My Story -Part I

I’m a survivor of sexual abuse that happened when I was a kid. I was about 8. Some of it I remember in pretty stark detail; some of it I remember only as feelings, or smells, or blurry kinds of visual memories.

The person who did it was the son of some folks who went to our church and lived next door to my grandparents. Grandma had charge of us grandkids while our folks were at work, which meant all day during the summers and the afternoons when school was in session.

This kid who violated me was older than all of us, so naturally we all fought for his approval and attention. When you’re little, you like being considered cool by the bigger, older kids. I was no different.

The first memory I have is in the swimming pool, being on his lap as we hid beneath a huge pool float during a game of swimming hide-and-seek. I felt his erection beneath my bottom, although I had no idea what it was. I felt it many times after that.

I don’t feel the need to go through all of my memories. What I will say is that I was lucky. He never beat me, never raped me. I consider both of those facts blessings; it was hard enough for me to cope with and heal from being touched that way.

I cannot imagine how much more painful it might have been if I’d had to recover from being beaten and raped as well.

I didn’t understand most of what was happening. I felt this weird combination of being flattered that I was getting all this attention from the Big Kid and being frightened, confused, and bewildered because I knew something about all of this was Not Right. He wasn’t hurting me, so my child-mind couldn’t grasp exactly how it was Not Right, just that something was going on that probably shouldn’t have been happening.

And because I couldn’t get my mind around it yet knew it was wrong, I said nothing out of my fear that I would be found complicit and would then be punished.

As the episodes continued and even escalated, the fear and the confusion magnified.

I have one memory of being in the driveway at my uncle Tom’s house. We’d been swimming in his above-ground pool that day, I was wearing my bathing suit. It was purple. We still have family photos of me in that suit.

Anyway, we were about to be taken back to grandma’s house for our parents to pick us up. I remember looking to my right, where the main road was, seeing the cars passing, feeling the sun-warmed concrete under my feet, the damp bathing suit against my skin, the sun-heated metal of my uncle’s car under my back and legs, and thinking that I was somehow ... so totally different and removed... separate... from the rest of my family at that point because of what had been going on.

That’s a really huge, powerful, and scary thing for an 8 year old girl to suddenly know in her bones, in her guts. That she was somehow now an outsider who didn’t quite belong – but why exactly?

I think that’s where the pain started.

My grandmother must’ve noticed the inordinate amount of time I spent with Big Kid, or maybe my cousins said something about the attention he showed me, because one night when my mom got to Grandma’s to pick us up, Grandma and my mom called me into the kitchen and point-blank asked me if anything was going on with Big Kid.

And I looked them both in the eye.

And I lied.

No, Grandma. No, Mommy. Nothing going on.

Wide eyes.

Serious face.

Heart beating like a cornered rabbit’s.

Body cold with slick, icy fear.

Oh, I just knew I would be in so much trouble. And maybe it was so much trouble, in fact, that they would stop loving me.

Because I knew it was bad, what was happening.

And I started believing I was bad because of it.