dear [not just YA] author
21 Jul 2009 05:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaigouI've always figured eventually I'd explain the reasons why I'd post about city/street, and a bit of how I ended up there if that might help others comprehend, but first, this segue is overdue. It's for all those authors who write for a teenage audience, or have teenage protagonists, because your genre has a lot to answer for. Not that this is your fault, personally, but it is a responsibility you bear, I think. And it's one you need to at least be aware of, if you aren't already, so if you choose to disregard you do so intentionally.
It's a little like deciding that in your book, all Hispanics are maids or plumbers: if you're going to play to the stereotypes, at least be able to look me in the face when we meet and say, yes, I'm aware of the issues surrounding using ethnic characters as lower-class background only; my use of that was intentional. Whether this can alleviate the larger issue would be contextual, based on the book you wrote, but it's still better than you giving me a pop-eyed look and proclaiming you had no idea! that anyone would be offended to see all Hispanics in your book are lazy, drunken, ill-educated part-timers.
This is more related to the issues mentioned in part III than in part I or part II. The first two parts mostly did a lot of implying. So here goes.
I grew up in the generation of the After School Special, before there was a specific "young adult" section in the bookstore or library. Not to say there weren't books that suited teen and pre-teen quite well; it was just that you had to do a little digging either in the 'older kids' areas or selective perusing through the 'adult' (read: mainstream regular) fiction. I recall two basic classes of books about teenagers, roughly: the adventure books — often SFF, historical (such as Kipling's works), or mysteries in the school of Nancy Drew — and the wackier distopian-fiction so big in the 60s, of which Lord of the Flies might be a forerunner.
The other class of books seemed to be geared towards an adult audience but with teenage protagonists, and often the tone was — I'd apply this now, though I didn't then, obviously — a bit more exploitative. Kids on drugs! Girls being promiscuous! Go Ask Alice and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden are two classics of those overly heavy ham-handed companions to the After School Special. Even when reading that type in middle school, I wasn't so stupid as to miss the strong sense that I was reading something written to make adults feel better.
So here's what I learned from the age of 8 through the end of high school, thanks to that nebulous genre that got its start around my middle school years and has since grown into the juggernaut known as the YA world. The assumptions and patterns, from what I can tell, remain strong in mainstream fiction and entertainment, which means even if some few are writing otherwise, there's still a fair bit to go. Thus, here's the kid logic that I'd ask you please consider the next time you set fingers to keyboard to create a teenaged-protagonist.
I'm not asking you to fix the world. I'm just saying that if you want to keep it broken for a share of your readers, at least be aware you are.
1. Abused kids have parents without jobs, who slept on the sofa.
Classic scene from book or TV show: kid comes home, Dad's on the sofa asleep. Dad wakes up, yells at kid, hits kid, and kid flees to room or to neighbors or whatever. Somewhere in there, backstory is that Dad's been laid-off and has taken to sleeping on the sofa during the day. Why? I never got that, as a kid. Adults have beds; that's where they sleep, like anyone. Sleeping on the sofa was bizarre.
My dad didn't get laid-off; my dad was a workaholic. My mother stayed home (and ran a business from the home) while I was little, taught part-time while I was in grade school, and went back to work full-time when I entered middle school. The only time a parent slept on a sofa in my house was if Dad fell asleep while watching his alumna play their big rival and the score wasn't close enough to keep his interest.
Obviously, for abuse to be happening, a parent had to be laid off and prone to sleeping during the day. My parents didn't, and thus I couldn't relate to those abused kids — because they were abused, and I wasn't.
2. Abused kids were always embarrassed to bring friends over, because their parents would be drunk or high.
Nope. Not once was I ever embarrassed about bringing friends home, for fear of how my parents would react — hell, I even brought home friends with mohawks and studded jackets and didn't think twice about that. My parents were articulate, well-educated, charming (in the case of my mother) and professorially-intimidating (in the case of my father) but if I'd ever walked through the door and found either of them falling-down-drunk, I think I would've checked for cameras.
Obviously, a big part of being in an abusive family was that parents embarrassed their kids by being useless, shiftless, drunkards, and since my parents weren't, clearly I wasn't abused.
3. Abused kids were perfect angels away from their family, and everyone liked them, and there were always scenes of friends' parents feeling angry at the parents for treating 'such a good kid' so badly.
Couldn't relate to that, either. I rarely visited friends' houses, because their environments felt alien to me, for reason I couldn't put a finger on. I'd talk to other friends' parents and then shut up abruptly, afraid I'd crossed a line, and they'd realize that actually, no, I wasn't a good kid. I wasn't even likeable. The majority of my life, my mother had been telling me that I was completely unloveable, and the only reason my own family put up with me was because they were legally obligated to do so. I wasn't naive enough to think this would all go away just by being elsewhere, and in fact, was terrified everyone else would find out my mother was right.
Nope, I was quite certain that in fact the parents were tolerating me, maybe out of pity, or maybe they were too stupid to realize and I had them hoodwinked, but nobody's stupid forever. Therefore, since no one was raving about how I was an amazing and awesome kid to the contrary of what I heard at home, obviously... I wasn't abused.
4. Abused kids in books and TV worked hard, really really hard, and when the parents yelled at them, it was always either from a misunderstanding or for something totally not the kid's fault (or even within the kid's control).
Again, nope. I was an absolute hellion in school, from about 1st grade on. I remember turning over a kid's desk in 1st grade when he pissed me off; I cheated outrageously in 2nd grade and rationalized it as the teacher said you had to turn in a paper with your name on it — she never said it had to be your paper that had your name on it, which seemed perfect to me because then I had more time to read. I yelled back at my 4th grade and 5th grade teachers. (Oddly, I don't recall getting into any trouble in 6th grade, mostly b/c the teachers then kept me way too busy.)
In 7th grade I bounced back and forth (literally, quarter by quarter!) between 'advanced' classes and remedial. I was too distractable to keep up in the advanced classes, while the remedial classes were often hands-on, enough of a change for me to enjoy the work and get it done... and just as I got bored, I'd be switched back into the advanced class to be re-surrounded by peers fully aware I'd been switched out only six weeks before for being Not Good Enough. I was almost held back in 7th grade, and again in 8th grade, and both times it took my parents in full-on shouting matches with the school principal (I learned, years later) before the school agreed to advance me.
In 9th grade I settled down, somewhat, but then I became a jock and who cares about the rest. I never smoked, drank, or did drugs, but I learned to forge my mother's signature so perfectly even she thought it was her signature, and as far as the school knew, I was sick — or at a doctor's appt — for about three days out of every four by my junior year. If I didn't have the car, I walked off-campus and caught the bus to my favorite museum or park. I did not get straight A's. I didn't really much come close. I was, on paper, a slightly below-average student who had twelve years of "you're not working up to your full potential" yammered at me, almost daily.
So... yeah, clearly when my parents got really mad at me, and I promised to work harder, it never happened, and so they were probably justified in throwing hot coffee in my face for back-talking. Or taking away the birthday gift they'd given me only a week before, and giving it to my sister instead. Or for smacking me. Or for catching me by the arm and squeezing so hard I got bruises. Because abused kids did really well in school, so that everyone — including this young reader — could see that the parents had no reason to treat their kids like that. But, obviously, I couldn't be abused, because my parents had lots of reasons, right?
5. Kids who lived in abusive houses weren't usually poor, but were definitely working-class, and their houses were always messy, and their parents cussed, a lot.
Again, obviously I couldn't be abused. My parents were college-educated, with five degrees between them, and had both taught at some of the most prestigious universities on the eastern seaboard. My father's parents may have been blue-collar, but my dad was a military officer, and most of my parents' friends were as well educated and cosmopolitan and charming as my parents could be. My mother cussed maybe once or twice that I recall, as a child, and both times she was on the phone with a friend and didn't realize I was listening — after which I got the lecture of those being 'adult words' and Not For Your Use.
As for the house? It might get a little cluttered, sometimes, but we had a lot of really nice stuff, and the house was never filthy. Even if my mother had to beat my head in with the vacuum cleaner because I'd done my chores haphazardly, that just meant if the house was dirty in some way it was my fault, not my parents', so clearly, still not abused. In the books and on TV shows, the kids were always working hard to try and clean the house despite the parents not caring, but that's not how it was in my house — I'd do anything to get out of vacuuming, because I could never seem to do it right and it always ended up with my mother yelling at me about how if the house looked like a pigsty it was going to be my fault, that she worked so hard for us to have a nice life and I was the one messing it all up, so... clearly, she had every right to hit me, and that meant it wasn't abuse.
6. The pattern was always very simple, and clear: Dad hit Mom, and then sometimes Mom would get really angry and hit the kids, OR, Dad hit Mom, and then Dad hit the kids.
In those books and shows, Mom didn't hit Dad, and Mom didn't just hit the kids without Dad doing hitting as well, and Mom didn't just hit only one kid and cherish the other kid. Obviously, whatever was going on in my house wasn't abuse, because what I lived with wasn't in a single book or on television — and that meant that every time Mom got mad and things got worse, that the label of 'bad family' couldn't be applied, so I applied the only thing that was left: 'bad kid'.
Slight tangent: looking back, I don't actually recall any stories in which the abusive family was a minority family. It was pretty much always an anglo-saxon family, if one that fit more comfortably into an income segment my maternal grandmother only somewhat affectionately called 'cracker'. The one or two times I can recall the focus being on a black family, the story had a single mother whose boyfriend was abusive, and invariably she'd learn from well-meaning neighbors or intervening (always white) teachers what her so-called boyfriend had been doing, she'd confront the children in tears and promise not to let that happen, because she'd learned her lesson about working two jobs to make ends meet and leaving them alone. Which, looking back, was probably meant to warp and punish single mothers (of any race) more than mangle my impressions of what made for a 'good' or 'bad' family, but still, not with the relating.
7. Abusive parents might be regular or might be mean, but then one drink and they'd start yelling for no reason and hitting everything in sight.
My parents were actually more relaxed after a drink, since they mostly drank when they came home from work and would sit in the den and talk about their day, while each had a glass of wine. On the weekends with adult friends visiting, they might have a beer or two. Out to dinner, they might have a drink or two each.
(This isn't counting the last three years of HS, when my father stopped drinking and my mother took up the co-dependent mantle and began drinking heavily, herself. By that time, regardless, the patterns were solidly set, and if my mother was drinking and became angry, I never made the connection, because I'd never had to, before then.)
But, nope, no Jekyll-and-Hyde routine here. Who my parents were, sober, was pretty much the same as who they were after a glass of wine or a beer — neither are massive drinkers, really, so 'drunken parent' wasn't within my mental scope. And thus, obviously, I couldn't be living in an abusive household.
8. Abused kids got hurt. A lot, and really badly. Like, trip-to-hospital bad. Cigarette-burn-bad. Broken-bone-bad. Thrown-down-stairs-bad.
(Though the one time I did get thrown down the stairs, that did cause a sudden revelation that maybe this wasn't okay for parents to do to kids, but then Mom probably yelled something about how horrible my grades were or how lazy I was about chores, and that just reminded me that in my case, clearly, the line was drawn a bit farther out — if the kid was really bad, then the kid shouldn't complain when really bad things happen.)
The only broken bones I've ever had were three fractured ribs from a horrible car accident, as a senior in HS. Never had a cast, never been burned, though I suspect in hindsight there were at least three times my mother did give me a contusion, but we never had the hospital emergency room visit with someone official looking dubious as to whether I really fell out of a window or walked into a door or whatever other stupid reasons mean parents gave in books or on TV. Then again, my mother didn't like her coffee extra-hot, so all the times she threw it at me, I got more damage from the mug than from the hot liquid, and most of the time — seeing how we usually lived somewhere hot and humid — it was an iced drink, not a hot drink. Only abused kids got scalding-hot drinks thrown at them.
I was thrown, slammed into things, hit with telephones and vacuum cleaners and mugs and books, shoved, clawed, gripped hard enough to bruise, had fingers and arms twisted, hair pulled, neck clawed, face and arms scratched, slapped, even nearly strangled a few times. But I never had a broken bone and I never got burned enough to need bandages and I never had stitches, so from everything I saw in books and TV, it was pretty clear that I wasn't abused.
9. If one of the parents was military, it was usually Dad, and if Dad was military, he was all military-precision and don't-backtalk-me tyranny and ran the house with an iron fist and hit anyone who got out of line, and that was military-family-abuse.
I think the most either parent ever demanded of such formalities from me, or my sister, was that we try to use "sir" and "ma'am" with our grandparents because it made them happy, but that if we forgot, our parents would rise quickly to our defense that within family, informality is okay. (But my father always used "sir" and "ma'am" with his parents and his in-laws, which even as a kid I thought was really cool; to me, it said those people mattered to my father that he'd give them the same respect he gave his commanding officers, and is also part of the reason I didn't work harder to "sir" and "ma'am" anyone in my near or extended family, as a tiny private rebellion of my own.)
