Intro

By sharing these stories with you I delve deep within myself to uncover pieces of a person I thought could be hidden away. It’s in the revealing of our tabooed existence that we truly begin to take form in this world.

A cookie cutter may press out designs that are easy to look at, but is it honestly in the sameness that beauty is found? How hard I have tried to fit into that  impossible mold of conformity. Each time failing because I felt a need to seek retribution from the sickness around me.
When you do not come from “normalcy” any attempt you make to appear normal comes out surreal and theatrical. I was a marionette claiming to be a girl. My made up tales and fictitious lives never satisfied the kids from the status quo. Maybe what I didn’t realise was the opportunity I had before me, to challenge them. To break their molds by speaking my truths, instead of shattering myself into fragments for their approval.

I used sexual touch as a means to make friends as a young girl; it’s what I knew. Now children are expelled from school and vilified if they kiss or touch each other. What are we teaching them…to cower in the horror of their truth?
How long will society…how long will you turn your head away from those that are hypersexual and tabooed because of abuse?
Not only are the stories of kind parents and happy childhoods welcome here. This is a place, a place we create together, where everyone is o.k. You and I are both beautiful, both abled, and both free to speak out whatever feelings rise to the surface. I am not afraid of your hatred or fear of where I come from, what has happened to me, or what I have done. It is only in the hiding of these feelings that you damage me.

And so I challenge you.

Amanda Lee

Education is an act of love, and thus an act of courage.  Paulo Friere

1. A Question of Sexual Abuse (1-7 Katy, Texas)

How much do you remember about your life before you were 7 years old? I have spliced film clips of those years. Trust, many have attempted to get the truth out of me for years, especially Skip (biological father and major character in this story) and his family. Did he touch you Mandy? Do you remember anything?
These questions posed to me after I hadn’t spoken to or seen any of them for 12 years.

This is what I can remember:

  • A friend of mine and I were put to bed, by Skip, for a nap. He told us to take all our clothes off so that we would be more comfortable. I was between 4 and 6 years old.

4posterbed

  • I was outside swimming in one of those monstrously constructed kiddie pools from the early 80s, with the hard plastic sides and thin rubber floors. No matter what precautions or maneuvers you tried you were sure to hurt yourself, either by slipping on the slick bottom of the pool and breaking your butt, or tripping over the high sides and cutting your thighs on the edge of the plastic sides all while skinning your shins and arms on the ground.
These pools were never this round. They looked more like the outline of a barnicled oyster than a circle.

These pools were never this round. They looked more like the outline of a barnacled oyster than a circle.

I walked inside of the house to go to the bathroom. There I saw my mother and Skip sitting on two chairs side by side facing me. Skip was shirtless, wearing short shorts, his penis and balls pulled out of the side of one of the leg holes. My mother in a leotard, her breasts hanging over the top, the leg hole pulled aside to reveal her vagina. The memory ends there. I asked Skip about this many years later, he said that perhaps he and my mother had a strange way of teaching me about sex. Unh huh, right… After reading some of Anäis Nin’s lectures I wondered if this type of sexual archetypal experience had influenced me in my identification as bi-sexual.

  • Mom and I were in the sunken living room, with the orange, red and black thick shag carpet. There were two ways into the living room, each had two steps down. An entertainment center was situated on one side of the steps leading to the front door and hallway. On the other side of the steps were two large, 4ftx4ft light blue denim pillows. The steps on the opposite end were the expanse of the room, which went to the kitchen and eating area, the back door, and the door leading to the garage. There was a tall glassed in shelving unit next to the door. Mom walked with me to the glass shelves to get her pink Singer button hole making box. It looked like a large pink horse pill, elongated and sorta football shaped. She still has that box and the button hole attachments today.
    We heard noises from the garage. She opened the garage door and there was Skip standing naked just inside the door, having sex with someone. At that moment I could only see the legs he was holding. My mother flew into a rage, screaming, “Do you want Mandy in there with you, huh? You want Mandy in there with you?” (she was asking him if he wanted me to join them…truth.)

glassshelf

Skip put a towel around his waist and came into the living room where he and my mother began to fight. My mother clawed his back so that there were visible red bleeding claw marks as if he had got into a quarrel with a wild cat. The last thing I remember was him pushing her into a round spinning naugahyde chair. (I later learned that the girl Skip was having sex with in the garage was my babysitter and one of Skip’s high school students.)

  • I sat on the large blue pillows in the sunken living room with Skip watching a porn movie. This was an important movie for me, as it is the earliest recollection of a movie I can remember seeing as a child. A woman was being cornered by a man in a stairwell, where he raped her.

denimpillows

I was not allowed to move or look away. Skip had me sandwiched between the two pillows. His captive audience, my captured childhood.

This was the first chapter in a multi-part series titled Memories of a Red Flagged Kid.

© Amanda Lee 2016