Trigger Warning: There is a trigger warning on this post for fear of and references to sexual/physical assault.

Inside and Out

I’m afraid of being seen.

I want to be seen.

When I leave the house, I rarely talk anymore, afraid of my voice giving away the unbearable truth of my history, the bulge in my crotch, the knot in my throat. Afraid of facing more violence, of the crack of knuckles against my skin. Of the wrong words applied to my body. Of that look that says exactly what you think of me.

Of seeking hands, again, feeling inside my clothes for a truth I can’t reveal, a desire I can’t satisfy. Again.

But I’m afraid inside, too. Living too much in this virtual world, feeling too much, everywhere. Afraid of losing my ability to work, afraid of not being clever, competent, together. Having to produce, be better, faster, more insightful.

Of being found out. Of being a huge fucking mess sometimes. Of being ridiculous, overly dramatic, sentimental, immature. Falling just for the rush of it, wanting just for the feel of it. Aching, yearning, needing I not know what.

Knowing:
how often I cry
how hard it is to sleep
how much pain there is

that there is precious little space to talk about this, of needing there to be.

but that’s when we would be free….

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Trigger Warning: There is a trigger warning on this post for explicit descriptions of sexual and emotional abuse of a minor.

Taking the long way home

Therapy is a deep well from which to dip replenishment. But, sometimes there are things unseen beneath the deepest waters. I began having nightmares after a session where I was trying to figure out why when things are at their most difficult, I turn away from what heals me and run headlong into the suffering. The nightmares were about a bright light shining in my eyes while dozens of large black spiders with long segmented legs pried my jaws apart. Then I started having the dreams flash on me while I was awake. Then memories began flashing.

Being the only child of a single, narcissistic parent, I’m pretty good at keying in to other people. I’ve been told that when I focus on someone in a conversation, they feel like they’re the center of the universe and that I really care about what they’re saying. And it’s true. I do find people and their passions fascinating. As a child, it was a coping mechanism in dealing with the only adult I had to rely on however inconsistently that love was returned. It was a constant shift between intensity and abject neglect both physically and emotionally. I was a latchkey kid from the time I was six years old. My afternoons were mine to do with as I pleased. There was usually an empty fridge at home, but we had plenty of neighbors. Any mention to my mother about feeling hungry were ignored or brushed aside. Actually any feelings that were not of interest to her vision of reality were pushed away or belittled.

I remember my mother telling me when I was ten that my grandfather died. Papa, as I called him, was the father figure in my life. I began crying and my mom moved over to hug me, as she began sobbing over how horrible it was for her that her father was dead. She needed comfort from me and I gave all I could until she was done, at which point she decided it was time to buck up and put on a brave face.

Shortly after this, my mother decided this brave face was going to need braces. My fairly straight teeth needed to be straighter, I suppose. Up until this therapy appointment I mentioned in the beginning, I’ve had zero memory of having braces or anything about going to the orthodontist. I knew I had braces because there were photos, but I have no connection to that girl in those pictures. I chalked it up as more of the hazy blur that most of my life is to me. But, for some reason the memory came up that she chose an orthodontist who was a few miles away so I would be able to ride my bike to appointments.

Those dreams were haunting my waking hours and memories were coming back in disjointed sensory snapshots. Bright light. Heavy breathing. Painful fingers pulling and pushing at my lips and jaws. Then it was back, like a key slipping into the right lock. My orthodontist enjoyed causing me pain. He told me how much he liked pulling on my lips and pushing against my gums. I understood that I should give an adult what they needed. I think I was 11 the first time he put his flaccid penis in my mouth. I told my mother but she didn’t believe me. It didn’t fit in with her image of who a daughter of hers should be. So, I never talked about it again.

I think I was twelve when he began putting his hands and dental tools inside my vagina. He liked to make me sore. He liked to crush my labia between his fingers. He like knowing he could push on my vulva and I would feel sore the next day. He liked to make my braces extra tight, so that my mouth would be sore longer.

I looked forward to my regular adjustments. I began equating suffering with being real. The rest of my life I wasn’t real. I was an adjunct to someone else’s whim.

I would to take the long way home over the gravel road on my bike from these appointments to keep the soreness that little bit longer.

When I was fourteen, I took an entire bottle of aspirin and went to bed. But, I couldn’t sleep because I was worried it wasn’t enough to kill me. So, I told my mother. I remember the drive to the hospital where she told me how furious she was at me for scaring her so badly and that I was a spoiled brat who would do anything for attention. I remember her disgust with me when I was induced to vomit at the hospital. I remember telling the hospital therapist, “I wasn’t trying to kill myself. I was looking for attention,” as my mother looked on.

I was sixteen when we moved and my mother took me to a new orthodontist. He was angry with how crooked my teeth had become due to the poor work on my braces. He recommended having them removed entirely and starting over again. I passively agreed. He removed them and I never returned to get them replaced.

I have not told anyone who knows me about this yet. Sharing this with my partner will be another burden he’ll willingly bear. That is the type of person he is. He is carrying so many of his family’s burdens right now that I’m not ready to add another of mine to his load. Sharing this with my therapist will change things and I’m not ready for that yet. I’d like to keep this in my well just a little while longer. Knowing that others will read it will help me feel real. It will give me time to heal some of the soreness.

My teeth are still crooked and I’m embarrassed by them. But, I know that their crookedness doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with me. And now I know why I turn away from the things that heal me when times are at their most difficult. It’s because I still take the long way home over the gravel road.