My grandmother could be quite blistering if you made a bed while visiting and didn't make hospital corners, but most of the time my own folks were willing to settle for me at least pulling the covers up and tucking the pillows nicely — a demand they pretty much dropped by the time I hit HS, anyway. Inspection? At home? The one time (as an adult) I mentioned it to Dad, he said he didn't want that at home; he dealt with it at work, and that's where it'd stay. Mom, raised in military family with a bit more formality than ours, felt the same. No, the military was not to blame and was obviously not a reliable pattern for explaining what went on in our house, because Dad was not the usual book-or-TV career officer.
In fact, my parents went out of their way to avoid any military colleagues who showed those tyrannical traits. Again, not a story that fit what I lived with, and that was abuse, so my life obviously wasn't.
10. A parent who was mean to his/her kids was almost always also mean to adults, and in general nobody would like them.
I think I realized this pattern somewhere in early HS, reading a book for English class, or something. By that point I was self-aware enough to get that there was more going on than what I'd seen/measured up til then, and this realization was a hugely depressing moment for me... because everyone liked my mother. Everyone. She could charm paint off a wall if she sets her mind to it, and most of the time, she doesn't need to set her mind to it, because she just does it as naturally as anyone else does breathing.
Even then, I wasn't surprised in the least when — on the rare occasions I ever let slip word or even hint about what life was like — adults would just assume off the bat that it was my recalcitrance, my attitude, my difficulty, and that (here we go again) if I'd just "be a better kid" then everything would be okay, would be happy. Because someone as cool and funny and intelligent as my mother couldn't possibly be just plain mean, and in books and on TV, abusive parents were equally mean to pretty much everyone, or at least just only kind of liked. They weren't popular, and my mom was popular — hell, most of my friends liked her more than they liked me.
This isn't to say my friends were totally blind, since my mom did slip every now and then, but it was always in a kind of snide way, enough that it could be brushed off. Though if I did any reflexive brushing-off by my HS years, I rarely noticed it. I was well beyond questioning much, by then.
Like doing the MBTI (Meyers-Briggs) which just became more fodder for the yelling: my father the INTJ, and me, the ENTJ, and my mother, the ENFP, and my sister, the INFP. You couldn't have better lines drawn if you wrote fiction: "you're just like your father, and you're just as impossible to love." There it was in the book, even (a text I later learned was discredited for its extreme slant against the NT style): that NTs are cruel, cold, unlikeable, too-intellectual, often unfeeling, extremely insensitive, and will hurt everyone who loves them and — as my mom would extrapolate — NTs are doomed to end up alllllllll alone.
Well, who was I to argue with what was there in black-and-white, by someone with a psychoanalysis degree? That was an expert saying those things. Who was I to rebut? I'd taken the test and been revealed as an NT, so... yeah, more proof I was A Bad Person. That was just how it was, and the sooner I reconciled to living my life that way, the sooner I'd, well, not be happy, but maybe less miserable. Lower the standards, as it were.
I mention all that so you're aware of the backstory for when my best friend took the test, and my mother was explaining the results to her. I can't even recall my friend's type, only that my mother contrasted for illustration, my friend's type to mine: "you're fortunate, because your type is very good with people, and always welcome, sensitive to other people's feelings, not at all like NTs, who are quite cruel and unfeeling." I barely even noticed it, because it was one more jab in the daily litany of such. It was, what it was.
Later that evening, when it was the two of us alone, my friend expressed outrage that my own mother would say that — and while I was in the room, even!
I recall being somewhat taken aback by this fury at my mother, and a bit uncomfortable, too. Yeah, so I didn't really like hearing that I was cold and cruel and unloveable, but it wasn't like I could argue with it, because that's what it meant to be an NT, and that's what I was. My friend remained disgruntled and pissed, and by that point, seemed annoyed with me, as well, and I couldn't figure out why (and didn't really want to try, at that, in that way we all shy away instinctively from major fault lines). I just remember having to do a bit of a tap dance through several topics before she let me change the subject, though for a long time after that she seemed to watch me with a peculiar expression, sometimes.
That was the only time I can ever remember someone not liking my mother, for any reason. All my friends were practically infatuated with her; if they weren't, they sure never let on to me. So, not only was it clearly a situation where things weren't abusive, but this also leads into another reason I knew my household didn't match what I saw in books and TV.
11. When abusive parents get mad and yell and hit, they're always lying while they're yelling.
Ever seen that famous scene in Mommie Dearest, the one about the wire hangers? Joan Crawford discovers her adopted daughter hanging up clothes on wire hangers, goes into a rage, and beats her daughter while screaming, "no wire hangers! no wire hangers!" (If you didn't know, now you do.)
That's what I mean by lying: the constant element in books and TV was that when the abusive parent got mad enough to hit, it was for some trumped-up reason that the kid couldn't have, wouldn't have, known or predicted. I remember watching that scene in HS and my first thought was, "well, that's clearly abuse, because there's no way that girl could've known that wire hangers weren't allowed." Because if she had known, by that logic, then she deserved whatever she got.
I mean, my mother must've told me once if she told me a thousand times to vacuum just so and couldn't I tell that I'd missed a spot? Or that when she said to hand over something to my sister even if I wasn't done with it yet, that this meant I shouldn't backtalk or complain but just hand it over and don't ask for it again later, or else — so it's not like Mom was lying when she got mad as she told me again that I shouldn't do X or Y.
It was true, she'd warned me, and I forgot and did it or did it on purpose or did it and hoped I could get away with it, and when I didn't... well, whatever I got, I deserved. Because she wasn't lying; it wasn't some last-minute trumped-up excuse. Well, usually. Sometimes it was just that I didn't extrapolate well enough to see that when she said "do this" that she also meant "and don't do that," so, again, not with the lying-while-yelling.
And that's why I was both surprised and uncomfortable when my friend got mad on my behalf: because my mother wasn't lying. She didn't lie to me; she'd made that clear from the very beginning, as far back as I could remember. She told me things that hurt, but she prefaced it with "I'm telling you this because I love you," and "I'm telling you this because no one else ever will, but you need to know it," and "I'm telling you this because you're out of touch with reality and don't realize how you appear to other people."
For a friend to be so angry that I'd be called cold and cruel just confused me, at the same time it made me withdraw a little from our friendship — because obviously my friend didn't know me as well as she thought she did, if she couldn't see truth for what it was. The only sane conclusion (if sane there be, in such a life) was to pull back a little, because if my friend didn't know it then, eventually she would, and then where would I be? So I had to cool down on the friendship before she figured out my mother was right, keep that friend at a distance in hopes I could fake it a little longer.
Because the belief that my mother told the truth meant that I knew when I dealt with other people, the only one lying was me.
But I didn't see that going on in any books or TV, so clearly, I couldn't claim I was abused.
12a. Parents are either abusive and horrible, or they're nice. They can't be both.
Part of this is the constraints of how much page space you've got, and how much screen time you've got — and besides, the drama of pitching a fit and pitching kids out windows is just so much more riveting than the times in-between when everything's lovely, right? But when all the books and shows have the same basic pattern and go through the same basic displays, it becomes an overwhelming message: parents who are sometimes cool and then sometimes cruel are not abusive, because if they were abusive, they'd be like that all the time.
There were stretches when everything was fine, or at least my mom was too distracted to bother much with me. Most of the time, we could go a month or two before another blow-up, and in between I could pretend like things were great. I had no idea what would set things off, other than knowing it'd be me who set it off, so in some ways I lived on eggshells in a back part of my brain, just like that rat in the unpredictable maze. (By the time I was in HS, actually, that tension on my part, alone, was sometimes enough to set things off, because my mom would react to my anticipation. Although I note that by that point, we had alcohol oiling the way, which complexifies things.)
But in abusive families in books and on TV, every time the kid comes home, the parent's on them about something. There's a stability to it, and sometimes the kids were written/acted as though they were expecting it. I could see them bracing for it — while the one thing Mommie Dearest did get right (for me, at least) was the look of shock on the girl's face when Crawford flies into a rage. Sheer, unadulterated shock, because she had no idea she'd just stepped on a land mine. But other than that movie, the land mines were portrayed as regular events, close enough together that I almost felt pity for those fictional kids, because at least I had good times, too.
And a bit of self-hatred at the same time, as well, because when I had bad times... those were my fault, anyway. I envied those fictional kids for having the assurance of knowing this was just how their parents were, and that it made no difference what the kid said or did. Big Ben's gonna chime when it chimes, and parents are gonna hit when they hit, and that's abuse. So, clearly, my family wasn't abusive.
12b. Kids who are abused don't like their parents. They fear them, they endeavor to please them, but they don't actually like their parents.
Thing is, I did like my mother, as a child — if a kind of uneasy liking, in that life was unpredictable — but if we were out and about, or people were visiting, or it was an easy-going day, I liked her a great deal. So I feel like this has to be said, rather than leave anyone with the impression that my childhood has left me an embittered person who loathes the parental units. I don't.
No, for all I went though, I still like, and respect, both my father and my mother, as human beings. I'll focus on my mother since she's getting the brunt of it here, and state it for the record that I'd want to know her even if I weren't related to her. She's funny, witty, a little goofy sometimes, incredibly bright and amazingly creative, always has eighteen different projects going and is always up for more; she's very much the life of the party and someone who enjoys doing things and seeing things and learning and experiencing.
She's educated and cosmopolitan but retains enough of her Southern upbringing that she doesn't intimidate people but sets them at ease, and she can find something in common with anyone, from the recent immigrant who worked as the night janitor when she stayed in the hospital to the multiple-honored Hungarian diplomat to the US who was a good family friend. She's equally at home at the Met for international opera or at a five-star restaurant with oyster forks as she is at a corner dive in suburban Macon GA that serves up barbecue with paper towels by a woman with a beehive.
She's liberal and progressive and has always believed — not just lip service said, but truly believed — that gays deserve every right as straights even back when I was a kid and being gay was still a mental illness in the DSM. She marched for women's rights and for desegregation, and has always been a proponent of diversity in all forms, and raised me to believe a single person can always make a difference, and a very small difference is better than none. (She sobbed all the way through Obama's acceptance speech, not surprising for a woman who drove four hours to see MLK.) She always told me, you can marry someone shorter than you, younger than you, a different color or culture or religion than you, or who makes less than you, or you can choose to not marry at all: as long as you're with someone you love, the rest is negotiable. Maybe even irrelevant.
My mother said a lot of things that hurt, and that even now — after we've made our peace and are pretty good friends with stronger boundaries — those scars remain, but the one thing she never, ever said was that I was stupid. Never. She always, always emphasized that I was wicked smart, though the tests that proved this were also the likely source of her insistence that I was mentally ill. How else do you explain someone so smart, doing everything so wrong? (Note that I wasn't physically hyperactive, and ADHD wasn't quite on the horizon, so any doctors and therapists concluded I was like that because I wanted to be.) Which means I was raised with the confidence that even if I was crazy, I was still able to run rings around anyone I'd meet. Maybe those rings would be a little lop-sided, but hey, still rings!
Both my parents had/have a lot of really amazing things about them. I can't think of a single year of my life in which they didn't do something, if not several somethings, that made me very proud of them, and proud to be their child. The fact that I couldn't live up to that, myself, was a source of disappointment to me and them, and the cause of a lot of the swirling anger and hurt. But that was my shortcoming, I knew, and just the way it was.
Kids in books and on TV were abused. That was obvious from script and narrative, and a big sign was that they were never conflicted about whether they liked their parents as independent, distinct human beings outside of the family obligations. Their parents were obviously bad, and the kids didn't like them. Mine weren't, and I did, so obviously, those kids were abused. I wasn't.
13. Teachers (or guidance counselors) can identify, seem to like better, and reach out to, kids with abusive families.
Every book and show, there was at least one adult figure — almost always a teacher — who saw the kid daily and said, something's not right. That teacher would either be extra-special friends with the kid, or spend extra time with the kid, or maybe even intervene, up to and including the After School Special, Touched-by-Whatever, kinda Disneyfied ending.
See, right there, I knew I wasn't abused, because my teachers couldn't stand me. In 1st grade, when I turned over the classmate's desk? The teacher made me stand on one leg in front of the class for the entire morning, as punishment even after I apologized to the entire class. In 2nd grade, 3rd grade, 4th grade, 5th grade: every year, I had a teacher who'd single me out for ridicule, for whatever cruel reasons of their own (and by 4th and 5th grades I was down to yelling back at them in defiance, unwilling to put up with it yet again). I think my 6th grade teacher liked me, or at least tolerated me; my 7th grade teachers didn't seem to know what to do with me, and same for my 8th grade teachers. I annoyed most of my teachers in 9th grade — except for my science teacher who I learned to avoid even though I liked him, because I couldn't seem to do well on his tests and I knew he'd dislike me if I hung around too much.
