The Elephant

When I was a child, from age seven to twelve, I suffered physical and emotional abuse at the hands of the man who would become my stepfather. I’ve talked and written about it elsewhere ad nauseam, but I think it’s appropriate to mention it here in this new venue. Unfortunately, the trauma I experienced is the central experience in my life. Every day, I deal with the effects.

It’s only fair to issue a trigger warning:

Trigger warning: Descriptions of abuse follow.

The abuse I experienced was both physical and emotional. I was beaten nearly every day on my bare behind with a wooden ruler with a metal backing. It was called “the stick.” At least, that’s what happened at first. I was eventually punched, kicked, and had my head held underwater so long that I had to literally fight for breath. The physical abuse escalated to the point where my mother thought he was going to kill me. The worst of the physical abuse came when I was eight, and he tore my infected fingernail off with a pair of pliers. This was ostensibly to avoid a doctor visit, which would have cost money. I ended up in the emergency room.

If you can quantify such things, the emotional abuse was worse. I was called worthless, stupid, lazy, and weak on a daily basis. But perhaps the worst thing that ever happened to me was when he burned all of my comic books in front of me. You’ve probably already read here what they meant to me. He claimed that they would give me nightmares, but the only thing that gave me nightmares was the burning of the comics.

The abuse finally ended on my 12th birthday, when my mother let me choose who to live with, my dad or her. That decision took 0.005 nanoseconds to make, and just after Christmas, I moved in with my dad, where I was safe. No one ever laid a hand on me again.

I bring all this up because, as the title of this post would imply, my abuse is the elephant in the room. Which room? Every room I’m in. As I said above, I struggle with the effects every day. Yes, I’ve had counseling. But as anyone who has ever experienced this to a certain degree will tell you, it doesn’t go away. It will never go away. The best you can do is learn how to carry it. And I think I have.

I don’t intend to write about this a lot, but almost everything I do write about will likely have at least one reference to it, so I didn’t want my readers to be in the dark.