Dr. Freud's Penis

When I was a little girl, I used to take baths with my cousin Kip. He was a great pal. His mom was nuts and an abuser; she was the man in the wheelchair's cousin. His dad was my mother's cousin, both of them nasty too, but in a whole other way--they were nasty with their talk, with their minds, not so much with their hands. Kip was a sweet boy, and we had simple, innocent childish fun together. His mother sexually abused me, at the age when I was too young to make sense of it, or even to tell on her--just like the man in the wheelchair did. (And it did not take me long to learn that telling on the adult never ever led to anything good for me.) I can only imagine what she did to Kip, or for how long. Or if at all. Maybe she liked messing with girls better. I know she was obsessed with her own genitalia--she stayed in my room when they came to visit and I accidentally walked in on her masturbating there. I backed out of that room so fast, and went somewhere and hid. I was really scared.

(One of the precursors to my last breakdown was the hypnotherapy sessions I was having with a therapist who had just learned the technique and liked to practice it on me. Little did she (or I!) know what a huge monster it would call to the surface in me, as times of Kip's mom abusing me began to surface in bits and pieces of memory and body sensation. It was painful and sickening and totally rocked me right off my foundations. After the breakdown, and my participation in the day program at the psych hospital, where I had told them of the hypnotherapy and the woman's inability to handle the consequences of it, I ended up telling that therapist what had happened to me, and how her practicing on me contributed to it--the memory of the uncomfortable angle of my neck as Kip's mom held me down on the table, of the sunlight shining into my face and the smell of the cigarette smoke lazily coiling up beside us making me queasy. I remembered that she always volunteered to go change my diaper so that she could manipulate me to orgasm. I remembered all that and it sent me right off the edge of the known earth. I told all the therapists that in the hopes they would not perpetuate such treatment on anyone else ever again.)

Anyway, they used to put us in the bath together. Knowing what a pervert his mother was (she died of cancer a few years ago and I was not sorry, in fact I thought, 'Serves her right.'), she probably hoped Kip and I would engage in some hanky panky so she could watch and get off on it. We didn't. Despite what the adults did to us, we were still innocent children.

All this is a long winded introduction into saying, when I was a small girl I knew about penises. And this is what I thought about penises, Dr. Freud. I thought that as boys grew older, their penises got smaller and smaller and finally dissolved so that by the time they were adults, we all looked the same.

At the time I was 6 or 7, my best friend was named Doreen and she came from a gigantic Irish American family who lived down the other end of the street. She had several older brothers. She knew the truth about penises. So, when I told her my theory about dissolving penises, she laughed really hard, and then she set me straight about that--saving me future embarrassment.

Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai