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In Reply to: Re: That's OK, maybe it wasn't so clear posted by exfamchild on June 20, 2002 at 11:40:28:
Well, I remember when 16, 17 and up I was the youngest person in just every home I was in. After me there were the 'children.' I was so bothered by the 'hugs' 'brothers and uncles' would give me feeling me up that I developed an aversion to hugging, because it was synonymous with being sampled. Yuck.
I thought then there was no way to avoid this and I had to just endure it because it was 'normal'(as in a normal distribution) though I hated it, and that I was meant to spend my life dodging and avoiding - it did not occur to me at the time that I could be in a totally different place where this behavior was NOT normalized. You know the joke about the 3 most important things in real estate: location, location, location. I think this is true about many things in life.
(in the culture I came from, even 12/13 yr olds could be harassed on crowded buses by a guy rubbing himself on them, (masturbating himself) and we would just endure it and try to avoid it and minimize it out of shame and fear. That sense of disempowered sticks with you. That really SET ME UP for the Family. :)
It was only MUCH much later (duh) that I understood (eureka) that there are some cultures that ARE different, and some people that are different. I mean, even the fish do not know what water is because it is all around them and it is all they know.
I have a few stories to tell about some of this and I plan to do it when I am finished grading the mountain of papers I have here. But yes, when it came to my children, I wanted, even dreamed of something different, something better than I had ever had. That is what helped me find the strength to get out even if that threatened my sense of livelihood.
