Sometimes I feel like I may be crazy. My older sister suffered from bi-polar disorder and my younger sister shows some signs of going through that as well. But I feel like my childhood was mostly happy up until my sister got sick. There are a few instances of what could be considered sexual abuse depending upon how you look at it: my father showed me his penis when teaching me the facts of life so I would know what he was talking about I guess. He also once called me in to view him and my mom engaging in sexual activity although it seemed more robotic than passionate so I think it was only for the purposes of teaching me what was supposed to happen. Maybe my parents just had weird ideas about how to teach kids about sex. Anyway that's the only two instances I can think of where anything happened, no one ever touched me except to spank me on the bottom. My father did shave my head when I was six because I butchered it trying to give myself bangs like my mother always talked about having. But all that paled in comparison to what happened after my sister got sick. When I was fifteen my father compelled me to help him strap my sister to the bed "for her own good" since he didn't want her in an institution. I always felt guilty about that. I also felt guilty because when she first got sick, it all started at this laundrymat where I was supposed to be helping sort laundry but didn't want to because my brothers peed the bed and the smell made me sick to my stomach. Dad had left us there to take care of it on our own, my older sister was 18 and I was 15 at the time. She went to the store to get detergent and told me to sort but I didn't. When Dad came back to check on us barely anything had gotten done and my sister was still gone. She and dad got into it. I witnessed him drag her by her hair and lots of other stuff that I felt was my fault for being lazy. Then right after that is when she finally went over the edge of sanity and began acting entirely manic. I never understood exactly what happened with her and wonder if things would have turned out differently if that day at the laundrymat if I'd not been lazy.

Okay fast forward, I told this stuff to my ex husband when we were together because I believe in being totally honest within a relationship. He then continually used it against me whenever we fought, many times he threatened to call the men in the white coats to come get me and take me to the "funny farm" and sometimes he told me I belonged there with my sister. Sometimes he told me the wrong sister went to the funny farm.
But he also physically abused me. He was abusing drugs the one time that he actually really beat me up but there were several instances where he did minor things. One time we were fighting in a vehicle when he was behind the wheel. We were stopped and I went to get out to get some space from him as he was being verbally abusive but he floored it the moment my foot hit the ground and I was flung from the vehicle breaking the door handle in the process. That night he told a friend that I had tried to kill myself by jumping from a moving vehicle.
I started calling 911 when he became violent because as soon as they showed up he stopped and calmed down but towards the end the police said that if I called them again someone was going to jail. I alternated between feeling like he was an abusive bastard and just a troubled man who needed my love and help the most.
I finally left because I was reliving the time that he really beat me up and seeing the bruises on my face and neck when I looked in the mirror. So I told myself that the next time he was violent with me, I'd leave and I did. He continues to verbally abuse me as we share custody of our three children and he uses them to control me constantly calling me a bad parent for things as minor as our daughter splashing in a mud puddle and getting her shoes wet, even though I sent her back in another pair of shoes, not the wet ones.
One of the most recent instances of verbal abuse before I left was when I didn't want to have sex with him that night because I was tired. He threw everything off my desk onto the floor, yanked the covers off me and told me that if I couldn't cook and I couldn't clean I was only good for one thing and if I couldn't do that I wasn't good for anything at all. This reduced me to tears. I can't count the number of times I spent in a corner crying and praying to be a better wife or die. I can't count the number of times I thought about killing myself. I still struggle with wondering if I made him into that person or if I somehow instigated all this.
One time I locked myself in the vehicle to get away from him and he brought his pistol out, cocked it and held it up to his own temple threatening to blow his own brains out if I didn't unlock the truck. At first I really thought he was going to shoot me. Another time I locked him outside during a fight thinking that would stop him but he put his fist through the glass on the door and almost cut off his own arm in the process. We ended up in the ER that night but he made me lie and say it was an accident.
But it wasn't always bad, I wasn't always afraid of him. When he was being nice I felt safe and loved. Am I totally messed up for compartmentalizing this for so long? It's like I kept the guy who cuddled with me and made love to me separate from the one who threw remote controls at me, poured milk over my head, broke the coffee maker by sweeping everything off the counter in a fit of rage, threw trash over the floor, threw dirty laundry over my head, bent my head down until I thought I was going to break in two, slapped me, encouraged me to commit suicide, told me I was a waste of space, told me I was crazy, told me I was good for nothing and finally once and only once held me down on the bed by my throat as he repeatedly boxed my ears until they rang leaving bruises on my face and neck and around my eye that I covered up with about three layers of foundation for the next three weeks?
I know the things I went through technically count as abuse. I knew that when I was going through them and I thought I could handle anything as long as I loved him. I really felt like that song in Oliver Twist that the abusive guy's wife sings "As Long as he Needs me". I really felt that as long as he needed me I could handle anything but I couldn't take it anymore. I am still scared of him and I haven't even tried to have another relationship for the two and a half years since I left him because I'm afraid of the same thing, or worse happening to me again. And I know I have made such a long post but I have been keeping a lot of this stuff in for a long time.