This post was written anonymously and submitted to Blognonymous for publishing on this blog. Please feel free to leave your help and support should you wish, in comments below. Many thanks.

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Today is my brother’s birthday. He is older than me and we are not in touch. I always feel sad on his birthday, because despite everything that’s happened he is my big brother and I love him.

It is very difficult as my parents and other siblings know we don’t talk but I cannot tell them the real reasons why, but I am absolutely insistent with them that I will not be in contact with him. It is for my own wellbeing and I know it is for the best but I do not want to make his relationship with my family difficult.

I find myself wanting to talk about it but cannot do it openly so the discovery of Blognonymous is great. I need to get these thoughts out of my head and I need to know whether I am being fair or whether I am being entirely selfish with my actions.

I am not holding off stating the issue between my brother and I for dramatic effect, it’s more that I don’t know how to approach the subject. So I’ll just come out with it.

When I was a child my brother sexually assaulted me. For years I wondered if I had a false memory of the incident, I also wondered if it had happened more than once.

This is what I remember. I was playing in my bedroom and my brother called me from the bathroom, asking me to get him a towel from the airing cupboard. I remember feeling nervous (which is why I suspect it wasn’t the first time, why would I be nervous of my brother?) I didn’t want to do it but I took the towel to him. He pulled me into the bathroom and trapped me behind the door. From a child’s perspective all I remember is seeing a huge erect penis, I was incredibly frightened and begged him to let me go. He made me touch him, I remember crying and then being shoved from the bathroom.

That is it, a few moments. I’m not even sure how old I was, maybe 9 or 11. He is 7 years older than me. I don’t know how long I was trapped, it felt like an eternity at the time. It had a huge impact on me and my confidence, I remember feeling confused and scared. As a child I adored this brother, absolutely idolised him and I simply did not understand what had happened and why.

When I grew up it had a huge impact on my relationships and how I was with men. I was unable to touch a partner’s genitals without getting flashbacks. For years I had very unhealthy sexual relationships and was messed up beyond belief. I’m not saying it was all just this incident, so much else happened that impacted on me; my parent’s divorce, an absent father, a further sexual assault as an older teenager.

It was about 20 years before I spoke to anyone about what happened, still believing it was probably a false memory I spoke to a counsellor about it. I was told it was probably in my head and it was best not to think about it, such memories were best suppressed. I didn’t go back to the counsellor but I did try to forget about the ‘memory’. I continued to be self-destructive. A few years later I worked up the courage to try counselling again, I had separated from my husband and knew I couldn’t continue to live my life the way I was.

It took me 6 sessions to broach the subject, I had thought about nothing else for a week before. I didn’t sleep, I didn’t raise the topic until near the end if the session, I shook the entire way through the session. My fear was that she would confirm it was probably a false memory, my bigger fear was that she would confirm it wasn’t a false memory and it would be true that my brother had damaged me in the way he had.

My counsellor was brilliant, she talked it through with me and said she really couldn’t tell me whether the memory was true or not. She recommended I talk to my brother, saying he needed to acknowledge it had happened and apologise in order for our relationship to move on. She didn’t stick up for him but she explained what a confusing time it is for teenagers and she doubted there was anything sexually deviant in his behaviour (I worried for years as he had a daughter of his own).

I followed her advice, I spoke to my partner about what had happened and he agreed to be in the house when my brother came to visit. When my brother arrived I explained that we needed to talk and we went into the next room. I told him what I remembered, I told him I needed to know if had happened and if it had I needed him to apologise or I couldn’t continue to have him as part of my life. He told me he didn’t remember and that he remembered very little of his childhood. But the moment I told him what I remembered I knew it hadn’t been a false memory, there was a flash of panic across his eyes that told me everything I needed to know. He remembered, he knew what he’d done and I think he hoped I had forgotten. I explained that I could no longer be part of his life.

My brother left the house and we haven’t spoken since. That was a couple of years ago, I have since had a child, I didn’t tell him, I knew he would find out through my family. My family know we don’t talk but I don’t tell them the real reason why, I know it’s hard for them and I know they don’t understand. I cannot tell them, how could I tell my mum that he did that? I worry about the impact on my mum, I worry how she would feel about not protecting me or that it would ruin her relationship with her son.

