My Dissonance

I’m just writing, waiting for Mike to get out of the shower. Today, like every Thursday, is our day together. He has every Thursday off and I keep Thursdays open so that we can just hang out. This is of huge importance in any relationship. To set aside time for one another. Especially for someone as busy as he is. I’m almost done with my analysis paper for my fiction class and then I’m done for this quarter! Woo hoo! I took off of group yesterday to make sure that I’d have it completed enough to where I wouldn’t have to worry about it today or this weekend (my birthday is on Sunday and we’re celebrating in on Saturday night).

It’ll be nice I hope. I’m looking forward to seeing Stephen most of all. Seeing that he’s my twin brother my birthday would never be complete w/o him. Hopefully I can get ahold of Becca (little sister) about joining us. She has a phone again finally! I don’t know how long she’ll manage to keep this one but hopefully long enough for me to call and talk to her about Saturday. Or just to see how shes doing. I worry about her and the girls. Sometimes she makes it impossible not to. I miss my baby nieces. It would be great to see them again but they’ll be with their grandfather Saturday.

::sigh::

Before I lay down next to Mike and fall asleep I thought I’d write a quick entry, even if it only manages to add up to five sentences. I’ve finished with the construction of this site. I’ve finished with all but the final page of survivor blogs, but the wordpress blogs have been added to the left on the side bar. I’ve even finished coughing up enough non-sensibly rubbish to complete the “author” page. I’m very much a whole to part person. Some people start off with just a blog and then they stretch out until the whole is completed day-by-day. But I’m very much whole-to-part. I need to see this site in it’s entirety before I can commence on the journaling in itself.

Bedtime. Nites.

Hope Sent,
~ Ani

So far I’m pretty much done with the outward construction and individual pages of this site. I still need to add social networking and feed reader buttons to the side. And I’ve decided that I’m going to make a seperate page filled with other survivor blogs. So far I almost have 45 different survivor blogs that I’ve located that I plan on adding! I think that this will be a really neat way to network with other survivors and support one another through healing. So, I’m really excited about it, I just need to contact everyone individually to get their okays first, for as many as I can.  Also I’m making sort of side blogs at blogger and live journal that are just portals back to this one.  That way this will show up on searches through those blogging communities.  So yeah, still lots to do before I’m satisfied with this project — of making myself a private place online to share personal issues during my continuous journey towards healing.    

Originally Posted: Wed. May 25, 2007

Yesterday my therapist gave me three choices for how our work together can continue:

A. Stay as I am (fuctioning now where close to the level I strive for, to get to in order to live a fully functional life as it were).
B. Falling apart (regressing backing into my old detremental ways of coping with my life, living in and out of psychiatric wards).
C. Working through my issues (a journey of processing a past that seems to leave me with nothing but heart ache, but also ending up with a great deal of spiritual, emotional, and psychological growth; living a healthy, balance life).

My real option lays somewhere between A and C since option B, to me, is out of the question. So now I have to devise a plan of action. I’m taking the next two weeks of from my book because its started to complicate things. Classes end in a week and a half, so that will give me more time to devote to my therapy and I can work on processing some truths about my past that I don’t even want to think about, much less make peace with.

Then theres my relationship with my Mike. We’ve been together almost six years and I really can’t imagine life without him. However he went through a hard time a few months back and started drinking and smoking the marijuana to the point of being intolerable. He was at the point of spending $140 in one night at a bar and then driving home. We’d lived with Mike’s mom for 5 months, he’d had a great job (until he had a breakdown of sorts and walked out) but still in that time he managed to save no money what-so-ever so that we could get a place of our own. But all my school loan money went towards paying our bills up to where we wouldn’t have that to worry about once we moved. So I had nothing and he seemed to play with his money.

I told him that from now on we go 50/50 on our bills and so far its working quite nicely. I figure this way I can save money to get my own place if I need to (which I was seriously considering). But he got a new job working at a car wash, and he’s made decent money, especially with tips. He’s managed to SAVE money…quite a bit. He’s sleeping again and is doing much better over all.

Right now I’m taking a healthy relationships group, and I got so depressed in there today. I thought back to Saturday night and suddenly got angry, both at Mike and myself. That night we went to a bar to see a band play with Mike’s best friend and his wife. His friend’s wife and I couldn’t help but notice how Mike left 2 or 3 times, disappearing outside to go smoke pot in his van. He always drinks more than anyone when we go somewhere. And then I puts down a mixed drink, liquor of some sort. This wouldn’t have been that big of a deal if it hadn’t been the fact that HE was driving us home. He didn’t drive crazily or anything, but still. I’m not supposed to drive because of my mental disorder, I zone out and run the risk of killing us all. But is driving with him any better?

So, in “healthy relationships” group I’m thinking of how really his behavior sort of embarassed me. We talk a lot in group about the family dynamics of drug addiction and alcoholism in families…how it affects everyone. Mike is nothing like my mother. But still theres the “why are you behaving this way, and pretending it’s acceptable?” I never did talk to him about Saturday night because I was so overwhelmed from the phone conversation with my sister that I had before we left. But, for some reason today in group it just hit me how maybe he’s never going to get it that you can’t drive around drunk and stoned? Before it never mattered to me because it wasn’t an issue. But it’s increasingly become an issue over the past year.

