Dangerous Families

Queer Writing on Surviving

Edited by Mattilda a.k.a. Matt Bernstein-Sycamore

[an imprint of the Haworth Press|Harrington Park Press], [2004]

Dangerous Families is a ground-breaking book: an anthology of writings by queer survivors of childhood abuse.

People have only been speaking out publicly in great numbers about abuse for a few decades, and been allowed mainstream visibility to talk about this for even less time, perhaps twenty years.

For much of that time, the discussion was moderated by therapists analyzing people’s experiences, as in The Flock or The Minds of Billy Milligan, or as currently happens on talk shows like the loathsome Sally Jessy Raphael. In fact, old-timers in our local Survivors of Incest Anonymous meetings talk about an era when meetings fell apart partly because therapists would come just to goggle at the survivors who were, inexplicably, getting healing without their help. (“You… talk to other abuse survivors? But… everyone knows that’s bad for you! You’re just going to get re-traumatized! There should be a therapist guiding the discussion at least!”)

Queerness is usually erased from the discussion, too, except for the unfortunate and now-rare occasions in which a mental health professional of some kind is attempting to “blame” queerness on abuse. Because, you see, they’re both so rare. And sexual. (Never, oddly, because they’re both so common.) And as a result of this, for some people it became forbidden to talk about being queer and being raped, for fear of reinforcing that farcical link and helping reduce a community to some Freudian wet dream.

Furthermore, most if not all writing about abuse is partitioned off: it is just about child sexual abuse, or specifically about domestic violence, or focusing on spanking. There is a sense that we must deal with our problems one at a time, a societal tendency to “divide and conquer” – a tactic which never serves anyone but the abusers, regardless of the milieu in which it is being used.

And maybe most importantly, the little speaking and writing about abuse allowed is usually limited to white women – or really, to straight, able-bodied, affluent white women. The effects of abuse and the silence around it pose two more barriers to communities which already have many hurdles between them and writing and publishing and the visual media. On top of that, there is a perception that abuse is already weird enough – we don’t need to alienate people more by talking about male survivors, survivors of color, queer survivors, Deaf survivors, working-class transgendered Latina ritual abuse survivors… mainstream culture, in the United States at least, reduces these different communities to the punch lines of anti-P.C. jokes.

Dangerous Families breaks all of those unspoken rules.

And a good thing, too. It is difficult to effectively break the rule of silence surrounding all abuse while sticking to all the other rules that keep us in line.

Dangerous Families is an amazing collection of essays for more reasons than those. Those are all the political reasons to read it; the personal are just as compelling.

It is a book full of stories in which the authors tell nothing but the truth, bold and clear and direct, the truth as it is right this minute. Some of the authors’ stories have arced up and down all the way into safety and healing; others are caught in the middle of figuring it all out, in chaos, or on some other bump or valley in the journey. In that way it offers both recognition and hope to its readers.

So whenever that magic moment came when I needed to slide over on the couch or run my hand down her ass, I felt like I was becoming her perp. It shocked the shit out of me when I started having friends who touched one another casually. It shocked me when I popped my cherry a second time, casually sleeping with a not-friend. “Fuck, this is weird,” I remember thinking, “he’s not leaving his body.” And neither was I.

– leah lakshmi piepzna-samarasinha, “gonna get my girl body back”

In the introduction, the editor observes all that is left out of writing on childhood abuse and talks about how it we need “literature that focuses on something more than the time line of events, the feelings involved, and the process of recovery.”

There is another book, called The Memory Bird, which collects personal writings about abuse. It focuses specifically on sexual abuse, but it is similar to this in many ways, as a collection solely of people’s thoughts and experiences instead of a prescription for life. I remember, when I first read it, how intensely struck I was by seeing my experiences and opinions echoed in the words of a few other survivors halfway around the world. It was amazing.

Dangerous Families serves a similar purpose with a wider scope. It can be difficult to read, particularly with its wider range of abuses: the more abuse is involved, the more readers are likely to see themselves reflected therein. There will be people who never thought of what happened to them as abuse before, and people who thought they had “dealt with it,” who find that something in them is opened up by reading this book. For those who are willing to see that part of themselves, this anthology can bring amazing fellowship and revelations about life.

