I figured I might as well tell the stories

It is terrifying to a child to be in hospital. I remember two mean old lady nurses giving me a sponge bath when I was in hospital to have my tonsils out I was 5. I remember being given ether through a small metal thing like a colander over my mouth on the operating table and my mother waving and smiling and walking backwards.

I remember they had me peeing in a bathtub at the hospital when I was three and a half. I was covered in red-orange Mercurochrome from my belly button to mid thigh. My mother had called my bio dad to come to the hospital. He was 6 foot 4 and towered, lumbering down the hallway beside me.

My mother insisted on taking our temperature with anal thermometers well past infancy. It like okay you think you're sick, bend over, I'm taking your temperature.

My brother was eleven when the ambulance came. They had to take him away on a stretcher so the thermometer wouldn't break. She said "I lost it" She had lost it up his ass. The whole neighborhood was out in the street watching the ambulance pull in and park in our driveway, asking what happened.

When I turned 30 I was squatting in a stone mill. The walls were three feet deep. I was hitting pillows crying and screaming trying to get to the bottom of my rage. I had been working with a rape crisis counselor at the time.

One day I worked up the nerve to finally call my mother. "Mom, I'm calling because I want to know why I had surgery on my vagina at age three and a half?"
"My baby, my baby is calling!'" She said to whoever was in the room with her. "Mom, I have some questions. I started crying and asked Bill for the toilet paper to blow my nose" Where are you? she said, laughing. I'm home, I said, blowing my nose.
I'm calling because I have some questions about why I had surgery on my vagina.
" It was a hormone thing, you would've filled up with urine and died." She said defensively
(Big Pause)
"You only have two holes," - she shouted angrily.
"You looked like a mannequin, you had no lips".

I was in shock because I knew I had and always had all of my parts. Her descriptions were hysterical. Is this how she saw my body?

I had called my childhood doctor but he said When you phoned I realized its been 30 years, so I took your records from my attic and threw them out.

I hung up on him

I phoned the psychologist Mr. Brown who had to go to every week for an hour often it was twice a week from age seven to age fifteen. He tried to record my phone call.

I hung up.

I remember my sister and I ages five and seven all dressed up in black velvet and white lace dresses with big white bows in the back and white tights and black patented leather Mary Jane's. We were going to my step father's office and being allowed to draw on big smooth white vellum drawing pads my mother set up for us on the black linoleum office floor. We had just been to Chock Full O' Nuts downstairs and had eaten brownies on turquoise high swivel stools at the counter. I remember my mother took our tights and underpants. Had we had an accident in our pants? Both of us? We were drawing on our knees in our little dresses with no underwear. I still shudder thinking of it.

there's more. Yes it is sexual abuse. It's all profound abuse especially for young poets.

I remember reading a story in one of Anais Nin's diaries or book of letters that Henry Miller's parents promised him a trip or a gift and instead they took him to get his tonsils out. These things are profound.

Years ago my friend was changing her daughters diaper in front of her former college teacher, at a visit to the school. I was totally keyed into the shame her daughter was feeling completely exposed in front of strangers a college classroom. Her infant daughter was crying. My friend was so preoccupied with wanting approval from this teacher for her new motherhood she wasn't noticing.

It was Christmas, the dining room had two oblong tables making a T-shape covered in red tablecloths at my parents house. The tables were filled with food and seated around them were extended family and a few close family friends.

My mother suddenly blurts out "Emily always had her hands in her pants, a real woman"
I looked around to see if this remark was upsetting anyone besides me. I remained silent. When dinner was over I began questioning my cousin and siblings "Did you hear what she said?" I was packing my bags to return to Rhode Island. My step father knew something was wrong and dropped a bunch of mini candy canes in my green canvas L.L.Bean bag.

I stopped going home for Christmas, holidays, parties, anniversaries, weddings. They invited my ex-boyfriend to their holidays, the one who raped me.

They continue to send me photos of themselves with descriptions of what countries they've recently visited and what expensive foods they've eaten.

We don't like you because you've never been anywhere and you don't read the paper.

You live in amongst the tenements.

Nice starter house!

My mother covered her eyes when I tried to show her my studio.

10 years after I was given an award from my college, at my step father's birthday party my mother mentioned to me her personal architect who was an alum of my college, had showed her the write up about me. She couldn't be proud, she waited ten years to drop the bomb.

It finally hit me, I didn't have a mother.

--------

I was 15 my parents were eating dinner alone in the closed off dining room. I came in to say hello.

"Your father and I were just discussing we don't think you have sexual feelings" she said.

That summer I was sent to a nude co-ed summer camp.

-----
In college I got pregnant, my mother called me at 6 AM and screamed into the phone "He's the guy who screwed you, He should pay!"
--

My brother was cleaning his glass ten gallon fish tank which was his hamsters cage, in the yellow bath tub in the bathroom and the glass broke cutting his wrist. My mother gets a police escort driving 90 miles an hour to Port Chester Hospital.

----
My earliest memories were the stormy nightmares I'd have that a person named Dee Dee was coming in the window to take my poop which we called doody. There was a loose wire that snapped against the windowpane during wind and thunderstorms and I would wet my bed. My mother would come in and angrily change the sheets propping me up on the mattress ticking covered guest bed, a mini Castro Convertible couch. All of this was when I was two and three years old. The walls were cobalt blue and a clown painting hung over the bed. I remember the fabric of the curtains a busy blue and gold pattern. I used to isolate the shapes tripping out on the pattern.

My mother later told me she used to use the anal thermometer as a stool softener by poking me in the ass with it. Doctors orders. I was an infant.

I used to get screamed for saying 'hey'. The neighbor said "Hay is for horses" I couldn't understand these tall scary adults.

My bio dad screamed at me for stirring my ice cream when visiting him in his NYC apartment.

I asked if God was dead.

I got bundled up. We saw Thanksgiving Macy's day parade. I had to pee.

I got abandoned in apartment house elevator when my sister and bio dad walked out.

I got lost at the YMCA in NYC with my older sister when visiting bio dad we were 4 and 6.

I was always getting lost in the supermarket with my mother. She would say "Your father abandoned you, not me!"

I was often lost at other people's birthday parties at Jones beach. Lifeguards were always kind and tried to give me my favorite food; a hamburger. For once I wasn't hungry. I was sure this time I had been abandoned for good.

I nearly drowned in a motel pool on a family on vacation the same vacation my 2 year old brother fell out of a moving car as we turned, and the door opened.