Last summer when he started playing shows with his band I noticed that he was drinking and driving all of the sudden. His spending habits and work are really what led us into having to move in with his mom in the first place. He HAS gotten better, but it hasn’t been that long and he could just as easily slip into the same unhealthy coping techniques of spending money we don’t have on beer and fast food. I worry about his health. Any human being who eats two large pizza’s per day to himself is begging for a heart attack. I saw my Dad have a heart attack at 45 so I know that in another 20 years he could keel over.

Over and over he tells me, “Its all okay, its fine. Don’t worry. Its cool.”

But I’m only kidding myself in trying to believe him, and letting things slide and ignoring. I’m a professional at ignoring and enabling…a classic “co-dependent”. So its no surprise that I wind up with an alcoholic but God, its a little heart breaking to see him suddenly decline into this over the coarse of 6 months really. He started with the band in April and we moved in with his Mom that November. While I was busy with class, getting surgery, and therapy he was out drinking, getting high, and suddenly it became to obvious to ignore that he was developing a serious problem.

He admits he’s had a problem. He’s gotten better. But still Saturday night showed me that perhaps he’s not as well as I’d like to think. So…I don’t know. My plan was to give him til July to save up enough money for us to move. If he didn’t straighten up and clean himself up I was leaving w/o him. But now he’s saving more money and he’s definitly not spending what he was.

But then theres Saturday night. And I wonder. And I feel guilty.

Original Post: Mon. May 21, 2007
Saturday afternoon I had what I now consider the most important conversation of my life, in terms of my healing.

BACKGROUND
First, some background information. About 2 1/2 years ago, upon hearing that my uncle was suspected by my sister of sexually abusing his son by my sister, I broke down and called her and told her the truth. He sexually abused me from the time I was 8 years old until I was 12 years old. After that I called Children Protection Services where he lives and reported my sister’s suspitions as well as reporting my past experience with my uncle’s sick nature. I kept calling for the next year and got absolutely no where. They said that they looked into it but found no reason to do an actual investigation.

In my last conversation with them I told them that I’d filed a report against him on an National Online Sexual Assault Database that could be used by any prosecutor, detective, and or police official if he is ever reported in the future. From now on my report can be used as evidence of past reported abuse against him. They said that they made note of my statement but that they had no prior record of my calling (grrr). Even though I’d been calling them off and on for the past year. I still have my report confirmation request saved in my email, sent to me from the database staff on Apr 14, 2006, over a year ago.

I took the time to tell my little sister, twin brother, and uncle (brother of uncle who sexually abused me) because I felt that it wasn’t right to make a report of any kind with the rest of my family unaware. My uncle told me that he didn’t blame me for reporting his own brother. However, when I was 19 I broke down and told my Dad but his response was to call me a liar. I’ve never forgotten how that made me feel.

CONVERSATION I.
My twin brother called me Saturday afternoon after getting off the phone with our older sister who lives out of state. All that he would tell me was that I needed to call her because there was some information ‘I might be interested in knowing about’. But he wouldn’t tell me what it was. I couldn tell nothing was wrong but his urgency seemed strange, like he was hiding something.

So I called my sister. A few months ago I announced to my family that I was writing a book about my life growing up with them. They knew that this would eventually include probably some mention about my claims of being sexually abused by our uncle. My sister explained to me that my older brother called my uncle and confronted him about what I said he’d done to me.

His answer? Silence. He stayed silent for so long that my brother thought he’d hung up on him. My brother was very taken back by this. Why wasn’t he pleading his innocence? While he did deny his actions there was no emotion in his voice and there were long periods of silence. This is not what anyone was expecting, definitely not me as my sister explained it all to me. Now, finally, after 2 1/2 years they believed me? I got off the phone with my sister, explained to my boyfriend what had happened, and just sobbed as he held me. My tears were out of shear relief.

CONVERSATION II.
I called my older brother yesterday whom I hadn’t spoken to in almost 2 years, and I thanked him. Through my tears I explained to him how I’ve felt like I’ve been carry so much guilt and shame for so many years…now finally, its on him. My uncle now has to own it. I think that his silence is an indication that me must be feeling some amount of guilt. I’m glad. Not out of spite but out of some conscious knowing for how much he’s put me through.

“Its like it’s over now… its all on him,” I explained my brother.
“It is,” he told me.

CONCLUSION
I can’t begin to explain how huge this all is to me. To hear that my mother doesn’t want to talk to her brother. To hear that my brother told him that he doesn’t deserve his own son. I have the people that I was afraid to tell all these years because I was so afraid of their reaction now supporting me - not even because of my claims but through my abusers reaction when confronted? My God, I’m shaking just typing this. I stayed up until 4am Saturday night just journaling about it. I still can’t comprehend that, after all these years, its really over. After all these years I’ve been set free.