The editor goes on to comment that,

“I always conceived of Dangerous Families as an anthology of non-fiction stories that goes beyond the recovery narrative to create a new queer literature of investigation, exploration, and transformation…. These stories… go right to the horror, the beauty, and the joy, often throwing the reader off guard, revealing layers of meaning before the reader can step back. As survivors, we become hyperaware; our vigilance enables us to dissect everything.”

This anthology has definitely achieved its goal. Each piece packs in powerful layers of experience and imagery, asking for multiple readings. As a whole, the layers of pieces and experiences and identities add up to something densely packed, multi-dimensional, world-changing, and amazing.

Eli Clare’s work, always lush and powerful in this way, goes even farther in this anthology, and serves as a good example of how much is contained within:

What I have to tell makes language a club, a bludgeon, sticks and stones wielded against advancing tanks and trucks. Yes, a weapon. Not even a tool, much less the snow tracings of the last wet storm before spring, bending the boxwood, elderberry, scrubby pine almost double. A story, yet another story.

Last night at the theater Jeffrey Dahmer’s voice came alive in one brilliant monologue – that black gay performance artist, cross-gendered and beautiful, leading us from hair salon to drum to Jeffrey’s seductive murder of black boys. I fled the building, bolting from the memory of blood. Dahmer the lone crazy man taking his full.

Let me tell you, my father was Jeffrey Dahmer. Jeffrey lived in my hometown over and over again. Too many people to count. We drank blood, decorated our bodies with blood, shaped symbols in blood. Human blood, animal blood. Sometimes I wake up in the deep of night, that taste still on my lips.

This book is incredible and important: important for survivors to read to see they are not alone, important for survivors of any kind of abuse to see the commonalities between abuse of all kinds, important for (those extremely few) people who have never been abused in any way to read to understand their friends and loved ones and the world in which we live. Read it piece by piece, slowly, read it in giant gulping banquets, read it alone, read it with support, but definitely, as soon as you can. Read it.

Lance Mannion (how awesome is that? that can’t possibly be his real name, right?) wrote recently about the idea that college is a waste of time for people who are happier in non-white-collar jobs. And the recent article in the Atlantic that suggested that those folks are unfit for college, which I think are (as the Simpsons might put it) strong, bewildering words.

I never saw college as something that I needed to get into a particular career; I figured, even at the time, that if I wanted to go to school to get a particular career (at least one outside of academia), I would go to some professional school for whatever it was I was trying to do.

I knew I wanted to be a writer, and I knew I could write well enough and didn’t need a degree to do it, just motivation and time and work. I was going to college because it was expected of me, because I figured it would get me a higher-paying day job in the meantime, but mainly, because I needed to get the hell out of my family home and I couldn’t make it on my own yet.

I needed college as a kind of decompression chamber between childhood and life. And, both while I was an undergrad and later when I worked in the college’s admissions department, I saw a large number of students in the same position. Whether or not they were studying what they wanted to be doing in life, (whether or not, in fact, they even knew what that was), they needed a place to find their own footing.

It became clear to me pretty quickly that many of us were emerging from the depths of dysfunctional, abusive homes – no matter how loving and well-intentioned they might also have been – and that we needed these four or more years to learn about boundaries, and healthier relationships, and our own wants and needs. Often, we needed the time to become willing and able to acknowledge our own abuse. It’s like fish and water: it’s hard to see it when it’s the only thing you’ve ever known. And it’s hard to feel safe acknowledging it when it seems to be the only option.

Some of us seemed to self-destruct in college. I’m sure every college or university has its share of suicidal students, people who get out of the house and plunge straight into drugs/smoking/alcohol (or just farther into drugs/smoking/alcohol), and people whose serious mental health issues are just becoming apparent. It can be ugly – just plain hideous and terrifying to them and those around them – but it’s part of the healing process. Like pus. I hate to bring pus into an argument, but there you have it. Nasty, hot pus clearing out the infected wound. Of abuse.

Moving right along….

We surely had our share, so much so that we often joked about whether there was something in the dorm’s plumbing that was making people go crazy. Over time, though, it became obvious: there were just a lot of students who were, basically, getting the bends on the way back up to reality. Away from their home lives. Some got the help they needed, though generally not from our school’s incredibly weak counseling department. Some are still working through this process… well, really, we all are, just at different paces and with different tools.

