Scary Monsters

I was three years old and remember being in my mother's arms as she and my father were talking/arguing with each other. Time slipped away into the fog between dream and reality and sometime later I woke up on my grandmother's couch. My first memory of dreams and reality weaving together.

I saw my grandmother in her old brown living room chair with the matching ottoman. "Your mother went to go deal with some things, you'll be here tonight." That's all she said about the situation and I was too young to even know that there was a situation.

The next memory logged was my mother bringing a new man into the house. I spent my fourth birthday in day care while the two of them got married in a civil ceremony. I stayed with my grandmother that night so that they could go on their honeymoon.

Almost immediately came what felt like an endless stream of moving from one place to another. Eventually we settled down for a year in a small blue one-level town home somewhere in Anchorage, as my mother was pregnant with my sister. I remember being very excited about having a baby sister, telling my mom "we'll have our own Downy baby!", thinking of the fabric softener commercial showing a happy baby swaddled comfortably in a soft pink blanket.

After the birth of my sister, my life changed dramatically. My sister was colicky and had strep throat constantly and starting at a very early age. I found out much later in adulthood that my sister's health problems were attributed to my stepfather's exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam. Studies of Vietnam Vets had shown that their offspring often had severe immune deficiencies and were born with no enamel on their teeth. My earliest memories of my sister are of her bawling while getting ice baths to drop her temperature and lying awake all night while she cried and screamed in her crib. My mother would get up to soothe her occasionally but usually my sister just screamed until she wore herself out.

Shortly after my sister was born, the abuse started. My stepfather and mother spent a lot of time after the birth of my sister having sex. On good days, I would be parked in front of the television during their fuckfests, on bad days I was called to join. It is, to date, still the most surreal and confusing situation that I have ever been involved in.

By the time I was five, I was the shy but brilliant kid. I was ahead of my class intellectually but almost failed kindergarten because I could not learn how to tie my shoes. My mother had gone back to work at the Anchorage Bureau of Land Management offices and had a small baby on her hands so she no longer participated in the sexual abuse but my stepfather did. The next five years were a blur of excelling in school, getting bullied in school, getting sexually abused at home and moving. A lot.

When I was nine, we moved from Anchorage, Alaska to Stehekin, Washington. My stepfather had gotten a job with the National Park Service and felt that he had really arrived. We packed it all up and spent three weeks driving to Washington. Stehekin is a tiny rural community near Lake Chelan and accessible only by ferry. As a young girl, I loved the ability to ride my bike anywhere and did well in the small one-room schoolhouse with twenty kids. It was less overwhelming and kids were kinder to me there, although I was still shy and awkward. There were a couple of families that bred Norwegian Fjord horses and owned an outfitting company for tourists interested in pack rides so I was thrilled to have access to horses all the time.

The abuse continued and increased in frequency. I would wake up to my stepfather's genitalia in my face and any time he wanted to go fishing, I vacillated between being excited to fish but knowing that there was going to be a price to pay. I spent most of Stehekin feeling dirty and sad.

We lasted in Stehekin for about nine months. The big job that my stepfather had gotten was actually working in the sewage treatment plant, a fact that I found humorous and fitting in my adult years. My mother had take a leave of absence from her job at Bureau of Land Management and was bored and uninterested in being a housewife or socializing with others in town. It was one of the more isolating times of my childhood.

We moved back to Anchorage and lived with my grandparents while my parents got back in their feet. My mother had been saving our Permanent Fund Dividends for college but then spent all of it on the move back. That was the last I ever heard of a college fund. I re-enrolled back in my former school and life continued as another three-year blur of abuse, bullying and school attendance.