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Trigger Warning: There is a trigger warning on this post for stillbirth and suicide ideation.

After The World Stopped Turning

We had been sequestered in our home for days. I was so fragile that I could crack and crumble to the floor if I began thinking about anything more than breathing in and out. I had my husband, but he didn’t understand. I had my 14 month old, but he didn’t understand. I had friends who might understand, but I wouldn’t let them help me.

I ventured out of the house because the fall weather was calling to my 14 month old and I couldn’t keep him from life even though I was no longer with the living. I strapped him into his carseat tightly and took him to the playground.

He couldn’t wait to be free of me as I lowered him to the grass at the side of the car. He ran toward the slide and I panicked. I slammed the car door shut and quickly caught up his hand in mind. He smiled his sunlit smile and I tried to respond like I used to.

I climbed to the heights above the smallest slide, placed my son carefully on my lap and slowly slid down, cradling him tightly against me to protect him. I made certain not to allow any of his limbs to extend outward because a broken joint could happen so quickly on a slide.

When my feet touched the ground, he squirmed away from me and ran back to the steps. I struggled to catch him up, but he was already climbing up and there were children between us. He was at the top of the towering play structure, a full three feet off the ground, and I knew I was about to watch my child die.

I watched from my trapped mind as he fell those three feet onto the padded, recycled tire covering around the play structure. I saw with my horror-filled imagination as his head hit the padding and crushed his life away. In my imagination, I couldn’t get to him in time to save him.

As he slid down the slide and ran up behind me giggling, I was frozen in my horrible panicked fantasy. My 14 month old son would die within my imagination just as surely as my daughter had died within my body a few days earlier. She was twenty-three weeks when her heart failed. I knew she was already dead when I gave birth to her body unassisted at home.

If I was going to let my son live, then I needed to stop hovering. Walking 10 feet away from the play structure to sit on the bench was hard. I wasn’t sure I would make it without crumbling apart, but I did it. I could do that for my son, if not for myself.

I did crumble when a playgroup arrived shortly after with three heavily pregnant mothers, smiling and unknowing how painful it was to see them. I cried silently behind my Jackie O sunglasses and watched my son play. I still believed that he would fall to his death at any moment.

Once I had myself together enough to gather up my son and get back to the car, we returned to our house and I began my new plan. I was staying alive to give my son breastmilk, but if I pumped and built up a large enough freezer stash, I felt I could be free to end my life.

Unfortunately, my husband was warned by my midwife to watch me for such a plan. He told me to get some professional help. I fought against it, but agreed to do it as long as I could continue unhindered in my milk-stash plan.

I saw a therapist who specialized in birth PTSD. She helped me a little, but my body had other therapy planned for me. I discovered I was pregnant for a third time. I knew it was a boy and I knew my body can nurture and birth boys well. I may still not have been be sure whether I’m meant to stay here, but I knew this growing healthy boy was.

*******

I look back on this time after having birthed two more thriving baby boys. If my daughter had survived, I would not have my second and third sons. I have not reconciled my desire for all four of my children to be alive with me. But, I have found a sort of peace in the exercise of letting my children run and play without a hovering mom. It is getting easier, even though it is not getting better. I no longer keep any milk stashed in my freezer.

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Trigger Warning: There is a trigger warning on this post for sexual assault, surgery, and sexual dysfunction.

Broken

By Kristin Lai¹

I’ve been broken since I was thirteen when my grade nine boyfriend sexually coerced me, triggering my first major depression. I spent the rest of grade nine and all of grade ten being called a slut and a square, depending on who you talked to and sometimes within the same breath. There’s nothing quite like being slut-shamed and prude-shamed at the same time. After that boyfriend my interest in physical intimacy of any kind slowly waned with each successive relationship. My boundaries were shaped more by my trauma than by my desires. I’m pretty damn sure that I would have tried to lose my virginity earlier, with my first truly amazing boyfriend, had I not been so affected by that early sexual assault – and make no mistake, coercion is assault. What I didn’t understand then was that even if I had wanted to “pop my cherry” it wouldn’t have been possible.

You know what I’ve always wanted to be able to do? Wear a tampon. When I was sixteen I mentioned to my doctor that I couldn’t even put in a tampon and she said I might have an unusually tight hymen, the technical term for it is “imperforate hymen”. She told me that I could get surgery for it but she never actually examined me so it all remained hypothetical – and FYI for all of those medical professionals out there, it is entirely unfair to require that a teenage girl be proactive in advocating for herself when it comes to sexual healthcare, it’s your job to pay attention, take notes and ask follow up questions – that doctor never again mentioned it and neither did I.

When I finally tried to get my first pelvic exam it was impossible. It hurt so much when she tried that she had to give up, and yet she had no suggestions or even comments about this fact.

Somewhere along the line I decided that I must have vaginismus, all the while still scared of sex, afraid of being taken back to that bedroom in grade nine; having to explain to each and every boyfriend why I couldn’t “do that” and why I sometimes cried for no apparent reason. I became defined not only by my trauma but by my brokenness.

I read so much shit about female sexual dysfunction I could recite it in my sleep. I even went to a sex therapist who did little more than diagnose me as “pre-orgasmic” rather than “an-orgasmic” and refer me to Lonnie Barbach’s “For Yourself” which assumes that if a woman is not getting into the sex it’s because she’s been taught that “nice girls don’t do that”. This so did not apply to me.

