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.
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.
