I'm just gonna be straight. One of my 7 brothers is a product of rape.
My mother has 11 kids, 5 of them with a husband that beat her.
According to the logic of that fuckhead misogynist senatorial candidate Todd Akin, she must have loved every minute of it.
Trigger warning; sexual violence, violence, rape.
My mother was with a man after she left my (step)father for good in the mid 80s. She had been seeing him for a while, perhaps several months to a year. One quiet school night, the phone rings and it's the police telling my grandfather that my mother was at the hospital, battered and beaten by this man.
I was only 13. I wasn't braced or prepared or ready for how I would see my mother lying on that stretcher moaning in pain. She couldn't lay on her back for some reason and she was squirming. I looked at her legs and they were covered in red-purple blotches from the back of her thighs all the way to her ankles. Her face had been left mostly intact but her eyes were swollen and her face was puffy. She was wearing a shirt but when my grandmother lifted it, the road map of red, purple and blue went up to her shoulders. She was begging the nurses for pain relief but they didn't want to numb her too much so they could assess her injuries or something. My mother's attitude was remarkable at the time. She refused to cry and sob much. She seemed more angry and concerned about the pain she was in. I didn't cry either. I couldn't. If I had seen my mother sobbing for her broken heart and the cruel world she had been born into, I might have cried. But something told me to keep my chin up and not let her see me cry. She didn't expect me to be there but she couldn't be too concerned about it at the time with all the pain. Maybe she didn't cry because of me standing there. We were both being strong for each other, I think.
My mother was born into a world where she watched her own father beat her mother so badly, she ran out the door when she was 10 years old and turned herself in to the authorities and begged to be given a normal life. My grandparents kidnapped her back from her foster mother, a former teacher of my grandfather's, and they fled across the state line, never to return to North Carolina until she was considerably older.
As she grew up in this fucked up world, it was the early 70s and she made a mistake with a boy and got pregnant at 16. She got pregnant just in time to miss out on the Roe v Wade decision. Hello world.
So she could save both us little girls from the fate of my loving but neglectful, violent and alcoholic grandparents, she married a nice man who turned out to be just as unstable, chemically dependent and physically abusive as her father was to her mother. She had 5 kids with this man. She had to leave him because he beat her.
Then she finds a new man. In a rage, he beats my mother so violently, he has to take her to the local park to finish beating and raping her because he was going to wake his grandmother with all the noise. He kicked her around like a ragdoll in that open field. Late in the year, one of my brothers was born.
She didn't know she was conceiving when she laid on that stretcher, squirming like a recently rescued victim of a sadist and serial torturer and beaten by a man she loved. If she had known that bit of information, she might have wept for her own lost soul, alone in this world of men who keep hitting her. Flashbacks of her own mother's bloody face caused by her father...
I wonder how my grandfather felt, standing over his bruised daughter. Did he REALLY see what he should have seen? Oh, yes, he was heated. He wanted to kill that guy, as any father would. But did Daddy see the legacy he continued that started with his own father, is what I wonder.
I can tell you, Akin, that my mother didn't like being kicked, punched, smacked, beaten and raped. She did not "secrete" anything because she was too busy fighting for her life, you twisted son of a bitch.
I can't really write anything intelligent, insightful, poignant and full of links and blockquotes right now but y'all know the story about the asshole senatorial candidate that said real rape victims don't get pregnant, etc. I have a mental block that makes me not want to think about how my mother looked when I was 13 and she was recently beaten, raped and we found out later, impregnated. Because of that, I tried not to focus on the whole subject but what that asshole said was a delayed brain grenade that made me have to go there.
I never thought in a million years I'd have to go there. Or back there.
In those days, before the OJ Simpson trial, domestic violence was treated with a slap on the wrist. This asshole beat my mother so badly that the cops made sure his ass got arrested. The judge was so angry at him, he got emotionally intense when sentencing this man because the limitations of the existing law wouldn't even allow the judge to throw this man in jail because my mother wouldn't press the charges and at the time, it was a requirement. That judge looked at him and told him right in front of everybody that if he's so much as a penny short paying his court costs, if he even breathes on my mother the wrong way, his ass is gone for 5 years to a correctional facility. Of course, my mother, victimized beyond self esteem and given the worst example of a functional marriage a child could have, took him back. It wasn't long before he was kicking my mother while she lay on the floor and I was trying to cover her with my own body.
That fucker was gone after that. It was out of my mother's hands.
What is this bastard Akin trying to tell the 13 year old who saw her mother broken and bruised on a stretcher? What's he gonna tell the little girl that caught the bus all the way up to the hospital to see her premature little brother in the ICU or wherever they put babies that are born too small and too early to go home? Her brother that was born 7 months after she went to that same hospital to see her mother beaten and raped on a stretcher?
Tell my brother he doesn't exist, you warped, woman-hating idiot.
You tellin me that if I get raped on my ovulation day and a pregnancy resulted that I must have liked it?
Oh, you sick...
I'm gonna stop writing now. I'm too angry to make this diary any more direct or clear than what I really have to say.
And that is...
FUCK
YOU
SENATORIAL
CANDIDATE
AKIN
YOU
UNINFORMED
KOOKY
TWISTED
CREEPY
SICK
MISOGYNIST
SON
OF
A
BITCH
Thank you. Goodnight.
(UPDATE: He's a senatorial candidate. My bad. I'm pissed. I changed it in the text, too.)
9:37 AM PT: Last night after I wrote this, I passed out, exhausted and spent. Venting really helped me get to sleep because I was pretty ticked off. Thanks for reccing this and supporting the rights of women. Thanks for being liberals. Thank goodness for liberals.
I just woke up 30 minutes ago to get ready for work. I have to leave around 1pm ET so I'll be going down the comment thread until then. I feel so bad writing this and then having to leave it but life calls and I gotta get to this job pretty soon. Hugs to everyone. Enjoy your day! ;-)