Scrubbed Innocence: Resurrecting My Words and Worth

Trigger Warning: Detailed Description of Child Abuse

I wrote this poem a few months ago, drawing from the well of ancient, long-buried feelings about the first time my mom forced my mouth open and poured Dawn dish soap into it. I was four. Although I had received spankings with a variety of objects over the last year (when her new partner introduced physical child abuse to the mix), this was new. As I choked on the pungent combination of soap, snot, and tears, I grappled with confusion and fear. Soapy bubbles of snot popped around my face, and I struggled to breathe. The soap burned my throat and nostrils. My mom, who had never done anything this cruel, tightly gripped the insides of my elbows, screaming at me to stop crying. 

To this day, I am only half sure what I “did” to bring on that previously foreign punishment. I only have a flash of a memory and clues from what came after to guide me in making deductions about what motivated her to unleash a new brand of assault. It was the first time of many. Washing our mouths with soap became a go-to when a hard smack across the face or tightly gripping our cheeks didn’t suffice after we “said something we shouldn’t have.” Sometimes it was a curse word; other times, an opinion. The times when my mom suffocated my opinions stung the most. 

There’s a little part of me that thinks that the first time I “got the soap,” it may have been after I shared my thoughts about her new partner; I didn’t like him and didn’t want him there. I solidly remember saying such while living in the house where I first choked on soap; whether that statement led to my oral “baptism” or not, I will never really know. I only know that time and time again, my words fell silent. The person who should have listened to me and heard me instead again and again gagged me. Had she asked me why I didn’t like him, it may have saved me from nearly a decade and a half of the sexual abuse and mental abuse that he initiated as early as he did the beatings. 

She didn’t ask, though. Instead, she silenced me. I learned to shut myself up, closing off my thoughts and feelings from the world. I sewed them up tightly within, and over the years, I only allowed them to escape when safely veiled beneath the mask of my poetry. 

I learned to suppress the truth of my reality, even from myself. For the next three and a half decades, I downplayed the cruelty of some of the things I experienced. That’s not to say there weren’t parts of me that knew many of those things weren’t right…that they were downright abusive. Of course, I KNEW that. I just couldn’t allow myself to FEEL it for a very, very long time. If you’re reading this from a place of trauma yourself, I suspect you know exactly what I’m saying.

I didn’t want to feel these things for a simple reason: I love my mom. Despite the cruelty of what I just described, I want to emphasize that she’s not a horrible person. She did, however, do some very bad things. Sometimes, even worse, she didn’t always do the things she should have done to protect her kids…like listen to us when we needed her to hear us the most. I have a lot of very strong feelings around those things. Only in recent years have I allowed myself to acknowledge and truly embrace those hard feelings. Those feelings come across strongly in the poem above. There are parts of me that take issue with some of the lines that erupted from me because they feel too binary. I’ve come to learn that life truly is not and does not have to live on a pendulum of sharp swings from one extreme to another. And…despite my hesitation around this “black and white” perspective, I’m keeping those uncomfortable lines in the poem. Those uncomfortable lines are a part of my truth. I need to feel them just as they are so that I can finally work through them and move forward.  

For me, a key part of moving forward lies in putting words to my experiences and accepting my story for what it is. Sometimes I wonder where my ability to string words into powerful phrases originated. I think that maybe it comes from that place within that was time and time again suppressed, choked, and gagged. When I write, I experience a ferocity of feeling, both freeing and terrifying in its ability to help me find meaning in the meaningless. Again and again throughout my life, I have returned to the refuge of my words. Fortunately, there were some things within me that simply couldn’t be silenced. I clung to the life raft of the words no one could take from me. I disguised my feelings in the poetry I wrote relentlessly as a child and teenager, and even sporadically throughout my adulthood, until a year ago when the floodgates opened, and it ALL began pouring out in a river of emotions. These days, I have again begun to write poetry, and I am learning to write my story in a much more direct kind of way. I’m taking ownership of my words and story. We ALL deserve to reclaim the words and the feelings that were taken from us. 

Scrubbed Innocence

You lit a lava fire that blazes in my throat
Its flames engulf me in fear 
They rage, burning the broken bridges
Between then and here 

In silencing my words, you murdered my trust in you
Violent echoes of the past
Color my eyes in lonely shades of blue
Your mutilation of motherhood 
Cast my world in shadows
A violation of my childhood
left me alone, bearing too much to handle

You suffocated my sense of safety
Left me drowning in my tears
Instead of saving me from my hell
You trapped me in yours

Your cruelty choked my confidence
The scorch of my tears ran through rivers of snot 
You scrubbed away my innocence
Nightmares bubbling to the top

You stood center of some of my darkest hours
You were supposed to be my soft place
You were supposed to be my mother
Instead, I’m left with smoldering embers of an unnamed guilt
The parts of you that loved me
No longer felt

I’m still choking on your brutality
Buried beneath suffering remembered
Your conscience stands empty
After all that I endured, after all the pain you rendered

Photo by Alex Shute on Unsplash

 

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