Craigslist Confessional

by Helena Dea Bala

  The next day, I went to get a pelvic exam. The doctors told my mom that there was scarring. I remember my mom looked at me like there was something wrong with me. A few months later, she told me that the DA had dropped the case. So nothing ever came of it.

  After everything came to light, I told my brother that I had seen him by the doorway, watching. He got angry and started screaming that Scott was innocent, but I could tell by the look in his face that I was right. I hadn’t imagined it. He had been watching.

  My mother and I didn’t talk about what happened again until I was eighteen. We were fighting—we often do—and she asked me whether I had “given it to him” and then had gotten scared because I’d lost my virginity. When I got angry and upset, she straight out said she didn’t believe me—she accused me of lying about it. My sister has also never believed that anything happened. We used to watch a lot of Lifetime movies together and many of them dealt with rape. They’re pretty formulaic: the victims are questioned, and nobody believes them in the beginning. But in the movies, the rapist always ends up getting in trouble if it really happened.

  “So why would you wait six months?” my sister wanted to know.

  I told her I’d never planned on saying a thing, that Mom had found out. I said I’d been too scared. She said that if it was her, she would have told.

  I saw Scott at a local restaurant once, years later, and I went into the bathroom and started hyperventilating. He works with children now. I worry about the kids all the time. I called his employer and tried to warn them about him. They said they hadn’t had a problem, and if there were no charges brought, there was nothing that they could do. I often blame myself for not saying anything—if I had told on him that night and the police had evidence, he wouldn’t be allowed around children today.

  My brother still lives with my mother. He isn’t doing well. Whenever I think about him, my gut tells me that it’s only a matter of time before he kills himself. I don’t blame him very much because he was molested by our half brother when he was younger. Our half brother was caught in the act by our parents, but it was swept under the rug. They sent my brother to counseling for two years, but anyone could tell he was never himself again—he used to try to force himself into the bathroom with me. My mom caught him one time, and she must have scared him bad, because he stopped. He probably deals with a lot of guilt from doing those things and letting Scott rape me. I remember I read a statistic once that half the Americans who have been molested will do it to someone else. Well, that makes me feel so sick. I am overwhelmed by sadness for my brother, who was a young boy himself when he was victimized. And I am sad for myself, too.

  I know that for at least part of what happened, my brother feels guilty. He’s told me that he’s sorry once before. He kind of looked at me one day and out of the blue said, “I’m really sorry.” I asked him what for. He just turned and walked away. I’ve told him that I forgive him, and I think I do. I know that I don’t blame him, so I don’t know if there’s much to forgive, because it wasn’t his fault.

  As for me, well, I have PTSD. During the day, snippets of that night flash into my head—the sliver of hallway light that cut a diagonal line into my room, the knife on my neck and the sound it made when he flipped it open, his hand over my mouth, and distinctly feeling like the weight of it would suffocate me. I often think about the rape exam six months later and that look on my mom’s face. Most times, these flashbacks happen in the shower. I wonder why. I guess I already feel so vulnerable in the shower and that sends me over the edge? I have regular nightmares, almost every night, about what happened. I don’t necessarily dream about Scott or what he did; when I wake up from the nightmare, though, the only thing on my mind is that night. I am a hypervigilant sleeper. My fiancé tells me that I swing my arms a lot, like I’m trying to punch someone. I guess it must be while I’m having a nightmare. I haven’t told him about anything that happened. I’m not sure it would change things between us if I did, but I’m not sure I want him to see that part of me.

  Throughout my teens, I decided that sex wasn’t mine to give away anymore because it had been taken from me, and so sex, indiscriminate and careless sex, became a coping mechanism—a way to work out the pain. The other was cutting. I used to cut up and down my left arm and some on my legs, particularly on the inside of my thighs. My high school counselor noticed the scars on my arm—they darken when I’m out in the sun—and told me that I needed to tell my mom, or she would.

  My mom’s reaction? That I was doing it for attention. The counselor disagreed. She said that I needed professional help because I was “very obviously struggling with something.” My mother was very angry, of course. When we were alone at home later that day, she told me that the next time I wanted to cut, I should do it in front of her so that she could tell me how deep to go.

  I’m not sure what else to say, except that I hope you believe me. And I wish it hadn’t happened.

  IDENTITY

  Justin, midthirties

  I lost my job a couple of years ago due to a back injury, and now I’m a stay-at-home dad. I love being at home with my kids, but it’s slowly killing me. I’ve never been without a job, and now, because of my injury, I can’t provide for my family like I used to. It’s a pride thing: I can no longer hunt, I can’t take on odd jobs, I can’t play with my boys because I can’t pick them up or run after them—I feel like I’m not only less of a parent but less of a man.

  My wife and I have been married for eight years, and for the first seven, we never fought. These days, her anxiety levels are through the roof. She works full-time, and she’s very high-strung. I can understand that: it’s a lot of psychological pressure to have to be the sole breadwinner. She’s not the type of person who is super adaptable to any situation. It takes her a long time to get comfortable with new situations at work, and so she’s constantly coming home with gripes about this and that. I try to talk her through things, talk her off the ledge, but she resents any advice I give her because she tells me she just “wants to vent.” The thing is, the next day she’s complaining about the same thing. It’s like Groundhog Day with her—nothing ever changes, all she wants to do is complain. She’s mostly unhappy at work, and I feel like she would like the option to walk away. Unfortunately, because we depend on her salary, she can’t, and that’s probably her chief source of resentment toward me.

