I Rode my Bike to my First Therapy Appointment

Memoir Series

Content Warning: Emotional, psychological, and physical abuse

“I already turned off my alarm!” I shouted at my stepfather as the icy cold water dripped off my face.

This was the third day I’d been woken up this way, my stepfather throwing a glass of cold water in my face.

It was the summer after my Freshman year of high school. I had a paper route, a job that my sister and I had shared for a couple of years. That summer she decided she no longer wanted to do it so I took it on myself. I needed the money as I no longer received an allowance.

During the fall of my Freshman year, my stepfather and mother had put me on a diet. Every morning I would run raw carrots through the juicer and read the daily affirmations of self-love my stepfather had created for me. It was a real mind-fuck to read, “Every day I am getting better and better,” and other self-affirming statements written by someone who had been verbally, emotionally, and psychologically abusing and torturing me for four years.

In two months I lost thirty-five pounds.

“For each pound you gain back, you’ll lose a dollar from your allowance.”

“What do I get for each pound I lose?” I asked.

“The weight loss will be the prize,” my mother said.

By the summer I had gained back eight pounds and no longer received an allowance, forever tying my weight to my finances.

I am not a morning person. I was born at 5:38pm and my working theory is that afternoon is my morning and evening is my day. I’ve heard from others that they have similar experiences based on their time of birth, but recently a friend debunked this. She was born later in the day and is a total morning person. Maybe she’s an outlier or maybe my theory is wrong.

Anyway, I always have to snooze myself into getting out of bed, more than once. Back then, in the summer of 1982, I had a radio alarm clock. It was my birthday present from my mother for my 13th birthday. I was supposed to have a big sleepover party back then with all of my friends to celebrate the milestone of becoming a teenager, but my mother had canceled that party due to “your behavior” with my stepfather. I got the radio alarm clock instead.

Waking up for my paper route was no easy task. I would snooze a few times until able to rouse myself at 6:00am, haul the papers in from the curb, sit on the floor of the foyer of our house, put the inserts into the papers, roll them, snap a rubber band around each, and/or a plastic sleeve around it on rainy days, pull my bike out of the garage, load up my basket, and off I’d go, riding and flinging, returning home an hour later to stumble back into bed and sleep the rest of the morning away.

I don’t know what changed to cause my stepfather to start waking up before me, a glass of water in hand as my wake-up call. He said he was woken by my alarm going off more than once, justifying his abuse of me, my mother doing nothing to intercede. Years later she would say, “I know he intentionally woke himself up before your alarm went off to do that to you.” Back then she was, I am trying to find the accurate word to describe her enablement of his abuse of me and complete participation in it and total abandonment of me - fuck it, just make one up yourself, it’s too exhausting to try to reason or rationalize her six years of silence, mental illness is the only thing that comes to my mind now, both her and him.

The first time it happened, I felt like I deserved it. This is how adept he was at his abuse, gaslighting me into believing that his abuse of me was my fault. The next morning I slept through my alarm and hit the snooze button in my sleep. So again, it was my fault. The third morning I woke when my alarm went off and turned it off. I had done it! The door to my bedroom opened and I found myself doused with cold water once more, screaming at him, “I already turned off my alarm!” He cackled his sinister laugh as he went back into their bedroom, my mother’s and his.

I was pissed and crying as I rolled the stack of newspapers, readying my route. It’s one thing to punish me for something I had done (being an exhausted teenager is not a punishable offense in my book), but I was raised by a mother who was very controlling and strict with us when we were young. I was programmed not to question authority and to accept punishments that included spankings back then as a parental right and something I was deserving of. So even though I knew in my gut that it was wrong of him to be throwing glasses full of water at me, I did also think on some level that he was justified in doing so those first couple of mornings.

But the third morning, well, the injustice of being punished for something I had not done was more than I could take. After I finished preparing for my route, seething with rage at this point, and not caring what the consequence would be, I went into the kitchen, grabbed the biggest glass I could find (it held 32 ounces), filled it to the brim with cold water, and headed up the stairs.