Certainly it’s possible to go through the same process without college, but I am so glad I had it to shelter me. I was thrown in with a huge peer group, given a set of basic rules, and against that background I learned a tremendous amount about how my own childhood had affected me, what did and didn’t work for me, and how it was all different from and similar to others’ experiences. I got to see other people go through the process of facing and addressing abuse and its effects before me, and learn about what I liked and loved and needed in life, and try to learn everything that I wanted to before they decided I had enough credits and kicked me out into the workplace.

It was like a great big womb, basically. Not the safest or most nurturing one, because we were young adults and didn’t need the same kind of womb anymore. But a reasonably safe place where we could be suspended between the child and adult worlds for a little while. It gave me a grace period for figuring out my own shit. I had a lot of resentments about my academic career at the time, some regrets, and a tremendous amount of confusion – but to a large extent, that was because I was concerned with what I thought I needed and wasn’t getting instead of what I did need and was.

It still took me a while to hit bottom, to come face to face with my experiences of abuse and their effects on my adult life. Part of that was denial, part of it was a lack of information about those effects and the resources available to me. I didn’t know this stuff, the therapists I went to didn’t know this stuff, the doctors I saw didn’t know this stuff, my friends didn’t know this stuff – we have a lot of work to do in making it common knowledge so that people can start healing sooner. But college helped a lot in closing the gap between what I knew and what I needed to know, outside of the classroom.

One of the big points that Barbara Sher makes in Wishcraft is that you are a genius. That each of us is a genius when we are born, full of curiosity and passion and talents and all the other things we associate with genius.

She offers exercises which are similar to the one Penelope Trunk suggests that I wrote about a few days ago. I’ve found it incredibly useful to look at the things that overjoyed and fascinated me as a child through Wishcraft, and now to look at how my childhood memories can teach me about what I need in my adult life and work.

Tonight, all of this came together in my head and I suddenly understood why I am so awesome.

You see, babies are awesome. Little kids are totally awesome. I personally think this is a universal truth. It was obvious to me with my own kid, but I figured I was biased. But it’s also obvious in every other child I encounter, and especially with my girlfriend’s nieces. Meeting a kid is just like being whacked with the awesome stick. They don’t even know how awesome they are. It’s like fishes and water. They can’t see it because they don’t know any other way to be. (Or, with the sad exceptions, they don’t know they’re awesome because they’ve already learned from their parents that they’re not – even though that’s not even remotely reasonable.)

Proof?:

 

(Sadly, I could not find my favorite baby picture, but I think these add a little something too! How cute am I with those little chocolate eggs?)

Well, a huge part of recovery for me was first learning how awesome I was… slowly becoming aware of the great things about me, my strengths and beauty and character, and slowly becoming willing to accept those things. Learning that the negatives I brought to my life were old coping mechanisms, old responses to abuse, and that I didn’t need them anymore. And, eventually, becoming willing and able to SAY that I was awesome – in front of other people and everything! – without immediately having to shame myself, hedge it around with conditions, trying to keep them from thinking I thought I was TOO great.

I’ve come to see myself, more and more, as (on one level) a spark of universe-stuff. A little bit of what everything else is made out of, connected to everything, with all this stuff that makes me a separate person important because it’s part of my experience now, but not all that relevant to who I am deep down. And that’s how babies and very young kids look to me too – just big SPARKS.

Tonight I saw that I’m awesome for the same reasons, in the same ways, that babies are awesome. You are, too. We are all born with all this great joy and energy and potential. We are born worthy and loving and lovable. Wonderful and good and loved. We are born perfect just the way we are.

We are all incredible, awesome, exciting people. We struggle, a lot of the time, with past traumas and with the crazy messages and old painful coping skills we’ve learned from them. And sometimes we act out, like cranky tired children, because of all that stuff. But that stuff is all layered on later. It’s learned and it can be unlearned.

One reviewer wrote, “Most books on life planning have, to my mind, two fatal flaws: they assume that your ’strengths’ are an infallible guide to what you ’should’ be doing with your life; and they then attempt to map this to a ‘career.’ Barbara Sher starts with the basics: what is most important to YOU? Given that, how are you to get it? (And this doesn’t necessarily translate into ‘career’!)” It’s true: often the things we think of as our “strengths” are the ways we’ve learned to cope. We’re proud of coping, of surviving, sometimes at a cost. Sometimes we don’t notice that we’re choosing painful situations over and over again, things we’ll need to cope with, because we’re so focused on those strengths at the expense of ease and joy.