In 10th grade, I met a teacher who did keep me sane and in one piece, and did open his door to me even when that meant I was sitting in his class during my lunch break. (I also had a huge crush on him, but to his credit, he was always gentlemanly, and always treated me like an equal, and I'd say I soaked it up.) And finally, a teacher in my senior year who, I suspect, knew more than he let on, because despite being brusque and ruling the school like a bantam rooster, he was always kind to me.
But no one ever actually said anything outright, and besides, by the time I was 16, I wasn't so stupid I was going to say anything myself. I'd had enough people — teachers, counselors, preachers, neighbors, and so on — pointing out that if I just worked harder, tried better, then bad things wouldn't happen. What was some johnny-come-lately teacher going to do to offset years of that training?
And most definitely, not a single teacher ever said a word to me about the bruises on my arms or the scratches on my face or even the bruises around my neck. No more than the friends who had to have seen plenty themselves, or the teammates or coaches I spent so many hours with every day. I know the signs showed up, because I could see them on me, but eventually I accepted that these were invisible to everyone else.
No, my experience with teachers was that they, almost even more than my own parents, were the enemies... and since in books and on TV, there's always at least one teacher who genuinely likes the kid and feels sympathy for the kid being abused, well, there you go. I wasn't innocent, and I wasn't liked, and I wasn't wanted, so... I wasn't abused.
14. A parent is always bigger and stronger than the kid being hit, and the book or show makes it real clear that this is part of why it's so bad, because the kid is outranked and outflanked (cf military abuse).
This was a subtle one that didn't sink in until I was maybe in college, but when it did, it was like, oh, yeah, well, of course! That makes sense. (You know the conclusion by now, so I'll let you sing the round in eight-part harmony on your own.)
Starting in my 1st year of HS, I was one of those kids who always came in last on those stupid annual Presidential fitness whatever things. I read books and I cycled (pretty long distances, actually, for someone only 13), but that was it. By the end of my freshman year in HS and a whole lotta time in a competitive sport, I could leg-press triple my own weight, could run three miles without getting out of breath, three hundred situps and three hundred pushups were nothing — and I was only about two inches shorter than my mother and maybe about twenty pounds less... and even at that, there was a much larger percentage of muscle in my 20-lbs-less than there was in my mother's 20-lbs-more.
To the outside observer, yeah, I should've been able to pick my mother up and toss her against the wall with only a slight bit of effort. Which is rather stupid to assume, since my sport was so definitely not a contact sport, and the only real fights I'd ever been in were, well, with my mom, and of those fights, I'd had ten years and lost every single one. Just because I could run three miles and not get winded didn't mean I could suddenly block every punch and dodge quick enough to avoid the claws. It just meant I could take even more, really, and the older I got and the stronger I got, the more she dished out. Alcohol was in the mix by then, and things were coming to a head on a semi-regular basis; all the time I spent at practice meant I was gone from 8am to 9pm or later. When things exploded, not only was I emotionally bare to the usual words, I was physically wiped-out post-practice, and all I could ever do was just hang on, try to defend myself and that just made it worse.
But! I wasn't considerably smaller or lighter or weaker. It didn't help that a few times my father counseled me to try and not make things worse, because Mom would only call the cops — on me! — and tell them I was the aggressor, and, well... Dad would shrug, leaving the rest unsaid. I'm covered in bruises and scratches and looking like, well, I just got the crap strangled out of me, and my mother's slightly winded but otherwise just plain steaming, not really injured — but it's me that's the athlete, and that means if there's violence, it's my fault, because only strong people do the hitting. Only weak people get hit.
And I knew for a fact that I wasn't weak... and yet I also knew I was, because I could never defend myself. But everything around me, from family words to books to movies to television said that abuse happens when the strong pick on the weak. If I wasn't the weak one, but I was the one getting hit, that didn't compute. Well, it did: the only logical answer was that whatever was happening in my house wasn't the same. I wasn't abused.
15. Sometimes in books and on TV, parents would say mean things, but they always took it back right away.
This one had me the most baffled. A parent would suddenly snap at the child, the child would recoil in confusion and hurt, and the parent (almost always the mother) would stop, look shocked, and then get all apologetic and go on and on about how Mommy's having a bad day, and didn't mean that, and sometimes we say things we don't mean.
Hunh. My mother always meant every word she said, and if I cried about it, she'd repeat it, just so it was perfectly clear and that I didn't miss a detail. If she hadn't meant it, she'd apologize — that's what books and TV (and even my own parents) told me was how the world worked. You screw up, you apologize; the lack of apology meant my mother's actions were not a mistake... so I wasn't not-abused, either.
In general, I was mostly confused, but falling more in the area of "I can't be abused, because..." and thus bolstered with these reasons thanks to books and TV, the only alternative was to accept that everything that happened to me, happened to me because I was A Bad Kid.
16. Abused kids are innocent victims. They cower and take it, and they don't fight back.
If I hadn't blown that one completely by adolescence, by the time I was 13 this last pop-culture lesson was the nail in my psychological coffin. I've never been one to take things lying down — a slight drawback of being taught to be independent, to think and speak for yourself, by a mother who means well... until you use those skills in an argument. Whoops. If I wasn't protesting, I was wriggling out of her hold, or complaining that it hurt, or crying, which usually just made her even madder. ("I'll give you something to cry about" is only a joke in the dark, morbid sense.)
Becoming an athlete, though, meant I did have some basic strength, though few skills and never any kind of emotional strength in the face of anger — someone else's anger (even to this day) will leave me almost completely helpless in terror. Sheer instinct sets in, and that's what I fought with, but fighting at all meant — if you go by books and television — that I had lost my right to say I was innocent. I was now part of the problem. If I was sitting down when Mom came at me, I'd plant a foot in her stomach to keep her off, shove her back so I could scramble away. If she grabbed me, I let my hands fly out and hit whatever they hit, in hopes it'd force her back, long enough that I could get away.
In books and tv shows, the kids cower, they cry, they might put their hands over their heads, but they don't kick and scream back and try to punch their way free so they can run for the bedroom and barricade themselves in, or bolt out the front door with Dad's car keys in their hands. They're victims and victims don't hit back. For ten years or more, all I'd been able to do was take it, and the taller and stronger I got (along with the usual independence-urge that comes with puberty), the less I was interested in taking much of anything. I couldn't stop it, I couldn't predict it, and I knew every single time that doing anything would just make it ten times worse — but I just couldn't keep taking it. For my own self-respect and my own integrity, I had to try and defend.
That was when I kissed any last illusion of eventual rescue/end goodbye: I wasn't one of those helpless, hapless victims any more. I was part of it, in some twisted way. I yelled back, I fought back, I hit back. It never did any good, and it never stopped anything, but the one thing it did end was any last ability to relate to those kids in books and television. Sure, they were abused, but me? No, I wasn't innocent at all. Not anymore, and thus, I obviously wasn't abused.
And that leads me up to the culmination of the day I realized that there was something inherently broken, some kind of disconnect, between everything in the books and on television and in movies, compared to my middle-class, relatively mainstream, superficially happy existence and the random explosions of violence after any audience had left for the night. I was in college, at a friend's apartment, and the television was on, and that's when I realized this last rule.
17. In the books and movies, you can't have a happy ending if you're missing one crucial ingredient.
Time and again I'd seen this scene, and it always precipitates the final resolution (or may prompt the cathartic finale and then the denouement, but it's in there). It was one of those corny shows like 'Touched by' or whatever that show was with Michael Landon, you know the kind of quasi-after-school-special where every episode is A Very Special Episode, blah blah blah. I don't even know why I was watching it, only that near the end, we see the abused kid with the teacher who'd befriended him. In walks some kind of official-looking person, with clipboard or notepad or whatever, and the teacher turns to the kid and says, "okay, now tell her what you told me."
See, in books and movies, the kid is always rescued: maybe some neighbors take him in, or she goes to live with a foster family who loves her and feeds her and makes her wear pink, or long-lost relatives show up, or maybe even the parents break down and admit they're horrible and promise to get help and everyone goes into therapy. The last version always closes with the kid promising the intervening person — be that an angel, or a teacher, or some travelling no-name who randomly turns big and green — that really, it's going to be all better, now. Just like some kinda little trooper who forgives his parents even after they threw him out a window and broke both his legs and starved him and all those other Really Bad Things that mark the kid as Really Abused.
I was used to that, and I was used to ignoring any possible wish-fulfillment for me in that, because, y'see, the entire show or story had reinforced in fifteen different ways that I wasn't really abused. Maybe hit a few times, but not abused, not like that — and since the premise wasn't mine, neither was the happy ending.
But that moment, seeing that scenario for the nth time and hearing that line, and I realized: every single time, that's how it works. Someone out there believes the kid, and after that, everything becomes happy and good. That made sense, until I realized what was wrong with this picture, and how the truth was that the entire show, every book, every story, every movie, were all lies. Nothing but lies.
Because for that kid to be believed, the kid had to speak up.
It's right there, in that single, simple, line: tell her what you told me. The kid told someone what was going on, told someone what his parents did, and it seemed to me the implication was clear: the kid first, then, had to believe it was wrong. Or else why open his mouth at all, why complain when it wouldn't change anything, when that's the way the world just is?
In that split-second, I knew for a fact that this kid on television had never once been abused, not in this story. Because if he had, he would've believed not that the situation was wrong, but that this is just the way the world is.
He would believe that everything his parents have done and said was his fault. He would believe that every time his parents say they wish he'd never been born that they're not lying. He would believe that when they throw him out the front door and lock it behind him that they really don't want him to come back because they can't stand a child as bad as him. He would believe that every time they take something away from him or break a promise or change their minds, it's because he's no good. He would believe he doesn't deserve any better than that and should instead feel grateful for what he does get.
He sure as hell doesn't go around complaining to other people, he doesn't expose his shame to the world and break the world's illusion that his family works so hard to present, that he's a good kid and they're happy, because the fact that he's bad is their private, shared, shame, and he's lucky they put up with him, when no one else will. He sure as hell doesn't go blabbing to someone else, because what good does that do? Either it'll get back to his parents how ungrateful he is, and prove even more solidly that he's a bad kid, or it'll just be opening him up to yet another adult so patiently explaining that if he just tried harder, everything would be fine, because it can be tough being a kid but his parents obviously love him and he just needs to be a better kid for them.
That is what you get when you open your mouth and tell someone.
So you don't. Freaking. Open. Your. Mouth.
And if you remain silent in the face of everything that happens to you, day after day after day, that is when you're truly a victim of abuse.
That's all I ask, authors. If you're going to write that backstory, just once, consider writing it without the stereotypes and without the after-school-special assumptions about education and class and race and addiction that are rampant in so many stories.
It has been a long time since I've read anything with a teenaged protagonist while looking to see myself in that protagonist — those days are long past. But I also know the world is not really much of a better place than it was when I was looking for answers for questions I couldn't yet voice. There are still, on any given day, two thousand or more children who may be reading your story, measuring themselves against your words. They'll be wondering if this time, once again, they're going to come up short, with the conclusion that yet again, they're not really abused, and all the pain in their life must be because they deserve it.
Their parents are telling them that, their teachers and neighbors and pastors and friends may be telling them that — or may be saying it by dint of not saying anything at all, and far as they can see, all that's left is in print and on film. Don't be one more voice telling them that to be Really Abused that they have to suffer in these precise ways. Don't be one more voice telling them that they're only abused if they have broken bones or a laid-off parent or there's alcohol in the mix. Don't be one more voice telling them that they're not really abused, or that they're not abused enough to warrant the happy ending. Because they are, and they do.
If no one ever listens to anything I write here, no one takes anything away from any words I put pixel to screen, let this be at least that one exception. Every kid, every person, deserves a chance at a happy ending, and every kid, every person, should have the chance to see themselves in a story's possibilities, at least once. Maybe you'll decide after all that you'd rather write a kid who's abused with lies and drunkenness and massive scenes in public, and to set aside the complexities of abuse when the kid isn't perfect, isn't small and weak, isn't a top student, isn't outgoing, isn't loved by teachers, isn't angelic, and isn't innocent. If that's so, and you'd rather go the easy path, then I'd at least ask that you do so intentionally.
That way, when we meet face to face, you'll at least know the options, and will be able to say with clear conscience that it served the story better to write the stock villain and the after-school special. You'll be able to say your choices were intentional. And then you'll be braced for the fact that I'll walk away without a word. Because you, clearly, could not be bothered to have words for me or mine, just like so many before you, and thus I will waste no more on you.
