Who Was the Victim

I’m finding it very hard to write this exact post, maybe it’s because I haven’t been completely reconciled with my past or something.

Okay, I know I am going to confuse some of you because earlier I leaped back into my eleventh year to bring out some Memory Files and this was after sharing what happened when I was a young teenager. Now I’m back into my teen years, got it?

Do you remember me telling you about being ‘kidnapped’ by a couple of uncles?

Well, here we are, a new life is before us. Now we are living in a proper home once again, one with running water, lights, and all that good stuff we were used to in this modern day and age. I assume Mom’s brothers and church family were instrumental in having that happen though it is a piece of the puzzle I never actually searched for.

We were given a warm welcome: I remember the girls my age, a couple of them which were my cousins, putting on a party which included presenting me with a homemade scrapbook where they had each added a page or two.  It was a very nice gesture.

But somehow, what lingers most warmly in my mind is going to school on that first day of grade ten. Just inside the glass doors of the big school were two girls waiting for me. They became my best friends.

  Okay, I guess I need to venture into what’s really hurting, can’t skirt it any longer.  Mom had gone home to her people but she wasn’t ‘one of them’ in spirit, if you catch the drift.

I’ve always shielded myself from this fact because it hurt too much. It was easier to say that Mom was depressed because of all the pain she had gone through, but the truth was I, we, were hurting and she wasn’t there for us. 

The silent disapproval I had already felt as a child remained, and I found her quite unapproachable.  Once, maybe a year or so after we got there, she shared her heart with me. It was a heady experience for a fifteen or sixteen year old, but I was too young to really help her. 

So what did I do? I turned to writing and finished my first novel while in my teens but later threw it out. I also wrote poetry that expressed my anguish and other moods. 

I still quote these lines from one of the poems from time to time: ‘Chains of darkness flung around me binding me with fear’, hmm, the rest of the words are escaping me. What were they? I wrote about the ‘echoes from the past’ meaning the sexual abuse that had such a damaging effect on my ego.

Teenage years can be tumultuous even for those from a stable home, and mine wasn’t easy. I had such extreme mood swings that on one occasion I took way too many aspirin in a desperate attempt to end it all. Did I have side effects? Not really. Did Mom know? Shrug.

But was God there? Yes, He most definitely was, and although at times I couldn’t feel Him, looking back I realized that what I thought were stumbling blocks were really stepping tones that shone like jewels on my way towards Heaven.