King Is Dead

Great weekend, long talks, old friend. Gave me an image to chew on.

Take just a few examples out of many. A six year old on the floor with her baby brother, screaming as her mother holds a gun to her father's head, he begging her to kill him. A nine year old home from the hospital after a near electrocution caused by ill-advisedly biting into a power cord, her homecoming dinner a plate with an extension cord on it. A girl's friends being so intimidated by her mother not one person comes to her 16th birthday party.

And of course there are more examples, from younger than six to older than sixteen, and I know everyone has stories like these, it's no distinction to have been abused one way or another, we all have, we all cope, we all have mechanisms.

(I know for a fact at least half the woman reading this have been sexually abused. Do not bother to argue.)

I know why my fundamental need was to be the good boy, the one whose love could be relied upon. When mine was no longer the simple sweet love of a baby and of no apparent use to anyone, I held it, pooled it (nowhere to put it), until old enough to have a girlfriend to pour it all into. So she got a corner of stability while working the demons spawned by sexual abuse out in a string of foster homes, and I got a substitute of sorts for motherly affection, and a functional pattern was set.

Ten years later, a girl who'd among other things sent her mother to the hospital and in turn been sent to the hospital by her father married a boy who knew nothing so much as that she needed someone to rely on and that her someone to rely on was what he needed to be.

Twenty years after that the relationship finally began to crack. After it crumbled, I stood among the ruins, and a friend who had watched the whole thing gave me that image of a woman often-heroically working out the abuse (some of which was sexual, yes) also carrying much of it forward as a victim in her own abusive way, while I found that my own coping mechanisms (benign neglect having its own associated trauma) dovetailed fairly enough; and this friend called it codependency, and I thought, yeah, I guess it was.

And I'm not free of it, but heading there. I only have to set her free, by being aware of and no longer playing any part in any of her behaviors. God knows I've got enough of my own.

And one obvious step is not to abdicate that throne, but to turn back and open my eyes and see that the throne and the castle and the kingship and queenship never even existed. Fuck that. We were just a man and a woman who found someone with whom we could grow and live and love; and also create familiar spaces in which to foster our unfortunate coping mechanisms. Those mechanisms don't grow together. They are a cancer. They are broken robot arms. What starts as hands holding, becomes two hammers colliding.

Now she can lose the cancerous mechanisms, if she chooses. So can I. She will be all right. So will I. The king is dead! Long live.