No doors, no secrets, no self

Property

Every day I left for school, I’d return to a bedroom that had been gone through. If I dared to write anything, my pens and pencils would be taken away.

Any art I made — drawings mostly, because I wasn’t allowed to have paints — were removed from my room and placed on the coffee table for my egg donor to criticize and rip apart when I returned home from school.

Property has zero rights to privacy and owning property themselves.

So it was no wonder I’d developed an affinity for blogging. This was the only outlet I was allowed — and I quickly learned how to use the internet as a tool. I learned how to create new accounts, remember passwords, and clear my search history.

Omnipresence

Of course, even that was in vain because my stepfather installed software on my computers allowing him to access it from his own. He even did it to my mother’s, and somehow she didn’t take issue with that.

Passwords weren’t private; they were things we had to share with him. Gods must be omnipresent, after all.

He would film my brother and me with his webcam while taking our mother out to dinner.

The Round Rock apartment we lived in, my bedroom connected from the garage to the laundry room. It was like another garage and cool, but it locked on both sides — the door to the garage and the door to the laundry room. There was a peephole on the door going to the laundry room; I could only lock or unlock that door if I had a key.

I danced to music and taught myself choreography to songs by Swedish pop band Play. While I knew he’d install spy software to watch what I did on the computer, I’d noticed he started making comments about my dancing even when the computer was off.

I covered it with a blanket, and he’d still make comments.

One day, I stood on my tiptoes to look out the peephole — and I realized anyone could see almost the entire room if they looked through it!

I stuck a sticky note onto it from my room. That night, he said my name loud enough for me to hear him from the other side.

“What?” I replied.

“What is covering this hole?”

“A sticky note.”

“And why is there a sticky note here?”

“So no one can see inside my room.”

“Why don’t you want anyone looking in your room? Remove it, please.” It wasn’t a request; it was a warning.

“I’m changing into my pajamas.” The lie didn’t matter, since he couldn’t see inside anyway. “Also, it’s my room. I need my privacy. I’m thirteen years old and–”

He swung the door open. “As long as you live under MY roof, it’s MY room — and I have the right to know everything and anything that goes on in MY room. Do you understand me?”

I stood, frozen.

“DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?”

“No,” I said.

“What?!”

“I feel like I’m in prison and can’t do anything. I don’t feel comfortable knowing you’re always watching me.”

“You think this feels like prison?” He scoffed. “You have no idea what prison is like. You’re lucky I don’t send you off to military school for this.”

He ripped off the sticky note and took all the stationary out of my room. On his way out, he turned off the light.

That was the first time he locked me in my room, which meant I didn’t have access to the bathroom or kitchen. I had irritable bowel syndrome and usually had water before bed.

He knew how terrified I was of the dark and how I couldn’t navigate in the dark.

I don’t know whether they heard my screaming and crying or if they did and ignored it. I do know, however, they told every single neighbor we ever had that I had “behavioral issues” — so they’d dismiss my screaming and crying as anything serious.

In other words, no matter how much I screamed and cried, no one was going to come for me.

This is the reality he created for me, wherever we went. He’d remind me that I was not a person, but a child, and that children did not own anything of their own.

He’d remind me of my place anytime I dared to call anything “mine” and chastise me for my selfishness.

I didn’t own anything. I wasn’t entitled to anything. Not once did I believe I was entitled to anything, but I kept being punished for thinking I was.

Every behavior of mine was pathologized, and there was nothing I could do about it but try my best to be invisible.

I’d often cry myself to sleep because I knew no one was coming to save me.

I think it says a lot about a person — whether they’re truly “good” or “bad” — when they dismiss a child’s allegations because their parent told them the child is “dramatic” or problematic in some way.

Those same people get featured on the news saying ish like, “I never knew they could do something like this,” or, “Yeah, I saw this coming,” despite never having pushed for any action.

Suffice it to say my story involves police, but none that would do anything. Every officer who ever visited over my cries accepted what he told them: “She’s got a lot of problems. She tends to throw a fit when things don’t go her way. I’m just glad it’s happening at home this time and not at the grocery store.”

Once, my mother called the cops on my dad whilst I was staying with him. My dad hid me in the master bedroom; officers sought me out. A female officer inspected my body, asking me about every bruise and scar.

All the scars were from being a kid; a few bruises were from being a kid, too. The ones that weren’t were from my life at home with my legal guardians — my mother and stepfather — and I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone about those.

This wasn’t the only time they tried to pin their abuse on my father, but it was the last I was aware of.

The other time was when I lived in Wills Point and had just come back from my dad’s house. My mother and stepfather always asked these questions that confused me and led me into saying things that weren’t true, then twisted whatever I said into new questions to further confuse me.

One day, I was held after school for a major bruise I’d sustained from being spanked with a belt and falling. I’d had multiple injuries from my stepfather’s belt “lessons”.

I’d been coached to tell the teacher that my dad’s girlfriend did it, which of course became a whole thing.

I didn’t like lying about my dad. Putting a kid into that kind of situation is extremely cruel and wrong, but holding this act against a child for the rest of her life is even worse.

Was I branded a “dramatic, pathological liar” as the result of choosing the road that kept me alive? Acting out meant abuse, and I never went a day in his care without fearing for my life or his hand.

I stopped telling my mother I didn’t feel safe with him the day she said, “You hear that [his name]? What are you going to do about it?” I realized she didn’t care about me as a person, but as a source of entertainment — a doll.

She would have these dreams when I was a kid that someone would come and take me away from her, and she wouldn’t be able to do anything.

As a child, I perceived this dream as an example of her love for me; as I grew up, I realized she was anxious about something that was hers being taken from her.

The more I distances myself, the more obsessively relentless she was at keeping me in her control.

No choices

I learned to accept my role as their property, so I could live.

That is what kept me alive — along with the fact that I was of monetary value to them. Each time he entered a particular state of rage, my mother would say, “We need the child support.” Eventually she stopped saying that and said his name in the same tone.

Saying yes or no — those were never choices. In that kind of environment, there is no choice — only doing.

Any choices you’re given aren’t real choices, and making the wrong one will be paid for later — in pain, shame, embarrassment…

Unfortunately…

A person viewed as property doesn’t stop being property because they age up.

I thought my mother and her husband was the sole problem — that no one else could be problematic — until I began going for what I wanted in my life.

The more I embraced myself and expressed my independence — which included learning about and developing boundaries, and excluded needing external approval — the more abusive my mother’s extended family became.

My life, for me — that side of my family — the problem? It was me.

When your property begins acting like it shouldn’t, your first thought is, “WTF?!” Of course you’re upset with its audacity.

Looking at people as property, I think this disconnect occurs. It’s easier for a person who views another person as property to perceive that human property as an object instead.

Even when objects are animate, it’s much easier to hurt them or try bending them to your will when you strip them of their humanity.

My abusers stripped me of my humanity so they didn’t have to see theirs in the mirror when they sought to control me, abuse me, and treat me like chattel.

Bet they never saw this coming.