Midnight Insights

That last post was supposed to be the end of a series about my past. I woke up though, last night at 3:30 after having a bad dream. My dream was something akin to the same punch and flavor as the movie "Dogville," and "Dogville" (starring Nichole Kidman), is about the most explicit way to depict what it was like for me growing up.

It wasn't my dream I find interesting, just the emotion in me it reminded me, I used to feel. That emotion helped me to remember why it was that I hated being sheltered, why I wanted more exposure to the world.

I have to warn whoever reads that this could be upsetting to listen to. So don't continue if you don't want to.

I used to be spanked with a wooden ruler, not the school-kind but the old-fashioned quality type that was made out of a solid wood, with a bare butt till I was either fourteen or sixteen. Thinking that now, makes shivers go down my spine, but I remember I used to get shivers back then, too. At some point I thought I was too old for that so my sister and I talked to my dad and we said we were too old for spankings, and he said he agreed. But then he took that back a few months later although sometimes we were allowed to keep our underwear on. His reasoning for reverting backward was "the only thing you understand is pain." But the effect on me was that I essentially felt like it was a violation for which I shouldn't have to go through. I thought that at some point I ought to have passed some kind of milestone of maturity or age by which I would be treated with more respect. I thought that spanking with my pants down when I was seventeen and eighteen was probably taking things too far for my comfort level about my person. And so I tried again to tell him that but I didn't know how to say it, and he decided that he was going to do it anyway. And so, when I deserved a spanking, anger would flash in my eyes at him, because he didn't understand that I didn't deserve this kind of treatment, not because of the pain, but because of the humiliation. He took great note of that anger, and I think he learned something about me by learning of it. Looking back, I wonder if he did understand that he was able to humilate me, because he became more confident and arrogant about using it as I went along in age. As he used it more plentifully, I only became more angry, which made it more useful for him. The effect was that I had purple black and blue skin which no one would ever see except me, but that wasn't the part that upset me the most. The more I stood up for myself in my attitude, the worse my skin looked.

Now I moved out finally, and I was on campus for three months. No one ever addressed my problem nor did I learn anything specifically important to help me regarding it. Just the effect of beginning to make my own decisions, and learning that people cared and that I had other options, though, was enough to help me when I went back home. This time he said he was going to spank me (being 20 plus) and I said to him, "I am aware that I have done these things wrong, but if you decide that I need a spanking, I am not going to stay here, I'm going to leave." He tried to tear that vow out of me, and I think he did eventually for a short time, and convinced me to take spankings again. But I did follow through after a short while, and I called my friend, and I walked out. He wanted me back, guilted me about my flaws and obligations to come back to stay, between being 20 and 22. That is when the spankings ended and the hitting became inventive. He saw my resolve to follow through with stopping the spankings, but hitting didn't have quite the drawn-out ritual. He could come up behind me and push or hit. It could happen very fast. And so the tradition during this time was, how fast could I find my shoes and later, my keys, and get out the front door? That was the game, my anticipating and doing a race to the front door, till the week before my wedding. He didn't want me to make it, and he would try to lower my guard when he saw that I was wanting to get out. I think this is where my diagnosis of being PTSD came from. I'm not PTSD anymore.

That's the reason why I don't like thunder during a storm, I have to have my back up against something solid. It's just a little too scary for me. Hmm, is that the only vestige left over from the damage of those times? There might be one or two more little oddities I still exhibit, but like I said, I'm pretty whole, now.

Duh. That's the reason why I needed exposure to the world. If I could get a sense of what I was or could be, then I could start to draw lines for myself with my father. Yeah. I wanted some reason to say no to the parts that I could know were wrong. And that is what I found, and what I did.

I also noticed for the first time, the reason why I constantly describe events with the age that I was, was because I had no other way to measure what should have been appropriate for me. I kept longing for a sense of milestones in my life, so that I could begin to make decisions regarding my own person. He never let me have any.

I look back at the way things went from spanking with no cooth, to hitting, and it makes me want to conclude that I was kept for so long, close, and incapable, as his important cog to build his self-esteem, which never got satisfied. But I won't forget what I've learned: not all of my childhood was bad, a lot of it was normal, even good. Who knows if my assessment is correct. That's one of the means by which I learned to forgive him. In the first year of our marriages my sister's husband and mine would argue about our dad and get heated about what exactly he had done. I'm not upset now. I am, when I remember that I was angry when they happened. But I learned by God's side to forgive and I don't plan to backtrack. If I could be an object of God's forgiveness, I ought to also be prepared to be a conduit. I know that these memories mostly fade, and sometimes come back out of nowhere. I don't mind treating them as real events, though, if I can get something important out of them. Otherwise, I have every desire to move on and I enjoy every morsel of adulthood, and all the freedoms I enjoy.

And despite these upsetting stories, because my hope was so strong, I turned out to be rather innocent of all the disturbing things that happened to me. They didn't turn me into their image. I delight in delightful things only. I spent too much time forced to wait to live... why would I agree to let it be diminished in any way, by evil?