"Why don't you just kill me?"
I was hunched over in the middle
of the room, half crying, half yelling. My face was throbbing where my stepfather had
punched me, and something inside me had just cracked. For the first time since he had started
physically and sexually abusing me eight years earlier, I stood up to him. But it wasn't bravery that compelled me. It was total and complete despair. I just didn't care anymore. I was fifteen years old, and I wanted to die.
My stepfather pulled back for a
moment in surprise. I had never
challenged him before, and my cry from the heart seemed to deflate him. I stumbled into my room and collapsed on my
bed, but I didn't weep. I huddled there with my arms wrapped around my body and
withdrew into a safe state of numbness where I felt nothing.
People who work with abused
children will tell you that this type of disassociation is a common mode of
survival. In some cases, the disassociative state becomes permanent, and the psychic
injury never heals. At that moment, I was dangerously close to slipping off the
edge.
On the day I confronted my
stepfather, I guess my words struck a chord because he never touched me
again. But it hardly mattered; the
damage was already done. I had become
weak, fearful, and empty - the product of a lifetime of physical and sexual
abuse.
The feeling of weakness, the
disassociation, developed with time. In
the beginning, I fought tooth and nail.
Even as a very young child, I knew it was wrong when my stepfather touched
me. I kicked and yelled. I screamed, "I hate you!" and "You're a
bad man!" My one victory was that
he never achieved penetration, but in every other way, he won. Each time my
stepfather hit me, I went deeper inside.
Each time he touched me, I became colder and more unfeeling. Eventually, I stopped fighting. Since I didn't have the power to stop him, I
simply gave up. Over time, failure
became an easy place to be. I was used
to feeling weak, to saying, "I can't stop this!" When you're abused
as a child, you feel helpless and learn to withdraw. You try to protect yourself with frailty,
with invisibility. I became a weak,
frightened young woman who lived in shadows.
My stepfather got away with the
abuse because my mother was constantly working to support us; he was always between
jobs. I never told my mother what was
happening. My stepfather convinced me
she wouldn't believe me. He loved to taunt me with that: "You're nobody, and nobody will believe
you."
But my mother had her own
grievances with the cruel man who lived in our house, and their marriage
finally ended. I still remember the day
she kicked him out. AS he left the house, he reached out and tried to kiss me.
I turned my back and closed the door. A
weight was lifted from my shoulders, but it took me many years to sort out my
feelings. I'm still putting together the pieces of that puzzle now.
Today, at thirty-two, I can
vividly remember the sensation of feeling that life held nothing for me. My
stepfather tried to take away my identity, my strength. But in the end I was
lucky. I'm telling this story for the
first time because I know that before a woman can get fit, strong, and
beautiful, she first has to know she exists - and push through the greatest
barrier of all - the inability to believe in herself.