The weary battle with negative coping mechanisms – aka the effects of abuse – can eclipse the truth: The stuff that’s actually part of us, at our core, at our birth, is pure AWESOME. That’s the stuff we really get to own, and live with, and enjoy, forever.

I’m on the verge of giving notice at my job, at a place I’ve worked for nearly nine years, the school I came to straight out of high school. I have been here for 12 years, my entire adult life.

This afternoon I am writing the documentation that is the last thing I have to do before I go, and then, “out of nowhere,” I remember what a peanut butter and honey sandwich on Home Pride bread tastes like, and I miss my mommy and want chocolate milk, with the Nestle Quik crystals not fully stirred up so when you get to the bottom of the glass, there’s powder that isn’t even wet you get to scrape up with your spoon.

I cannot actually eat any of those foods. Not a one! I’m lactose-intolerant and gluten-intolerant. I am a sugar addict and a peanut butter addict and a caffeine addict in recovery. I don’t want the actual experience of chocolate milk and a peanut butter and honey sandwich (nor, incidentally, do I want the experience of being with my mother); I want what those things did for me when I was a little girl, or what I thought they were doing for me. I want the comfort. I want the familiarity. I want the sweetness.

When my mom abandoned our family, I couldn’t run to her anymore. And it was much too painful for me to even think of running to her. I felt so sad and so scared, and I wanted her to come and comfort me, but I felt that way because of her, so the feelings built on themselves. I was triggered, and when I sought relief, I became even more triggered, in a seemingly endless cycle.

I loved my food, though. I loved it and it comforted me. I stood in front of the cupboard after school, looking at the bounty and furtively gathering my favorite foods. I took out slices of white bread and spread them with peanut butter, chocolate syrup, and coconut shreds. I smushed them into my mouth as fast as I could so no one would catch me. At the kitchen table, I ate bowl after bowl of cereal, adding more milk in between servings. I ate spoonfuls of sugar straight from the sugar bowl.

I did other things, too. I read books and I watched TV and I pretended outside as long as it was light out. I went to church. I petted cats. I listened to my records and cassettes over and over again.

The food, though, goes straight to the core for me. It is unmediated. It is direct and primal and central. You eat to live. You eat to survive. Nourishment. Sustenance. I needed to be nourished. I needed to be sustained, and I was.

There wasn’t a lot of love or tenderness in my life. I didn’t get a lot of the things a child– or any person, really– needs in order to survive. I couldn’t make anyone hug me or hold me. I couldn’t make anyone tuck me into bed or hold my hand. I couldn’t make anyone tell me it was going to be all right. But there was food in my house and I could get it myself. I could make a peanut butter and honey sandwich. I could mix chocolate into milk.

And now, I could easily do the same thing. I am powerless over peanut butter and honey and chocolate milk and white bread. If I didn’t give those things over to my Higher Power, it isn’t just that I could eat the sandwich and drink the milk, it is that I couldn’t not eat and drink them. What happens when I don’t comfort myself with food?

I get to feel the sadness and pain and discomfort of right now. What it is like to lose this place that has meant so much to me, these people with whom I’ve shared my life. What it like to miss them, to miss a place. How scary it is to go somewhere completely new. How scary to be independent, my own little self in the world. And I get to feel all the sad from back then that echoes now: what it was like when I was little to have everything I had known taken away, to be devastated and scared and comfortless and alone. What it was like to miss her. What it was like to wake up in an unfamiliar life, to wake up in the morning and for a few seconds be untethered, unsure of where I was, before I remembered with a whoosh, Oh, she’s gone.

(It’s not that the peanut butter takes that away, of course. The pain and the memories are right there, underneath, where I can’t get to them.)

There’s something else here, though, when I let myself feel: there is comfort. I can hear my Higher Power calling to me, holding me, sustaining me. When I don’t put something else in her place, there is room for the Goddess in my life, space for her to come in and comfort me, and an opening (and openness) for me to receive. It is bittersweet. I get to feel it all at once, the pain and the fear and the sad and the comfort and the sweetness.

I’m leaving this comfortable job, too, for what I don’t yet know. I get to feel what is under here, too. There will be sweetness in that too.

(with thanks to Jimmy Eat World for the title)