The counselling had a huge impact on my life, I dealt with a lot of ‘issues’ and was able to move forward in a better way. I don’t regret for a moment having the counselling or confronting my brother about what happened. I have felt happier since he has stopped being in my life, simply because I rarely spare him a thought these days. I wish he had felt able to talk about it with me, I am not angry with him but I need it to be an issue that is dealt with in order to be around him, otherwise it’s just our own elephant in the room that no one else can see.

So, I haven’t sent my brother a birthday card, but I am thinking about him today and despite everything I still love him. In fact I love him so much it breaks my heart that he’s no longer in my life, but I only think about it today and tomorrow I shall put it away again.

This post was written anonymously and submitted to Blognonymous for publishing on this blog. Please feel free to leave your help and support should you wish, in comments below. Many thanks.

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My day, like many others in the past, started off with a stupid argument with my husband. We are so different yet in some ways quite the same. Needless to say, we both have a horrible stubborn streak.

And I let my day be ruined as I sank into a rut and once again began wondering how to recapture the emotions and rhythm of how our lives used to be. How our lives used to be back when we used to have time, patience and energy for each other. Back when our lives were more of a “one” than our lives now. Now, where we can go days without any deep conversations other than the day to day chit chat.

And I thought about the argument which revolved around my youngest daughter who was throwing a tantrum. It wasn’t so much her as the fact that each of our parenting views is quite a bit different. As the youngest, she wraps her father around her little finger and he loves it every minute.

And then as I was reflecting upon this morning, the scene played through my mind. The look I got, the words said, the tension in the air. And the reason for my pain today and probably a good amount of my pain in the last few months, became clear to me.

I realized that while I know I am important to quite a bit of people, there is not a single person in this world that I was the MOST important person for.

Not my parents, not my siblings and not even my kids. The kids who aren’t teens prefer their father, the kids who are teens are teens and have a different most important person depending on which way the wind blows.

And I realized that while I know my husband loves me, our kids come first.

And that realization stung and made me cry for the umpteenth time today.

And as I am sitting here and writing this, I wonder whether this was the way it was meant to be for me. Am I meant to be the most important person to myself? Am I meant to fix this? Am I meant to do things different in my life?

And my heart is breaking, and there is a lump in my throat and the tears are streaming down my cheeks. Because being important to a lot of people can’t make up for being the most important person for even just one person.

How am I going to carry on?

This post was written anonymously and submitted to Blognonymous for publishing on this blog. Please feel free to leave your help and support should you wish, in comments below. Many thanks.

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My dad left home when I was around 10 years old. Sadly we never really got on since then. I would spend the odd weekend with him but it was more because I had to and not because I wanted to. The weekends were spent following him around while he continued his usual routine or trying to entertain ourselves. It makes me sad that the thing I can remember most about growing up is sat waiting in the front room window for him to come to collect us, only for him not to come on the days he was supposed to. I spent hours waiting for him, he is my dad, he will surely come? As I grew older I began to see that we were simply not the most important people in his lives and that he was choosing not to spend time with us. I resented him hugely for this and did not speak to him for many many years. He did not see me graduate, he did not hear of my engagement, he did not walk me down the aisle.

Predictably he reappeared in my live when there was a grandchild on the horizon. Again this angered me, why did he think he was entitled to be involved now? It still frustrates me that I feel like this and that he probably hasn’t got a clue. I so want to tell him how I feel but am not able to without getting upset. I do not want to give him the satisfaction.

Over the last few years he has improved. He will visit when he says he will and if he cant come he actually lets me know this instead of leaving us waiting for him. We are still not close, I suspect he knows very little of what my life actually involves, he does not have the grandchildren, he does not baby sit, we do not spend days out together. We see him probably once a month, it is usually quick and rushed and peppered with tension. He does not know the grandchildren enough to know their likes, dislikes, their little ways. He can not see when he is pushing their buttons, does not know when they are tired or hungry or in need of a cuddle.

So why after all of this so I feel so let down and rejected at this weeks news that he is emigrating? I know it should not matter to me and that it really wont make that much difference. The numbers of hours he will spend flying there is more than the number of hours I seem him for in total each year.

Are we not important enough? are we not worth staying for?

I know this is selfish, he has his own life, a right to be happy, to go where he feels life should take him. I do not rely on him, I have a husband and children, I am strong and independent.

I am angry at myself. Why do I allow him to make me feel like this. Why did I allow him back in?

