I have many skeletons that I have to keep to myself.  Many I keep secret because I feel if people knew them, they wouldn’t want to be associated with me.  I’ve decided to just reveal as many as I can online.  I mean how much can we really know about a person if they hide certain aspects of themselves? The impression you get is based on whatever “mask” they have on that day.  That point is even more evident in the virtual world.  So, I’m going to get a few out of the way.  I can’t control your reaction, so let’s just get going.

I’m fat.  That doesn’t seem so earth shattering does it?  What woman doesn’t say she’s fat?  No, I mean I’m really morbidly obese.  We’re talking a little over 300 lbs.  Why am I so heavy?

Two reasons:
1. I don’t exercise because I’m extremely self-conscious & it’s painful. 
2. I chug a handful of medications daily including weight-gaining anti-depressants. 

This leads to another apparent skeleton I try to cover up for.

I have a mental illness.  It’s major depression disorder.  We’re not talking the feeling depressed for a month or two.  This is years and years.  I cannot remember a time of truly ever being happy for any length of time in my life until recently.  Why?  I think it’s partially genetics, but mostly environmental reasons.

I had parents that made Mommy Dearest look like the Snuggle Fabric Softener Bear.  No joke. Only thing missing was my mom didn’t drink.  She physically and emotionally abused me completely sober without regret. Remember that scouring cleanser scene in Mommy Dearest?  Yeah, that happened to me, before the movie came out.  I didn’t have to worry about the "no wire hangers".  She used the hangers to beat my sister and I with if we did something wrong.  That was only after the 4th butterfly fly-swatter broke after a spanking one day. Imagine my horror to discover these still exist. The welts after those spankings would stay for hours.  Looking back now, I would say my mother has Narcissistic and Borderline Personality Disorders.  Go look that up sometime if you’re bored.  Sad thing is, I don’t recall ever feeling loved.  She would say she was doing “these things” because she loved me.  That’s not love. 

My mom didn’t exactly have the greatest of role models of how to parent either.  I’ve heard stories of how my grandma would blame my mom for things her sister did. Then she’d chase my mom around the house with electrical cords, whipping her until her legs bled punishing her for something her sisters did.  She couldn’t rely on having food to eat everyday either.  I learned later that her father abandoned them when she was just three years old.  Mom married at age 18 and had her first child almost exactly a year later.  Being married to an USAF test pilot didn’t lend itself to an easy life either.  I don’t know much about those years, because I wasn’t born yet.  All I know is it was very difficult through the Korean and Vietnam wars when my father was gone.

My father, on the other hand, had a temper which no one else saw except my siblings and my mother.  He also is very narcissistic which made for an interesting parenting technique.  He would make sure my mom followed through with discipline and punished us for being out of line or doing things he did not agree with.  He also, I believe, had a drinking problem for a few years.  He would hide empty beer and liquor bottles in the basement which I had inadvertently found at age four.  That fight was so bad, I barely recall what the fallout was.  I just went outside and hoped I wouldn’t get into too much trouble. 

The total mind-fuck about being abused is no one believed me.  All of my siblings and I were beaten, spanked, yelled at, and more.  I purposely don’t braid my hair in two braids anymore because it reminds me of being dragged upstairs by my hair during one of my mother’s rages.  We weren’t white trash, just middle to upper-middle class. What made it all that much more unbelievable is my parents are the pillar of the community.  Everyone knows them.  My mom honestly is the most giving, caring individual to everyone else, but her daughters.  She has won awards for her volunteer work, and I’ve seen her go out of her way to help others.  It’s the only positive thing I’ve acquired from her.  She would give money to cousins or her sisters if they needed it. She has purchased clothing for the poor, and volunteered her time with the disabled.  Police officers, judges, you name it, knew my mother.  No one would believe me when I said what was really going on at home.  My friends didn’t even believe me in school.  They loved my mom.  She would talk to them so sweetly, invite them to dinner, and she knew their parents. 

Then, the crack in the veneer appeared.  It took long enough—at least 15 years into my life.  My best friend came over to spend the night.  I said something that must have been the wrong thing to my mother.  She slapped me in the face and I swear the sound echoed.  Immediately, a hand print appeared on my cheek as the heat stung my face. My friend stood there in shock as my mother started yelling at me.  I flinched as I thought she was going to swing again.  That was nothing compared to what usually happened, but this time it was in front of someone else other than family.  I ran upstairs with my friend to my room and then burst into tears. I was so embarrassed.  All I remember my friend saying was, “I’m sorry I didn’t believe you.”  Needless to say, the word got out and no one  wanted to spend the night at my house ever again.

