Get it Off Your Chest
Write it Down, Get it Off Your Chest
Approx Age: 13
I learned how long I could hold my breath under the pressure of lukewarm water between moments of panic at the deep end of a day pass public pool. While my best friends, Angel and Melanie were sunning themselves on the patio, I was six feet below the surface of a glorified public bathtub. I had held my breath in instances before, for quite a long time under controlled circumstances, of course. I was an avid horror movie fan and every drowning scene, swimming scene or scene with a victim trapped in a room filled with water left me holding my breath to see if I could survive; if that poor person’s fate would have been my own.
I remember looking up with burning eyes and sinuses that felt like my face was on fire and seeing Angel’s strawberry blonde hair reflecting sunlight as she peered under her pink plastic rimmed sunglasses at me through 6 plus feet of over chlorinated, slightly cloudy and over glorified reused bath water. The charm bracelet I made her swayed back and forth on her wrist and her dark purple painted nails looked almost black. I hated pools in general but still went swimming because that’s what my friends wanted to do. I felt at ease in a bathing suit with them because, unlike most of my classmates, their bodies looked like mine; round and full. We had developed early and each one of us had parts of our bodies that already, at our young ages, we hated and we had taken turns that morning picking out cute baggy t-shirts to wear over our suits. We agreed, if one of us has the courage to take their shirt off, we all would in solidarity and support.
I had taken a risk and jumped off the diving board simply because I wanted to cross it off some sort of list I had kept in my mind. I wasn’t a strong swimmer and it wasn’t my fault; my pool experiences up until that time were limited to lower middle class, unmowed backyard above ground, highly under maintained and essentially celebrated leaf and bug trap pools. They were four and a half feet deep stretched rubbery tarp with sharp metal edges and ladders that didn’t quite sit correctly and tight floaties shoved up into my armpits so restrictive that I could feel my pulse in my palms. Even then, with those pools experiences, I preferred to relax, skimming and rescuing bugs clinging to life on the surface and occasionally floating on a raft, staring at the sky than to splash or “play”
I didn’t realize how long the trek from the bottom of the pool actually felt to a child who could barely swim. I had passed the random “swim test” yeah but swimming across the water is a bit different than swimming up through water when your breath has been taken from you in a pure fit of terror. I remember when I was at the bottom of the pool, when my butt sank right down and I felt the smooth tile on my thighs thinking “It’s up and down the river not across the stream” A really off color joke my brain told me whenever I was in a situation where I felt unsafe. My best guy friend and I had heard it in a movie in reference to a suicide attempt with a razor blade by a main character.
My mind does that still to this day; it cycles through thoughts and images like switching channels on a television at a new friend’s house whose parents could afford a cable television subscription.. I remember every thought I had as I kicked my legs as hard as I could in a rush to the surface to breathe. I remember feeling my thigh fat ripple through the water as my calves started to burn while I pointed my toes way too sharply. I remember thinking, as I saw my two best friends shaking their heads at me through the water, how gorgeous both of their hair and skin were and how secretly jealous I was that they both had such unique and striking features and I was a plain jane chubby, boring mousy haired dork. I remembered the moment my mother met Angel, how she fawned over how pretty she was; her skin glowed and her lips were always a rosie pink. I remembered thinking how slighted I felt when my mother absolutely melted over Angel’s beauty but never mentioned her weight and shape which was much heavier and rounder than mine. I had been convinced through months and months of brow beating and forced dieting that I was unsightly because I was heavy. I remember telling myself to calm down and not gasp for air once I did breach the surface so my friends wouldn’t realize that I had just almost drowned myself like a complete fool. All the while, I counted in my head “One one thousand….two one thousand…..three one thousand” What was 15 seconds of my life felt like full blown minutes. I learned too that had I calmed myself down, let go and just pushed off the bottom of the pool, eventually I would have reached the surface in plenty of time to not drown.
That is how my brain works in moments of stress, I channel surf through sensory experiences and intrusive thoughts while I keep track of time in some manner so that I don’t get caught up in how long something lasts. When bad things happen to children, some of us develop a strange co-dependent relationship with time in order to get through abuse, neglect and living nightmares. I learned early on that I could manipulate time in my mind by dissociating and focusing on details; colors and scents, sounds and imagery, quotes from movies and lyrics from songs. Time flows differently for trauma kids. Even as adults we struggle with how our bodies perceive time.
