The Marvelous Blues

Doesn’t seem like the time to write about this but here I am. Writing about a culture of irrationality. I call it intergenerational trauma but its also intergenerational abuse. One begets the other. I come from a family with sexual secrets. A great-great grandmother who ran a brothel in the red light district of Cincinnati; an aunt who joined a cult known for its ‘free love/sex’ doctrine that was so extreme that it children regularly witnessed adults having sex in the open; a mother and aunts who were subjected to the touches of an older neighbor boy, year after year; cousins who played sex games that were tantamount to child rape. These are the building blocks for my life experiences. My initiation into this world began early. By 5 I was being touched on by my babysitters son and his friends, by 7 I was engaging in oral sex with a cousin, a girl, who had witnessed extreme sexual acts when she lived at the cult with her mom. From there I was aggressive, trying to interact sexually with girls who spent the night at my house or whose house I went to. It was the game I was used to. Things went dormant once puberty began. A friend pushed back, I felt weird, so I focused my energy on boys and getting one to like me. But that turned bad as well. I had few boundaries and little protection. 

My family doesn’t talk about these things. And we don’t protect our children. Some might argue that we’re unable to protect them. That we’re so damaged by our own traumatic experiences that we become ill equipped to protect our own. It’s a foreign model.  But either way, origin stories aside, WE DO NOT PROTECT OUR KIDS.

I complained about my own mother as I grew into womanhood. I still complain though I feel conflicted about it. I told her what happened to me at my babysitters house. I cried, sobbed because of what was happening. And she sent me back. She talked to them but she sent me back. I stopped telling her things after that. Later, much later, she told me that she wasn’t the type of parent to storm in and save me. There was only so much she could do, so much she would do to interrupt my life. She valued my grades, my degree, my secular success. And none of the things I experienced threatened that. She used my success as a marker of things being ok. She once told me, the adult me, that I didn’t feel bad about my experiences. She knew because I had friends and got good grades. I pushed back, not believing that we were arguing about my feelings. Specifically, feeling regret and shame about my own sexual behavior in high school. I threw out an example to challenge her – what if I had an orgy with 7 people in college. Would that make me wrong? She was steadfast. She told me it didn’t matter whether I had an orgy with 7 people, I was still a good person because I had friends and got good grades. I was shocked but shamed because its a sentiment that I know well. Because I have done the same thing with my daughter.