It wasn’t until I was twenty-six and married (that’s right, someone actually married my broken ass) that a doctor actually gave a shit. First doctor in my life to take me seriously about anything. He sent me to a brilliant gynaecologist who was quite impressed with exactly how imperforate my hymen was, she immediately scheduled my surgery and I had that little piece of skin excised (if you’re curious it’s called a hymenectomy).

I went through surgery and hobbled around for three freakin’ weeks (eighteen days longer than predicted) only to find that while I could now get an uncomfortable pap smear I still could not have “the sex” without a great deal of work and discomfort if not outright pain. Also, although I could get a tampon in I could feel the stupid string so, no thanks.

Believe it or not we somehow managed to get me pregnant: it was a goddamn chore, and it hurt. Sex should not be like that. Your partner should not have to ask you repeatedly, “Are you okay? Should I stop?” but he did ask, and he hated that it was hurting me but I grit my teeth and took the pain because I wanted that baby.

I assumed that if I mentioned this to anyone I would be given the same advice I’d heard a million times, “stretch it out with your fingers/dilater/butt plug” and frankly, I didn’t have enough of a libido to put that kind of daily work in. When I had to have an emergency c-section I was disappointed because I had hoped that the delivery would stretch me out to a normal size.

Eight years after my first surgery I finally mentioned it to my doctor and he sent me right on back to my lovely gynaecologist who examined me yet again and yet again she was truly impressed by just how broken my cooch was. She found that even the slightest brush with a soft little Q-tip was enough to make me cringe and wince, turns out that in addition to having been blessed with a truly imperforate hymen I had also been graced with an “exquisitely sensitive” bit of skin at the entrance to that most blessed of orifices.

My thoughts? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

Back to surgery to have, I kid you not, a skinning vulvectomy (I couldn’t make this shit up); a surgery usually performed to treat cancer. If you’re looking this up online, rest assured I did not have my labia or clitoris removed (Wikipedia nearly put my big sister into a fit, “Nobody’s cutting off my little sisters clit!!!”)

I healed much more quickly this time and promptly called big sis to proclaim, “They slit my snatch and my hoo-ha’s healing!” Once the healing was done I took my vajingo out for a test drive and lo and behold, I could put a small dildo in with no pain! I cried, I felt like for the first time in my life I wasn’t broken.

And yet… it’s been several months since my surgery and my partner and I are so used to not having sex, so used to there being issues and difficulties and, in my case, so tired of hoping that maybe just maybe this time it will be okay… that we still haven’t done it.

For a long time I told myself that it was all fine, we just did other stuff and that was enough and maybe for someone else it would have been. But to not have “the sex” because you can’t, because it hurts, because some part of your sexual self was stuffed into a box when you were thirteen, is not okay. To end every attempt at intimacy with the female equivalent of blue-balls; feeling guilty that you can’t be enough while your partner worries about hurting you or triggering you; not even being able to give yourself an orgasm, is not okay. And then the realization that the only way you’re likely to ever have an orgasm is through the one thing you can’t do. It’s heartbreaking.

I have spent my whole life repeating one simple prayer, “Please God let me not be broken anymore.”

***

I have always believed in being sex positive; sex is something to be enjoyed and talked about and no one should ever be made to feel shame or guilt about expressing and owning their sexuality. I believe that if we were truly a sex positive culture I probably wouldn’t have gone through all of this. I also believe that it was my sex positive position – that is, my willingness to openly talk about my boundaries – that protected me from further exploitation. That being said, when you are a sex positive person who’s not having sex it can be isolating and often painful to listen to others share their own experiences of sex and lust and eroticism. After so many years in the queer community it can become unbearable. That pain is where the following poem comes from:

Please stop talking about sex. Oh God please just shut up.
Don’t tell me that sex must be a part of any healthy marriage – you erase me. Don’t make jokes about ‘frigid’ women – you judge me.
Don’t conflate sex-positive with having sex – you mistake me.
Please just stop talking about sex.

I have spent countless hours in my life listening to friends regale me with their sex-capades.
Smile and nod.
“Oh my God I haven’t been laid in three months!”
You poor fucking baby.
There is no room in this room for my experience. So I keep my mouth shut.
This is what invisible feels like.

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Trigger Warning: There is a trigger warning on this post for mentions of self injury and related coping mechanisms.

If wishes were horses…

Tonight is a bad night. It is well past midnight and while my two-year-old is soundly asleep in the bed next to me, I am wide awake, my thoughts a jumble of flashbacks, my body remembering the years of torturous abuse it suffered at the hands of “friends”. I desperately want this to end. Between memories, my mind goes back to all the ways I have coped in the past – heroin, cutting myself, anorexia, suicide attempts. It takes every ounce of strength I can muster to stop myself from doing something drastic. I keep reminding myself that if something were to happen, that if this was the time I finally went too far and my body gave up on me, that this beautiful, perfect angel sleeping next to me would be left alone and scared and unsafe in our apartment until some one noticed I was missing and came to find me.

I wish there was some one I could talk to about these feelings, but there is not. Sure, I go to counseling and my therapist is amazing, but I can never be truly honest with her. You see, I have already been labeled as deficient by society. I am young, poor, single, queer and mentally ill. While I will readily admit that I have white privilege, I doubt this is enough to compensate for the seemingly insurmountable mountain of crap I have working against me. I am scared that if I were to ever be truly, completely, 100% honest about how I feel, about what I struggle with, they they would take my baby, my Reason, away from me. There are days when the depressed part of me thinks this might not be such a bad thing. The depressed, traumatized part of me injects doubt into every facet of my life, telling me that I am shitty parent, that my child would be better with some one who doesn’t have the struggles I have.