  After I was hurt, I filed for disability, but I was denied. It takes about fourteen to sixteen months to get a disability hearing, and when I told her that, she got so angry with me. It’s not like it’s something that I can control! It takes as long as it takes, but I guess she was already getting tired of me hanging around the house—she was probably hoping for an easy fix, and for things to go back to normal. When we were both working, we had a safety net. Yeah, we were paying for the kids’ day care, so financially we weren’t really better off, but at least the both of us got to leave the house and be adults every day. So God knows I was hoping for things to go back to normal, too. We’re both under so much pressure: 90 percent of the time, she thinks I don’t care about the state of our lives because I don’t react to bad news the way she does. But it’s not like anything would get any better if we were both freaking out.

  People who knew us as a couple used to hate that we never argued. I knew my wife was “the one” when we started dating because things were easy. We didn’t butt heads, there were no miscommunications, we didn’t have to think twice about bringing something up—it just worked between us. Everything happened easily, organically. It was unlike any relationship I’d ever been in before. I was used to conflict, fighting every few months, minor and major disagreements. But we moved in together, got married, had kids, and we didn’t really hit any bumps in the road until recently. In the past year or so, we’ve been fighting like crazy. Every little thing sets her off.

  If I’m on my phone, she’s pissed. If the dishes aren’t done, the dinner cooked, the kids in bed, she’s pissed. If she doesn�
�t see me “doing something” at all times, she’s pissed. And ever since we had our second son a couple of years ago, there has been no action in the bedroom at all. She doesn’t show any interest in me if I don’t beg and plead. It’s always been me initiating. There’s something about sex, about the release of it, that just sets things back to equilibrium for my soul. It’s animalistic; it’s evolutionarily what people need. It’s what I need desperately, and to have it withheld is so emasculating. I feel like because it’s sex, the lack of it isn’t taken seriously. But if it were a hug that I needed, or a home-cooked meal, or a comforting cup of tea brought to me in bed—or whatever it is that makes any particular person feel seen, valued, and loved—withholding it would be seen as callous, a sign of a careless partner.

  The thing is, there’s a lot more expected of me now that I’m home all the time. When I was working and the kids were in day care, I never really stopped to consider what it takes to be a stay-at-home parent; it’s demanding. I was working nights for the first five years of our first son’s life, and so I missed out on the day-to-day work of raising him. The responsibility that I feel when I’m with my sons far outweighs anything I ever felt at my job. I have to cover the basics, which I guess is easy enough: make sure they’re clean, fed, and safe. But that’s the bare minimum. On top of making their food, doing the laundry, and keeping the house running (repairs, etc.), I have to also make sure our kids are thriving. That means setting up activities for them when they’re at home, helping them with their homework, driving them to and from extracurriculars, and setting up playdates with other kids. Once all that is done, I’m completely exhausted. I have nothing left in me.

  It takes such a toll on me to spend all day taking care of the kids. I do everything for them. And I hate to sound whiny, but raising kids these days isn’t as easy as it used to be—you can’t just send them to school with a Lunchable and tell them to count their lucky stars. These days, everything has to be organic and free-range and hormone-free and all that. It’s easy to get sucked into this vortex of high-performance parenting because you don’t want your kid to be the one who’s behind. When my wife comes home, it’s more of the same demands; she’s tired from work, so I have to pick up the slack. I feel like I can’t complain or tell her to help out, because she’ll get angry and tell me to get a job, and I really can’t hear that right now; my ego can’t take it. I feel so beat down. I’m downhearted.

  My friendships have also suffered ever since I lost my job. I’m fairly traditional as far as hobbies go—I used to enjoy hunting and fishing, watching and playing sports—and now that I can no longer do that with my friends, it’s hard to find common ground. All my friends work, of course. It feels emasculating to be in a room full of dudes and to have nothing to share except what the kids did at school that day, what the kids said over breakfast, all the chores that are piling up.

  I guess I’m upset because my wife isn’t really articulating her appreciation for everything I do for her, the kids, and the house. I don’t want a party, but it would be nice to be told once in a while that what I’m doing is noticed. That it matters. I am also an empath, an emotional sponge, so when my wife comes home in a foul mood, it really affects me. I absorb her feelings, and I take them personally and try to “solve” her problems. I am almost always overwhelmed because I feel like the emotional backbone of the family, but there’s nobody there when I need support. When I think back on when the tables were turned—when she held the primary responsibility for taking care of the kids—I’m not sure that I was all that appreciative of her, though. I guess it’s one of those things that has to be lived in order to be understood.