I learned that I could hold my breath much longer than I thought that summer; much longer than in the pool and under much more stressful circumstances. I learned that I could hold my breath for over a full minute while a 120 pound woman sat on my chest. I learned that if I carefully let out air slowly rather than a complete exhale, I’d have more room to gasp for more air later on. I learned that I could hold my breath through a series of hammer fist punches to my face, head and neck. I learned that if I didn’t panic, eventually I would float to the surface; I would pass out or…my mother would tire herself out and walk away. I learned that some of those actresses in those horror movies that I loved, despite their shrieks and best attempts, had no idea what it felt like to be surrounded by life preserving air and yet not be able to take it in. I learned that its much more terrifying for me to drown in a pool than it would be to have someone choke the life out of me.
The memories are still like strobe lights in a dark room for me. I’ve been piecing them together like so many strips of film blanketing an editing floor; I know the pieces are real and go together but their order sometimes escapes me and because of that, I lose the plot and myself within it. Time passes differently for trauma kids and while I know my memories are real, I sometimes have to start with the visceral experiences. I remember holding my breath and the burning sensation gnawing in my lungs after I coughed and gasped for relief as my throat and head pounded with welts and bruises forming.
I’m supposed to write this as a letter to my mother; to heal. We had moved further from our family after the Social Services visit that left me in the crosshairs of both you and John. You had told me not to say a word and to keep my fucking mouth shut. This new house was a surprise blessing as I lucked out and had friends within walking distance and your work schedule and time away with your boyfriend and his family gave me a reprieve from having a constant critical analysis of everything I said, did and ate. John was busy because his girlfriend and her family were now a comfortable walking distance and for the first time I had the place to myself. You had flirted for a time with actually filling the prescription that you forced upon me; prozac is now contraindicated for patients under 18 years of age. Hindsight is 20/20 right? I was going through another bout of withdrawal and I wasn’t able to sleep.
The heat of the summer had set in which meant that every one of the windows of the house would be shut tight, likely roughly taped, curtains would be pulled and the air conditioners would seemingly serve little purpose other than to recycle the cigarette laden air that wafted up the stairs and under my door. Ironically, summer usually meant that our house was darker than average which a child with depression would find counter productive to any “healing”. Let’s be honest, there wasn’t a focus on healing was there? Prozac was a double edged treatment not a cure that you hoped would quell my “outbursts” and my eating binges and doctors would later realize that children shouldn’t take it.
I wouldn’t know until the next summer, once the fog of Prozac had cleared, just how much I would come to dread the weekends; the late nights when you wouldn’t have to worry about getting up early for work the next morning. What average kid dreads summer vacation? One that knows their backyard will be full of alcoholics, drug addicts and derelicts and a menagerie of other colorful characters that shouldn’t be permitted around animals let alone impressionable children. I learned how to lock an unlockable door that year. I had already begun to have a distaste for summer evenings in this short lived house because the neighborhood parents didn’t often let their children spend time with me; they convinced one another that you had AIDS and that our home wasn’t safe for their kids. I had their pity but not their approval. Sleepovers were non-existent so, I had learned to stay out as late as I possibly could to keep out of the way. I had become accustomed to meeting new people in the evenings in passing; in the summers as you often brought someone home. I didn’t often learn their names because I had become a quick judge of character and I knew that most men were only there for one thing and not all of them were there for you.
You had spent the night like so many others with one of your boyfriends having loud sex and I had struggled all night to fall and stay asleep. He and I crossed paths as you went upstairs together. I had held my bladder all evening trying to avoid eye contact let alone an actual conversation with either of you. To this day, as an adult I still can’t humor drunk people or suffer fools well. I mistimed going to the bathroom and unfortunately crossed paths with both of you in what was an awkward exchange in my bedroom doorway that likely added to the events that would follow. “Hi there, I’m……” he said as he met eyes with me and I abruptly cut him off. “Yeah don’t waste your time, we won’t be seeing one another again after tonight, dude and I’m too tired to care.” I could tell he was shocked by such a sentence coming out of a young girl’s mouth and I was too eager to pee to add a quip or wait for a retort. I often enjoyed messing with the men you brought home; they weren’t too bright and I got quite a bit of practice honing my skills of hurting the feelings of strangers with sarcasm in ways that left them speechless.
