There were others

One area of my memories that I haven’t reached yet is my sexual abuse from the hands of others, not only from my father. A small percentage of my panic attacks pointed to memories where the identity of the abuser was different from my father. There are so far two that I have identified – my grandmother’s second husband and my aunt’s first husband.

If you’re reading this and wondering about me – could she have gone too far?  I understand she had one abuser, her father – but now two more? I have heard this question many times, and I wish I have gone too far for real. Unfortunately, I am a picture case of an incest victim – from the data that I have gathered and that others have researched – a child that is an incest victim, in general exhibits behavior that other males, susceptible to sexual abuse, interpret as seduction. 7 is the typical number of people that abuse an incest victim from the onset of the first abuse to the time when the child becomes an adult (18 yeard old in US). If I only had 3, it would be considered “mild”. Back to the others.

Number one, uncle Sasha. My grandmother was severely abused by her mother, from what I gather in family history. She was beaten almost daily, and performed the duty of “the mother of the house” while her mother (my great grandmother) was away working. She married young (like everyone in my family), when she was around 20, to a man who was drinking, beating her, and who fathered two of her daughters – my mom (the oldest) and my aunt. As my mother states, her mom and dad rarely had sex, and he looked at pictures of young boys, which is why in the end they divorced. Sevral years later, my grandmother married her second husband. I called him uncle Sasha. He was an alcoholic, he spent several years in prison, and he worked as a butcher, earning very little money, but he looked like Marlon Brando, and my grandmother was smitten. They moved into the already crowded 3 bedroom apartment – the total number of people living there was 4 – my great grandma, my grandma, her two daughters (my mom and my aunt). I wasn’t born yet. From the moment he moved in, my mom started running away form home – she was 16. He caused chaos and the ultimate destruction of the apartment where I grew up in, and the family itself. He drank all his money away, his friends came for drunken parties and destroyed what little was left of the furniture that looked decent. The family held on to the only stronghold left – my great grandmother. She was a powerful and fearless woman (though violent in her own accord) – one day she chased uncle Sasha out of the house and that was that. He only came to visit for the holidays (I guess this is one more reason I hate holidays). But here comes the bad part – he was our neighbor at the summer house (in Russia, everyone flees to th country to their summer homes – called dacha) – that’s where my grandma met him. I spent every summer at our dacha – with my grandmother and my great grandmother (my mom was trying to find a new husband, so she was never there). When did he start abusing me, I don’t know, but I was left at his house many times when my grandma’s had to go grocery shopping. He lured me in with the rabbits – I have a scene in my novel describing it – but I haven’t gone beyond the rabbits in my memories, I’m scared to know what he did – though everything points to the fact that he was “gentle” – I only had to touch him, touch his penis, as opposed to being penetrated. I don’t want to know the details yet, and I’m not ready to go there yet, but when I went to Moscow this November, I talked to my other half-sister (I have two, one on the mom’s side, one on the dad’s side) – and she broke out crying. She remembered the rabbits too, and how when I was gone, he shifted to her, he told her he will show her a trick, a magic handkerchief – if she touches it, it will start growing. Uncle Sasha is dead now, he died from an overdose of alcohol when I was 13 and away from Moscow, so I would have to forgive him in spirit.

Number two, uncle Igor. Not many men visited the apartment where I grew up in – it was either my father picking me up, or uncle Sasha visiting my grandma, or it was uncle Igor who came to visit when he dated my aunt, and later, when they moved out after getting married (that marriage lasted only a few years). He was tall, handsome, with dark hair – I just loved how handsome he looked, and I looked forward to his visits. He was funny, he cracked jokes, he brought a camera with him (the fact that I have any pictures of me at all from when I was a child is largely because he took pictures of me), he carried me on his shoulders. I have recovered a very vague memory (haven’t really gone there yet to confirm) that I came up to him and lifted up my skirt – as I knew this was the only way to get any love from a man – sadly, many men interpret this as a seductive move, where really anyone who sees a behavior from a child like this should alert the authorities as this is the child’s cry for help. I think he took my to the bedroom and cuddled with me, nothing extraordinary as opposed to what I was used to – but my aunt walked in on us and thankfully nothing more happened. I have yet to confirm all details of this memory, and I don’t know if uncle Igor is alive or not – he should be not very old, and maybe I will attempt a trip to Moscow to find him, to speak to him face to face and to forgive him, or maybe I will have to forgive him, talking to his picture.

I’m sharing this with the public for educational purposes – sexual abuse is real, incest is real, multiple sexual abuses in the child’s life are real, as are multiple abusers, and re-victimizations throughout adult life (ask any pimp whom they prefer for a perfect prostitute – they will tell you they like girls who had sex with their fathers, uncles, brothers – because they are obedient). No matter what the child does, it’s the adult who decides to turn it into sex, it’s fully the adult’s responsibility.

Each time I walk into my therapist’s cabinet and we settle in for the next session, I’m terrified to go into my past. I begin by drawing an unsettling detail from a not fully recovered memory, an image that has been haunting me for the past several days, or years. It is usually something completely unrelated to the abuse itself. An object I focused on while disassociating from my body and from the pain. More details form themselves under my pencil, then the full memory usually comes to me, sometimes together with yet another panic attack. I wanted to draw the rabbits last week, didn’t have the heart to. I will try next week, again.