I'm normally funnier than this when talking about suicide. Honest.

This is a little bit depressing. It also has to come with a trigger warning for child abuse and mistreatment of women, with a little nod towards racism and homophobia. Also a spoiler alert if you haven't read/seen the last Harry Potter. Come back tomorrow if you like your humour to be suicidal-thought-free when there may or may not be a post on the joys of working part-time service jobs, depending on where my thought train goes over the next 24 hours and whether or not I can get myself to get on with my essays...


By the way my internet's gone down, so the timings in this post probably won't fit in with the time that the submit button actually works. Just pretend it's early hours in Britain when you read this.

The other night I was talking to my paternal grandmother about some memories from my childhood, when we got onto the topic of when things had gone wrong. She suddenly forgot about all of the other things that we'd discussed before this and asked me if I had any good memories of her from my childhood, as she feels that if my father were to be listened to she was the worst mother in the world and the only parent he had was my grandfather. This got me thinking about how odd I feel talking about happy memories of my father. Although I don't go around introducing myself with "Last time I willingly exchanged words with my father I told him that if he hit me again I'd be calling the police." when asked by friends I do sometimes use those words as a quick summary that covers the fact that I don't speak to my father, want nothing to do with him, and why I have come to make the decision to get away from him, therefore eliminating the need for further questions beyond the "Where are you spending Christmas" that I get if the subject is raised in the November-December period. So when telling stories about my childhood that include playing games with my father, I sometimes feel that my friends will think that I'm exaggerating or lying about the fact that he is a far less than plesant man on a whole. When in my tweens I would refer to him in my head as 'Daddy' and 'the Bastard', and would look for signs as to which one was in the room/car when I came into contact with him to see how to behave. I actually have some memories of some very fun times with my father, and I'm sure that all of his exes have some very good memories of their time with them, otherwise he wouldn't have managed to get them into, and keep them in a relationship that was sapping them of all of their feelings of self worth and esteem.

Unfortunately the majority of people don't realise how utterly charming abusers have to be to get away with things, not only in keeping the person involved quiet and willing to put up with the bad, (as the abuser convinces the person that they couldn't get the good without staying dependant to them and that they need the good) but also in not being suspected by the person's friends and family (but in my case doctors, social services, schools and numerous councillors) of being responsible for changes in the person's behaviour/demeanour or increased physical problems. When working as a Sabbatical Officer in the Students' Union last year, my father started phoning reception on a daily basis asking for me (he must have heard about my job from my sister, aunt and cousins). This coincided with the Census, so I assume that as I always took care of his official paperwork he was wanting to get me to deal with the form for him, despite not having wanted any contact with him for almost 3 years. I said to the receptionists that I didn't want to speak to him, and gave the line that covers most bases (which, as it was February/March, covered all) and they expressed shock as he 'sounded so charming on the phone'. People don't realise that men who can convince educated and successful women to become dependant on self-important, sexist, uneducated, unemployed, fat bastards and convince everyone that they come in contact with that they don't need to be locked up for eternity is by being the most extremely charming person most people will ever meet. Which makes it harder for people to ask for help amongst their friends and family who know their abuser. When I made the decision to try and get help when my stepmother was abusing me I went to my grandmother, who immediately went to my stepmother to speak about the issue. She was as charming as only a psychotic bitch who abuses small children and tweens can be, as far as I was aware my grandmother then did nothing. My stepmother then went to all of my family members telling them that I was spreading lies about her so that I had no one left to turn to. And I was, of course, punished for telling these lies.

I now know that when my grandmother was asked to take me to a hospital appointment for a condition I was suffering from as a result of my stepmother's abuse, she shared her thoughts on the issue with the doctor. The doctor had already suspected that my stepmother had something to do with my health problems from my demeanour around her and a specific previous appointment. I had asked my stepmother if I could go in alone before the appointment after I'd made the decision to ask for help, although I'm not sure if this was before or after I spoke to my maternal grandmother. She had refused to let me go alone and come in with me, then at the end of the appointment asked the doctor to speak with him in private, rubbing my nose in my helplessness because of my age. According to my grandmother, she had started to speak to the doctor about my stepmother during the appointment, however he had stopped her. Later on he'd sent me out to get a nurse to re-weigh and measure me to speak to my grandmother to get confirmation of his suspicions. He told my grandmother to make sure that my father took me to my next appointment, and my father left my stepmother shortly after speaking to the doctor. Unfortunately my father was charming enough to convince even the head of the local social services that he was an upstanding citizen, so I was stuck with him until I was pushed to take my chances on my own. I then realised that I'd have been much better off if I'd done this sooner.