The writers of this world are dreamers, and if there is anyone who needs a dream — deserves a dream, even — it's those children living in warzones that pass for family. Please, at least once, spare a bit of your dreams for them, too.
It's a little like deciding that in your book, all Hispanics are maids or plumbers: if you're going to play to the stereotypes, at least be able to look me in the face when we meet and say, yes, I'm aware of the issues surrounding using ethnic characters as lower-class background only; my use of that was intentional. Whether this can alleviate the larger issue would be contextual, based on the book you wrote, but it's still better than you giving me a pop-eyed look and proclaiming you had no idea! that anyone would be offended to see all Hispanics in your book are lazy, drunken, ill-educated part-timers.
This is more related to the issues mentioned in part III than in part I or part II. The first two parts mostly did a lot of implying. So here goes.
I grew up in the generation of the After School Special, before there was a specific "young adult" section in the bookstore or library. Not to say there weren't books that suited teen and pre-teen quite well; it was just that you had to do a little digging either in the 'older kids' areas or selective perusing through the 'adult' (read: mainstream regular) fiction. I recall two basic classes of books about teenagers, roughly: the adventure books — often SFF, historical (such as Kipling's works), or mysteries in the school of Nancy Drew — and the wackier distopian-fiction so big in the 60s, of which Lord of the Flies might be a forerunner.
The other class of books seemed to be geared towards an adult audience but with teenage protagonists, and often the tone was — I'd apply this now, though I didn't then, obviously — a bit more exploitative. Kids on drugs! Girls being promiscuous! Go Ask Alice and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden are two classics of those overly heavy ham-handed companions to the After School Special. Even when reading that type in middle school, I wasn't so stupid as to miss the strong sense that I was reading something written to make adults feel better.
So here's what I learned from the age of 8 through the end of high school, thanks to that nebulous genre that got its start around my middle school years and has since grown into the juggernaut known as the YA world. The assumptions and patterns, from what I can tell, remain strong in mainstream fiction and entertainment, which means even if some few are writing otherwise, there's still a fair bit to go. Thus, here's the kid logic that I'd ask you please consider the next time you set fingers to keyboard to create a teenaged-protagonist.
I'm not asking you to fix the world. I'm just saying that if you want to keep it broken for a share of your readers, at least be aware you are.
1. Abused kids have parents without jobs, who slept on the sofa.
Classic scene from book or TV show: kid comes home, Dad's on the sofa asleep. Dad wakes up, yells at kid, hits kid, and kid flees to room or to neighbors or whatever. Somewhere in there, backstory is that Dad's been laid-off and has taken to sleeping on the sofa during the day. Why? I never got that, as a kid. Adults have beds; that's where they sleep, like anyone. Sleeping on the sofa was bizarre.
My dad didn't get laid-off; my dad was a workaholic. My mother stayed home (and ran a business from the home) while I was little, taught part-time while I was in grade school, and went back to work full-time when I entered middle school. The only time a parent slept on a sofa in my house was if Dad fell asleep while watching his alumna play their big rival and the score wasn't close enough to keep his interest.
Obviously, for abuse to be happening, a parent had to be laid off and prone to sleeping during the day. My parents didn't, and thus I couldn't relate to those abused kids — because they were abused, and I wasn't.
2. Abused kids were always embarrassed to bring friends over, because their parents would be drunk or high.
Nope. Not once was I ever embarrassed about bringing friends home, for fear of how my parents would react — hell, I even brought home friends with mohawks and studded jackets and didn't think twice about that. My parents were articulate, well-educated, charming (in the case of my mother) and professorially-intimidating (in the case of my father) but if I'd ever walked through the door and found either of them falling-down-drunk, I think I would've checked for cameras.
Obviously, a big part of being in an abusive family was that parents embarrassed their kids by being useless, shiftless, drunkards, and since my parents weren't, clearly I wasn't abused.
3. Abused kids were perfect angels away from their family, and everyone liked them, and there were always scenes of friends' parents feeling angry at the parents for treating 'such a good kid' so badly.
Couldn't relate to that, either. I rarely visited friends' houses, because their environments felt alien to me, for reason I couldn't put a finger on. I'd talk to other friends' parents and then shut up abruptly, afraid I'd crossed a line, and they'd realize that actually, no, I wasn't a good kid. I wasn't even likeable. The majority of my life, my mother had been telling me that I was completely unloveable, and the only reason my own family put up with me was because they were legally obligated to do so. I wasn't naive enough to think this would all go away just by being elsewhere, and in fact, was terrified everyone else would find out my mother was right.
Nope, I was quite certain that in fact the parents were tolerating me, maybe out of pity, or maybe they were too stupid to realize and I had them hoodwinked, but nobody's stupid forever. Therefore, since no one was raving about how I was an amazing and awesome kid to the contrary of what I heard at home, obviously... I wasn't abused.
4. Abused kids in books and TV worked hard, really really hard, and when the parents yelled at them, it was always either from a misunderstanding or for something totally not the kid's fault (or even within the kid's control).
Again, nope. I was an absolute hellion in school, from about 1st grade on. I remember turning over a kid's desk in 1st grade when he pissed me off; I cheated outrageously in 2nd grade and rationalized it as the teacher said you had to turn in a paper with your name on it — she never said it had to be your paper that had your name on it, which seemed perfect to me because then I had more time to read. I yelled back at my 4th grade and 5th grade teachers. (Oddly, I don't recall getting into any trouble in 6th grade, mostly b/c the teachers then kept me way too busy.)
In 7th grade I bounced back and forth (literally, quarter by quarter!) between 'advanced' classes and remedial. I was too distractable to keep up in the advanced classes, while the remedial classes were often hands-on, enough of a change for me to enjoy the work and get it done... and just as I got bored, I'd be switched back into the advanced class to be re-surrounded by peers fully aware I'd been switched out only six weeks before for being Not Good Enough. I was almost held back in 7th grade, and again in 8th grade, and both times it took my parents in full-on shouting matches with the school principal (I learned, years later) before the school agreed to advance me.
In 9th grade I settled down, somewhat, but then I became a jock and who cares about the rest. I never smoked, drank, or did drugs, but I learned to forge my mother's signature so perfectly even she thought it was her signature, and as far as the school knew, I was sick — or at a doctor's appt — for about three days out of every four by my junior year. If I didn't have the car, I walked off-campus and caught the bus to my favorite museum or park. I did not get straight A's. I didn't really much come close. I was, on paper, a slightly below-average student who had twelve years of "you're not working up to your full potential" yammered at me, almost daily.
So... yeah, clearly when my parents got really mad at me, and I promised to work harder, it never happened, and so they were probably justified in throwing hot coffee in my face for back-talking. Or taking away the birthday gift they'd given me only a week before, and giving it to my sister instead. Or for smacking me. Or for catching me by the arm and squeezing so hard I got bruises. Because abused kids did really well in school, so that everyone — including this young reader — could see that the parents had no reason to treat their kids like that. But, obviously, I couldn't be abused, because my parents had lots of reasons, right?
5. Kids who lived in abusive houses weren't usually poor, but were definitely working-class, and their houses were always messy, and their parents cussed, a lot.
Again, obviously I couldn't be abused. My parents were college-educated, with five degrees between them, and had both taught at some of the most prestigious universities on the eastern seaboard. My father's parents may have been blue-collar, but my dad was a military officer, and most of my parents' friends were as well educated and cosmopolitan and charming as my parents could be. My mother cussed maybe once or twice that I recall, as a child, and both times she was on the phone with a friend and didn't realize I was listening — after which I got the lecture of those being 'adult words' and Not For Your Use.
As for the house? It might get a little cluttered, sometimes, but we had a lot of really nice stuff, and the house was never filthy. Even if my mother had to beat my head in with the vacuum cleaner because I'd done my chores haphazardly, that just meant if the house was dirty in some way it was my fault, not my parents', so clearly, still not abused. In the books and on TV shows, the kids were always working hard to try and clean the house despite the parents not caring, but that's not how it was in my house — I'd do anything to get out of vacuuming, because I could never seem to do it right and it always ended up with my mother yelling at me about how if the house looked like a pigsty it was going to be my fault, that she worked so hard for us to have a nice life and I was the one messing it all up, so... clearly, she had every right to hit me, and that meant it wasn't abuse.
6. The pattern was always very simple, and clear: Dad hit Mom, and then sometimes Mom would get really angry and hit the kids, OR, Dad hit Mom, and then Dad hit the kids.
In those books and shows, Mom didn't hit Dad, and Mom didn't just hit the kids without Dad doing hitting as well, and Mom didn't just hit only one kid and cherish the other kid. Obviously, whatever was going on in my house wasn't abuse, because what I lived with wasn't in a single book or on television — and that meant that every time Mom got mad and things got worse, that the label of 'bad family' couldn't be applied, so I applied the only thing that was left: 'bad kid'.
Slight tangent: looking back, I don't actually recall any stories in which the abusive family was a minority family. It was pretty much always an anglo-saxon family, if one that fit more comfortably into an income segment my maternal grandmother only somewhat affectionately called 'cracker'. The one or two times I can recall the focus being on a black family, the story had a single mother whose boyfriend was abusive, and invariably she'd learn from well-meaning neighbors or intervening (always white) teachers what her so-called boyfriend had been doing, she'd confront the children in tears and promise not to let that happen, because she'd learned her lesson about working two jobs to make ends meet and leaving them alone. Which, looking back, was probably meant to warp and punish single mothers (of any race) more than mangle my impressions of what made for a 'good' or 'bad' family, but still, not with the relating.
7. Abusive parents might be regular or might be mean, but then one drink and they'd start yelling for no reason and hitting everything in sight.
My parents were actually more relaxed after a drink, since they mostly drank when they came home from work and would sit in the den and talk about their day, while each had a glass of wine. On the weekends with adult friends visiting, they might have a beer or two. Out to dinner, they might have a drink or two each.
(This isn't counting the last three years of HS, when my father stopped drinking and my mother took up the co-dependent mantle and began drinking heavily, herself. By that time, regardless, the patterns were solidly set, and if my mother was drinking and became angry, I never made the connection, because I'd never had to, before then.)
But, nope, no Jekyll-and-Hyde routine here. Who my parents were, sober, was pretty much the same as who they were after a glass of wine or a beer — neither are massive drinkers, really, so 'drunken parent' wasn't within my mental scope. And thus, obviously, I couldn't be living in an abusive household.
8. Abused kids got hurt. A lot, and really badly. Like, trip-to-hospital bad. Cigarette-burn-bad. Broken-bone-bad. Thrown-down-stairs-bad.
(Though the one time I did get thrown down the stairs, that did cause a sudden revelation that maybe this wasn't okay for parents to do to kids, but then Mom probably yelled something about how horrible my grades were or how lazy I was about chores, and that just reminded me that in my case, clearly, the line was drawn a bit farther out — if the kid was really bad, then the kid shouldn't complain when really bad things happen.)
The only broken bones I've ever had were three fractured ribs from a horrible car accident, as a senior in HS. Never had a cast, never been burned, though I suspect in hindsight there were at least three times my mother did give me a contusion, but we never had the hospital emergency room visit with someone official looking dubious as to whether I really fell out of a window or walked into a door or whatever other stupid reasons mean parents gave in books or on TV. Then again, my mother didn't like her coffee extra-hot, so all the times she threw it at me, I got more damage from the mug than from the hot liquid, and most of the time — seeing how we usually lived somewhere hot and humid — it was an iced drink, not a hot drink. Only abused kids got scalding-hot drinks thrown at them.
I was thrown, slammed into things, hit with telephones and vacuum cleaners and mugs and books, shoved, clawed, gripped hard enough to bruise, had fingers and arms twisted, hair pulled, neck clawed, face and arms scratched, slapped, even nearly strangled a few times. But I never had a broken bone and I never got burned enough to need bandages and I never had stitches, so from everything I saw in books and TV, it was pretty clear that I wasn't abused.
9. If one of the parents was military, it was usually Dad, and if Dad was military, he was all military-precision and don't-backtalk-me tyranny and ran the house with an iron fist and hit anyone who got out of line, and that was military-family-abuse.
I think the most either parent ever demanded of such formalities from me, or my sister, was that we try to use "sir" and "ma'am" with our grandparents because it made them happy, but that if we forgot, our parents would rise quickly to our defense that within family, informality is okay. (But my father always used "sir" and "ma'am" with his parents and his in-laws, which even as a kid I thought was really cool; to me, it said those people mattered to my father that he'd give them the same respect he gave his commanding officers, and is also part of the reason I didn't work harder to "sir" and "ma'am" anyone in my near or extended family, as a tiny private rebellion of my own.)
