15 years...

The year I turned 15 I moved from living with my paternal grandmother - who started the day with a vegemite jar full of brandy, and would continue consuming the bottle through out the day - to living with my abusive father and his new wife and her children. Frying pan to fire....

I had hoped that because he was newly remarried that the history of abuse would cease... how wrong was I.

He loved an audience. Comes with the territory of being an entertainer I guess. Him and his wife would come home from a gig anywhere from midnight to 2am, and he would proceed to wake myself and her three children up. We would all have to sit and listen to the tirade for whatever supposed offence we, or his wife had committed that day/night/hour/minute.... then the physical violence would start, usually as a result of his wife telling him to stop, or to leave one of her kids alone. And we would sit in silence. This was new to them... for me, it was just a continuation of how it had always been. The only difference being the place, and the woman.

I had hoped that because he had a new wife that I would no longer be a target for sexual innuendo, or touch. It had been safer in the past when there was a woman around. The degree of sexual abuse changed, what would happen was to a lesser a degree, I wasn't raped anymore... but that was all that changed... After all "don't be stupid, I'm your father" was the common catch cry if I protested.

"Don't be stupid, I'm your father" apparently meant that it was ok to grope your 15 year old daughter's growing breasts, that it was ok to walk past her and goose her, at the front or the back... It meant that it was ok to come into the bathroom while she was showering, and open the shower curtain under the pre tense of getting the soap...

I only remember once being on the receiving end of my father's violence. I hadn't put the vacuum away quickly enough in his opinion, and because I spoke to him with attitude, I was promptly pushed up against the wall with his hands around my throat. I woke up, on the floor to him kicking me and yelling at me "who the fuck do you think you are?"

What's this got to do with anything?

I have spent 100's of hours in therapy... 17 days in the psyche unit... a plethora of anti- depressants and other meds, a committal hearing, a trial, and successful conviction for the historical sexual abuse that he committed against me. The continual fight to overcome Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome and Acute Anxiety Disorder. Read God know's how many books in the hope of learning how to parent successfully, because my own point of reference is so skewed, that all it gave me was the HOW NOT TO parent experience.

There have been many many times through out my daughter's life that I have been triggered by her femaleness... as she entered adolescence and the physical changes occurring in front of me were so visibly confronting that I went into counselling again, to learn what was 'normal' for a adolescent female to experience and show.

And here I am, heart sore. Because it feels like it was for naught. My 15 year old daughter, in the midst of her own teenage angst, has declared me the enemy, and is moving to live with her father. All the therapy, all the books, none of it can quieten the angry 15 year old in me, as my daughter tantrums at my answers of no, at boundaries being put down, at not getting her own way right here, right now.... the 15 year old inside of me, looks at her, aghast, and thinks ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME???

Then, of course the mother in me kicks in, and says shush, Laura's experiences are relative to her, this isn't about you. Which tends to only irritate that 15 year old me even further, and I split, and oscillate between being Laura's mother and trying not to take it so personally, and being 15 again, when my world was so very different to the one my own daughter is in and feeling profoundly angry about it.

How did I so royally fuck this up?