CORPORAL PUNISHMENT

My Mother Read My Diary and My Father Beat Me for It

I learned I could leave my body during trauma

CW: physical abuse and rape.

As a child, I kept a diary. Into this diary went every feeling and event. This included a horrible incident that happened when I had a serious crush on a neighbor boy, two years older.

The neighbor boy got me drunk and raped me. It wasn’t a mistake on his part. It was deliberate and premeditated. In the same way he murdered his own father a decade after that. He was a cruel person, with no conscience. Hurting others — rape and murder — was just part of his routine. I know this now.

This bad thing didn’t happen ‘to me.’ It just happened. I thank my friend Doug Brown for teaching me that bit of advice. Of course, as a fourteen-year-old girl, I absorbed every drop of blame. My self-esteem plummeted, and I sank into depression. I covered my shame and unhappiness with feathered hair and mascara. I didn’t talk about the bad things that had happened. Except in my blue and green flowered diary with the golden brass lock.

The pain of the attack was the worst incident in my childhood, aside from my brother dying six years later. I was nineteen when my brother died, just shy of twenty.

I wrote the attack in my diary, but disguised it mightily, as a young writer does. I did not point a finger at him. I was the broken-hearted and deserted girlfriend, jilted the very next day. I woke up in a pool of blood and knew I was forever to live a lonely, unhappy life. Without my psychopathic, cruel lover.

If it weren’t so pathetic, it would be funny. Why do girls and women own all the misery of such horrors?

School began in September, and I began my freshman year aware that all eyes were on me. I walked in the halls of my school and saw my old friends turn their backs. It was lonely and difficult. The psychopath and his friends busily chatted up his prowess, and all the girlfriends he had that summer. I was the cherry on top. What were bragging rights for him was a blight on my character. I was ruined.

One night in October, my sister and I helped decorate our school’s floats for the Homecoming parade. I felt the full sting of not fitting in with my peers. Conversations were stilted. I was an awkward young teenager anyway, and my imagination filled in all the gaps. If other kids didn’t talk, it was because of my shame. I didn’t have romance to look forward to. Without my virginity, I was ruined. Dirty.

Looking back, if I had been able to smile, joke around, and just be a kid, things probably would have been all right. I felt so judged and naked. I couldn’t move beyond.

My parents showed up in the family car to pick us up, just as I had lit up the remnants of a cigarette I found in my jacket pocket. I’d thrown it down, careful to stamp it out. I didn’t need to get in trouble. The car pulled up and Mom said, “We’re going home now.”

My sister and I looked at each other. What was going on? The ten-minute drive home was ominous, and my parents didn’t talk. I began to imagine the worst. What was this all about? I was terrified and felt my heart beat.

When we arrived at home, my mom told us to go into the small family camper parked outside the house. What was going on here?

My little brother was in the house. I realized whatever this was, they didn’t want him to have any part of it.

Once we were inside, my sister and I sat down on the bench seat of the camper. My father reached inside his pocket and pulled out my diary. My little diary with blue and green flowers covering the front, with its little brass lock. The strap of fabric that kept it closed had been cut.

He handed it to me and said, “Start reading aloud. You know which part.”

I began crying and didn’t know what to do. I read. I read my own words aloud. As I sat with tears rolling down my face, I felt my entire body go numb. I simply vacated the building, and disengaged my personality, feelings, fears, and unhappiness from my physical self. It was an alarming but empowering feeling.

I recognize this now as a trauma response. When I finished reading the part where I had lost my virginity, about living in the tall tower of stone, I had written lyrics to a Carly Simon song, ‘Waited So Long.’

Of course, the irony with those lyrics is that I hadn’t waited long at all. I was barely fourteen, a child. Even now, when I talk to kids that age, I’m stunned and saddened by my experience.

Carly Simon’s lyrics go like this,

So blow, blow, blow out the candles Make my bed wide and long Tell all my girlfriends Not to wait for me Daddy, I’m no virgin I said I’ve already waited too long

My dad clearly didn’t know the song, and thought I wrote the verses to mock him. I asked him if he wanted me to read the song lyrics aloud and remember looking up at him.

Even now, I realize he didn’t know the song. It wasn’t at all meant to be sarcastic or flippant. It was a typical sad Carly Simon song that seemed to fit the occasion. In the same way I’d written the lyrics to “Sunrise, Sunset” when my cat Mai Ling had died. I was that kid who found a suitable song for every moment.

He said ‘Read’ with angry, red eyes. He was furious.

That’s when he backhanded me, hard. I heard as much as felt my jaw pop. I felt my young bones give, and my head flew to one side. Was my jaw broken? I didn’t know. My ears rang, and blood began pouring from my lip.

My mother, who had read my diary and reported to her higher-up, suddenly began making some sort of defensive noise to my father. He had gone too far. My sister, who was not a writer at all, had escaped all wrath. I was glad I hadn’t written anything about her later when I thought about everything.

At one point, as I sat bleeding and beaten down, she was queried. Had she also been bad? No, she said. Not at all! She tried to act appalled at my horrid behavior. All factions in the house were against me. Clearly.

I sat stiffly, tasting the iron of my own blood as it filled my mouth. My head was down. I was a prisoner, and ready for the next torture. My body floated above me. I was gone now. No coming back for a while. I remember my father leaving the trailer. My mom told us to go inside and go to bed. I walked as if in a dream to our tiny farmhouse.

When I was inside, my father embraced me and cried. He apologized.

He knew he had inflicted torture and punishment on me, and had forgotten his role as a parent — -to guide and love. To teach. Not to judge. He had become judge, jury, and executioner. At no time did he ask for details or explanations, nor had he or my mother cared to understand.

As I got older, my mother apologized every decade for what happened that night. I heard her out. She didn’t know Dad would do that. She realized Dad had issues with women’s sexuality. She didn’t know he’d hit me. On and on. I heard her out, but didn’t say much back except, “Don’t worry about it. What’s done is done.”

After Mom died, her care provider came to me and told me Mom still talked about it.

What I will say now is this. No matter what a child does, or is perceived to have done, corporal punishment will never make an issue better. I’m not talking a light tap on the backside for pinching a sibling. I’m talking, clearly, about the bigger events. And for all teenagers, bigger events will occur. The stealing of booze, the wrecking the family car.

Striking anyone in the face is a blow that will be carried a lifetime. I don’t see it serving any purpose.

Even now, I feel myself vacating my body and I wish I could conclude writing this experience in a pretty way.

No song lyrics for this occasion to mind. I came back to edit this in — this morning, these lyrics floated to me over and over. “Comfortably Numb” by Pink Floyd. This part —

There is no pain you are receding A distant ship smoke on the horizon You are only coming through in waves Your lips move but I can’t hear what you’re saying…

Judy Walker wrote a piece about being belted by her stepfather, and this incident came to mind. The truth is that it’s never far away.

Here is another story about my childhood attack, if you want to read. I have written a few about it.