My grandmother could be quite blistering if you made a bed while visiting and didn't make hospital corners, but most of the time my own folks were willing to settle for me at least pulling the covers up and tucking the pillows nicely — a demand they pretty much dropped by the time I hit HS, anyway. Inspection? At home? The one time (as an adult) I mentioned it to Dad, he said he didn't want that at home; he dealt with it at work, and that's where it'd stay. Mom, raised in military family with a bit more formality than ours, felt the same. No, the military was not to blame and was obviously not a reliable pattern for explaining what went on in our house, because Dad was not the usual book-or-TV career officer.
In fact, my parents went out of their way to avoid any military colleagues who showed those tyrannical traits. Again, not a story that fit what I lived with, and that was abuse, so my life obviously wasn't.
10. A parent who was mean to his/her kids was almost always also mean to adults, and in general nobody would like them.
I think I realized this pattern somewhere in early HS, reading a book for English class, or something. By that point I was self-aware enough to get that there was more going on than what I'd seen/measured up til then, and this realization was a hugely depressing moment for me... because everyone liked my mother. Everyone. She could charm paint off a wall if she sets her mind to it, and most of the time, she doesn't need to set her mind to it, because she just does it as naturally as anyone else does breathing.
Even then, I wasn't surprised in the least when — on the rare occasions I ever let slip word or even hint about what life was like — adults would just assume off the bat that it was my recalcitrance, my attitude, my difficulty, and that (here we go again) if I'd just "be a better kid" then everything would be okay, would be happy. Because someone as cool and funny and intelligent as my mother couldn't possibly be just plain mean, and in books and on TV, abusive parents were equally mean to pretty much everyone, or at least just only kind of liked. They weren't popular, and my mom was popular — hell, most of my friends liked her more than they liked me.
This isn't to say my friends were totally blind, since my mom did slip every now and then, but it was always in a kind of snide way, enough that it could be brushed off. Though if I did any reflexive brushing-off by my HS years, I rarely noticed it. I was well beyond questioning much, by then.
Like doing the MBTI (Meyers-Briggs) which just became more fodder for the yelling: my father the INTJ, and me, the ENTJ, and my mother, the ENFP, and my sister, the INFP. You couldn't have better lines drawn if you wrote fiction: "you're just like your father, and you're just as impossible to love." There it was in the book, even (a text I later learned was discredited for its extreme slant against the NT style): that NTs are cruel, cold, unlikeable, too-intellectual, often unfeeling, extremely insensitive, and will hurt everyone who loves them and — as my mom would extrapolate — NTs are doomed to end up alllllllll alone.
Well, who was I to argue with what was there in black-and-white, by someone with a psychoanalysis degree? That was an expert saying those things. Who was I to rebut? I'd taken the test and been revealed as an NT, so... yeah, more proof I was A Bad Person. That was just how it was, and the sooner I reconciled to living my life that way, the sooner I'd, well, not be happy, but maybe less miserable. Lower the standards, as it were.
I mention all that so you're aware of the backstory for when my best friend took the test, and my mother was explaining the results to her. I can't even recall my friend's type, only that my mother contrasted for illustration, my friend's type to mine: "you're fortunate, because your type is very good with people, and always welcome, sensitive to other people's feelings, not at all like NTs, who are quite cruel and unfeeling." I barely even noticed it, because it was one more jab in the daily litany of such. It was, what it was.
Later that evening, when it was the two of us alone, my friend expressed outrage that my own mother would say that — and while I was in the room, even!
I recall being somewhat taken aback by this fury at my mother, and a bit uncomfortable, too. Yeah, so I didn't really like hearing that I was cold and cruel and unloveable, but it wasn't like I could argue with it, because that's what it meant to be an NT, and that's what I was. My friend remained disgruntled and pissed, and by that point, seemed annoyed with me, as well, and I couldn't figure out why (and didn't really want to try, at that, in that way we all shy away instinctively from major fault lines). I just remember having to do a bit of a tap dance through several topics before she let me change the subject, though for a long time after that she seemed to watch me with a peculiar expression, sometimes.
That was the only time I can ever remember someone not liking my mother, for any reason. All my friends were practically infatuated with her; if they weren't, they sure never let on to me. So, not only was it clearly a situation where things weren't abusive, but this also leads into another reason I knew my household didn't match what I saw in books and TV.
11. When abusive parents get mad and yell and hit, they're always lying while they're yelling.
Ever seen that famous scene in Mommie Dearest, the one about the wire hangers? Joan Crawford discovers her adopted daughter hanging up clothes on wire hangers, goes into a rage, and beats her daughter while screaming, "no wire hangers! no wire hangers!" (If you didn't know, now you do.)
That's what I mean by lying: the constant element in books and TV was that when the abusive parent got mad enough to hit, it was for some trumped-up reason that the kid couldn't have, wouldn't have, known or predicted. I remember watching that scene in HS and my first thought was, "well, that's clearly abuse, because there's no way that girl could've known that wire hangers weren't allowed." Because if she had known, by that logic, then she deserved whatever she got.
I mean, my mother must've told me once if she told me a thousand times to vacuum just so and couldn't I tell that I'd missed a spot? Or that when she said to hand over something to my sister even if I wasn't done with it yet, that this meant I shouldn't backtalk or complain but just hand it over and don't ask for it again later, or else — so it's not like Mom was lying when she got mad as she told me again that I shouldn't do X or Y.
It was true, she'd warned me, and I forgot and did it or did it on purpose or did it and hoped I could get away with it, and when I didn't... well, whatever I got, I deserved. Because she wasn't lying; it wasn't some last-minute trumped-up excuse. Well, usually. Sometimes it was just that I didn't extrapolate well enough to see that when she said "do this" that she also meant "and don't do that," so, again, not with the lying-while-yelling.
And that's why I was both surprised and uncomfortable when my friend got mad on my behalf: because my mother wasn't lying. She didn't lie to me; she'd made that clear from the very beginning, as far back as I could remember. She told me things that hurt, but she prefaced it with "I'm telling you this because I love you," and "I'm telling you this because no one else ever will, but you need to know it," and "I'm telling you this because you're out of touch with reality and don't realize how you appear to other people."
For a friend to be so angry that I'd be called cold and cruel just confused me, at the same time it made me withdraw a little from our friendship — because obviously my friend didn't know me as well as she thought she did, if she couldn't see truth for what it was. The only sane conclusion (if sane there be, in such a life) was to pull back a little, because if my friend didn't know it then, eventually she would, and then where would I be? So I had to cool down on the friendship before she figured out my mother was right, keep that friend at a distance in hopes I could fake it a little longer.
Because the belief that my mother told the truth meant that I knew when I dealt with other people, the only one lying was me.
But I didn't see that going on in any books or TV, so clearly, I couldn't claim I was abused.
12a. Parents are either abusive and horrible, or they're nice. They can't be both.
Part of this is the constraints of how much page space you've got, and how much screen time you've got — and besides, the drama of pitching a fit and pitching kids out windows is just so much more riveting than the times in-between when everything's lovely, right? But when all the books and shows have the same basic pattern and go through the same basic displays, it becomes an overwhelming message: parents who are sometimes cool and then sometimes cruel are not abusive, because if they were abusive, they'd be like that all the time.
There were stretches when everything was fine, or at least my mom was too distracted to bother much with me. Most of the time, we could go a month or two before another blow-up, and in between I could pretend like things were great. I had no idea what would set things off, other than knowing it'd be me who set it off, so in some ways I lived on eggshells in a back part of my brain, just like that rat in the unpredictable maze. (By the time I was in HS, actually, that tension on my part, alone, was sometimes enough to set things off, because my mom would react to my anticipation. Although I note that by that point, we had alcohol oiling the way, which complexifies things.)
But in abusive families in books and on TV, every time the kid comes home, the parent's on them about something. There's a stability to it, and sometimes the kids were written/acted as though they were expecting it. I could see them bracing for it — while the one thing Mommie Dearest did get right (for me, at least) was the look of shock on the girl's face when Crawford flies into a rage. Sheer, unadulterated shock, because she had no idea she'd just stepped on a land mine. But other than that movie, the land mines were portrayed as regular events, close enough together that I almost felt pity for those fictional kids, because at least I had good times, too.
And a bit of self-hatred at the same time, as well, because when I had bad times... those were my fault, anyway. I envied those fictional kids for having the assurance of knowing this was just how their parents were, and that it made no difference what the kid said or did. Big Ben's gonna chime when it chimes, and parents are gonna hit when they hit, and that's abuse. So, clearly, my family wasn't abusive.
12b. Kids who are abused don't like their parents. They fear them, they endeavor to please them, but they don't actually like their parents.
Thing is, I did like my mother, as a child — if a kind of uneasy liking, in that life was unpredictable — but if we were out and about, or people were visiting, or it was an easy-going day, I liked her a great deal. So I feel like this has to be said, rather than leave anyone with the impression that my childhood has left me an embittered person who loathes the parental units. I don't.
No, for all I went though, I still like, and respect, both my father and my mother, as human beings. I'll focus on my mother since she's getting the brunt of it here, and state it for the record that I'd want to know her even if I weren't related to her. She's funny, witty, a little goofy sometimes, incredibly bright and amazingly creative, always has eighteen different projects going and is always up for more; she's very much the life of the party and someone who enjoys doing things and seeing things and learning and experiencing.
She's educated and cosmopolitan but retains enough of her Southern upbringing that she doesn't intimidate people but sets them at ease, and she can find something in common with anyone, from the recent immigrant who worked as the night janitor when she stayed in the hospital to the multiple-honored Hungarian diplomat to the US who was a good family friend. She's equally at home at the Met for international opera or at a five-star restaurant with oyster forks as she is at a corner dive in suburban Macon GA that serves up barbecue with paper towels by a woman with a beehive.
She's liberal and progressive and has always believed — not just lip service said, but truly believed — that gays deserve every right as straights even back when I was a kid and being gay was still a mental illness in the DSM. She marched for women's rights and for desegregation, and has always been a proponent of diversity in all forms, and raised me to believe a single person can always make a difference, and a very small difference is better than none. (She sobbed all the way through Obama's acceptance speech, not surprising for a woman who drove four hours to see MLK.) She always told me, you can marry someone shorter than you, younger than you, a different color or culture or religion than you, or who makes less than you, or you can choose to not marry at all: as long as you're with someone you love, the rest is negotiable. Maybe even irrelevant.
My mother said a lot of things that hurt, and that even now — after we've made our peace and are pretty good friends with stronger boundaries — those scars remain, but the one thing she never, ever said was that I was stupid. Never. She always, always emphasized that I was wicked smart, though the tests that proved this were also the likely source of her insistence that I was mentally ill. How else do you explain someone so smart, doing everything so wrong? (Note that I wasn't physically hyperactive, and ADHD wasn't quite on the horizon, so any doctors and therapists concluded I was like that because I wanted to be.) Which means I was raised with the confidence that even if I was crazy, I was still able to run rings around anyone I'd meet. Maybe those rings would be a little lop-sided, but hey, still rings!
Both my parents had/have a lot of really amazing things about them. I can't think of a single year of my life in which they didn't do something, if not several somethings, that made me very proud of them, and proud to be their child. The fact that I couldn't live up to that, myself, was a source of disappointment to me and them, and the cause of a lot of the swirling anger and hurt. But that was my shortcoming, I knew, and just the way it was.
Kids in books and on TV were abused. That was obvious from script and narrative, and a big sign was that they were never conflicted about whether they liked their parents as independent, distinct human beings outside of the family obligations. Their parents were obviously bad, and the kids didn't like them. Mine weren't, and I did, so obviously, those kids were abused. I wasn't.
13. Teachers (or guidance counselors) can identify, seem to like better, and reach out to, kids with abusive families.
Every book and show, there was at least one adult figure — almost always a teacher — who saw the kid daily and said, something's not right. That teacher would either be extra-special friends with the kid, or spend extra time with the kid, or maybe even intervene, up to and including the After School Special, Touched-by-Whatever, kinda Disneyfied ending.
See, right there, I knew I wasn't abused, because my teachers couldn't stand me. In 1st grade, when I turned over the classmate's desk? The teacher made me stand on one leg in front of the class for the entire morning, as punishment even after I apologized to the entire class. In 2nd grade, 3rd grade, 4th grade, 5th grade: every year, I had a teacher who'd single me out for ridicule, for whatever cruel reasons of their own (and by 4th and 5th grades I was down to yelling back at them in defiance, unwilling to put up with it yet again). I think my 6th grade teacher liked me, or at least tolerated me; my 7th grade teachers didn't seem to know what to do with me, and same for my 8th grade teachers. I annoyed most of my teachers in 9th grade — except for my science teacher who I learned to avoid even though I liked him, because I couldn't seem to do well on his tests and I knew he'd dislike me if I hung around too much.
