Hooray, trauma dump

I recently got confirmation from an ENT specialist that my nose has been broken in toddlerhood. Now if you’ve known me long enough, you may have heard me joke that my mother was probably lying about genetics and that my dad probably punched me in the face.
You may say, “That’s not a very funny joke,” and I would agree with you, but you’ve got to laugh about these things.

You may say, “Geez, it took you an awfully long time to get that looked at.”
Which is a fair point. Most of my twenties was spent trying to teach myself how to be a person. Every day my dad would get drunk and scream about what a stupid, lazy, piece of shit I was, how I should “whore myself out for a place to live because he didn’t want me” or “cut deeper next time.” People used to say shit about how my hands would shake, or I’d be nervous, or my memory was shot.

You know I forgot my dad got arrested in 2011 for hitting me when I was a teenager? I have the documents proving it, mugshot and all. But I don’t remember it. You’d think you’d remember your dad getting arrested for domestic battery. It happened twice, actually. There was a separate charge in 2009. But the memories are gone. Poof. Right out of my amygdala.

Apparently I had been trying to protect my mom because she still lived with him at the time. I looked up old messages from those years to see what I could find. My poor, sweet, enabling mother. The perfect victim. I tried to keep a relationship with her for the longest time. Well, right up until I got pregnant, and then after my son was born, that was it. Because looking back, how do you scream in your toddlers face? How do crush up pills and put them in their food? How do you lock your door when they’re outside begging for your help? She used to say she was “afraid of becoming like Andrea Yates.” At the time, I took that to mean she didn’t want to hurt us. Maybe she just meant she didn’t want to get caught.

“Well they must have had a reason,” you might say. “No one just beats their kid for no reason.”
To that I’d say
A.) You sound like my father and
B.) That motherfucker would *find* a reason
It didn’t matter. I was a straight-a, clarinet playing, queen of all that is dorky who literally wanted to be a cartoonist - like Patrick McDonnell, the guy who illustrated goddamn Mutts - I was a good fucking kid.
They didn’t care. It didn’t stop my dad from barging into my room drunk as fuck or from harassing my friend’s parents. And it didn’t motivate my mom to stop directing his rage at us so she could watch Seinfeld in her room like a coward.
Or if you say, “I don’t believe you.”
I’d say to check your mother fucking privilege. I’m happy that there are people out there who don’t know that there are truly heinous, evil people doing heinous and evil shit to children with fucking impunity.

“So what,” you may finally ask, “is the point of posting all of this? Why does it matter now?”
Well, aside from revisiting this trauma through the eyes of a mother, (and aside from feeling confident my son could never, ever, break his nose without me taking him straight to the hospital), (and confident I’d certainly never lie about it), part of healing is getting angry. I didn’t advocate for myself when I was a teenager and the police asked me if I wanted to press charges. I spent my twenties foolishly trying to forgive them and mitigate the pain of unresolved issues. I never got justice, and I probably never will. But I’m pissed. There is so much that having c-ptsd robs you of, so much expended energy in maintenance, so many opportunities robbed of me because I was a scared, hurt kid who didn’t know how to help herself or do anything.

Fuck them. That’s all.