Awareness P.1

TW: April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month, and we're diving right in.

April is full of awareness days and weeks, and awareness month for several things.

Today I want to talk about sexual assault, and I’m not pulling my punches. We’re going to start with my lived experience, and then we’re going to talk statistics.

I was 6 years old the first time an older boy touched me inappropriately.

This happened on and off until I was 8 or 9. I don’t remember all of the details, just that it made my heart pound and my adrenaline rush and that it made me feel so ashamed afterward. I didn’t recognize it as a form of CSA until I was well into adulthood.

There was another boy who tried to lure me away from gatherings and parties, but my older sibling knew something was off and intervened.

Both of these boys went to church with us.

When I was 11, I liked to go for bike rides in our neighborhood. My mom asked that a family friend who was a few years older than me go with me, to make sure nothing bad happened to me. It didn’t take long for this boy to start grooming me, and touching me inappropriately. I stopped riding my bike soon after that.

I did not tell my parents. I internalized the blame.

When I was 15, I rebelled after a turbulent childhood and a difficult relationship with my parents.

Abuse made me grow up too fast, and, desperate for an escape, I started dating a 19 year old. Even though I hated him at first. Even though all my instincts screamed predator. My friend, who lived with us, was dating his older brother, and how convenient would it be to double date? I lost my virginity at 15, to a 19 year old predator who would emotionally abuse me, sexually exploit me, and psychologically terrorize me.

There is a road in the town over from where I grew up, that I can’t drive down without flashing back to a time when that ex told me that he would pimp me out for drugs, and that I better not fight back.

There are certain kinds of touch I can’t stand, and I hate having the lights on during sex, because of forced exhibitionism, and because of what my ex-husband would later do to me.

When I finally told my parents and we went to the police, the first thing the detective asked me was a pointed, “Well, what were you wearing?” A Twilight hoodie and jeans, guy, thanks for that. Without physical evidence, my case was dismissed.

At the time, I’d never even heard of a rape kit. You gotta love abstinence only in Tennessee. Keep the girls in the dark so they don’t know how to fight back or that most men are actually terrible at sex.

When I was 17, I dated a 21 year old. He was emotionally unavailable, gaslit me, cheated, and I finally ended things after 11 months of him only coming around for sex.

A month later, I met my ex-husband. He came in like a knight in shining armor, promising to treat me the way I should have been treated from the start.

Beware men who claim they want to save you.

Less than a month later, he had ignored my no, and coerced me into having sex with him. It bothered him that other men had had sex with me, but he hadn’t. I didn’t register this possessive and controlling behavior as abuse or coercion at the time.

Looking back, I can see the red flags that I blazed right passed. I didn’t trust myself then. My self-esteem was only beginning to recover from a series of exploitive and abusive relationships, and I was in a vulnerable state. I was a terminal people pleaser, to my own detriment. I was socialized not to take up space, that my “big feelings” make people uncomfortable, so it’s better to just keep my mouth shut and “keep the peace,” and I internalized that something was wrong with me on a foundational level. I have anxiety, childhood trauma, cPTSD, and I didn’t learn that I’m autistic until the age of 27. And despite all of this, I was so desperate for real love and connection, that I still wore my heart on my sleeve.

I might as well have had a neon sign on my forehead.

2 months into our relationship he cheated for the first time. I didn’t find out until over a year later. A month after that, so 3 months into our relationship, he proposed. 3 months later, he took that proposal back. I had this horrible gut feeling that I needed to break up with him because something was very wrong. I even voiced that I felt like a switch had flipped in him and he was not the same person that he was for the first 6 months of our relationship. He told me that was just the honeymoon stage wearing off.

I ignored my screaming instincts, and listened to him. After all, I had been told my whole life that I was the problem. It was too easy for him to send me into a tailspin of blame and self-doubt, blaming my trauma and anxiety for what he called overreactions, immaturity, and oversensitivity.

A little over a year into our relationship he started standing me up, ignoring my texts, refusing to celebrate anniversaries or Valentine’s Day. He said he just wasn’t that kind of person to celebrate those things, and that they shouldn’t be important to me.

Less than a year and a half into our relationship, he was hanging out with another girl, texting her, and going with her to do things I’d been asking for months to do, while I was out of the country. I still stayed. I still believed him when he said nothing was happening, despite the fact that through our relationship he gave me recurrent yeast infections and what I thought was BV, but now suspect was actually Trich. I certainly learned my lesson, his parting gift to me an incurable STD that I have to live with for the rest of my life.

That summer, he got back on Tinder. By our 2 year anniversary, his affair was full blown, and ended with her buying Plan B.