  I know that what I do at home is important—not just theoretically, but financially, too. If I weren’t home, we’d have to pay for day care, which would effectively cancel out one of our salaries anyways. Even so, I can’t help but feel that my wife isn’t sexually attracted to me anymore because I’m not “the man”—I’m not out there, providing for our family. I know that it’s a double standard: men are expected to contribute around the house, fifty-fifty. Gone are the days when women worked and took care of the house and kids. And gone are the days when women were expected to stay at home. But now that the tables are turned and I’m contributing more than my fair share, I feel like she certainly doesn’t respect me as much as she used to. My stock has definitely gone down in her book. I’m at home watching the kids and playing house—basically, I’m a housewife. It’s hard to find a housewife sexy.

  My mom, God rest her soul, she was a white-knuckles type of person. I want to pick up the phone and call her, ask for her advice. It’s been two years since she died, and I still have images of her last day—the way that her skin looked, the way she took my hand just before she was going to pass, like she was afraid of being alone. I miss her. She was my best friend. I need her wisdom now more than ever because I feel like my life is slipping away from me. Whether I liked it or not, my job defined me. It took up my time and made me feel like I was a productive member of society because I got a check every two weeks and paid my taxes. Without a job, I don’t know who I am anymore. I love my kids, but being their caretaker just isn’t enough.

  I don’t know how long my wife and I can go on like this before something happens—before we disintegrate. And there is so much at stake—our family, the kids. I can’t let that happen.

  Maddy, early thirties

  One look at me, and people think I’m privileged. And in a lot of ways I am, because I’m white, I sound educated, and I can get unskilled jobs pretty easily. I let people see what they want—I conform to the picture of me that’s easiest to digest. It’s neater than the truth. People just don’t feel the need to dig because I don’t send up red flags—at worst, they assume I am harmless and bland; at best, my image tells them I am competent, educated, worthy, superior. It’s amazing how big a part appearances play in success.

  I grew up poor in America—in a dilapidated house in the middle-of-nowhere Texas Hill Country, with no running water, no heat, very little food, and no medical or dental care for miles and miles around. I went to school with the wealthy kids from the suburbs of Austin. They all assumed I was just like them. High school taught me to fit in, to be a social chameleon—to take on the look and mannerisms of my peers. But they wore nice clothes, drove the nicest cars, and lived in mansions, while I often went to bed hungry and wore the soles off an old pair of shoes. People only see what they want to, though. They thought I was just like them, and anything that didn’t fit into that narrative was dismissed as an eccentricity, a quirk. In a school as big as mine, it was easy to hide in plain sight. I got used to being glossed over, being painted in the broadest of strokes. It worked in my favor—not being seen.

  It’s hard to believe that poverty—real poverty like the one I lived through—still exists in America. That’s why I don’t tell anyone about my childhood, and it’s also probably why I’m always eating or snacking as an adult. It’s a survival mechanism that’s left over from that fear I had as a kid that we wouldn’t have enough food that night. It’s also why I’m such a private person. My mom was deeply ashamed of the way we lived. She worked her whole life, but it still wasn’t enough to break even. I still carry my mother’s shame. It became my shame.

  She was so secretive about our home and financial situation that she never let me have any friends over. The one time that a school friend did happen to visit, it was really obvious that she didn’t know what to make of me now that she had this context. It seemed like she didn’t know how to act, and I became really self-conscious. Was she judging me? Did she feel sorry for me? She just seemed so uncomfortable, almost like she didn’t want to sit down because she thought we were dirty. We were poor, not dirty! I immediately regretted having invited her, and I never had anyone over again.

  When I was in my early twenties, I got out. My best friend moved to a big city, and I followed her. I started working—hustling and scraping by, often holding down several j
obs at once—and I felt normal for the first time because I was in a city where so many people did the same thing. It wasn’t weird that I was a white girl in the back of the restaurant, washing dishes and mopping floors in a room where English was the foreign language. Work is work. I never felt too good or above it. It wasn’t weird that I was sharing a one-bedroom with two other people because everyone my age was in the same position. I told myself that it was the grind, that we were all in the same boat. I felt assimilated. But I still have lingering hang-ups from my past, and I often feel like an impostor in my new life—like if I try for more than I’m worth, people will see right through me. Maybe washing dishes in the back room is where I belong. Maybe unskilled labor is where I top off. Or maybe I allow myself to think that because it makes it okay if I fail out here. They’ll see the girl I used to be. The girl I am, I guess.

  I never moved away from home with the intention of “making it” elsewhere—but it’s how I tell the story (to myself) now. I don’t like to think about home because it depresses me, where I came from. It’s the sort of memory that I lock away and only visit when I’m about to fall asleep and the anxiety gets to me. Home is kind of like my “or else.” I better get this job, “or else.” I better make rent, “or else.” It’s an alternative that scares me enough to want to do better.

  But people also assume I have a safety net to fall back on if I fail. And that’s as far as that illusion of being “in the same boat” will carry me. Whenever I’m struggling, my friends ask why I don’t just hit my parents up for help. They can do it, sure: one call to Mom and Dad and rent is paid. One call, and they can afford to spend $8 on a small ice cream, or $5 on a latte, or $12 on a green juice. So, yeah, they’re sharing that one bedroom with me, but the difference between me and them is that I don’t have a choice. They do it as an experiment in independence, in hacking it on their own in the big city.