Not Real Rape

My story is a little different than all the stories I have heard about rape. Yet, I am suffering the exact way rape victims do. I was 5 the first time it happened. I was left with my grandparents when I was born. They were the only parents I knew. When I was 5 my grandmother died. We were alone and my grandfather had to work. I was starting school so he had to find somewhere I could go after school. There was an older boy. He invited me to the attic to see something special. He showed me a ceramic pot. He told me he was going to pee in me and then I could pee in the pot. He put the end of his penis barely inside of me, then he told me to pee in the pot. I didn’t know how angry that made me until we were playing tag in the yard later and I grabbed a spade and hit him on the head with it and split his head open. I didn’t understand at the time why I was doing that, but I remember I felt good.

A year after that my grandfather remarried. She had a son about 16. When my grandfather and his wife went out he would make me touch him. One day he had several of his friends over. He called me in to the living room. He told me I had been bad and I had to be punished. I was afraid and confused. I didn’t know what I had done wrong. He told me to stand in the middle of the room. He demanded that I was going to get a spanking and ordered me to pull down my pants. I had never been punished this way before but I had to do what he said. He told me to lean over the foot stool, then he spanked me hard over and over and while I was screaming his friends laughed. Then we moved to the country. He would take me out to the out house and make me fondle him. One day he told me if I went out there he would show me his favorite white mouse. He said he would even let me hold it. So, I fondled him and he took his white mouse out of the cage and very carefully put it in my hands. I hated that white mouse. I opened my hands and let it drop to the floor and it immediately squeezed under the door and ran away. He was mad but I didn’t care. After that I was send to my mother.

I grew up normally but when I reached 18 and boys tried to touch me I would recoil and didn’t know why. I didn’t remember what had happened when I was small. When I got married I couldn’t enjoy intimacy and hated my husband. He was a very loving and kind man. We had three beautiful children After 25 years I left him and I left the church. I went to Greece to live with a man there. When I came back to the States, I was 37. I went ballistic. I was promiscuous, I dressed provocatively. Then I became anorexic and started cutting myself. I attempted suicide several times. I married a drunk and an abuser. I divorced him and married another drunk and a worse abuser.

One day I was watching a talk show and what came out of my mouth surprised me because it wasn’t a conscious thought at all. I said, ” that happened to me!”

Now I’m finally divorcing my 3rd husband after 17 miserable years. Bipolar disorder ran in the family and I learned that it is predisposed but doesn’t develop unless there is a trauma. I was diagnosed with it.

So now I’m constipated so badly I have to do a lot of things to get my body to work. I’m older now and my life on the inside is miserable. I was a good mother for the first 25 years and now my three sons are loving husbands and great parents to their own children, all strong in the church. They are puzzled that I am agoraphobic and so troubled.

So, you see, my story is different because I was never really raped in the dictionary sense. But my mind and my heart are gone. I’m a dead woman walking, haunted and only biding my time until I finally die.