I knew something was seriously wrong and asked him point blank if he was cheating on me. He got mad at me and accused me of starting things, said my accusations were baseless, and the conversation ended with him saying he didn’t know if he could be with someone like me and me begging him not to break up with me. We were in limbo for a horribly painful week or two, and, both (supposedly) devastated by the thought of breaking up, decided that we would recommit to our relationship and making it work. Two weeks after this decision, he slept with the other girl. Who, by the way, had the same name as me.

The next 6 months were better. He answered my texts, stopped blowing me off as much, and told me he was saving up for a ring. Guilt is a good motivator I guess? He never ended up buying one because he kept spending the money on booze and weed, but stupid me, I stayed.

He proposed with a borrowed ring, without romance, and without knowing if he was even sure he wanted to. The next month was the best month of our relationship, until a month into our engagement, he finally told me he’d cheated on me after manipulating me into telling him he could tell me anything, and I’d still love him. After I’d hired a photographer, wedding planner, we had set a date, and bought my wedding dress.

And. I. Stayed.

I stayed because I was convinced that God wanted me to marry him, that we had to get married because we’d had premarital sex, because I loved him, and because he promised he had changed, and everyone said boys take longer to grow up. Oh, something clicks when they get married. Oh, when they become a dad it’s like a switch flips. Oh, it gets better after 30. Well, you know, he’s just not a very emotional guy. (This was said with a large heaping of disdain for my perceived over-emotionality.) Still waters, and all that bullshit.

I stayed because my ENTIRE LIFE I have been taught NOT TO TRUST MYSELF. That my feelings matter less than other people’s. So of course I believed him when he said it was my anxiety, my childhood trauma, my baggage from other boyfriends, etc. warping my view. It couldn’t possibly be him that was the problem.

I walked down the aisle despite fighting off a panic attack. I plastered a smile to my face and prayed Dear God, please don’t let this be a mistake. Please don’t let me regret this. Please let this be the right choice.

Spoiler alert: It was not, in fact, the right choice.

I had this vision of what our life could be though, and I was determined to have that. Until we got married, and suddenly he wasn’t sure he wanted kids anymore, something that I had said was a deal breaker for me.

I told him I wanted a divorce for the first time 6 weeks after our wedding. He had gotten black out drunk, puked all over both of us and the bed (and sadly this wasn’t even the first time he’d done that), busted a pipe in the wall that flooded the downstairs apartment, was incoherent, punched a hole in the door, punched the mirror and shattered it, shoved me into a wall, shook me, raised his fist at me, and went and passed out in yet another pile of puke while I panicked, trying to turn off the water, deal with our neighbors and landlord, apologize profusely, and clean up his mess.

He said it was the bourbon, and that he wouldn’t drink it anymore. He hid how much he was drinking for a little while, and then it was back to whatever he wanted. But don’t worry-- he’s a big boy, it takes a lot.

I was in my first year of teaching, and also managed all the household responsibilities. I tried to distribute responsibilities equally, but then he was late on the rent and electric bill multiple times, and one by one, responsibilities that were his, ended up falling onto me, because of his own laziness and forgetfulness.

He continued to drink and game all day while I was teaching, and then slept while I was home. I barely saw him, but if I said anything about wanting to spend more time together, he told me I was being ridiculous. We lived together, what more could I want?

6 months into our marriage, he raped me. It didn’t matter that I laid there motionless, silent tears streaming down my cheeks. Later, he told me it was my fault for not fighting him or screaming. Then he cried, blamed being drunk, and swore it would never happen again.

It did.

I miscarried for the first time that month, and trying to conceive became my single-minded focus.

All abuse is horrible, but I find emotional abuse and sexual coercion to be particularly insidious. He had me convinced that something was wrong with me for not wanting to have sex. I carried so much shame around my lack of desire that I tried all kinds of methods to increase my libido, usually turning to alcohol.

When I look back now, I can see that my obsession with getting pregnant was a survival technique; a way to cope with his utter lack of regard for my consent. If I could force myself to want to have the sex he was always pestering me for, often 4-5 times a day, I didn’t have to deal with the reality that I was an object to him, not a person. It gave me purpose, and after my first miscarriage, became a full-blown obsession.

I blamed my unhappiness on my yearning for motherhood, because of course, the problem couldn’t have been my ex-husband, who had an inexhaustible plethora of excuses for his actions.

The problem with abusive men is not a lack of morals, as people commonly think, it’s a distortion of morality.

