Climb On Down

~ Let's begin the tour from the soft space between our closed eyes, the place one may see colourful spots, auras of timeless reflection, a shade between our restful state and consciousness. Just lie there. Here is where you are truly alone, the emptiness we are left with, a place Freud referred to as our Id. No one truly knows us and our highest self often ignores this quiet spot altogether. Truth is not always pretty and so easy to hide from. ~

The world within us is our secret, our shame, our hidden beauty, desires, compassion and selfishness. And more. Look at the person lying next to you or sitting next to you in the room. Could you possibly blurt out your truest conceptual excerpts without offending them? Probably not.

We are constantly filtering ourselves from childhood. Everyone knows how to dance around a subject that could lead to hurting someone's feelings or lead to conflict, unless you don't care the result.

At this time before sleep, should we be lucky enough to actually fall into a dream state and meet healthy R.E.M. recommendations, we may worry, regret, feel scared or reflect on a fabulous day content. I generally lie in exhaustion from over-thinking, not a spectacular habit I confess.

I remember my dreams vividly as I do my childhood, my formative years and hurts. I never escape them; do you remember yours?

Once seen, never forgotten: damn. So there was this scenario that occurred when I was perhaps four or five. I can't shake it and of course if it's bad it hails from either one of my two abusive boyfriends or entailed some crazy shenanigans with my father. This particular place that I revisit unwillingly, I add, is with my father. Freud would have been fascinated with my regurgitating ID and EGO and all of my slips in between. I'm quite the case.

So like I said I was little. He'd gotten a teenager pregnant and had to marry her or be sent to jail for statutory rape; he was married to my mother at the time so they had to get a quickie divorce so he could save his ass. It has always been his ass that needed saving by the way. No one else's ass mattered or matters unless it's in his best interest.

So I, the little kid, maybe, just maybe, four years old wakes up to a flashlight illuminating the sheets and bed like the bright moon through a window and I freak out: I screamed, I cried. "Stop, stop, stop". - I don't know what I am seeing but innately know it's wrong for me.

My father and his underage wife? Girlfriend? They're at it. Like laughing, drunk, stoned or both, who knows. Their giggling was as annoying as my seeing their naked bodies smashed together like a jelly sandwich, body parts flashing before me like the Vietnam war on TV. Every memory is in black and white except flesh: flesh is yellow and pinkish. Vietnam was always black and white: I was too little to understand any of it, duh!

So, I guess my father and his teenaged lover stopped.

I was flying alone early. I am not sure how it panned out to be honest. My mother told me decades later that I did ask her if people were allowed to sleep without pyjamas and somehow she pieced together like a good bloodhound sleuth that I had seen something that upset me.

My father told her, 'it's natural'-:the '60's: nah. His Id, his EGO, his drugs, booze and lust overall were not what a young girl or boy should be exposed to. This memory is in a file marked,*forget about it* - but sometimes this file is lying open, staring at me and I revisit it reluctantly.

It's too bad parents aren't ordered by the court to pay for therapy. Can you imagine how many lives would be improved if only there was a professional ear, the kind who understood how to reply to our broken inner child?

I remember trying to talk to a therapist when I was in my early twenties; it was an experience of complete denial on my end. Apparently, for cognitive therapy to work one must accept feedback and not bolt out of the office in a huff. Yet, I was trying but not ready to go no contact or face my worst scenario- isolation.

I told the therapist about the time I was fourteen and my father was so drunk he got us kicked out of a restaurant along with his teenaged wife's brother. I had no response other than, SHIT! when the three of us bolted for my sort of Uncle's utility van. The *Uncle* was in the driver's seat and on the hard metal flooring behind him was my father and me. I don't know exactly where we were but we had stopped: a red light?

Suddenly my father, the under the bed cover Dad with pink flesh and flashlights was on top of skinny me: his lips and hands everywhere.

My not REAL Uncle turned around from his place at the helm and shouted, " What the fuck! That's your daughter!"- Uschh! Saved by the teenaged girl's bro', the same girl with a flashlight and vivid squeals of WTF?

There is no moral to this reality show other than, hey sometimes the person who saves your ass is not who you would think of as a super role model. This 'Uncle' would be in my father's life and tight circle for decades more with his long, dark hair and scruffy beard, his pot smoking sloth like ways would churn many a future girlfriend and wife of my fathers' bulldog mad. They despised him never knowing that his dumbass saved me from something so undeniably heinous one night, at fourteen, in some white van at a stoplight.

When the psychologist heard this true story forty plus years ago they said, " You were sexually abused." I vehemently barked back, "Nothing happened like that!". I thought sexual abuse meant penetration: now I know that's not the case. I never went back to that therapist.

Going "NO CONTACT" took me fifty plus years.

To you, dear reader that can relate to any of this, I can only say, I loved my father with every bone in my body however there is no restitution for being physically, emotionally, mentally or sexually abused by anyone- don't go back.

MOVE FORWARD. Ask for help and be kind to yourself.