This message is, of course, reinforced by every image of parenting that surrounds me. White, married, heterosexual, neurotypical, upper middle class is touted as the ideal, the norm. And of you are not those things, well then you better keep your legs closed, ho. You have no business adding another leech to the system. It breaks my heart to write that, to recognize that that is what my beautiful, kind, compassionate, funny, creative, loving little person is reduced to: a leech. All because of who I am and the choices I have made. I also worry that there are components of this that are genetic and that I have doomed by baby to someday go through the hell I am going through right now. Just thinking about this is almost more than my heart can bear.

I am sick of living this life. I am sick of denying my pain, of pretending like it doesn’t exist. I should not have to choose between being able to keep my child and healing the very real, very deep emotional wounds I carry. I am sick of being made to feel like less than by a society that tell me that my parenting, my body, my being is defective simply because of the way my brain chemicals work.

I wish this story had a happy ending. I wish I could say that I pulled myself up by my bootstraps like I have been urged to do so many times by clueless people. I wish, I wish, I wish… sadly, it seems like wishes are all I have.

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Trigger Warning: There is a trigger warning on this post for references to child abuse and violence against people with disabilities.

Surviving Abuse with Disabilities

I am an abuse survivor, although I don’t like to use the word “abuse”. I was physically and emotionally hurt by my parents. I am also disabled. Autistic, among other things. These two things may not seem like they have anything to do with each other, but they do.

First of all, people with disabilities are more commonly victimized to abuse than the general population. This may be for several reasons that I do not understand, but it is true. Secondly, disabled people may be less likely to report abuse, for example because they do not have the skills to communicate what happened to them. These are both points that warrant attention, but this is not what I’m going to write about now.

What I’ll write about is when abuse is excused by a person’s disability. My parents beat me on quite a regular basis, and more often said that I was worthless and that they were only parenting me because no foster home would want me. These actions would’ve been considered abusive if they happened to a person without disabilities, but in my case, almost everyone — even my therapist — contends that my autism is the root cause of it all.

You see, I had behavior problems as a child and young adult. I had frequent meltdowns in which I would scream and yell and sometimes, as a child, act physically aggressively towards my parents. Even though no one says that this excuses the actions my parents committed, people often do say that it is my autism that is the main problem, and that, if my parents had sought help for my autism — which they didn’t, since they were in denial –, nothing would have happened.

Even in abuse survivor communities I sometimes hear talk as if my disability is at fault instead of my parents having to take responsibility for their actions. Once, I wrote to a support group about being triggered by an article that revealed that children with behavioral conditions are more likely to be victimized to abuse, and I was informed repeatedly by a fellow member that people needed to protect themselves and others from the hurt done by children with behavior problems. This gave me the idea that my disability was truly at fault for the abuse. When someone stuck up for me and said the other member’s words were inappropriate and that abuse by parents is never the child’s fault, this person was reprimanded by the group owner.

I have internalized a lot of the logic that says that disability makes abuse understandable. Survivor guilt is the result, but a more complicated kind of survivor guilt than that experienced by most survivors of trauma and abuse. “It was not your fault,” simply doesn’t make sense when people go on to blame an integral part of who I am.

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Yes, Tinkerbell!

I am the mother of a toddler boy (or apparent boy, but I’m going to stick with the male pronoun since as best we know it applies), and recently he had his second birthday. We took him out to do several things. Including pick something (modest, not huge) out at the toy store, and get a toddler pillow for his new bed.

At the toy store, we were wandering with him in his dad’s arms (where he had chosen to be), trying to spot things to offer him as choices. As we strolled through the books, he lunged down to grab at a book on a shelf that was waist-high to his dad (ie, down around his feet) and clung to it. Well, then. The book in question was a Tinkerbell book, an oversize board book with a little keyboard that played some pre-set sounds related to the story. My husband was briefly concerned but, to my relief, his concern was whether or not the book had small parts (our son still tries to eat his toys and books) — it was age-suitable, and my husband relaxed.

Our son loves this book. He punched buttons all the day he got it, and he comes back to it frequently. One button is a pink sparkly heart that makes a sound I can only describe as sparkly, and the first time I heard it I said “Awwww!” (in that sappy voice you do) and now my son says that about every fifth time he hears that button.

That evening we went to get him a second pillow for his newly-converted bed (he already had one I made him). There were a number of options, but once we offered him the Tinkerbell pillow he rejected all others in the “this one or that one?” game and clung to it throughout the store. So Tinkerbell came home again.

When we got home, he poked the pillow in Tink’s nose and frowned. “Bwoken!”

“No, honey, it’s not broken. The book makes music. That’s a pillow. It’s still Tinkerbell, but it doesn’t make music.”

He set the pillow down on a chair and went back to playing with the book. I left the tags on the pillow, waiting to see what would happen (and to give him time to forget the disappointment), and he appeared to ignore it for the most part. Two days later I asked him if he wanted the Tinkerbell pillow in his bed (the Tinkerbell book stays downstairs; we try to keep loud toys out of the bedroom). “Tinkuhbell upstairs!” He hugged the pillow. I took the tags off. He’s cuddled it many nights since.

