Invisible Family Dynamics

I am a strange-looking person. I can appear either regal or ozark incested, depending on the moment. I have the sharp profile of the Roman patricians on ancient coins, probably by way of the highlands, given the blue eyes and dark hair going gray.

My hair is a lot of work. It’s fine and breaks easily, so it doesn’t grow thick and long. I have often suspected that the endocrine onslaught of childhood sexual abuse affected it, as well as my early Franken-growth—days when I’d wake up and the ground was an inch farther away. I was a cartoon child with freakishly long legs, big feet, scraggly hair and budding breasts, standing on a homemade diving board over an irrigation canal at the age of nine, in an old Polaroid I managed to digitize long ago when I lived in New York.

I’m so glad I did. I’m not sure I would know she existed had I not. By then, I had been sexually abused by my brother and his friends for several years. It wasn’t constant, but more like guerrilla warfare. They were my only playmates. There were no little girls in my neighborhood—at least none that came anywhere near our house for long. Maybe everyone knew and did nothing, because that’s what you did.

Sexual abuse and its life-long mental torture slithers from generation to generation toxically masquerading as the sanctity of family. Rural, Midwestern people do not get involved. We do not talk about it. Virtually no one is capable. The best I, myself, can do, is write this random and vaguely anonymous blog.

My hair wants to be left alone. It was chopped off shortly after the picture on the diving board. My dad was not a barber. I was soon outfitted in a quilted PTO jacket. My parents had clearly seen in the old Polaroid that I was a girl. It caused them to panic from a place they’d never acknowledged with words, but with depression-fueled anger from my dad and terrified paralysis from my mother, who’d been abdominally eviscerated by inept country surgeons by that time.

My mother’s surgeries occurred before and after my brother and I were adopted. It started with a tubal pregnancy. The corn-country surgeons—many from World War I and mostly ignorant of the female body—took everything. Total hysterectomy. Put her on estrogen. She’s then a farm wife in a primogeniture family who can’t have kids, and there’s no such thing as therapy or survivor blogs. She and my adoptive father have zero guidance, compassion or commiseration in dealing with their guilt, shame and grief—their trauma—which naturally transferred to the next generation.

The complications from that initial surgical savagery required three more surgeries and culminated in her brief death on an operating table when my brother and I were around three and five years old.

Mom feared she would lose us. Only she and a few close relatives knew my father had a drug problem. I would later hear from their siblings that he was hooked on “narcotics,” which most likely was morphine. He’d been hospitalized for several weeks shortly after I was adopted. He told me once that he’d had gangrenous legs from spraying 2-4-D on waist-high weeds in the unused horse corral. I later heard phlebitis, which is associated with needle use. Whatever it was, some of his behavior—and the things that came out of his mouth—could only be explained by opioid addiction, the “epidemic” we all think is so new. Only talking about it is new.