I can not help feeling this way. I suspect a lot of how I am feeling is related to other events happening in my life and that it is this which is making me over react to the news of his emigration. I feel like life has pulled the rug from under my feet at the minute, I do not know when or where the rug will settle or who will remain in my life when it does.

This post was written anonymously and submitted to Blognonymous for publishing on this blog. Please feel free to leave your help and support should you wish, in comments below. Many thanks.

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I don’t really remember much. Not really. Just snippets.

It’s part of the reason why I’ve never talked about it. Never written about it. Never shared it with anyone, really.

I remember the aftermath. I remember the incessant droning voice of incompetence that suddenly entered my life – I remember cutting and making myself throw-up and feeling like a failure, already, at nine years of age.

I remember hiding it all from my parents, my friends, teachers, everyone. I’ve always been a private person, even before, but afterwards I hid things even better. It’s funny that someone who blogs and writes can be so private. I have certainly learned the art of oversharing the meaningless stuff so the essentials can remain hidden, like my own hoarded and forgotten treasure.

I hid it so well I eventually forgot it. It came to me sometimes in dreams of unknown origins, those snippets flailing their waving arms into a story I was sure I had created.

But it wasn’t my story. And if it was, I had outgrown it, just like the cutting and the puking and the self-hatred.

****

The real reason drugs and alcohol are not safe is because they make you let your guard down. For most they’re dangerous because of the possibility of others hurting you, or you accidentally hurting someone else. For me, it was the hurts of my past.

I lay sobbing and puking on my professor’s bathroom floor at our year end party – memories washing over me. I didn’t hear my friends calling out for me, nor my prof knocking on the door. Eventually I sobered myself up, straightened my persona and went back to the party. I even played Truth or Dare with my horrible secret tumbling inside of me. I’m pretty sure the little girl I’d tucked away was raging to get free.

Truthfully, my secret made me feel powerful. I could sit and talk about Ernest Hemmingway even while that girl screamed inside me. Later when we read a story I had written one of my classmates asked “how can someone forget having sex.”

“Perhaps it was traumatic,” another answered.

It wasn’t really. Not in any kind of physical way.

She didn’t hurt me; except for squeezing too hard when she hugged me, and the time she lay on top of me to keep me from calling out.

She was only there for 10 days and some nights it was the other sitter who put me to bed. So I don’t think it even happened very often. Maybe three or four times. There was the night we were almost caught. I remember that one. When she rubbed me and poked inside me I felt burning hot. She said I liked it – that all girls did it. But when the nice sitter called out to me, she jumped up and told me to pull up my underwear. She made me pretend to be asleep. And when the nice sitter came to the door she was tucking me in. The nice sitter said “she doesn’t like being hugged so much.”

It wasn’t true actually. I loved being hugged. But not from the fat sitter. Even before she touched me she made me feel gross when she hugged me.

She told me that she and the nice sitter did those things together too, but that night I knew that was a lie. And I realized that what we were doing was bad. And even though I didn’t want to do it before, I really didn’t want to do it when I knew the nice sitter wouldn’t like it. So I tried to tell her no. I tried to hold up my doll and pretend to be a baby, because babies don’t do things like that.

It was my fault she said, for squirming when she hugged me and making her hold me tighter. And for letting her catch me touching myself that night she checked on me. It was my fault.

****

In the bathroom, before I went downstairs, I looked at myself in the mirror, with the new haircut I already hated. I chanted to myself “it’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault.”

Later, after the games and the reading, when I was cleaning his sink after vomiting in it, the professor said “have you noticed all your stories seem to be about some kind of abuse.”

I flinched when he touched me. “No. Never occurred to me. Sorry I got so drunk. I’m not like this you know.”

I felt him staring as I walked away and I thought of seducing him so he’d forget. But fat girls are not seductive, especially with vomit-breath and red eyes.

****

I want to vomit now. I want to punch her. I want to stick a knife into her fat stomach and tell her to leave me alone. Instead, since I started writing this last week, I’ve dragged a knife across my arm, feeling its cold bite take my pain and twist it into something manageable. I haven’t done that in almost 20 years. Tonight, I read that journaling is a recommended therapy to prevent self-injury. That made me laugh. I wish I hadn’t gone down this road again. My secret is raging to get out – like the monsters that shook my closet doors at night. There were nights I wanted the monsters to get me and drag me away to their rank, furry hell. I hear them calling. I don’t know what to do.