My double rainbow baby was born at the end of Infertility Awareness Week in 2021. It was a hard pregnancy, and an extremely difficult labor. My daughter had a shoulder dystocia, and I hemorrhaged and required a D&C and a blood transfusion.

Fun fact about that: that was coded as an abortion, and if that happened again today, I would not have received the life saving care that I needed. I hate it here.

I was in the hospital overnight. My mom stayed, because my ex-husband was so tired and needed to sleep in our own bed, rather than stay with his wife and newborn, who both almost died mere hours before.

Less than 4 hours after coming home from the hospital after a near death experience and only 24 hours postpartum, my ex was pressuring me for sex, and when I incredulously said no, berated me until I gave in “at least” did a sexual favor for him.

He said it was a need. That he couldn’t feel close to me without it. That I was shaming him and making him feel bad about himself when I said no. That I was harming his self-esteem by refusing when I was too tired.

He did the same thing when our second was born, when I had 13 stitches closing up the literal cloaca our 10lb baby gave me, less than 8 hours earlier.

So many times I was told, “you’ll like it once we start,” followed by him pushing in dry and immediately jackhammering away.

So many times I was made to feel like something was wrong with me for not wanting to have sex with him…

There was rarely enough warmup to get anything going, and I didn’t want to engage in any foreplay because sex was just another obligation/task he had added to my plate.

I tried to tell him so many times that foreplay starts outside of the bedroom, with being a partner and taking care of responsibilities. With not “forgetting” Christmas and then telling me that he’s just not a Christmas person, that it’s not a big deal, that holidays are stupid, and they shouldn’t matter to me either. The first time he skipped my birthday and Christmas was the first year we were married. He said, We’re married, why would I get you anything? It’s coming out of the same account. Just get yourself something if it matters that much to you.

Let me ask you this: why would anyone want to have bad sex that debased them in the name of kink, with someone who very clearly does not even view them as a human being?

Disclaimer: I have nothing against kink when it is consent based and informed. My ex’s version of kink came from bad porn. He did degrading things to me, like spitting on me, slapping me, choking me, yanking my hair, telling me to make stupid faces, etc. because it turned him on. When I tried to say I didn’t like it, he called me vanilla and berated me for not being into it enough.

If I had to sum up my sex life with this man in 3 words, I would call it an acting career.

My consent never mattered to him. He would purposefully get me drunk because it was easier to coerce me, and whenever I said something hurt, he would tell me to hang on, that he was almost done. Or to push past it, because it felt so good for him. He would ply me with alcohol because it made me easier to coerce, and then turn around and shame me for only being in the mood when I was drunk.

There was one time in particular, when I told him I absolutely could not bear it, and he stopped only because I told him if he didn’t, I would scream and wake everyone up. He then berated me for not finishing him, and told me I was heartless when I told him to take care of himself. I can’t remember his exact rant, but I do remember laying there in disbelief, bleeding from what he’d just done to me, while he shamelessly attempted to coerce me into giving him a blowjob.

My fourth pregnancy (2nd live birth) was the result of reproductive assault. I asked him to wear a condom, and he refused, promising to withdraw. I told him there’s a word for people who rely on withdrawal as a form of birth control: parents, and to put the condom on. He refused. When I realized that he was not going to pull out and tried to get away, he held me in place.

I found out I was pregnant two weeks later. That baby is now 2, and I hate that he is the product of rape. He is a joyful, loving, intelligent child who lives so fully, and my greatest fear is that he will grow up to be like his father, or find out how his conception came to be.

My ex constantly complained about how many days it had been since we had sex. If I said no, he continued touching me, asking, or pestering until I either gave in, or shouted no. If I said no and didn’t give in, he sulked and threw a fit. If I got frustrated enough to snap at him, here come the Oscar Winning Tears and you’re so cold to me, am I not attractive to you? You make me feel like shit about myself.

I voiced multiple times that I didn’t want to have sex because he was always mean to me afterward, and he always denied that, yet not even 30 minutes after having sex, he would be rude or hurtful or flat out mean.

He would tell me that he needed me, that he wouldn’t be able to sleep. He constantly begged for sexual favors, and if I said no something was wrong with me and I was emasculating him. When I said that I felt like a bang maid, he scoffed derisively and said you’d have to actually put out for that.

His chief complaint, the one he put on his paperwork as grounds for divorce, was that I withheld sexual relations, and that I was disrespectful.

I never withheld—

—I was never allowed to.

This was previously one monstrously long memoir, and I decided to split it into two, hopefully less daunting, pieces. You can find part two by clicking here. 🩵

If you’ve already read the original, thank you for 21 minutes of your life. The real MVPs. 🫶🏼