The point of all of this is, I had intended to write about those happy memories with my father that I have been thinking about since my conversation with my grandmother. However today I found out that my father has been showing photographic evidence of how he treated some of the models and career women that he slept with/dated. He is apparently very into bondage, which makes sense for a guy who believes that men are superior to women but is surrounded by women who are more academically gifted, driven and successful than he is. This I have no problem with. Consenting adults can do whatever the hell they want. My problem is that he told his friends that these women had no idea that he'd gotten the camera out after blindfolding them. And then he shared these pictures with his friends. There's also the fact that in my teens I was constantly having to remove viruses off his computers (his room was like a computer graveyard, he was constantly getting new ones and having the hard drives of the old ones removed) and seeing unsavoury images. He always said that it was because he was going to websites full of jokes and pop-ups kept coming up and that he must be getting the viruses from these. I asked him if jokes were really worth it and why he couldn't just get some books or make wittier friends, however I knew he was visiting adult websites as, as I have mentioned before, I had walked in on him wanking after he'd gotten his laptop, and before this his bedroom door would only be locked when I could hear his computer on. Now I wonder if he was also contributing to these sites.

Today my maternal grandmother told me that she's been told about these photographs that he's been showing people, and then asked me if he'd ever touched me. I've never been able to properly talk about this subject with any of my friends, only skate around it with a couple of them when it was causing me problems and I wanted to try to talk to someone about it. So I just went for the easier "No." option since that can of worms is staying well and truly shut in face-to-face conversations. Perhaps one day I can use this as free counselling since the NHS and student councelling services are far too over-subscribed and when I have tried to speak to a councellor about these things before, I took so long trying to get to the main points that they decided I didn't have any problems I couldn't deal with and took me off their list.

So, instead of writing about my happy memories of my father at a time where I want to hurt him, badly, I was planning on writing my customer stories from the part-time jobs I've done on weekends and holidays. however it's taken me at least an hour and three quarters to write this (or 2 Big Bang Theories, an How I Met Your Mother, and a Scrubs) so I'll go back to trying to tell my life story in an amusing way tomorrow.

Just so you know, I do rely on self-depreciation in my humour, and some people take this as me moaning about my lot in life. I actually hated using the words 'abuse' and 'abuser' in this, but my housemate, who is one of the people I've tried to speak to about the subject my grandmother asked about, insists that I should use these words. However I hate them. I won't use 'abused' or, even worse, 'victim'. Shit fucking happens. People put up with a lot of crap in their lives. Some people, unfortunately, sink, or find it harder to swim than others do. Some of us get on with it and are made strong because of these things. Even those who struggle are made stronger despite having to keep up the fight not to sink over and over again. But although these experiences have made me push myself, led me to achieve what I have, and, hopefully, someday will mean that the drive they have given me will lead to me landing the Dream Job and making a difference with my life - they don't define me. I wouldn't be who I am without them, but they can fuck off if they think I'm going to let them stick a label on me.

Some people find labels comforting, help them understand things better. I know my stepmother had munchausen's by proxy syndrome and another doctor told my father that he believed that she has hystrionic personality disorder - which doesn't seem to exist and was described by him as something completely different to hysteronic personality disorder. I know that my father has a type of 'small man syndrome' where he is inferior to most people in that he is of below-average intelligence with very few qualifications, he has no drive, people he's not trying to charm dislike him, he has no regard for other people or the law beyond what they can do for him, and he's overweight and spends his days sleeping in an armchair. However he does everything he can to over-compensate for this and prove his superiority to himself beyond doing any actual work to improve himself. Whenever he has a job he spends his time finding ways to avoid work, and in doing so congratulates himself on his ingenuity in pulling the wool over people's eyes, regularly boasting about his antics to myself and all of his friends. As I've gotten older and come to speak to some of his former workmates I've found out that they were in no way fooled and made jokes about his laziness, hence why he's never kept a job. And in trying to find ways that he can be superior to others, the easiest way is to buy into the sexism, homophobia and racism that my paternal grandfather, for lack of a better term, 'suffered' from. And in trying to instill his superiority in his own mind, he must treat these people like shit. And as it's difficult for him to get homosexuals and people of a different ethnicity into a position where he can treat them in a way that proves his superiority without getting into a relationship with an 'ethnic' woman, which would bring him down in his own eyes as that would show others that he can't pull a white woman, he's left with mistreating women. And understanding all of this makes no bloody difference, because I still had the childhood that I had, both the good and the bad, my father and ex-stepmother are still making people suffer, and I still refuse to be the scared, hopeless little girl that I once was, whose only reason for not committing suicide was the fact that the coroner and someone in the funeral home would see her 'disgusting' body naked. (When I disclosed this to my housemate we both ended up laughing. Unfortunately I can't work out how to get the humour into that part of my past in written form given the context of this post.)