I don’t personally understand his love of it: it’s very pretty, and the back side is soft, but the Tinkerbell side is scratchy because of the fabrics and threads she’s done in. All the same, he does love it.

To those of you who, when told this story, give a sigh of relief when I describe his disappointment to discover that the pillow didn’t make music, and to whom I never tell the ending: fuck you. The Tinkerbell pillow is cute, my son loves it, and I probably ought to tell you that but I also refuse to pull him — a living breathing person you know — into a battle he doesn’t even realize exists.

To those of you who are neutral: thank you.

To those of you who visibly bristle when I say I left the tags on the pillow (often before I say why, because of how I normally tell it, feeling out my audience), and who relax or smile when you hear why, and that he did keep it? Thank you. Thank you for caring enough to be ready to tell me off (or at least be contemplating it) if I was squashing my child. I remember, and I appreciate it.

Thank goodness, none of the people who disapprove of his love of Tink are close to him so far. (At least as far as I know; maybe someone hid it better, but if they hide it, it’s their problem, not his or mine.) Because if it were someone who would bring it up to him, I’d have a Conversation to have.

A few things for you to think about, if my son’s love of Tinkerbell bugs you:

1. He’s two. Just barely two. Nothing about now is permanent, unless it is. There’s no way to know.

2. What is he supposed to do, hate girls or fairies? I’m not too worried about him being antisocial with faeries (the Tinkerbell kind, not using this as the modern slang, thanks), but he does have to attend school and work with girls and women as he grows, and I’d rather he liked them than not!

3. If you’re worried he’ll grow up feminine, or gay, or…let me just say that if he turns out to be a lesbian when he grows up? My one hope would be that he’ll be a happy one. Which means that if you disapprove of this kind of thing, you’re not the person I want much involved in his life, in case I’m using all the wrong pronouns now.

He’s young, and he’s a person, and he’s finding his own way. I won’t push him to like or dislike Tinkerbell — or trucks, or dragons, or roaring, or anything else that isn’t harmful to himself or others. And if I can help it, I won’t let others, either.

Because I want him to grow up whole and strong. Whoever he is, whoever he will be, he is my child and I love him. And I expect you to at least respect that he is and ought to be his own person.

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From Arwyn: For more posts on this topic which, serendipitously (or unsurprisingly, given my known interest in gender and parenting) I recently ran across, see Tinkerbell Valentine of Much Consternation and And Another Thing! at Pax (Ro)mama and My Sons are Gender Conformists at Blogging When the Baby Isn’t Looking.

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Trigger Warning: There is a trigger warning on this post for descriptions of medical/birth trauma.

Trauma by Any Other Name

There’s a lot of stuff around about on the Internet about birth trauma — both the medical-clinical kind, wherein actual physical damage is caused to baby or mother or both, and the emotional/psychological kind, which is posited for babies and reported by mothers after some births. Like, I suspect, a lot of women, I’ve read my share of these stories and have been moved by many of them, horrified by others, and mystified by a few.

While sympathetic, even empathetic, to the raw pain expressed by many of these women, I wondered in my heart if birth trauma wasn’t what my mother has always referred to as “women’s war stories” — an expression of shared trouble to bind and bond a group as much as to release emotion. Birth, after all, is by its nature a major, transformatory and physically and emotionally very significant event. I suppose it would be fair to say that I never really thought the concept had applicability to my own three birthing experiences — until the past few months.

Let me be clear: neither I nor any of my three baby girls suffered physical birth trauma. The damage done to my body by the major abdominal surgery that is a cesarean section was planned, and, in the scheme of things, proportionate to the result it produced (ie a healthy, intact baby). My body was not unduly tardy in healing these gut wounds and my uterus, if scarred, remains functional and behaves normally, as does my skin. I did not feel then, and do not feel now, that my c-sections were botched or that they were unnecessary. The surgeons who performed my deliveries were careful and neat workers and I had none of the complications that I know can attend abdominal deliveries.

However.

My last delivery, of my beautiful almost-2-year-old, C, in February 2009, did involve physical injury to me, although not related to the surgery itself but to the spinal anesthetic. The anesthetic caused nerve damage to a wide span of nerve bundles in my upper spine, which caused a range of subsequent physical and emotional effects which mimicked the onset of MS, and left me living in terror of the paralysis I felt sure was coming, for several months at least.

Even after my wonderful, thrice-blessed neurologist, who took me seriously and tested me to within an inch of my life to find out what was *really* going on, had reassured me that the damage was not life or mobility threatening and that I would, in time, recover, I still had many months more of physical symptoms to get through before late 2009 and 2010 brought ever-increasing improvement and relief, to the point where now, in January 2011, those physical sensations are a nightmarish memory, with only occasional flare-ups if I am exhausted, very stressed, or very sick. (I will be vulnerable to those flare-ups all my life).

Excuse me if I ramble. I am actually having difficulty writing as I am shaking as I start allowing these memories to surface and be spoken. I need to write this, though; tonight I realized how badly I do need to.

I knew, obviously, that I had been physically traumatized by the anesthetic at my last birth. That was clear once my neurologist had completed his tests. What I have only woken up to recently, however, is the fact that I have also been psychologically and emotionally traumatized by this experience as well.

I have been shying away from calling this trauma by its name, because I have been unwilling to label myself as a “victim”, unhappy to allow the word to be breathed in the same context as the joyful welcoming of my daughter, all too aware of how much suffering others have undergone and not wanting to even implicitly compare my experience to theirs. But I know that really those are not reasons enough to deny my reality and that continuing to do so is not helping me to face these memories and deal with them.

