Friday, April 07, 2006

Life Number One

I'm not someone with multiple personalities, and yet, I feel old. Old as in feeling stretched and broken, used and tossed with the trash. Don't know why, just do. The result is trying hard, really hard to please, to be important and special to someone... but the real result is that I end with the empty feeling. Used. Taken for my talents, but never filled up.

I wondered when my soul died. I can think of a few times...

like when I was very small and dad whipped me with a belt. When my dad wanted to teach me a lesson and made me drink my own urine. When my dad took my pants down "in front of God and everybody" and spanked me. Basic shame. But that didn't kill me.

like when my mother took a hair brush and spanked me with it because I was careless and broke something important to her, a teacup, I believe that had been very old and dear. She thought by spanking me, I'd learn something. I learned that anger didn't replace things and mothers thought it would make them feel better.

like when my mother tried to molest me, tried to fondle my small budding breasts.

like when my mother told me that if I got pregnant, don't come home. As I recall, I didn't even know what sex was. But I never forgot that babies were not something she wanted. Like me.

I thought my soul died when my best childhood friend moved away. As a 5 year old, I didn't understand people would not always be there in my life. What I learned was that little kids' feelings didn't matter. That I didn't matter. Somehow, I thought I was supposed to matter. Then I grew wise--at the age of six.

It could have been when a camp counselor took interest in me and wanted to sleep over. When I said I didn't want to fool around, I woke up alone. I was thirteen.

But it was probably when my infatuation with another counselor and another sleep-over resulted in a proposition to join their little lesbian clique. For you see, if anyone paid attention to me, I was enamored. So hungry for that unnamed factor called acceptance, that my roll-models became giants, wonderful, perfect and worthy to be in the shadow of, I'd do almost anything to be okay again. But, I just didn't know--I could never by okay again.

I thought my soul died when my new husband informed me that my opinions didn't matter. They were not valid. He called me unworthy, unnecessary, unnatural. Pretty sure my soul, withered and gasping, gave it up then.

I'm pretty sure it finished when I met a guy who seemed interested in who I was, who taught me why some of this hurt. Oh, there was a spark of me left... until he used me saying, "Oh well".

So why bother? Can't say. Yet I try. Try to keep trying. Try to pretend the gaping wounds of my soul didn't matter. Try to be a good example. Try to be a quiet survivor in a place where no one could care less what I am as long as I "do". I'm still trying to "do".

My efforts are discounted, results minimized. If I'm dead, my soul crushed and brittle, then why am I still here? What laughing muse finds this a great sport?

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