Story 14: Baptized in Bath Water
I hated bathing as a kid. Even now, as an adult, showering or bathing requires a conversation, I always have to have with myself before getting in. I have to convince myself that I’ll feel better after my skin has been cleansed or my hair washed of the scents and oils from the days passed. The discomfort for this area of any and every home I’ve ever lived in stems from one of my earliest memories as a child.
Michael’s Creation
Before Gayle became the babysitter Mom trusted her children with, there was my neighbor Michael. He lived right next door to us. There is not anything particularly alarming about Michael from this memory. He seemed like your average 20-something living at home.
One night in the fall of 1999, Mom asked Michael to watch my baby brother and me while she took my other three siblings to wherever she needed to be. Three kids are a lot easier to manage than five. It wasn’t the first time he’d looked after me; there was no reason for a four-year-old to suspect anything out of the ordinary that evening. In retrospect, nothing terribly dramatic happened. Yes, he bathed my brother and me and washed me more attentively in places than needed, but, and perhaps this is because so much time has passed and the mind is a funny thing, I don’t remember being alarmed at what he was doing. Not then.
I don’t remember what happened to my brother as Michael took me out of the tub. I sometimes think about the fact that my brother is a year and a half younger than me and very well could have drowned himself if he was left alone for too long. Michael must have taken him out after he brought me into Mom’s room to dry off.
I don’t remember my clothes being in Mom’s room. There was a chair in there, though. My memories remind me that the chair sat in front of the bed Mom and her boyfriend shared. Dad wasn’t around then, and I really wish he was. I don’t know if this wouldn't have happened with him around, but I know he wouldn’t have allowed a man to watch his children. He told me so during the one visit I had with him as an adult a few years back. I have many questions I’m not sure how to ask when he’s no longer incarcerated.
This is when my memories turn into something of a muted nightmare. It wasn’t scary to experience, but thinking about it now makes my heart palpitate and my knee bounce. I’m walking a thin line of possibly triggering myself, but I know I’ll be okay. I am safe, I am grown, I am strong, and I can protect myself. I’m also taking bong rips, which always helps.
Michael sat me down on the chair in Mom’s room and let my small body drip dry. I remember not saying anything the entire time. I think I was always a quiet child, but this experience left me damn near-mute. I watched as droplets of water rolled down from my hair, past my chest, along my stomach, and to my crotch. I felt frozen as my eyes met Michael’s hand where the droplet stopped.
He tried gauging if I liked what was happening, but my lack of response gave him nothing to work with. The mind is a funny thing. I don’t remember anything past feeling his fingers inside me and hearing him ask me if it felt good. I don’t remember saying yes, but I also don’t remember saying no. I wouldn’t be surprised if I said nothing and if he mistook my silence as compliance.
I don’t know when I told Mom or how I did. I don’t know if she noticed something off about me one day and decided to ask, or if I refused to be alone with Michael after that night, but at some point, shit got a bit rough for him. I don’t think he was sentenced to prison, but rather a mental hospital for a few years because he pleaded guilty to child molestation and claimed he wasn’t mentally sound. He might have a warrant out for not registering as a sex offender. I try not to keep tabs on him, but he crosses my mind from time to time.
I think I saw a child psychologist once after the incident. I was asked to draw out what happened, which is all I remembered. My family and I did not talk about the incident after. I’m not sure that I ever told them that the night I had one of the first of a series of nonepileptic events as a sophomore in high school was immediately after seeing someone who resembled Michael. I thought it was him in the school since the school was maybe five blocks from where our houses were when the molestation happened. I rarely ever thought about him before then, and I’d never felt that kind of fear up to that point in life.
I remember a man looking up at me as I stood watching the audience trickle into the school’s theater for a musical being performed. Many of my siblings were in the production, and I worked in stage crew, which is why I was on the balcony. I remember seeing the man’s balding head and piercing blue eyes when he turned to look up at me and feeling like I was going to faint. I did just that and woke up to paramedics telling me I had a seizure. That was over a decade ago.
Gayle’s Contribution
My issue with bathing didn’t stop there. That was the beginning. As time passed, Mom needed a new babysitter, someone nearby who wasn’t going to fuck her kids up. Gayle seemed like the “ideal” option considering she was quite literally the neighborhood babysitter. Our mailperson, Kathy, even had Gayle watch her three kids from time to time. I’m not sure why Mom didn’t approach Gayle sooner. Maybe she knew about the church. Maybe she couldn’t afford the rate. I’m going to go with the latter. There was a period where Mom held a stable job. Come to think of it, there were a few periods where the illusion of stability was felt when living with her, not just one. The first bout of normalcy came when I was in the first or second grade. It was a few years into building a relationship between Gayle and us kids before Mom went AWOL, making sense with the timeline I’m creating. (Sidebar, there are so many stories I need to map out for you to make this seem more cohesive. I hope one day someone will stumble across these stories and be able to put them together.)