So here it is:

I am traumatized by what happened when I gave birth to C.

Remembering the anesthetic being inserted is like an unbearable toothache, where the tooth throbs in agony but you can’t seem to help yourself from poking at it with your tongue. I try not to dwell on it or even give it head room, but things remind me, and all of a sudden I’m back, telling the anesthetist that it feels wrong, different from the other times, and being shushed. I flush with heat and then cold, and then the tingling starts, a psychologically induced but physically felt ghost of the myoclonic jerking, loss of balance, parasthesia and terror that I felt when C was 1 to 10 weeks old (the worst time).

By careful mental discipline, I can think about C’s birth without allowing my mind to touch on the anesthetic. I can remember the delight I felt in seeing her delivered safe and beautiful, I can remember her sweet newborn smell, I can taste my tears of happiness as I gave her the very first and blessedly easy breastfeed. If I focus my mind’s eye on her, on C herself, I can remember peacefulness and love and tiredness and happiness and milk and sleep and sweetness. All that good stuff. It’s not lost to me and it’s not less real for the fact that, if I let my mind stray to my own body -

I feel sick.

I feel incredibly anxious.

I feel fearful and closed-in and yes,

I feel invaded.

It was brought home forcefully to me how strong this reaction is as I was telling my elder daughters stories before bed tonight. They wanted me to tell them the stories of when they were born, stories they have always loved hearing and I have always loved telling. Tonight, for some reason (perhaps her increasing need for detail to know every bit), the 7 year old wasn’t content for me to talk in generalities – she wanted the specifics of how the needle was inserted, where it was inserted, how it felt when my legs went numb. And although her birth was not traumatic at all, I found myself struggling to breathe as I described these things to her, my mind’s eye filled with a picture of myself in 2009, lying on that table, about to be harmed. I had to tell her that I couldn’t talk about it anymore, and move the story on to talking about her surgical delivery (I can talk and think about my abdomen being incised and a baby removed with complete equanimity and even humor. Strange).

Is this reaction disproportionate? Sure, it is. Is it reasonable? No, I know it isn’t. Do I have any just cause for complaint? I think I don’t, and so I don’t complain.

I’m not complaining now. Not really.

I’m just calling it by its name. Birth trauma. Trauma, occasioned to me, during a surgical birth. Trauma that I have to understand and acknowledge in order to be able to release.

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Will You Love the New Baby More than Me?

It’s the kind of things small children worry about, not their parents. But here I am, pregnant, and worried that my in-laws will love this baby more than our first.

My husband is an only child. His family moved quite a bit. His family made it very clear starting shortly after our wedding that they expected us to give them grandchildren – that we owed his grandmother babies to play with since he hadn’t been around for her to dote on as an infant; that we owed his parents the baby girl they’d wanted but never had.

When we started pursuing fertility treatments, we said nothing. Smart-ass comments met every question about when we were giving them grandchildren. A friend of theirs came to visit with a little girl she’d adopted a year or so before, and my in-laws spoiled her rotten… and proceeded to berate us further about not giving them a baby girl. When it got to be too much that evening, I finally said that we were considering adoption. That stopped my father-in-law in his tracks, and his response was that their friend was very lucky, and we had to be careful if we were going to adopt, “because you never know what you’ll get.”

My response was that you didn’t really know what you were getting with your own child either, but he brushed me off as being silly. Looking back, that should have been a clue right there.

After 5 years, including a couple of breaks and a consult with the world’s least sympathetic reproductive endocrinologist, I got pregnant. We told our parents right away, and told them we weren’t telling anyone else yet. The following weekend, I was 6 weeks pregnant, and we traveled to a family gathering in a small town a few hours away, only to discover that my father-in-law had told everyone in his entire hometown that we were having a baby.

I knew only a handful of people there, but more than half of the attendees stopped to congratulate us and to ask the age old questions – boy or girl, due date, names, etc. Seriously, I was six weeks pregnant, just getting hit with all-day morning sickness on the trip, and we didn’t even know most of these people, yet here they were, asking questions that really, there was no answer for.

My in-laws continued throughout the pregnancy, suggesting names based on the most embarrassing nicknames they could come up with, and making comments about how they’d be more than happy to babysit immediately upon birth, if not sooner. They wanted us to have a girl so they could buy dresses more appropriate for pageants than babies. They wanted us to at least partially formula feed so they could feed the baby too. When our ultrasound said it was a girl, they were ecstatic.

Imagine their horror then when complications resulted in an emergency c-section very early in the pregnancy. When they arrived at the hospital, their only concern was when they could see “their” baby – keeping in mind that I was so sick I did not see my baby for more than two days.

And then we had the audacity to tell them “by the way, the ultrasound was wrong, It’s a Boy!” Their dreams were crushed, and you could see it in their eyes.

During my recovery in the hospital, my in-laws accused me of being rude for being too sick to carry on conversations with them. They were angry that the hospital had rules for the NICU and thought the rules shouldn’t apply to them. Their visits became rarer as they realized the nurses meant business, and even when they did come, they stood back in the corner, terrified of the equipment and alarms.