In 10th grade, I met a teacher who did keep me sane and in one piece, and did open his door to me even when that meant I was sitting in his class during my lunch break. (I also had a huge crush on him, but to his credit, he was always gentlemanly, and always treated me like an equal, and I'd say I soaked it up.) And finally, a teacher in my senior year who, I suspect, knew more than he let on, because despite being brusque and ruling the school like a bantam rooster, he was always kind to me.
But no one ever actually said anything outright, and besides, by the time I was 16, I wasn't so stupid I was going to say anything myself. I'd had enough people — teachers, counselors, preachers, neighbors, and so on — pointing out that if I just worked harder, tried better, then bad things wouldn't happen. What was some johnny-come-lately teacher going to do to offset years of that training?
And most definitely, not a single teacher ever said a word to me about the bruises on my arms or the scratches on my face or even the bruises around my neck. No more than the friends who had to have seen plenty themselves, or the teammates or coaches I spent so many hours with every day. I know the signs showed up, because I could see them on me, but eventually I accepted that these were invisible to everyone else.
No, my experience with teachers was that they, almost even more than my own parents, were the enemies... and since in books and on TV, there's always at least one teacher who genuinely likes the kid and feels sympathy for the kid being abused, well, there you go. I wasn't innocent, and I wasn't liked, and I wasn't wanted, so... I wasn't abused.
14. A parent is always bigger and stronger than the kid being hit, and the book or show makes it real clear that this is part of why it's so bad, because the kid is outranked and outflanked (cf military abuse).
This was a subtle one that didn't sink in until I was maybe in college, but when it did, it was like, oh, yeah, well, of course! That makes sense. (You know the conclusion by now, so I'll let you sing the round in eight-part harmony on your own.)
Starting in my 1st year of HS, I was one of those kids who always came in last on those stupid annual Presidential fitness whatever things. I read books and I cycled (pretty long distances, actually, for someone only 13), but that was it. By the end of my freshman year in HS and a whole lotta time in a competitive sport, I could leg-press triple my own weight, could run three miles without getting out of breath, three hundred situps and three hundred pushups were nothing — and I was only about two inches shorter than my mother and maybe about twenty pounds less... and even at that, there was a much larger percentage of muscle in my 20-lbs-less than there was in my mother's 20-lbs-more.
To the outside observer, yeah, I should've been able to pick my mother up and toss her against the wall with only a slight bit of effort. Which is rather stupid to assume, since my sport was so definitely not a contact sport, and the only real fights I'd ever been in were, well, with my mom, and of those fights, I'd had ten years and lost every single one. Just because I could run three miles and not get winded didn't mean I could suddenly block every punch and dodge quick enough to avoid the claws. It just meant I could take even more, really, and the older I got and the stronger I got, the more she dished out. Alcohol was in the mix by then, and things were coming to a head on a semi-regular basis; all the time I spent at practice meant I was gone from 8am to 9pm or later. When things exploded, not only was I emotionally bare to the usual words, I was physically wiped-out post-practice, and all I could ever do was just hang on, try to defend myself and that just made it worse.
But! I wasn't considerably smaller or lighter or weaker. It didn't help that a few times my father counseled me to try and not make things worse, because Mom would only call the cops — on me! — and tell them I was the aggressor, and, well... Dad would shrug, leaving the rest unsaid. I'm covered in bruises and scratches and looking like, well, I just got the crap strangled out of me, and my mother's slightly winded but otherwise just plain steaming, not really injured — but it's me that's the athlete, and that means if there's violence, it's my fault, because only strong people do the hitting. Only weak people get hit.
And I knew for a fact that I wasn't weak... and yet I also knew I was, because I could never defend myself. But everything around me, from family words to books to movies to television said that abuse happens when the strong pick on the weak. If I wasn't the weak one, but I was the one getting hit, that didn't compute. Well, it did: the only logical answer was that whatever was happening in my house wasn't the same. I wasn't abused.
15. Sometimes in books and on TV, parents would say mean things, but they always took it back right away.
This one had me the most baffled. A parent would suddenly snap at the child, the child would recoil in confusion and hurt, and the parent (almost always the mother) would stop, look shocked, and then get all apologetic and go on and on about how Mommy's having a bad day, and didn't mean that, and sometimes we say things we don't mean.
Hunh. My mother always meant every word she said, and if I cried about it, she'd repeat it, just so it was perfectly clear and that I didn't miss a detail. If she hadn't meant it, she'd apologize — that's what books and TV (and even my own parents) told me was how the world worked. You screw up, you apologize; the lack of apology meant my mother's actions were not a mistake... so I wasn't not-abused, either.
In general, I was mostly confused, but falling more in the area of "I can't be abused, because..." and thus bolstered with these reasons thanks to books and TV, the only alternative was to accept that everything that happened to me, happened to me because I was A Bad Kid.
16. Abused kids are innocent victims. They cower and take it, and they don't fight back.
If I hadn't blown that one completely by adolescence, by the time I was 13 this last pop-culture lesson was the nail in my psychological coffin. I've never been one to take things lying down — a slight drawback of being taught to be independent, to think and speak for yourself, by a mother who means well... until you use those skills in an argument. Whoops. If I wasn't protesting, I was wriggling out of her hold, or complaining that it hurt, or crying, which usually just made her even madder. ("I'll give you something to cry about" is only a joke in the dark, morbid sense.)
Becoming an athlete, though, meant I did have some basic strength, though few skills and never any kind of emotional strength in the face of anger — someone else's anger (even to this day) will leave me almost completely helpless in terror. Sheer instinct sets in, and that's what I fought with, but fighting at all meant — if you go by books and television — that I had lost my right to say I was innocent. I was now part of the problem. If I was sitting down when Mom came at me, I'd plant a foot in her stomach to keep her off, shove her back so I could scramble away. If she grabbed me, I let my hands fly out and hit whatever they hit, in hopes it'd force her back, long enough that I could get away.
In books and tv shows, the kids cower, they cry, they might put their hands over their heads, but they don't kick and scream back and try to punch their way free so they can run for the bedroom and barricade themselves in, or bolt out the front door with Dad's car keys in their hands. They're victims and victims don't hit back. For ten years or more, all I'd been able to do was take it, and the taller and stronger I got (along with the usual independence-urge that comes with puberty), the less I was interested in taking much of anything. I couldn't stop it, I couldn't predict it, and I knew every single time that doing anything would just make it ten times worse — but I just couldn't keep taking it. For my own self-respect and my own integrity, I had to try and defend.
That was when I kissed any last illusion of eventual rescue/end goodbye: I wasn't one of those helpless, hapless victims any more. I was part of it, in some twisted way. I yelled back, I fought back, I hit back. It never did any good, and it never stopped anything, but the one thing it did end was any last ability to relate to those kids in books and television. Sure, they were abused, but me? No, I wasn't innocent at all. Not anymore, and thus, I obviously wasn't abused.
And that leads me up to the culmination of the day I realized that there was something inherently broken, some kind of disconnect, between everything in the books and on television and in movies, compared to my middle-class, relatively mainstream, superficially happy existence and the random explosions of violence after any audience had left for the night. I was in college, at a friend's apartment, and the television was on, and that's when I realized this last rule.
17. In the books and movies, you can't have a happy ending if you're missing one crucial ingredient.
Time and again I'd seen this scene, and it always precipitates the final resolution (or may prompt the cathartic finale and then the denouement, but it's in there). It was one of those corny shows like 'Touched by' or whatever that show was with Michael Landon, you know the kind of quasi-after-school-special where every episode is A Very Special Episode, blah blah blah. I don't even know why I was watching it, only that near the end, we see the abused kid with the teacher who'd befriended him. In walks some kind of official-looking person, with clipboard or notepad or whatever, and the teacher turns to the kid and says, "okay, now tell her what you told me."
See, in books and movies, the kid is always rescued: maybe some neighbors take him in, or she goes to live with a foster family who loves her and feeds her and makes her wear pink, or long-lost relatives show up, or maybe even the parents break down and admit they're horrible and promise to get help and everyone goes into therapy. The last version always closes with the kid promising the intervening person — be that an angel, or a teacher, or some travelling no-name who randomly turns big and green — that really, it's going to be all better, now. Just like some kinda little trooper who forgives his parents even after they threw him out a window and broke both his legs and starved him and all those other Really Bad Things that mark the kid as Really Abused.
I was used to that, and I was used to ignoring any possible wish-fulfillment for me in that, because, y'see, the entire show or story had reinforced in fifteen different ways that I wasn't really abused. Maybe hit a few times, but not abused, not like that — and since the premise wasn't mine, neither was the happy ending.
But that moment, seeing that scenario for the nth time and hearing that line, and I realized: every single time, that's how it works. Someone out there believes the kid, and after that, everything becomes happy and good. That made sense, until I realized what was wrong with this picture, and how the truth was that the entire show, every book, every story, every movie, were all lies. Nothing but lies.
Because for that kid to be believed, the kid had to speak up.
It's right there, in that single, simple, line: tell her what you told me. The kid told someone what was going on, told someone what his parents did, and it seemed to me the implication was clear: the kid first, then, had to believe it was wrong. Or else why open his mouth at all, why complain when it wouldn't change anything, when that's the way the world just is?
In that split-second, I knew for a fact that this kid on television had never once been abused, not in this story. Because if he had, he would've believed not that the situation was wrong, but that this is just the way the world is.
He would believe that everything his parents have done and said was his fault. He would believe that every time his parents say they wish he'd never been born that they're not lying. He would believe that when they throw him out the front door and lock it behind him that they really don't want him to come back because they can't stand a child as bad as him. He would believe that every time they take something away from him or break a promise or change their minds, it's because he's no good. He would believe he doesn't deserve any better than that and should instead feel grateful for what he does get.
He sure as hell doesn't go around complaining to other people, he doesn't expose his shame to the world and break the world's illusion that his family works so hard to present, that he's a good kid and they're happy, because the fact that he's bad is their private, shared, shame, and he's lucky they put up with him, when no one else will. He sure as hell doesn't go blabbing to someone else, because what good does that do? Either it'll get back to his parents how ungrateful he is, and prove even more solidly that he's a bad kid, or it'll just be opening him up to yet another adult so patiently explaining that if he just tried harder, everything would be fine, because it can be tough being a kid but his parents obviously love him and he just needs to be a better kid for them.
That is what you get when you open your mouth and tell someone.
So you don't. Freaking. Open. Your. Mouth.
And if you remain silent in the face of everything that happens to you, day after day after day, that is when you're truly a victim of abuse.
That's all I ask, authors. If you're going to write that backstory, just once, consider writing it without the stereotypes and without the after-school-special assumptions about education and class and race and addiction that are rampant in so many stories.
It has been a long time since I've read anything with a teenaged protagonist while looking to see myself in that protagonist — those days are long past. But I also know the world is not really much of a better place than it was when I was looking for answers for questions I couldn't yet voice. There are still, on any given day, two thousand or more children who may be reading your story, measuring themselves against your words. They'll be wondering if this time, once again, they're going to come up short, with the conclusion that yet again, they're not really abused, and all the pain in their life must be because they deserve it.
Their parents are telling them that, their teachers and neighbors and pastors and friends may be telling them that — or may be saying it by dint of not saying anything at all, and far as they can see, all that's left is in print and on film. Don't be one more voice telling them that to be Really Abused that they have to suffer in these precise ways. Don't be one more voice telling them that they're only abused if they have broken bones or a laid-off parent or there's alcohol in the mix. Don't be one more voice telling them that they're not really abused, or that they're not abused enough to warrant the happy ending. Because they are, and they do.
If no one ever listens to anything I write here, no one takes anything away from any words I put pixel to screen, let this be at least that one exception. Every kid, every person, deserves a chance at a happy ending, and every kid, every person, should have the chance to see themselves in a story's possibilities, at least once. Maybe you'll decide after all that you'd rather write a kid who's abused with lies and drunkenness and massive scenes in public, and to set aside the complexities of abuse when the kid isn't perfect, isn't small and weak, isn't a top student, isn't outgoing, isn't loved by teachers, isn't angelic, and isn't innocent. If that's so, and you'd rather go the easy path, then I'd at least ask that you do so intentionally.
That way, when we meet face to face, you'll at least know the options, and will be able to say with clear conscience that it served the story better to write the stock villain and the after-school special. You'll be able to say your choices were intentional. And then you'll be braced for the fact that I'll walk away without a word. Because you, clearly, could not be bothered to have words for me or mine, just like so many before you, and thus I will waste no more on you.
The writers of this world are dreamers, and if there is anyone who needs a dream — deserves a dream, even — it's those children living in warzones that pass for family. Please, at least once, spare a bit of your dreams for them, too.
