I was reading one of the forums I frequent for adult children of abusive parents, and an interesting topic came up: Parental snooping. Someone brought up the idea that it's abusive for your parents to insist on seeing you naked or exposing you to their own nudity... and a whole wave of memories flooded my mind. Things that I had packed away in the back of my mind for years, and it took me a couple of days to be able to get over the "ick" I feel even writing about them.
When I was about 6 years old, we moved to the United States. My parents moved around a lot until settling on one city where they could reliably find work as illegal immigrants, exposing me to all sorts of creepy roommates and dangerous situations in the mean time. We lived in a one bedroom apartment from the time I was 6 years old until I was 17 years old, because they couldn't find another place to let them lease a unit without the proper documentation. There was only one bathroom.
For 11 years of my life, there were at least 8 hours total every single day that I was not allowed to use the bathroom. My dad would wake up at approximately 3 am every morning to go into the bathroom and audibly masturbate and watch pornography for hours, as well as drinking at least 5 beers and coffee with a shot of vodka, as well as smoking a pack of cigarettes each morning between the time he got up and the time he drove me to school (around 7 am). The room I slept in was right next to the bathroom, so I heard everything.
My dad wouldn't even bother locking the door, because he got off on the fact that I'd sometimes want to pee at night and I'd stumble in there, half-asleep, thinking it was earlier than he usually began his routine. Even though he yelled at me for having the audacity to try to use the bathroom, he was always an exhibitionist who enjoyed the fact that I would "catch" him doing those things. I'd go back to my room and hold my pee for hours until about 5 minutes before he drove me to school.
My mom emptied the trash every night at midnight, and I'd count the empty beer cans in it before we left the house every day. Sometimes he'd drive me to the shuttle stop, sometimes to the school itself. I was terrified every single morning, and I had one seriously life-threatening event after I told him that I don't like to go to school reeking of cigarettes. He floored it, almost hit a tree, was barely able to brake to a full stop, while drunkenly screaming at me about how "everyone's parents smoke". The skid marks were on that road for years. My mom let me walk after that. Before this incident, she assured me that "he knows what he's doing" when I expressed that I felt unsafe. It's a miracle he never got a DUI.
I'd get home from school via bus a couple of hours before he got off of work. When he got off of work, it was back to the routine - another 4 or more hours of sitting in the bathroom, drinking, loudly masturbating, and smoking. My mom would sometimes plead with him outside of the door to let us use the bathroom, and he would swear at us and tell us to leave him alone. Sometimes, he'd let us use the bathroom about 15 minutes after we asked, but after that, he made sure we felt like burdens for wanting to use the only toilet in the house.
Sometimes, my evenings after school would be spent pressing my butt against a radiator, because I felt like the warmth relaxed my body enough to not be in pain from having to hold poop in for hours. I feel ridiculous even saying it, but the rigid edges of the radiator were more comfortable than the fact that I just was not allowed to go to the bathroom until very late at night. I often cried in pain and as embarrassing as it is to admit, I nearly went to the bathroom on myself multiple times. There were many days where I was tempted to pee in front of the bathroom door or in his office chair because I just couldn't hold it in for 4 or more hours. There weren't any stores with public bathrooms within a walking distance, and you don't exactly ask neighbors to use their toilet randomly. I just had to tough it out.
When I was very little, in early elementary school, I remember my dad doing all of this but with me in the bathroom with him. I'm really trying to get over the "ick" to type this - he used to invite me into the bathroom with him, while he smoked, drank, and used the toilet for hours. He would be pooping right in front of me while trying to have a conversation. When I complained about the cigarette smell or asked him if I could leave, he sprayed some of my mom's hairspray in the air and told me to stop complaining about the cigarette smell. I'd have no choice but to sit right next to him as he sat on the toilet for hours talking to me about whatever... one conversation I remember was specifically about how he thinks I should have sex with black men, because their penises are bigger. We are white and I wasn't even a teenager yet at the time.
We moved into a two bedroom, two bathroom apartment when I was 17 years old. This didn't exactly stop the bathroom-related abuse, although I was extremely relieved and thankful that I was able to use a toilet for more than 1/3 of the hours in every day. The walls were very thin, and I could still hear my dad doing what he did every single day. The entire bathroom was previously white but became stained with nicotine, and thus practically unusable. I was always ashamed when people came over and saw it. If I ever had a friend spend the night, I was horrified by the possibility of them trying to use that bathroom at the wrong time and walking in on something as grotesque as what I described in this post. Needless to say, I almost never had anyone over.
After I was allowed to use the bathroom, I frequently got walked in on while showering, and my mom would peek in the shower at my naked body. It was considered fair game to walk in on me when I was using the toilet, even though I always asked them to leave because it made me uncomfortable, and their response was to roll their eyes. It was frequent in our family to change clothes in front of each other, or to walk around in underwear, even when we had people over. I was always embarrassed when my aunt came over and my dad would prance around the house in a t-shirt and his underwear, which was tight enough that you could really see everything. She was uncomfortable with it too, but I think she just knew not to bother speaking up. A part of my dad's exhibitionism was to wear shorts that were too short and loose for him, and he'd purposely fall asleep on the couch with his penis hanging out of them, just to make me uncomfortable.
That's it for now - I pushed all of this to the back of my mind, like I said earlier. It's really weird mentally reliving it. I want whoever reads this to consider the fact that I just had a baby, and that during my pregnancy, my mom acted like it was utterly incomprehensible that I don't want my dad near my child and that I certainly will never allow my children to spend any time around either of them unsupervised. I haven't spoken to my mom since the birth of my daughter a month ago, and I haven't spoken to my dad since about halfway through my pregnancy. I mean it when I say that I'd genuinely rather die than have my daughter live through even one day of my childhood. Sometimes, I wonder how I survived growing up with them.