Paper Covers Rock

About a year ago, I severed communication with my parents. This came after a challenging autism and ADHD diagnosis that brought relief, regret, and indignation.

Indignation because I can no longer mask or pretend to conform to some long-dead idea of me. I cannot be anything other than authentic around my parents, for whom an upbeat disposition is an expectation. The damage I suffered from needing to present as ‘on’ at all times is incalculable.

The hardest thing to accept is that my mother abused me, and that contributed to my sexual arousal template skewing younger, which I’ll explain later. Let me state from the jump: my decisions and actions are my own, and I take responsibility. I cannot change my past, I can only process my present.

I also state emphatically the misery of having an attraction to minors. Perhaps the greatest and most inaccurate idea of me is that I enjoy, or at least am not bothered by it. This is not the case. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.

My mother interfered with my sexual development in my tween years. First, she interrupted a make-out session to have a talk about ‘the mistakes that can happen in the heat of the moment’, as I stood there with an erection while the girl I was with scrambled to cover herself up.

That same year, my family traveled to Iowa to visit some distant acquaintances. The family had a daughter a few years younger than me, and we sat by ourselves on their back stairs. Out of nowhere, she asked if I wanted to make out, and shoved her tongue down my throat. I felt ashamed, confused and violated. Surely, I thought, she was too young to know how to do that.

My mother constantly violated my privacy. I came home from school on multiple occasions to find my mother, sitting on my bed, leafing through a pornographic magazine I had unsuccessfully hidden. She would want to talk about how ‘the women in the pages weren’t happy’, and that I was contributing to their violation.

The idea that I could have my personal space wasn’t possible. It was early on, in my junior high school years, that she began to think of me as a sexual deviant.

I don’t know how well my parents communicate. My father had a warmth and playfulness, but there was an aloofness; a stoic mask that leveled mirth with bluntness. From as early as five, I became aware of my mother’s vicariousness; how she turned to me for validation and support in lieu of my dad. As the first-born overachiever, I assumed the mantle of peacemaker. Any emotional displays of sadness, frustration and anxiety were verboten. A Nirvana cd I borrowed from a friend had to be returned the same day. I had to tell my friend Matt, with my mother watching from the car, that I couldn’t listen to music that had negativity in it. I was mortified.

Into the fold to soothe my anxiety, I found pornography. Pre-internet, it was magazines, and their power was immediately gratifying. I could exert control over the women in the pages. I could swear at them, flick them off, spit at them, and then try to find a hiding spot to outfox my overbearing mother.

I understand now how primed I was to develop a fixation on pornography, and how, in my under twenty-one years, it came to be everything I sought to cope with serious mental health struggles.

I can also see that my mother was envious of the attention I was giving other girls, and clawed to regain it, in essence wanting me as a lover emotionally, satisfying the lack from my father. My mother’s own adolescence was marred by sexual abuse from her older brother, and her father. Her abuse stunted her sexuality, and partly stalled it around her tween years, coinciding perfectly with my own nascent lunges towards sexual maturity.

This grotesque collision, along with greater internet access, altered the course of my life. Arrests, hospitalizations, homelessness, divorce, bankruptcy, loss of parental rights. Even now, suicide remains a viable option. It is only, and I mean ONLY through my girlfriend’s love that I’m still alive.

So, after all the aforementioned realizations, I cannot continue a relationship with my parents using outdated scripts. Piecing together my mother’s roll in my narrative is only the beginning, and I’m just now starting to process. I don’t hate my parents. It’s far more complicated than that. They themselves suffered trauma they never processed, and handed down what they couldn’t restrain.