grandparents one weekend, and when we got back, our whole house was packed into a U-Haul, and we literally left at that moment and drove to Kansas. We moved to Hutchinson, then to Inman, where I attended high school.
At some point my mom and her husband, (they had gotten married by then) seperated, and subsequently divorced. I was a sophomore in hight school at the time. (They would have loud, physical fights.) I don’t know the reason for the divorce, just that they split. My mom at that time had a social life, and I could, for the most part, do what I wanted. Although Mom slept, and I remember cleaning the house before friends came over, and Mom did give me a curfew to follow, which I did because she was very strict.
I started drinking when I was 16, and boy did that relax me. I had a routine during the week, and then on the weekends we (me and friends, etc) would go “out” and cruise main and drink beer. On one particular weekend…not sure when or what time of year it was, me and a friend decided to drive to Colorado to visit some of her friends that were there. We made it to “the party” where I was raped for the first time. I lost my virginity with this rape. I thought it was my fault because I was there and partying with everyone. All I remember is I kept telling him “no” and he just held me down and penetrated me anyway. I remember closing my eyes and laying still and trying not to think about what was happening to me. I was on the floor in someone elses room, and didn’t know at the time that another guy was “asleep” in the bed. Not real sure on the happenings after that, just that we drove home the next day. Goodbye to my virginity that night.
I moved out the weekend I graduated from high school. Married my daughters father, had my beautiful daughter, and got divorced. Got into an abusive relationship; got out…then married my son’s father and had my handsome son. Got divorced from my son’s father….that’s a long story for another post. Then I got into another abusive relationship…then got out of it. This had become somewhat of a trend, even though I tried so hard NOT to do it. I was in another abusive relationship, again, and was raped and beaten. Again, I got out. Fast forward to 2006-7 and I found myself, you guessed it, in another abusive relationship. And yes, you guessed it, I was raped again by this man. When I left that relationship…he didn’t handle it very well. He stalked me, beat me up, and ended up breaking into the house to come after me. At that point my life just started to go to shit. I lost everything…house, cars, horses, jobs. I couldn’t function anymore. (For those than don’t know, you CAN be raped within the boundaries of a “relationship”.)
This leads me to today. I have PTSD/CPTSD, fibromyalia, inflammatory arthrithis, social anxiety, major depression, BPD, APD, suicidal thoughts, and have been hospitalized five times in the psychiatric ward of four different hospitals. It’s hard to function day to day. Things will go well for a couple of months, then something happens and I have a breakdown. I’ve managed to get up, but each time is harder than the last. My last visit was in 2018 and I had a plan to end my life. That scared me. It scared me that I didn’t care or want to be alive anymore. When I called the crisis line I told her that I had a plan and she said that if I didn’t come into the office, she was calling the police to do a welfare check. So I got in my car and thought “I can just swallow these pills, and by the time I get there it won’t matter anymore.) I was on my way and didn’t have any water in the car. That was the ONLY reason I didn’t swallow all of that medication. Upon arriving at the office of my therapist, the clinician I met with immediately “suggested” that I go to the hospital. (I say suggested because if I had said no, she was going to involuntarily admit me.)
It was a good stay. They changed my medications, and I was released after four days.
Why is this my “Why”?
My “Why”? Why, because I am a human being, and I know there are other women out there who have been through something similar or the same as myself. I NEED something that makes me feel worthwhile and like I mean something. When we share our story, it could help another person. I need to feel like I’m not alone. (Which is hard sometimes, I’ll admit.) I need to feel pretty, and loved, and validated. We all need that. I want that in everything I do…
I have since learned that spending time out in nature, away from people and around animals, helps me a lot. Some days I can’t get out of my funk, no matter what, but that’s the way it goes. I’ve turned my 24 year old jeep into a mini camper, with a solar panel and generator, sink, and I can stay out in my little campsite that I found, in my horses summer pasture. It REALLY helps.
I share this all because I need to, I have to, I want to. I hope it helps someone else.
✌️
Shassy
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Keywords: rape, bpd, mdd, depression, suicide
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