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Date: 22 Jul 2009 04:12 am (UTC)*takes so very many notes* More rewriting than I thought - oh well, I always knew I'd have to start that particular story over from scratch anyway - and, clearly, more stories I haven't written that I ought to. If I can do them decently, anyway. *practices on Schwarz*
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Date: 22 Jul 2009 04:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 22 Jul 2009 04:29 am (UTC)There it was in the book, even (a text I later learned was discredited for its extreme slant against the NT style): that NTs are cruel, cold, unlikeable, too-intellectual, often unfeeling, extremely insensitive, and will hurt everyone who loves them and -- as my mom would extrapolate -- NTs are doomed to end up alllllllll alone.
As another ENTJ, I'm glad the book was discredited.
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Date: 22 Jul 2009 04:54 am (UTC)As for the book, Please Understand Me, yes, it did end up being discredited a few years after it was first published. I don't know whether the newer editions calm down the anti-NT stance, but it's actually a double whammy, in that the preface-test (a copy of which is all over the 'net, of course) was written at a kitchen table with absolutely no statistical validity at all, and horribly slanted against NTs, but the rest of the text is also subtly but consistently anti-NT. Rumor I heard was that the primary author's an SF who'd had a few bad turns with some NTs. Go figure.
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Date: 22 Jul 2009 05:27 am (UTC)One thing that surprised me in your entry was how negatively portrayed NTs were. When I was about 12 or so I was fascinated by the idea of psychoanalysis and picked up the Please Understand Me book. I think it was a second edition though so things might have been changed but I remember reading about NTs and NFs. I was labeled a INFP but back then thought NTs seemed so much better because they were intellectual, more direct (hence considered insensitive by others), and not controlled by their emotions. I never saw these as bad qualities, just different ones, maybe ones I wish I had so it's surprising to hear that there was such anti-NT sentiment in the original.
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Date: 22 Jul 2009 06:14 am (UTC)Dysfunction is dysfunction, and then there's always that quote about happy families -- but abuse is a multifarious thing, which is part of what makes any CPS worker's job so damn hard. How do you know whether it's really abuse when you can't see scars and don't have six pages of hospital records? But still, legally, I can see how it's a gray area for CPS and other legal officials (including teachers). But for writers? I don't think they should get that cop-out. They're in a god-like position to explore, and expose, plenty.
Feel free to comment all you like. I like to hear what you have to say, too, y'know.
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Date: 22 Jul 2009 05:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 22 Jul 2009 06:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
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From: (Anonymous) - Date: 22 Jul 2009 01:18 pm (UTC) - Expand(no subject)
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Date: 22 Jul 2009 01:14 pm (UTC)(Glad to see that comment link at the bottom of the LJ-mirrored page. It's not that I'm ignoring your posts--more like figuring out how to respond on DW is more than I have energy for most days.)
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Date: 22 Jul 2009 03:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 22 Jul 2009 02:38 pm (UTC)I had a few thoughts to add, but I think I'll sort them out and add them tomorrow, should the post still be here and available. :) Thank you. Again.
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Date: 22 Jul 2009 04:05 pm (UTC)That's one way in which popular fiction (books, shows) really don't help, because they reinforce this expectation that any situation is only 'really' bad if it matches the exaggerated, stylized, or stereotypical versions. There's nothing quite so frustrating as being told, "well, at least your parents aren't drunks," to the point that in HS, there were points that I wished my parents were laid-off alcoholics because even if that would make life pretty damn hard (lose the house, not live in nice area, not have computer, etc) at least, maybe then, it'd be "bad enough" that someone would stop it.
Hell, at times, I wanted to be put in the hospital, because in books and on TV, it's when kids go into the hospital that things finally take a turn for the better. And the blame for that perception -- and that horrible wish, which carries a lot of guilt on its own for wanting such -- falls squarely on popular media's presentation of what it's like to be in a 'really' bad situation.
I'm tempted at this point to tell you that it's over now and I'm fine, no really! although the truth is that there will always be some kneejerk reactions I carry that are just so deep that even decades of sandpaper will probably never wear them off. I figure, I'm at least aware of them, which is better than nothing, and if I can serve as example for someone else, then in the end, that will have to make it worth it. Maybe, in the end, it does.
And yes, you are more than welcome to come back around with more after you've processed. I guess it is a lot to take in at once, eh.
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Date: 22 Jul 2009 02:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 22 Jul 2009 04:21 pm (UTC)I'm wondering how I might have reacted, had anyone in authority said anything to me, as a child. Maybe when I was in grade school I might've been surprised, maybe open to the assessment, possibly relieved to know someone out there understood. Possible. I'm fairly certain that by my sophomore year in HS, though, I would've been downright antagonistic about it -- because my freshman year in HS was truly hellacious, in the wake of Dad quitting alcohol and Mom starting and my parent's relationship really hitting the skids, and the pressures of HS and falling into a sport that consumed me to the point of nearly having a breakdown myself... it was one vicious, violent, year, and no one said or did anything. The lesson learned was that authority wasn't, couldn't, wouldn't do anything, hell, that authority didn't even care.
By the time I was 15, I'd be willing to bet I did give the impression I provoked a lot of it, or was fully at fault myself, because getting defensive was the only defense I had left. It was some small measure of control, to be able to say at least I yelled back, struck back when I could. Which was another reason TV and books told me my life didn't qualify as 'bad', because in books and TV, the kids never hit back, never defend themselves, don't yell, they just curl into balls and cower. I'd done that until I was 13, and then gradually I started kicking back. And that meant I was part of it, so... obviously not abused, eh.
(Hrmm, maybe I should add that point, too, now that I think of it.)
I guess the question is: when you report, do you ever say anything to the kids? Because even if nothing changes, even if the parents get angry, the kid should know that someone out there knows it's wrong. That was the worst, growing up, I think: the feeling that no one even thought this was wrong, and eventually, I just didn't trust doctors or therapists or teachers or coaches any more, because they were in on it. Having someone willing to 'not be in on it' would've at least been a consolation, no matter how paltry it may seem to you.
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Date: 22 Jul 2009 03:13 pm (UTC)I have many beefs with Misty Lackey as a writer, but this is one thing she manages to get right about half the time. Sad that that's as heartening as it is.
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Date: 22 Jul 2009 04:33 pm (UTC)Ironically, I think if my mother had been less progressive, less unconventional, less privately ambitious, she'd have had an easier time of it. I think on some levels she knew that, too, and it just makes it worse, to know if you could just be an automaton, the perfect officer's wife (like her mother!), then you wouldn't get so angry at being treated like a second-class citizen, at being told you'd make a great secretary when you've got advanced degrees, at being treated like you're some kinda freak for wanting a career and life of your own. Not, mind you, that my Dad ever expressed such -- he's always supported my mother's educational and career ambitions, but the rest of the world was an overwhelming force that drowned out the rest, and my mother didn't have the internal strength to turn away from that and focus on the family's support.
Which is to say: I would not be half the person I am, now, if it weren't for my mother. For all the bad she did, the good she did so outweighs the bad that in retrospect, I guess it's come out even. Maybe even a little ahead, because one thing's for sure -- through whatever combination of my own personality and hers and the world we lived in -- that cycle's been broken. I'll make my own mistakes, sure, but I refused that inheritance.
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Date: 22 Jul 2009 03:15 pm (UTC)This is an excellent summation of a lot of issues, even if it did hurt to read. I would hope that nowadays people aren't as likely to fall into the "no one likes these people because they're mean to everyone" trap; I see plenty of stuff where a completely charming person turns out to be a villain - but admittedly, I don't read a lot of stuff with child abuse in it, so I don't know if that's an exception.
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Date: 22 Jul 2009 04:41 pm (UTC)I hated those stories, as a kid. Hated, hated, hated. They were so patently false, plus they totally knocked me out of the ballpark as any kind of potential wish-fulfillment. For one, I wasn't an orphan anyway, and I didn't want my parents dead, either (the one time, in grade school, that my mother ever discussed with me and my sister what would happen to us if anything happened to our parents, the eventual tentative conclusion was that we'd probably live with cousins... and that was a fate worse than death. (Ugh! We had all boy-cousins, so our aunts and uncles always kept us at a puzzled distance, and neither my sister nor myself saw living with them as anything pleasant, because we didn't 'get' them anymore than they 'got' us.) Plus, my family wasn't dirt-poor, either, and all the orphans were dirt-poor before being adopted by some really rich guy... apparently really rich guys only like dirt-poor abandoned kids, not middle-class kids from the exurbs.
I think the abusive parent being written as "no one likes the person" stereotype is because it's easier to write, and clearer (in that you don't have to work so hard to get the reader's loyalties to lie solely with the victim) -- much harder to write abusers like they really are, as con artists. That's what they are, really: con artists who take from the victim while fooling everyone else (as well as the victim) into thinking the victim deserves this, even so far as to present themselves as the helpless victim. They're manipulators of the first degree, and that can be a really difficult thing to write/portray, because it can split the audience loyalties -- someone out there, after all, is going to fall for the portrayal just like everyone does in the real world. A lazy writer won't take that chance, and that's part of my point for posting this, that I'd appreciate a few less lazy writers in the world.
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Date: 22 Jul 2009 05:25 pm (UTC)Finally how was it that you ended up living on the street? You once implied that you were a street kid from 14 on, and at some of that was full time, not skipping school, from your discription of squats. Was that after HS? I'm afraid you piqued my curiosity.
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Date: 22 Jul 2009 06:19 pm (UTC)My folks definitely enshrined education, but our family was far less predictable. If I got good grades, I did get rewarded, but sometimes that came with, "oh, look, you actually got an A," as though it was completely unexpected that I could do well at something. It was treated like an anomaly, sometimes. And other times, when I didn't do well, I didn't get punished or even yelled at; I got the quiet disappointment of letting them down (which was almost as bad, in its own way). No, a lot of what triggered madness in our family was related more to my mom's life separate from me -- her work, her marriage, her relationship with her own parents -- and thus unpredictable to me, as a kid, even as a young adult. So I never could see any of it coming, for the most part.
Ah, no, I didn't mean to give the impression I was on the streets quite that young -- I'd probably not be here at all, if that were so. No, I was too in love with my sport to risk it, and that meant hanging in there with the family. I really only bolted for short stints (overnight, at most) during HS. I just didn't have the resources until college to even know there was any place I could go.
Eventually I'll do a public post that explains the whys and wherefores; I'd been working up to it with the most recent installment and then got sidetracked as I started thinking about whether I'd ever really thought of myself as having a valid reason to get out. Even in college I wasn't entirely convinced I had valid complaints, enough to justify leaving -- it was more a survival instinct that felt separate from whether or not I deserved my life. That is, I didn't really believe I didn't deserve it, but at the same time I wanted to escape the pain, and that meant running away was the only option.
Abusive dads were blue collar drunks, or unemployed ones, not school administrators with PhDs.
Ayup. The corollary to this, of course, is what I found from friends who come from lower-income families, who'd speak freely of growing up with so little, but then say with a laugh, "but I never felt like I missed anything, because my folks loved us so much that even when things were rough, it was still good." More proof that books and movies had it completely wrong...
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Date: 22 Jul 2009 06:43 pm (UTC)My upbringing wasn't perfect--my mother tends towards the passive-aggressive drama queen end of the behavioral spectrum--but I never doubted for an instant that in their eyes, I was smart, I was special, and I was loved. They liked spending time with me and my sister, and they were proud of our accomplishments.
Some of the mindfuckery you describe above was inflicted by my peers in grade school, and I carried the scars for years, but god, never never by my parents.
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Date: 22 Jul 2009 07:17 pm (UTC)Setting that aside, the point of this post is that society itself was colluding in the mindfuckery: nothing out there indicated that I had any reason to think I deserved other than what I got. That's what pisses me off, to this day, because it keeps going, the stories around us continue to perpetrate this myth that one can 'rate' such horrors on some kind of scale. If you are X hurt, then you are Really Abused. Anything below that, you can't take that ride.
It's not like the parents themselves -- or, in my experience (for practical/legal as well as social reasons) anyone else -- is ever going to tell the kid directly that this isn't how the world should be. Someone's got to do that, though, and the only other outlet/resource kids have, especially at a younger age, is in books and television shows and movies. But the more those stories reinforce the "you must be X hurt," the more they compound the problem until by mid-adolescence most kids (like me, and those I've known) just assume that they're all alone, with no resources, and no one who'd even recognize, let alone help.
Kids are already isolated, psychologically, by adolescence: every single person goes through the "I'm the only one who's ever felt this way!" phase. Unfortunately, that's fodder for authorities to discount any accusations of abuse, since it can easily be brushed off as, "look, kid, everyone argues with their parents at some points, you're nothing special that you deserve any better, you'll eventually get over it and realize this is just life." The fact that writers, our society's dreamers, would take the easy way out and thus betray the kids even further -- well, it's that fact that I might be able to influence, and it's that fact that galls me more than anything else.