Over the years, it’s not gotten any better with them – we have a pretty smart child with some physical challenges. Grandma and grandpa would not hold him when he was finally big enough to hold, and are now upset that as a busy toddler he doesn’t want to be picked up by people who he’s not comfortable with. They wouldn’t learn CPR when he was about to come home from the hospital, and they were horrified that we expected them to learn to care for his physical needs if they wanted to babysit (they haven’t learned, so they haven’t babysat, and no longer seem interested in doing so). They only come to visit for holidays, and they’ve actually never called to check on him when he’s had surgery – and he’s had 5 surgeries over his short life. They’ve said to him, “well, we’d like you to come visit, but maybe when you are bigger and need less attention.”

And now, here I am, pregnant again. Will this be the perfect little girl they so desperately want? If so, what does that mean for my son and his tentative relationship with them? Would they love her more just because she was the baby they wanted but didn’t have, and how differently would they treat the two?

And if this child is not “perfect” – and let’s not even get into defining that – I suppose it depends on how it works out, because it’s obvious from things they’ve said that they see a hierarchy of disabilities. Apparently they see it as a blessing that at least their grandson is towards the top of the food chain – he can see, he seems cognitively intact, he’s not in a wheelchair. They’ve made comments about other children in his favorite signing videos – amazement that “kids like that” can learn sign language or even have any sense of meaningful communication.

Their bigotry goes further though. They’ve told us that they’re glad we didn’t adopt – glad he didn’t come from some foreign country, glad his skin color is the same as theirs, glad his mother wasn’t “some crackhead”. They’re very pleased that, as far as they can tell, he’s “all boy”; we’ve been asked not to dress him in anything too girly, even for Halloween, for fear of turning him gay, because that would be horrible, as far as they’re concerned.

What a sad world they must live in to see things this way, and to not have learned that all children start out the same, and they all deserve our love. How sad that they’re missing out on our amazingly cute, opinionated little boy and his wicked sense of humor; that their promise in his first days of going to the park to play has not materialized….even though the park is one of his favorite places to go.

In any case, we already love this new baby as much as we love our son – I’d prefer a full term healthy baby and a complication free pregnancy, but if not… we’ll play the hand we’ve been dealt, just as we have with our son, doing the best we can to get everything this child needs to succeed in life.

I just hope I never have to figure out how to explain why it seems that grandma and grandpa love one of them more than the other.

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Anonymous comments are welcome on NPFP posts. Simply put “Anonymous” or any pseudonym in Name, and either your own or a fake email addresses (ex me@me.com) as the email. NOTE: If you have a Gravatar associated with your email address, it will show up even with an anonymous name, in which case please use a different or a fake email address. If your comment does not appear within 12 hours of posting, please email me as I may have to rescue it from the spam filter.

My Breasts, My Children, My Self

Boobs. Hooters. Knockers. Ta tas. Bazongas. Melons. Tits. Jugs.

Breasts have a lot of nicknames. It’s how you know they’re naughty, right? I can also think of a lot of nicknames for penises, vulvas and vaginas. But I can’t think of any for elbows or ankles. It tells you something about what were afraid to name. It probably also tells you something about why our society is so intensely uncomfortable with breastfeeding. Breasts are naughty, therefore breastfeeding must be naughty, right?

But that’s not my point. Not exactly.

No matter what you call them, I’ve always been rather proud of my breasts. Since I’m anonymous here I feel free to say that I have great breasts. I have enjoyed them immensely — both out of vanity, and as part of my sexuality. My breasts always play a large part when I express myself sexually.

Then I had babies. I always knew that I wanted to breastfeed. It wasn’t easy at first, but I did it. The exclusively breastfed-for-six-months-and-continued-well-into-toddlerhood kind of did it. Breastfeeding plays a large part in my mothering. I would have been a mother whether I breastfed or not, of course, but the fact that I did has been incorporated into most every part of my mother-identity.

In sex and breastfeeding my breasts serve two very different functions, and I keep them separate. I don’t feel aroused when I breastfeed. And I don’t think of my babies when my partner licks my nipples. My frame of mind is not the same. The sensations are not the same. The people I’m with are not the same.

And yet, my body isn’t always so clear on the separation. If I watch a suggestive TV show while I’m breastfeeding, I find the intermingling of nursing my baby and sexuality to be uncomfortable. The scene on the TV (which may only be PG-rated petting) plus the stimulation of breastfeeding leaves me feeling slightly aroused, and I don’t want to feel aroused while breastfeeding. So I steer clear of TV shows that are likely to feature anything more than chaste kissing while I breastfeed, and I’m fine.

When I’m sleeping, though, it’s not so easy. At least three times over during my years of breastfeeding I have woken up from a suggestive dream that happened to occur while my baby was latched on and nursing. My babies nursed at night a lot — eventually I was bound to have a sexy dream while they were doing it. But on these occasions, the telltale clenching in my vagina told me that I’d just had an orgasm.

This is not a good orgasm. It’s intensely emotionally disturbing. Breastfeeding my baby caused me to have an orgasm. What kind of mother am I? What kind of person am I? Children and sexuality should not intermingle. I don’t want them to intermingle. I am concerned about what other people would think of me, and my mothering, if they knew that they had intermingled in this way.

After waking up to an orgasm while breastfeeding, I feel reluctant to breastfeed for some time. For days, I try to put my baby off when he or she asks to nurse. To this day I haven’t told anyone that I orgasmed while breastfeeding, not even my husband. I am too afraid. I have faced a lot of internal turmoil, and decided that it’s something best kept to myself.