The memory of ritual Saturday morning cereal binging sessions in front of the television came to mind that evening; images and sound bites of old cartoon cats caterwauling on fences under the full moon late in the evening only to find themselves dodging boots tossed from windows by nondescript hands. With exhausted eyes I reached for the nearest object to me, pulled my door open and heaved a handful of whatever had, by chance, fallen upon my blind grasp in the dark; it wasn’t a boot. I cringed almost immediately but in slow motion as I came to the realization that the distinct rattling sound that was now traveling in the opposite direction of my hand at a rather high speed was a large plastic container full of glass beads for a bead loom. In hindsight, the sound of thousands of glass beads hitting a hardwood floor is a rather pretty tinkle and sprinkle of airy almost ethereal magic; almost like a rainstick but spread across the space and acoustics of an entire room. It echoed and flowed as they slid across the floor, under the railing and plinked down the stairs. I immediately broke out in one of the loudest deepest bouts of belly laughter that I have had to this day; those beads had a back story and while I knew my ass was cooked I didn’t care. It was totally worth it, I had thought as I quickly shut my door.
Like with all moments where I have worry or regret or make a mistake, the moment those beads poured down the stairs, I dissociated and time seemed to rewind for me. Earlier that summer I had spent time at Derrick’s house. You and his mother, a lesbian womanizer and avid cocaine user, alcoholic as well as skilled child beater had put your heads together and decided that the best way to care for your troublesome, damaged children was to take turns not caring for either one of us in one another’s empty homes. It amounted to me being a latch key kid in another random house for a week at a time with my best friend so I didn’t care much. We had spent that evening watching horror movies in the dark and enjoying scaring one other by the silliest of creature features and monster stories. Trauma kids do that, they like to scare the hell out of themselves with the nonsensical fantasy of horror and thrillers because the reality of their lives is terrifying enough without whimsy and special effects. We abruptly pretended to be asleep as we heard the muffled talking and rattling of keys fumbling in the door. His mother had stumbled home with her newest conquest; a drunk woman from the Star bar walking distance away. We proceeded to hide until we needed to find a distraction from the sounds coming from upstairs.
We reached for a king-size bag of cool-ranch Doritos and sat across from one another barely able to see each other’s faces; illuminated only by the bright yellow street lamp outside. His face was segmented by contrasting lines of darkness and bright light as the partially opened blinds mapped out the fluorescence into stripes. His eyes always sparkled, even when he was sad and this night, in between the tears of fear and embarrassment he had, his eyes were absolutely twinkling. His glasses sat on the table so he squinted at me through a cheeky smile as we quietly counted. 1…2…..3..CRUNCH. We would fill our mouths with Doritos and eat them as loudly as we possibly could to drown out the noise and then laugh so hard we couldn’t breath at the sheer stupidity of it all.
We had spent our birthday money that morning on huge paper lunch bags full of candy from Bonsal’s Penny candy shop down the street. He complimented Margaret’s lipstick and “Whatever happened to Baby Jane” thick black eyebrows and we left giggling with our spoils. Cherry drops, twizzlers, skittles and mini M&Ms were now littered across the glass top coffee table amongst our game cartridges and art supplies, crumpled pages that didn’t quite make the cut for our comic book and my prized bead loom that I never quite learned how to use.
The noises from upstairs got louder and he fumbled around on the table until he came up with a handful of something. I heard the familiar plastic pop of a mini M&Ms container, we had been doing shots of them most of the evening so this wasn’t an unfamiliar flirt of sound. I waited patiently for the grumbled growls of pleasure and the crunch of the candy coating that would usually have us both splitting sides in laughter but instead heard my best friend gag and watched him jump up almost out of his skin. I knew immediately and what was one of the most hilariously panicked moments of belly laughter and hysterical floundering that we’d ever had or ever would turned quickly to a stampede of terror in both of us. Yes it was funny and as he spit glass bead loom beads about in a panic we both came to a sobering realization that his OCD laden mother would be livid if we didn’t perfectly clean the mess up without disturbing her in her moments upstairs.
We couldn’t use the vacuum and we couldn’t turn the lights on or risk his mother seeing us awake through the curtain covered doorless entrance to her room. A role of duct tape was discovered in the kitchen and we proceeded to try to painstakingly dab up the shiny little glass bits in organized waves. We would never clean up in time with this method and instead proceeded to wrap one another completely in duct tape. What would ensue would be a mad-cap goofball rolling and plopping on the floor together. At that point we both realized the damage had been done. That’s the other thing trauma kids do, we leverage the punishment with the infraction and we often realize the ironfist sentence would have come with much less of an insult to the rules so we might as well enjoy it while we can.