My father, on the other hand, always kept his cool.  He never got angry in front of any of my friends and he never wanted to look like the bad guy.  When my boyfriend and I were dating, I tried to explain to him the long story of abuse.  He didn’t believe me.  He thought my parents were wonderful, albeit “yellers”.  That was until he came to pick me up one summer day to give me a ride back to college for the fall semester. I asked my dad to write a check for my dorm rent because I had to leave.  I don’t recall exactly what he said back tome, but I remember saying, “Could you just write the check?”  Just then, my father hauled off and slugged me in the face and knocked me to the floor right in front of my boyfriend.  Stunned, R* didn’t know whether to call the police, slug my dad, or what.  I bit my cheek to avoid crying and spent the entire two hour car ride to college in silence.  It was one of the two times in my entire life that my dad slipped up and left a witness other than just immediate family.  Why my boyfriend stayed with me and later became my husband after seeing that, I’ll never know.

I don’t want to go into each and every incident of the abuse, because that’s what ten years of seeing a neuropsychologist is for.  All I can say is it happened.  I know it happened.  My mother says I “interpreted events differently than how they truly happened”.  In other words, it didn’t happen like I say it did.  I also got the “What would you have done instead?  It’s how everyone disciplined their children back then.” You know what?  I don’t know what I would have done in her shoes, but I sure as hell know I wouldn’t have done that!  When you hit, spank, drag, slap a child to the point that they are crying hysterically, begging for you to stop,curled up in the fetal position protecting themselves, you’d think that would be a clue to not do that.  Nor do you tell your child you “wish they’d never been born” even once let alone half a dozen times in their lifetime.  As for my father?  He doesn’t know what the hell I’m talking about.  It’s totally been erased from his memory.

Because of those events, I’ve acquired hypervigilance.  Hypervigilance is by definition is: “an enhanced state o sensory sensitivity accompanied by an exaggerated intensity of behaviors whose purpose is to detect threats. Hypervigilance is also accompanied by a state of increased anxiety which can cause exhaustion. Other symptoms include:abnormally increased arousal, a high responsiveness to stimuli and a constant scanning of the environment for threats.” Great, huh?  Essentially, a facet of post traumatic stress disorder.

The positive effect of hypervigilance for me is I’m an amazing reader of body language. I’m very aware of people’s facial expressions and can interpret them pretty accurately. It’s made me very empathetic and caring.  I would do anything for someone else.  People seem to find me approachable, even total strangers in the grocery store.  They just start telling me their life story,and honestly I don’t mind.  It’s no surprise that because of that empathetic mind-set, I’ve held jobs in the medical field and I was very good at it. 

However, my past pain has left me with a huge fear of being a bad mother.  I experience anxiety at times when I don’t have the answers as a mother.  I have also discovered that when I became a mother, I started to experience flashbacks. It doesn’t help that my youngest daughter looks exactly like me at that age.  I just deal with the memories of abuse as they come with each year the girls grow older.  The sad thing is, I’ve watched E* playing and laughing, and thought, “So this is what I would have been like had I not been abused and was loved.”  It’s a bittersweet feeling knowing your children are so happy and are very much loved,when I had none of those experiences.

The outcome of living a life where you didn’t have parents that loved you, nor were proud of you, is “self-loathing”.  I learned horrible ways of coping with the emotional pain and hatred of myself.  Surprisingly,overeating wasn’t one of them.  (Unfortunately,another sibling acquired that maladaptive coping skill).  I’d talk about it now, but I’d rather save that for another skeleton day.

So, I hide behind an avatar.  I don’t feel in this society people can see past weight.  It’s just human nature tolook at what is pleasing and ignore what isn’t. I don’t feel sexy despite posting my “boobs” on Boob Emancipation and getting some nice feedback. (http://boobemancipation.com/2009/09/hotness-from-kitterztoo/) My internal thoughts are “If you saw all of me, you would change your mind”.

It reminds me of a portion of the lyrics to Beautiful by Eminem:

So why don’t you all sit down
Listen to the tale that I’m about to tell
Hell we don’t gotta trade our shoes
And you don’t gotta walk no thousand miles

In my shoes, just to see
What it’s like, to be me
I’ll be you, let’s trade shoes
Just to see what it’d be like
To feel your pain, you feel mine
Go inside each other’s minds
Just to see what we'd find
Look at shit through each others eyes
Don't let them say you ain’t beautiful
They can all get fucked just stay true to you.

I know you can’t walk in my shoes, but I’m hoping you can see a part of me that many do not. So, if you don’t mind, I think I’ll go back to being anonymous and only showing people who I am on the inside and not the outside.