My Favorite Show

mentions mother-daughter sexual abuse and mother physical abuse

My favorite show of all time is Law and Order. I’ve seen it late at night so many nights. For the longest time I could watch two episodes in a row from two to four in the morning. (Hello, insomniac!)

For the longest time I recorded on my vhs recorder lots and lots of episodes and watched them over and over as well. Eventually I got rid of my vhs recorder and all the old tapes that I had. My player made tons of squeaky noise while playing, so it was definitely time and I couldn’t buy another new machine. I was trying to convert a lot of my favorite stuff by buying dvds.

So much of the dvds that I have now were bought  on sale or used. After you have paid several times for a movie, you tend to not want to buy things at the high price that they want. At least for me.

I do have the whole nine seasons of Seinfeld on dvd, got it for an incredible price around Christmas shopping season a couple of years ago. I got the whole show for about $75, a huge sale.

But I still don’t have any seasons of Law and Order. Nor Homicide: Life on the Streets, another show that we are kind of loopy about watching over and over, and used to have recorded on vhs, and watched many, many times. I just never come across those shows at used stores and just didn’t want to spend the money on getting them new. I think that it is about time to start doing that, cause I miss not being able to watch specific episodes when I want to watch them. Oh yeah and Law and Order has not been available on Netflix for some time and Homicide never has been on there since I became a member.

I think that my favorite seasons of both series are the earliest seasons. I think they are both the best earliest in their creations.

One reason that I love Law and Order so much is that one of the main characters, Mike Logan played by Chris Noth, is that he was a survivor of abuse. Slowly it comes out, his mother was a drunk and physically violent. Raised Catholic and from  a dysfunctional family he was vulnerable to also being exploited by a sexual offender priest. Other boys of his acquaintance were sexually abused by the priest, one who he confronts years later for trying to recruit him for being abused by the priest. He’s a complex flawed character throughout. Chris Noth plays layers over the years.

I was a fan of the show from the first. For the longest time I did not remember that my mother had sexually abused me, it really wasn’t until 2002 that I started having flashbacks of her cruel physical abuses of me while I was a toddler and pre-schooler and wasn’t until 2003 that I first started having flashbacks of her sexual offending against me, mother-daughter sexual abuse.

A weird thing happened after I started remembering being sexually abused by my mother, though I’m sure that any survivors of child sexual abuse will not find this weird at all. For so many years I had blanked out, forgotten, suppressed, and repressed the scenes where the Mike character talked about his mother’s physically abusing him. When I started remembering and healing from mother-daughter sexual abuse and physical abuse by me mother I was watching episodes quite often and sure enough there were scenes where he talks about his mother and her physically abusing him, episodes I had watched and thought I remembered. Sometimes life can seem so seamless to me, it is hard to see how much I was deleting from my adult life that I was oblivious to.

Much later in the life of the series he has a new female partner that he discloses to, and yeah I had blanked that out too. He says, rum punch, and doesn’t explain it. Later he shares how his mother used to recruit him to go to the liquor store and buy rum for her. For the first hour he was her favorite person in the world, showered with kisses and attention. Later, as she got drunker and drunker, and meaner and meaner, she would start throwing her rage onto him with punches; rum punch.

After that I really understood why I had such a strong connection and commonality with this character. Even though my mother was not a drinker, she used her rage and used it to try to work all her issues and problems out on my precious little body.