I came to in my own bedroom from my moment of reminiscence, still giggling but even more exhausted. Stress and worry does that to a person; it exhausts them. I was sad now too, I missed Derrick terribly and still couldn’t make sense of losing his friendship. I knew that I couldn’t risk the time spent in the open to clean up the mess I had created and couldn’t problem solve the conundrum so, I accepted my fate. I finally decided shoving toilet paper into my ears so that I could have some peace would be best. The whole upstairs smelled like alcohol and sweat and I remember wanting to open my window but worrying because the box elder bugs had swarmed so severely that season.
I spent the night carefully organizing my room, refolding clothes and cataloging my beloved bookshelf full of children’s books that were well below my reading level. I didn’t care. I had read them each dozens of times and seeing the familiar illustrations and knowing the endings brought me comfort. When the house was quiet at night, when you were all sleeping, I would sometimes sit on the porch in the cool air and just breathe. I couldn’t enjoy the porch on nights when you had visitors; there was no telling when they would leave and I had learned that some of them would be opportunists when they found a young girl alone at night.
I watched the sunrise that morning and listened as you got up to start your day, music blaring on the radio downstairs and the smell of coffee mingled into the billows of chain smoked second hand clouds. I listened as the door next to mine creaked open and heavy footsteps fell onto the floor and almost instantly I was delighted by what could only be described factually, a nihilistic-metal head, violent teenager falling down the stairs feet first; hitting every step on the way down with every single boney protruding joint he had only to utter a sequence of incomprehensible high pitch squeals . John had slid down the stairs on cotton socks over the remaining glass beads and found himself hungover and confused at the bottom. I wish I had the courage to have opened that door just to see the shock and confusion on his stupid face.
I was exhausted and my body finally shut down. I closed the venetian blinds and climbed into the bottom bunk of the bed under my comforter. My body had finally let go and I was blissfully falling deeper when the door of the room was kicked open. You scrambled into the bed on top of me grabbing for the covers that I had tightly wrapped around my body. Trauma kids do that; we cocoon for comfort. You grabbed the only things you had access to, my hair and ears and you repeatedly shook and slammed my head up and down until the pillow had migrated and my scalp began to bash into the wood beam behind me.
You screamed until I heard your voice crack as you ranted to stay awake in between slurs and insults but my body was shutting down even before you left the room. I couldn’t stay awake even if I had wanted to. I had learned from a friend that if I tickled the roof of my mouth, my palette with my tongue I would have an easier time. “Imagine if the guys on the Titanic had done that…” I remember him saying. It didn’t work for them if they did and it didn’t work for me. I don’t know how much time passed before you came back into the room but the second interaction was more violent than the first; I had fallen asleep outside of my blankets and you now had access and leverage. The flurry of blows this time were focused on my chest. I don’t know if you left the room or just climbed out of the bed but I woke a third time to your dragging me out of the bed by my feet. My head hit the painted hardwood floors hard and I was immediately dizzy. The headache that followed felt like a perpetual ice cream brain freeze.
I remember processing through all of the different pains of my body at that moment. The last injury to register was the sharp sting of the rugburn and your fingers around my sensitive ankles as you dragged me to the middle of the room across the cheap berber carpet. I didn’t black out then from the concussion, I traveled; through sensory experiences and random thoughts and channels as I passed out from being so exhausted . “Anywhere but here” I remember thinking to myself. You climbed onto my chest and closed your fists and my eyes wandered to the double windows on my left; they were covered in elder bugs. I started counting. They really are quite a striking insect with bright red wings and a pop of silky jet black in the shape of a v down their backs. One elder bug, One hammerfisted punch, one insult. My head throbbed. Two…three elder bugs. Two and three and four more punches. I realized that if I wasn’t careful you would squeeze the air right out of my lungs and my arms, pinned beneath your knees, had started to throb. I could have fought back but I didn’t because at least in this moment you would tire yourself out and I was still questioning whether I was caught in a night terror.
I learned how to conserve my air that day; how to exhale slowly to fend off the panic that one tends to go through when they are being suffocated. One one thousand…..two one thousand…….six..seven…eight box elder bugs….nine…ten punches. I learned that I could hold my breath for one minute and 16 seconds that day. 76 One thousands. I lost count of the box elder bugs, the punches and the insults though.