I fought hard to get out of there. I battled a lack of funds, academic support from both my family and my school (although a handful of teachers did what they could to help me along, which unfortunately was very little within the school's system) and illness to get to University whilst caring for a special-needs sister. I choose to be defined by the work that I've done, and hope yet to do, not things beyond my control. As Dumbledore said to Harry, it's his choices that made him different from Voldemort, and not even by putting a part of his own soul inside him could Voldemort force Harry to be someone that he didn't choose to be. I think I may have just compared myself to Harry Potter. I did have a bedroom beyond a cupboard under the stairs. I even had the largest bedroom in the house throughout most of my teenage years. So since I had my own bedroom growing up (except for sharing with my sister for most of my childhood), and I've never had anyone accidentally stick a part of their own soul in my body (as far as I'm aware - I'll keep you posted on that one) then I choose to be a volunteer, a Masters student, a part-time notetaker for students with disabilities, a graduate, and a future campaigner who will help others have their voices heard and make a difference to their own lives (and hopefully, perhaps, one day a girlfriend, fiancee, and, if he's worth taking the label on, wife.) I am not a victim, I am not the abused. My father, stalkers, attempted rapists, attackers, and everyone else in the world, can fuck right off if they think I'm carrying a label around that I haven't chosen or done anything to earn of my own accord.

Living on a farm involves a lot of mishaps with fire, apparently.

Having grown up on a farm, I had loads of experiences that my peers didn't. Of course, I'd go through the whole summer not seeing anyone that I didn't share genes with or who wasn't employed by my grandfather, and any time someone got lost and ended up driving up to the house, my cousins, sister and I would go running to see the 'strangers, from the outside' (sometimes even with an 'oooooooh'.) One time, when giving a car full of such strangers directions, my grandmother told them that when they reached a fork, they should "...fork off to the left...", which earned her a rather interesting set of looks. The extended hours of family time also meant that I got the pleasure of explaining to my grandmother what a lesbian is. It's only now that I realise that she probably heard the word because that would have been around the time that the rumour that I am one began circulating amongst my nearest and dearest. I came out as straight to one of my cousins, but we both decided to go along with it for the entertainment value. I have mentioned that I didn't get out much when at home, yes? My father had also stopped threatening that when I brought my first boyfriend home he would line up spent shotgun cartridges (with a different male name on each) atop the mantelpiece and either; be holding a new cartridge and marker pen when being introduced, or, be sat in his chair stroking his shotgun and dribbling out of the left side of his mouth (as dribbling out of the right side of his mouth would have made him appear too common). My cousin and I kept the in joke going for years while my family tried several different ways to get me to come out to them whilst I played dumb, then one day I slipped in front of my aunt when speaking with my cousin about my crush on Hot Guy With A Band. My aunt immediately jumped on this and advised me to get my knickers off and my legs in the air. Needless to say I didn't take this advice, although my reasoning for this at the time was my exam on the following day when the opportunity arose, and the next time I saw him outside of our seminars he had his tongue down another girl's throat so it didn't seem appropriate to remove my underwear and drag him into the disabled toilet of the nightclub at the time.

Coming out as straight is becoming something more and more common for University students it seems. Not only do I have many friends who have been assumed to be gay as they've been to embarrassed by their families to introduce them to their love interests, but I also have friends who have been assumed to be gay/lesbian because they're too 'different' from their less educated family members. I have one friend who, after she had her Facebook relationship status changed to show her to be in a relationship with her housemate by a mutual friend of the two of them, invited the same housemate to visit her over one holiday. During this visit she discovered that following her relationship status change, her family had all called one another to discuss how they would ensure that she felt that her sexuality was accepted by everyone, and how relieved they were that she'd finally come out. The truth came out over dinner when the family thought they were being introduced to the girlfriend. Some parents actually have the Eddie-from-Ab-Fab-esque want of a gay child so that they can be kept away from beige and blue rinses in their old age (some of these have a wish-list of children including a plumber,  lawyer, and accountant, and a Hollywood kid to pay for it all. They generally don't mind which one's gay but assume it will be Hollywood kid). Unfortunately I also have many friends who are too afraid to come out as gay to families that I know would be accepting, and other friends who have been driven out of their homes by their families and neighbours after coming out.

Anyway, being constantly in close quarters with my extended family meant that I missed out on some of the experiences my friends were having at 15 such as having sex with men in alleyways by the bin whilst having conversations with my other drunken friends who were fine with this as 'they'd seen it all before', then having to go to the school nurse the next day for the morning after pill. These experiences, such as the pub where the landlord knew our ages and encouraged us to go there and dance and would stick lollipops down our bras if we danced well, made us feel cool at the time. Now, they creep the bejeesus out of me. However there were plenty of good things about growing up in the middle of nowhere.

