This past weekend I took my beloved on a tour of my past. We drove down roads I traveled so many times growing up. We went past the lot where my childhood home once stood: it has been removed and a new house stands in its place. We tried to cross the bridge I walked over every day of my thirteenth summer: it was closed to traffic. We looped past the house where I was babysat as a child, the house where I learned that some things cannot be returned once they are taken: it was condemned and the lot overgrown. We paused at the school I attended as an elementary student: the playground I ran around on has been reduced to a field and the playground shrunken to nearly nothing but shiny plastic.
The journey left me sad, hurting and scared. I'm not sure why the memories that washed to the surface on the drive were so dark. I feel safe with my lover. I trust her deeply and know that she would do anything to protect me. I can be vulnerable with her, and maybe that is a part of it, but I've never gone to these places. Now I can't hide from them. They showed up in my dreams last night and in my shower this afternoon.
Children deserve protection, faith and love. I didn't have all of those... well, I did, just not all at the same time. My mom tried to protect me. She did, from adults. She always taught me to trust my instincts around men. If my gut told me to go, I did. If a man gave me a look, or set my spide-y senses tingling, I walked away quickly. I learned to be tough. But, my mom never thought to warn me about boys who were just a little older, just a little sneakier, and they flew into my world below both of our radars.
That condemned house is what tipped me. Seeing the house, the same color it was when I went to daycare there, in shambles pushed every memory of that place in my face. I remember it all. Their names, where it happened, and happened, and happened. I remember that I wasn't the only girl under 10 who wanted their attention, craved it, scrambled and flirted for it. I wanted to be liked best, so I took it further. I was so little and perfect for their cruelty because I was so needy. I wanted love, no matter what it looked like. And it felt good, so I wanted the most. I told my mom, not because I was ashamed but because I was happy. She made me feel shame. Told me I was dirty, that it was disgusting. She pulled me out of that house.
I told Liz about the time the car door opened and my mom kept me from falling out as we were leaving, what I didn't tell her was that this was the last time I was there. It was the last after school babysitting before I went to a new after school babysitter with a vigilant mother of four on guard. It was also the last time my mother trusted me.
Lately I have realized that I internalized the feeling that I am unworthy. I have been trying to figure out where this voice started, because it seems to me that I can go back to that place and fix it if I can figure it out. This weekend, I realized when. It started when I told my mother about those boys and she blamed me. She lost faith in me and I in her. How am I going to go back and reframe something that happened 26 years ago? How can I tell Liz that not only have I been broken forever, I have been broken for longer than she has been alive?
I want to move forward from this. I want to be brave and find the love, faith and protection we all deserve. More than anything, I want to cradle that ten-year-old in my arms and tell her that she does deserve love. I want her to understand that it isn't okay for anyone to do anything to a child, even if that child thinks she wants it. I want to tell me that. We need to be okay.
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