I do realize that I haven’t done anything wrong. I in no way asked for this to happen, or caused it to happen. If I were conscious, I would do everything in my power to keep myself from feeling aroused while breastfeeding. And to put it in perspective, we are talking about three occasions over the course of many years of accumulated breastfeeding. I believe that my own emotional discomfort over these incidents is outweighed by the benefit that my children gained through breastfeeding into toddlerhood. But I still wish it hadn’t happened.

I love my breasts. My breasts have provided some lovely window dressing. They have provided immense pleasure. They have nourished my children. They are a part of me, even though I haven’t always gotten along with them. I suppose this is why we’ve given breasts so many names – they can be enigmatic and fill us with conflict. They can sustain life and create pleasure, but they can also cause intense discomfort as we just try to get a decent night’s rest. By calling them boobies, or jugs, or melons, we’re just trying to lighten the blow.

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From Arwyn: Though our stories are different, this naked and faceless writer is not the only one to feel sexual sensations while breastfeeding. If you have as well, and thought you were alone, I promise you are not: On breastfeeding and things we don’t talk about, and Nursing and nuance: breastfeeding isn’t creepy, except when it is. Please share links in the comments or email me if you are aware of other stories of how parents who breastfeed have struggled with — or embraced, or ignored, or done away with — arousal during breastfeeding.

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Please support the Naked Pictures of Faceless People project by commenting on the posts. Comments which attack or attempt to guess the identity or any aspect of the identity of the blogger will be deleted, however. Protect and respect this space as though it were your own work on display here, naked and faceless.

Anonymous comments are welcome on NPFP posts. Simply put “Anonymous” or any pseudonym in Name, and either your own or a fake email addresses (ex me@me.com) as the email. NOTE: If you have a Gravatar associated with your email address, it will show up even with an anonymous name, in which case please use a different or a fake email address.

Boobs. Hooters. Knockers. Ta tas. Bazongas. Melons. Tits. Jugs.

Breasts have a lot of nicknames. It�s how you know they�re naughty, right? I can also think of a lot of nicknames for penises, vulvas and vaginas. But I can�t think of any for elbows or ankles. It tells you something about what we�re afraid to name. It probably also tells you something about why our society is so intensely uncomfortable with breastfeeding. Breasts are naughty, therefore breastfeeding must be naughty, right?

But that�s not my point. Not exactly.

No matter what you call them, I�ve always been rather proud of my breasts. Since I�m anonymous here I feel free to say that I have great breasts. I have enjoyed them immensely - both out of vanity, and as part of my sexuality. My breasts always play a large part when I express myself sexually.

Then I had babies. I always knew that I wanted to breastfeed. It wasn�t easy at first, but I did it. The exclusively breastfed-for-six-months-and-continued-well-into-toddlerhood kind of did it. Breastfeeding plays a large part in my mothering. I would have been a mother whether I breastfed or not, of course, but the fact that I did has been incorporated into most every part of my mother-identity.

In sex and breastfeeding my breasts serve two very different functions, and I keep them separate. I don�t feel aroused when I breastfeed. And I don�t think of my babies when my partner licks my nipples. My frame of mind is not the same.The sensations are not the same. The people I�m with are not the same.

And yet, my body isn�t always so clear on the separation. If I watch a suggestive TV show while I�m breastfeeding, I find the intermingling of nursing my baby and sexuality to be uncomfortable. The scene on the TV (which may only be PG-rated petting) plus the stimulation of breastfeeding leaves me feeling slightly aroused, and I don't want to feel aroused while breastfeeding. So I steer clear of TV shows that are likely to feature anything more than chaste kissing while I breastfeed, and I'm fine.

When I�m sleeping, though, it�s not so easy. At least three times over during my years of breastfeeding I have woken up from a suggestive dream that happened to occur while my baby was latched on and nursing. My babies nursed at night a lot - eventually I was bound to have a sexy dream while they were doing it. But on these occasions, the telltale clenching in my vagina told me that I�d just had an orgasm.

This is not a good orgasm. It�s intensely emotionally disturbing. Breastfeeding my baby caused me to have an orgasm. What kind of mother am I? What kind of <em>person</em> am I? Children and sexuality should not intermingle. I don�t want them to intermingle. I am concerned about what other people would think of me, and my mothering, if they knew that they had intermingled in this way.

After waking up to an orgasm while breastfeeding, I feel reluctant to breastfeed for some time. For days, I try to put my baby off when he or she asks to nurse. To this day I haven�t told anyone that I orgasmed while breastfeeding, not even my husband. I am too afraid. I have faced a lot of internal turmoil, and decided that it's something best kept to myself.

I do realize that I haven't done anything wrong. I in no way asked for this to happen, or caused it to happen. If I were conscious, I would do everything in my power to keep myself from feeling aroused while breastfeeding. And to put it in perspective, we are talking about three occasions over the course of many years of accumulated breastfeeding. I believe that my own emotional discomfort over these incidents is outweighed by the benefit that my children gained through breastfeeding into toddlerhood. But I still wish it hadn't happened.

I love my breasts. My breasts have provided some lovely window dressing. They have provided immense pleasure. They have nourished my children. They are a part of me, even though I haven't always gotten along with them. I suppose this is why we've given breasts so many names - they can be enigmatic and fill us with conflict. They can sustain life and create pleasure, but they can also cause intense discomfort as we just try to get a decent night's rest. By calling them boobies, or jugs, or melons, we're just trying to lighten the blow.