He was already flying out of the bed as he heard the door to their bedroom open so my water hit him full-on in his face and torso. He came after me as I ran down the stairs. Feeling him gaining I fell into the rattan Papasan chair sitting near the bottom of the staircase and flipped over on my back as I raised my legs to try to kick him in the gut as a defense. I don’t know how many times he hit me in the face before my mother and my sister pulled him off of me, screaming at him to stop.

I do know that I then got on my bike and delivered my papers, crying the entire time, I did not for a second think that I should not do my route. I was a good little girl back then who did everything she was told, from schoolwork to housework to my job. Skipping out on my responsibilities in the face of having just been psychologically and physically abused was not something that even entered my mind.

When I got home, I went into the basement and called my father at work.

“Dad, I need to come live with you,” I said.

Long pause, “……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….Okay.”

I could hear it in the amount of time he took to respond and in the sound of his voice, he did not want me. He was good with being an every-other-weekend dad. That was it. But I felt out of options and he was it.

“I don’t want you to leave,” my mother cried, as in actual tears when I told her I’d called my father and he’d be picking me up after work that day. “Please don’t go.”

So I called him back and told him I had changed my mind.

He came over after work to see what was going on.

Nope. He could not be bothered. I vaguely remember him asking me when I saw him next how things were and I just said, “Fine”. What was the fucking point of telling him the truth.

“I think you should go talk to someone,” my mother said. Right, I was the problem.

“I already have an appointment with someone this Wednesday,” I replied. I had not planned on telling her about the therapist I had found on my own. My best friend’s mom, Chris, worked at a place that offered therapy to kids and adolescents who could not pay for it and needed government assistance. They lived next door to us. I had asked Chris to make an appointment for me with someone there, which she did.

It was not the first time I had tried to get myself some support. On the last day of school, just a month earlier, I had a small panic attack as I realized the three months at home with my stepfather looming ahead with no school to hide out at were upon me. I went to the counselor’s office and tracked down the one who was assigned to me. I found him in the inner hallway that ran down the row of counselor offices. His arms were laden with books as he was packing to leave. He was retiring.

“I have a situation at home,” I said to him as I started to give him the rundown. I was not then using the term abuse. I knew it was wrong, what was happening, but my awareness of abuse came from the after-school specials I had watched, and I was not being sexually molested nor walking around with cigarette burns and bruises on my body.

The look on his face told me everything I needed to know. He was not going to help me. “Don’t worry about it. I have another resource for help available to me.”

The relief that he would not have to handle me filled the hallway.

A month later, I got on my bike, two days after the water/paper route incident, and rode the six miles to the next suburb over to my very first therapy appointment. She was kind. That’s all I remember from my first conversation with her. I went again the next week, again on my bike. When we finished that second talk, she let me know that I did not qualify financially to be receiving therapy there for free and I would need to come in with my mother the following week and talk about it.

My mother drove. The therapist suggested that unless my stepfather would be willing to come in, there was not much she could do, and also we would need to pay.

“He won’t,” my mother said.

Au revoir, therapy.

There was no discussion of the benefit of me continuing by myself for support.

This was 1982, and mandated reporting of child abuse had not yet become the law in Illinois. I have often wondered if that would have made a difference for me. As time went on, every adult around me from neighbors to teachers to counselors had some knowledge that I was being abused and to my knowledge none of them did anything. I once had a friend say to me a couple of months later while standing in front of her locker in the early school morning hours, “If you tell me another story like this, I am calling the child abuse prevention hotline.” I never told her another word. We were both fifteen at the time.

Years later my mother would also say to me, “I was never prouder of you than I was in that moment when you threw that glass of water at (fill in my abuser’s name here)”.

Trauma bonding at its most insidious.

It would be another year and a half before my stepfather was gone. I would leave six days before he did.

It would be ten years later that I would get some real therapy after numerous starts and stops and finding myself in multiple relationships where I was being emotionally abused.

I used to think this all made me the healer and guide that I am and that I needed all of these experiences to “do what I incarnated here to do”.

I’ve moved to another interpretation now that tells me that I happened to have incarnated into a home where predators, abusers, addicts, and alcoholics lived, and I am who I am despite what I survived not because of it. I do wonder what I could have done/become had I had real support and love.

Epilogue: Now that our move to Chicago seems like it’s happening, I understand why I have felt the need to finally write about and share these stories from my past. There will be more. Thank you for reading.

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