Apart from: -

1. driving a tractor when I was tall enough to reach the peddles, and steer before that; 
2. driving a quad bike at high speeds over banks and humps to see how far I could fly well before I'd hit double figures; 
3. rowing a boat across the pond (which was more lake-like than pond-like and doesn't mean I've rowed a boat across the Atlantic) whenever I was bored with all other forms of entertainment; 
4. playing with various kinds of animals, including one time where I went missing as a dummy-sucking toddler only to be found walking a bull by its nose ring up to the house by adults who were apparently terrified of approaching me as the bull could turn on me any second, however had enough time to get photographic evidence; 
5. learning to shoot a shot gun and rifle in my early teens (and almost getting one of the cats by accident); 
6. having my helium balloon rescued from a tree by an employee my grandfather had get into the front bucket of a JCB that was quickly filling with rain water because I was sick and needed cheering up; 
7. and the various climbing and exploring opportunities that come from growing up in a 400 year old house with multiple changes and additions made over the years (making it slightly Burrow-esque if the Burrow had to obey the laws of physics), which was built on the site of an ancient Celtic site complete with chieftain's burial ground behind the house, and in an area integral to the war effort meaning the farm hosted loads of relics of the preparations for the possibility that the Nazis might make it to Britain such as tunnels and hiding places. We also heard stories about the balloons the farm hosted to prevent Nazi aircraft from getting through. Whilst in the back fields there were concrete blocks in the ground with huge metal rings to which the balloons had been tied, as the front fields were used for crop a van had been placed in one with a balloon tied to the top. One day the man in the van fell asleep and the van was lifted by the balloon and carried across several fields. The guy received a medal for getting the van back down, although he admitted to my family that it wouldn't have happened in the first place if he'd been awake.

I also had many other experiences that could only come from the combination of unlimited land and my family. A few of these came from our method of waste disposal. Because of our location, getting waste collected was an issue, so as much as possible was burnt. I would put the bin bags in two separate piles, one for burning and one for the dump. My father rarely listened to this but luckily my grandfather or grandmother usually dealt with the waste. Shortly after my school had taken the girls out of lessons to give us the period talk, (When we were 15/16, which was too late for every single person in the room.) I put the free tampon samples in with the bathroom waste as I had been unsuccessful in my attempt to use them. The bathroom waste also contained an empty can of deodorant, so was put in the landfill pile. Unfortunately my father decided to take charge of the burning that week. As he was walking away from the bonfire he'd created there was an explosion, and tampons began raining down over the field.

Another fire story involves my father's hoarding. Whenever I tried throwing things away, I'd get in huge amounts of trouble. But at the beginning of each new relationship he'd be on his best behaviour and would pretend to be a decent human being, so every new girlfriend would decide to help the poor, single guy by cleaning the house for him. I would obviously have to have a preclean leaving the house at just the right level to be 'poor, useless bachelor' without being disgusting. One girlfriend came across something she couldn't identify when cleaning, so decided to just throw it in the burn bag. When my father put it on the bonfire, he and my aunt were talking, when suddenly they heard a shot and something flew past them. My aunt, father, and cousin were all sent running for cover from an armed bonfire.

These weren't the first examples of my father's incompetence with fire. Gorse would be burnt on the farm to stop it taking over, however the bushes would get to impressive sizes before being dealt with. During one burning session, my father decided to cover a bush with an entire gallon of petrol before putting a match to it. Family lore dictates that the bush went up so quickly that he lost his eyebrows and had to back away quickly.

Although my grandmother wasn't much better. One day she decided to be spontaneous and burn rubbish somewhere other than the burning spot that had been used for generations. She chose a spot behind the house. Next to some blackberry bushes. Which were about 10 feet from the house. And 20 feet tall. The fire was noticed when my father went outside to see why a fire engine had arrived and to give them directions to the next farm, where he was certain the real fire must have been...until he realised that his back was unusually warm.

My grandmother betrayed me in another way involving a blackberry bush. Every year we went to pick blackberries from the bushes dotted around the farm so that she could make jam for the world and her dog. One year I was trying to reach a berry from near the top of a bush, and kept inching forward into the bush to try and get it. Suddenly my foot slipped, and I ended up up to my chest in a rabbit hole, unable to get out. My grandmother was laughing too much to rescue me, luckily we were near the house and my grandfather heard the dogs doing their Lassie impersonations.

The dogs rescued my sister, cousins and I a few times. Once, my special needs sister went missing, and every single one of us was searching the house and fields looking for her. Suddenly, those of us in the area nearest the house saw her being marched back over the hill with a German Sheppard on either side.

As we are talking about a farm, there are far too many animal stories to go into right now. So I'll save some of those for another post.