A writer has a chance, really, for a one-on-one with each reader, and you never know who might be reading. In fact, you never know whose life you might save by the story you tell. That's not exaggeration. There are books, fiction books, that do save lives and save sanity, and who needs that more than someone whose entire world is telling them that their everyday horror is just how life is?
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From: (Anonymous) - Date: 22 Jul 2009 09:48 pm (UTC) - Expand(no subject)
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Date: 24 Jul 2009 07:03 am (UTC)For now I will just leave it as "thank you." I hope you will keep this entry public.
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Date: 24 Jul 2009 08:36 am (UTC)I had my email address up as visible to non-registered users, but after even just one post like this, I figured it'd best to not be quite so available. Kinda drawing the boundary, no offense, which is why you're stuck with replying here. Sorry.
I don't have a lot of bravery, though, and in many ways, I retain many of the fears I learned growing up. It's just that I've had enough time and distance to realize that even if I have fears, my care for others experiencing the same outweighs those fears by a long, long, stretch. That's why I figure, if this makes someone think twice about what they're writing, or helps someone realize they've measured themselves against those stupid book/tv rules to their own detriment -- then any unease I feel about being so honest is, quite frankly, secondary.
When you're ready, you can come along as well. Until then, just know some of us have gone on ahead, to try and make it a little easier for you and anyone else coming along the path. You'll get to this point, and farther, eventually. Won't be easy, but you will.
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Date: 24 Jul 2009 05:30 pm (UTC)Some of my experiences matched the YA stereotypes: my parents were blue-collar, not well-educated, and everybody knew Dad was violent, whether he acted it out or not. It was embarrassing to bring friends over (I stopped in elementary school) because they'd be scared of him even if he was just watching TV, ignoring us. He puts off a definite "Field of Psycho" detectable to all, no matter how sheltered or privileged. I can't really explain it, but Ben Kingsley illustrates it best in his portrayal of Don Logan in "Sexy Beast". That guy. That's my dad. I knew when he was abusive, but it was never worth telling the tale to others.
Thing is, he never beat me. Instead, for many reasons including the deaths of family pets, I believed he'd snap and kill me if I crossed him. So the rule was, don't give him a reason.
Like any life or death rule, this spawned whole system of behavior and the delusion that I could control him by being good. Because, unlike the stereotype, he was fairly predictable and didn't drink. And if Dad went overboard now and again, Mom was right there with a list of excuses ("He was abused as a child! He survived five years of prison as a teenager! etc.) Even though the teachers liked me and would have believed any story of abuse, it was never worth reporting. No bruises. Mom would explain that he was wrong, and say she'd leave if he hurt us, but then she'd excuse him.
I've always been detail-oriented and easily focused, so it was easy for me to follow the rules. I maintained my status as his favorite, and other family members would enlist me to control his reaction to things--which worked. I didn't like my dad, but I could make him stop breaking stuff/threatening pets or siblings by getting his attention with the correct response (righteously angry silence, wide-eyed "BUT I LOVE YOU!!", and/or cower and cry). That plus being virginal and getting good grades meant I was safe.
So. Deluded. At the time, I knew it was abusive, but I liked myself for being good at surviving it and felt slightly contemptuous for family members who weren't as good at living with him. It was all very One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, except NOT THAT BAD. Heh.
I can still fill pages with ways I could make the people around me happy, but ways I can make myself happy are hard to think about. I'm still trying to convince myself in my daily life that if I make a mistake, no one will die, and I'll still deserve to be loved. Without a happy abuser around, when am I good enough to feel safe? Hard to know.
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Date: 26 Jul 2009 01:06 am (UTC)In some ways, being the non-black-sheep does make for an awful lot of coping mechanisms that at least pass for more socially acceptable, one reason I envy those who claimed the 'good-child' position. At least it's something employers like, even if it still leaves you mucked terribly on the inside. For me, being treated as the contrarian ("why can't you leave well enough alone!?") and I still do it in adult-hood, pure habit that's well nigh unbreakable by now. Not all employers care for that. I have a ream of coping mechanisms that do me no good in the adult world. *kicks self*
I'm still trying to convince myself in my daily life that if I make a mistake, no one will die, and I'll still deserve to be loved.
For me, it's trying to convince myself that I can be myself and no one will abruptly start hating me, and will instead assure me that I continue to deserve to be loved. (And if I think of it as "make the mistake of being myself" then we really are saying the same thing.)
felt slightly contemptuous for family members who weren't as good at living with him
Sometimes I suspect this is exactly how my sibling views me, even now. I wouldn't, or couldn't, game the system, and I get the sense sometimes that I'm seen as just a bit stupid or dense in some way for not 'getting' it. On the other hand, what I think is sometimes forgotten in such characterizations is that for one of us to look good and be the good child, there must be a bad child with which to contrast. At least, that's been what I've seen. Like Vidal said, it's not enough to win; others must lose.
Boy, we is some messed-up folk, but on the plus side, we is some survived-that-hell-yeah messed-up folk. I try to see the good in that.
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Date: 26 Jul 2009 03:39 am (UTC)i decided to look at your journal after you commented on my css problems post in
what you've written here is really, really important..
and i'm a lot younger than you and probably most of the readers (at least the ones who replied here) -- i'm only 18, going into my second year of college. so i guess i feel like i'm one of those possible readers of YA novels (well, more so than older people maybe?) especially since i used to love reading them up until a year or two ago. i don't know, i guess i slowly gave up on them over the years. the triteness and unrealness got to me, too. though i still kept trying.
i grew up in india and didn't have very much access to YA novels, actually -- so in a way i feel like i had a similar experience to yours. nancy drew was the more staple ingredient for young people while i was growing up (and horribly abridged classics -- the really old ones, like heidi, and sweet valley, and agatha christie, though she's not necessarily for young people i guess?). though i visited the u.s. in the summers a lot because i have family here (my mom is american) and then i came to live here for tenth grade.
anyway, the point is i think i had more limited exposure to YA novels, and they seemed like a godsend in a way because at least they sort of spoke to my experience a little. for example, i think reading about other glbtq teenagers might have helped me come to terms with my own sexuality (which i haven't fully come to terms with yet or anything, but..) but as i grew older and i realized how different my own experience was and how it seemed like i'd never get that happy ending, i started to get really disillusioned..
i don't think i'm making much sense, but your post really struck me very deeply. it really makes me think about my experiences growing up (and continuing) and wondering what to make of it all. and yeah, i think the message out there is, "you can only have been abused if you didn't do anything to deserve it" -- which assumes that there can actually BE a reason, a valid good reason, to be abused.
i think i sort of come from a position similar to taithe, as i've grown up rather dysfunctionally maybe (it's hard for me to actually say that and believe it because my parents have always told me that we're not dysfunctional at all, and commonly use guilting strategies.. and actually i feel really bad saying any of this at all about my family. um. ok. i'm going to stop).
#16 really meant a lot to me -- i think i have my own anger issues, and there have been times when i started a fight with my mom, when i hit her first. and i don't think i've had an abusive relationship with either of my parents exactly, or rather, i don't know what to make of it yet, and it's scary to even think about it, though i need to (and i constantly feel like my mom's telling me i'm making a big deal out of nothing even as i write this, but anyway..) -- um, sorry, tangent again. i meant to say that i really, really, really hate the way victims are ALWAYS portrayed as helpless innocents (which, really, what does that even mean?)
i have this rather idealistic idea that there shouldn't be a hierarchy of oppression, of pain, of abuse -- but then it becomes very necessary to have one, at least to some extent, in a legal and a practical framework. it's important to recognize when oppression is institutionalized, when someone faces oppression because of racism/sexism/homophobia/etc and to mark that out so that it doesn't become "the same" as another person's experience (who wouldn't experience that), and it's also important to figure out what to do about kids and people who are abused, who have been abused. it seems like you (and several of the commenters here) have a social work background/career and so you probably have to deal with this a lot.
though i still don't know what to make of the idea that there can be "true" victims of abuse.. i think it's probably very complicated and grey-area-ish, yes, but it still needs to be known? i don't know. i think my life has been a lot about blurred boundaries, so i speculate a lot, but.. i don't know. um. ok. i'm going to stop with that, too.
but thank you for writing this. i hope it's ok that i'm adding it to my memories.
i think it's great that you're brave enough to talk about your life like this.
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Date: 1 Sep 2009 04:09 am (UTC)Violence and anger are complex things, and when you put them in the framework of family, it's just ten times, twenty times worse. I mean, if you think about it, you've known these people your entire life, and there's something to be said for the old adage that familiarity breeds contempt. It can. And, too, it gets murky because between 12 and 18, there's so much growing up going on, and changing expectations, that if there's any time in a life that violence (or at least extreme anger and vicious words) are going to occur, it'll be then -- from the kid, or from the parent.
The larger scope of it, though, is harder to see when you're in the middle of it, and even for a long time after, from what I've seen / experienced / learned from others. It takes having a fair bit of independence under your belt before you've really got some distance and perspective. But then, that's true of a great deal, even in good/healthy families -- and in some ways, it's the sole reason I can even contemplate writing stuff like this. It's been long enough now, for me, that it's hold on me isn't as fierce as it once was.
Besides, I was always all about pointing out the elephant in the living room. Now I just try to use my power for good.
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Date: 26 Jul 2009 11:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 1 Sep 2009 04:10 am (UTC)this was really difficult to read for a lot of reasons
Date: 4 Dec 2009 02:59 am (UTC)There are bits which are, almost word-for-word, my experiences. Things in there that make me go "oh, that still counts, does it?". Your justifications and my justifications are very similar (it's because I'm so difficult, if I wasn't such a nuisance it wouldn't happen, it's so hard raising a special needs child on your own, she wasn't well herself, there was no support, I made things difficult all the time) and I'm really kind of reluctant to face it at the moment.
Bit odd coming across something which unravels in a numbered list all your careful self-deceptions about Why Your Childhood Wasn't So Bad Really, LA LA LA, I've Met People Who Were Really Abused, My Childhood Wasn't Abusive I Don't Know What You're Talking About It's Perfectly Normal To Dump Your Child Out Of The Car On The Motorway And Drive Off To "Calm Them Down", It Was All My Fault For Being So Angry All The Time, etc., etc.
I'd quite like to unread it. Mostly because I never really managed to stay in therapy (considered myself too clever, them too stupid, etc) and my means of coping has, until now, been to minimise the importance of it, deny that any of it was that big a deal, and make fun of people with non-abusive childhoods for being "weak" or coddled.
But thank you for writing it, and for posting it. I hope it does have an effect.
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Date: 4 Dec 2009 04:29 am (UTC)Despite the mostly positive reaction to the first two posts in the series, I did sometimes come across responses (elsewhere) about how Obviously It's All Made Up, because there is the subtext (intentionally) in the posts that I never truly considered myself as part of that subculture. More like a mini-anthropologist, recording everything for later, hopefully-useful, posterity. ("Someday this may have value, somehow.") It disgusted me that I was getting the "you're not really X" attitude, even though it was an attitude I admit I held/hold myself. Then I realized: to recognize that yes, no matter how much I tried to hold myself distant, to acknowledge I really was in there means I had to acknowledge the cause that led up to the experiences (in those two posts). As long as I told myself I wasn't truly abused, then I also would be telling myself I wasn't truly homeless/helpless/stuck. And if I'd learned to value from being in/on the streets, then I needed to find value in what got me there.
Okay, it might be a negative value -- in the sense of "it may be that your sole purpose is to serve as a bad example for others" -- but it's still a goddamn value, and it's a value I should finally own, rather than continue to let it be measured by someone else's standards. But it was only really while writing this 4th one that I had to finally face all the ways in which everything around me had maneuvered me into a position of -- even these many years later -- still buying into this Stop Crying You're Not Really Abused crap. I'd always just brushed it off, even in therapy, with "well, I'm not a kid anymore, so I fail to see any use in dredging up ancient history." Now I wonder if that was due to an unconscious fear that raising the issue would result in a therapist saying, "well, as a matter of fact, obviously you did deserve everything you got." Easier to just avoid the question altogether, eh?
Believe me, there are times when I look at this post and cringe, wishing I could unwrite it somehow.
As for effect, I have no idea. I've yet to meet or hear from a single YA-author (present or planned) who's had anything to say about it, so either the reaction is annoyance for telling them their job, or annoyance at my presumption about how YA gets written, or maybe it's just that the calibre of YA authors on my flist and foaflist are good enough that they know this already and write to avoid such stereotypes. Or maybe they're silently lurking, who knows! But if it helps anyone like me and you realize after the fact that yeah, that's us, and we have a right to own what happened to us instead of living another day believing we deserved even an instant of it, in that case I think maybe that's just fine, too.
Even if sometimes I do wish we'd never had to have gone through it in the first place.
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Date: 6 Apr 2010 05:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 6 Apr 2010 05:54 am (UTC)