By the time Mom went out West and left us at the mercy of Gayle, I had a pretty serious understanding that life with Gayle would be miserable. I wasn’t wrong. Having we three girls sit in the bath together, then having my brothers use the same bathwater after we were finished, was done so more out of frugality than abuse in Gayle’s mind. The underlying fucked up thing about what Gayle was doing was that she was firming up an already low connotation to bathing and hygiene that Michael helped create. She bathed us once a week, on Sundays after the night time service.
There eventually came a time when the eldest of the five siblings was too old in the eyes of Gayle to bathe with her sisters, so she got to shower after Gayle bathed the younger four of us. I felt most sorry for my brothers, who had to sit in second-hand water. Sometimes, if the water were too cool for them (which it often was), Gayle would run the hot water for a few moments but complained that it was wasteful.
The fact that we were only ever allowed to clean ourselves on Sunday during a time in my life when I was undergoing such a profoundly negative religious experience makes me feel like Gayle decidedly baptized us in the bathwater she ran every week.
During my time with Gayle, I was baptized at First Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana. I could list a slue of articles regarding the cult-like atmosphere of the organization, blatant sexual harassment, and subtle grooming tendencies of those who held the highest positions of power. Still, if you want to know more, you can always hit Google up. I know there are support groups for formers members of the church floating around, but with everything else I’ve got going on in my life, I haven’t felt the strength to dive into learning about others’ experiences when I don’t have a full grip of my own.
As of January 2020, Gayle was still a devout member of the church.
My Engraving
The first time I understood what self-harm was, I dismantled a razor blade in my bathroom before getting into the shower. After watching the blood trickle into a small pool in my palm, I ran the water and watched the red color dissipate.
I’d gotten dumped by the first girl I ever called my girlfriend that morning. It was the first Saturday of spring break. Her name was Monica, and she was this little emo girl in a grade higher than I. We had gym class together during my freshman year of high school. Her not being athletic and me not having any friends led us to walk around the gymnasium for the entirety of the class, talking about many things every day. Well, she talked, I listened. It wasn’t long before I noticed all of the bracelets she wore daily, and after a few weeks of walks and talks, she showed me what lay under them. I didn’t understand why she did what she did. She told me, “It helps me feel something when I can’t feel anything,” and as someone who felt things in extremes, I couldn’t quite understand what she meant by not feeling anything. It sounded like a luxury. At the time, I didn’t understand just how great I was at compartmentalizing and never dealing with what I tucked away.
It wasn’t the breakup that made me want to bring the blade across, not down, my wrists. It was the thought of controlling the physical pain I felt since I knew I could not control the emotional yet. I couldn’t begin to process that I was in emotional distress. Again, I’m not talking about some trivial high school breakup, (though it was a phenomenal guise to use with family) but rather the series of traumatic events experienced a little more than six months prior. I hadn’t come to grips with how toppled life had become because my family and I were still in the process of recovering from what Mom had put us all through. We never spoke about our shared experiences and certainly not in a way that held depth all of us could understand. Gina, the sister who filed for guardianship of my siblings and me when I was a teenager, did so at the expense of her not getting to live out life as a 20-something should have been able to. I often think of what she gave up to save us. I wish I would’ve had the insight and awareness to not further the hurt my family felt as a consequence of my actions.
I found myself falling into the same need for control in September 2020 when relapsing into the act of cutting. Not my wrists, but my lower right hip, a new spot easier to hide. My wife wouldn’t have noticed, and I sometimes think about how dangerous a hole that would’ve been to tumble down had I not burst into a full-fledged breakdown minutes after the blood ran down my skin. I wouldn’t say I like using the word regret, but I wish I didn’t have that moment of weakness, as it shifted the way my ex saw me from there on out. I gave her a narrative to run with: emotionally unstable. Who cuts themselves after their wife cheats? I still struggle with being kind to myself about that development in our breakup. I think about what would’ve happened had I kept it together.
Truth be told, I’m glad I didn’t.
In the months after my separation from my wife I’ve had a lot of time to think about myself, my needs, and have begun to open the closet full of demons I’ve tried to keep locked away. I thought that with therapy I somehow had already faced these demons, but with never being able to delve deep within with traumas scattered throughout my existence with any therapists I’ve had, I know there’s a lot more work to be done.
I never thought to tell any of the licensed mental health professionals I’ve seen about this internal struggle before bathing. The few times I mentioned depressive episodes during sessions, it would have been a perfect opportunity to say, “I don’t want to shower not only because I can’t seem to get myself out of bed, but also because of x,y, and z experiences.”
Now that I’ve written this out, I suddenly don’t feel as weighed down by this struggle. The beauty of writing is that sometimes it’s better for me than therapy. No one to tell me I’m wrong for having the emotions that I do. My last therapist told me my emotions were equivalent to “a bull in a China shop” with regards to how I express them.
That was during one of our last sessions.
Until next time,
Jen
