I can vividly remember a confrontation with my mother�s 3rd husband. This guy was a good 15 years older than my mother and their relationship was inherently twisted. He insisted that he was a lesbian. Yeah. He was also a very feminine, soft-spoken old guy with a fairly sinister twist. His business practices were dubious at best, and where he got all his money was a mystery to me, which was probably to my benefit. There was a time when I came home from a weekend with my dad to find my mother with a severely swollen and purpled ankle, lying in bed, unwilling to go to the ER for X-rays. She said that they had gone to P-town (er, Provincetown, for those out of the know) for the weekend and stayed in a hotel. Fred (never trust Freds) had apparently kicked her (I know not why) and in retaliation and an attempt to get away from him, bitten him in a very sensitive area. Anyway, I had seen enough guys come and go (including during the marriage) to know that what she was saying was true. The last straw was when he blamed me for a malfunction with her car. I was standing in the kitchen when he blamed me for something he had done himself. I flew across the room to where he was in the dining room, practically foaming. I suppose it was lucky that my mother held me back before I got to him because I would have done damage.

I have to say that I really hate my violent streak. I detest the blind rage that makes me incoherent when speaking and deadly accurate with my hands. I have hit, in sum total, 1 person who did not physically confront me first and I beat myself up for it to this day. I know that what caused the anger was in itself unforgivable, but my reaction was equally so. Had I a time machine, I would most certainly go back to that day, both days actually, and change how I handled them. I was swiftly forgiven for my actions, but not by myself. There are times when I still cry about what I have done, despite being told that I need not. I cannot rectify what an unthought about backhand has done.

I know where it comes from. It lives in the child that I was. In the little, helpless girl who was intimidated for fun, taken out back and humiliated, my skin left stinging and red. It also lives in the adolescent girl sitting in the passenger�s seat of an �88 Corsica while her mother smokes, letting hot ash fall onto her still damaged legs, the first real pain she had felt since the paralysis, listening to the mother laugh when she began to cry. It lurks in the summer evening when a black eye was handed out for sleeping through dinner, the following weeks spent with family friends and then, after the bruise had healed and no one who would really take notice would know, staying with the grandparents, not wanting to return to what waited for her. It crawls in the thunderstormed night when memories long left undisturbed were stirred, conjuring the six year old running sock-footed to neighbor�s houses screaming for someone to call the police. It also slithers in the unknown things that have not been dredged up but happened nonetheless.

I have to work to keep things in check when I am angry. I have to watch my words, my thoughts, my hands and feet too long taught that control was no virtue. The strong, smart, funny, sweet, and pretty young woman goes out the window the moment I get angry. I try talking about what transpired, but emotion never comes. It�s merely a narrative, devoid of feeling, a recitation of fact after gruesome fact, reading like the autopsy report of a functional child ruined. The only thing that sometimes brings the tears is the mourning for what could have been had I not lived what I did, had they not been who they were, for the relationships that have been scarred by all that transpired. I am not a victim and I am not blameless. I must be responsible for my own actions, for my own utterances, for all the snarled, deep-slashing insults and also for the fists, though never closed, that have flown or wanted to fly.

Think less of me. I do. But, I never discount my merits. I have lived through storms that broke the windows but were not allowed to take the house. I have realized that, for all my faults, I am a good person, willing to help any in need, bright, capable, funny. Less than 1% of the time, though, I am not an example for the positive, just a perfect case study for the effects of childhood trauma on adults.

This entry was never intended to be what it has become, but I suppose that such is the nature of writing, allowing what is coursing through my neurons to spill through fingers onto a screen. All I wanted to say was that I found my dream amusing and that I had made a mistake in taping Angel Wednesday night and can�t watch it.

I make no apology for what has preceded.