MY STORY
Part I
Hurt and Hardship
As a child, growing up in a culture where girls were considered not as important as a man-child, I was given no love or any possible attention from my father. My mother was too busy rearing the seven of us to step in and ‘set the record straight’ so to speak with my dad when important moments happened. Like I remembered standing there in front of him while he sat at the kitchen table eating, and without looking at me he said between mouthfuls of food and sips of beer, “What do you want?” And prompted by my mother an hour previously before he came home from work, I would say embarrassingly because I figured he should already know this, I blurt out softly, “Today is my Birthday.” As I rigidly stand there with my jaw tightly locked, he goes for his wallet in his back right pocket and takes out a one-dollar bill and hands it over to me without so much as a glance my way. I take the dollar from him and say, “Thank you dad.” As he continues to eat and drink and with my mother still standing there, making sure I said my, “Thank you” I turn my little self around and as I walk down the hall to the bathroom to relieve myself. I am crying through the lack of emotion from him and my desire of wanting to die.
My mother was always busy, washing dishes, cooking, cleaning, and the forever everyday chore of laundry. Everyone pitched in to help her, if we didn’t; it was a paddling on our behinds. Which would always hurt and keep hurting long after the paddling was over. My mother had a strong right hand and I do believe it was due to her constant efforts with keeping us in line. Good quick slaps across the face wasn’t out of her control both depending upon the severity of the offense and if you were in reach of her arm. My mother was quite accurate with either target on the individual offender(s). She would also throw things at us with the accuracy of a professional when we were out of reach. I learned at a very early age to be on my best behavior out of more than respect than fear of her.
With the seven of us children there was severe teasing to tears along with inhumane verbal abuse between each other. Biting, hitting, kicking, and pulling hair went along with it. They hated each other as we all grew up within our three-bedroom house. Love was rarely mentioned between us and never heard of between my parents.
Out of all of this I was reared a Catholic. My morals, values, and principles from my mother and her strong faith in God were forever present within me. For ten years I was all for God and my Brother Jesus, it was an extremely ethereal decade for me.
As a teen I was on my own. My mother left my dad due to infidelity that he finally admitted to. She left completely with her boyfriend to another state when my dad threatened to kill her with his gun. We were then abandoned for two weeks in a house we had just moved into with no supervision. We stopped going to church when all of us were split up again between older siblings. Two of my sisters married shortly afterward which these marriages didn’t last very long.
I was raped when I was seventeen years old while I was walking to work one November morning. My bus was late so I walked the two miles that it took to get to work. A black man walked in front of me as if he was crossing the street. He turned quickly and grabbed me as I was walking past him and forced a knife up against my throat. He told me to stop screaming or he would kill me so I stopped. I told him I didn’t have any money and asked him to let me go and he hesitated and then said, “That ain’t what I want.” and he proceeded to guide me behind a drugstore alley. Once there he told me to take off my pants while he still held the knife to my throat. I did as I was told. He told me to lie down and when he lay on top of me he couldn’t enter me. I noticed it was getting just a tad light out and I said to him, “I have never done this before; it is starting to get light out, if you leave now I won’t be able to see your face and identify you to press charges.” This young man bolted upright zipped up his pants and took off running down to the other end of the alley and turned left at the street. By then I was going back to the corner where he had grabbed me, crossed the street crying completely and totally upset by all of this. Before I reached the phone booth I passed a man and a woman who were casually talking to each other. I had noticed them there, as I was being jumped across the street from them. I put my money in the phone and called my sister.
After the attack I went to live with my mother and her boyfriend in California. When my mother’s boyfriend would drink he would verbally attack me saying the reason for the rape was my own fault and that I had asked for it. My mother never defended me; she let him say those hateful things without stepping in. If she had said anything he would have hit her like all the other times during his abusive life with her. He eventually committed suicide with an overdose of prescription pills. I was saddened by the news but I knew it was an end to a relationship that shouldn’t have been. Every hit and slap from him to her and when he would attack us was God telling her to leave him for good and be on her own. She didn’t get it and never did. This abusive situation in her life started from her father, to her husband and continued through to her boyfriend. Now she lives alone and in complete bliss with God in control of her life now. She is happy and content.
At the age of 21 I found myself pregnant from a man I didn’t love and didn’t want to marry. This momma’s boy didn’t want the baby due to ‘how it would look without being married’ stigma. And because of that attitude from him I never told him the real reason for my wanting the abortion. I had two sets of full dental x-rays to have surgery done for impacted molars. I was concerned for the health of my little girl and I didn’t want to bring another little girl into the world whose father wouldn’t love her because she would have been imperfect as I had been to my own father. I didn’t trust in God and put this situation into His Hands. I had walked away from Him eleven years ago, like my father; I didn’t think God loved me. I was wrong; *I should have had my Valerie at any cost. I wasn’t brave or strong enough, I had no place to turn and no one to talk to. After the abortion, it was such a traumatic occurrence for me; I vowed to God that I would never do something as terrible as this again. It was still murder and a part of me died when Valerie died. The abortion was the wrong choice to make, I had no faith, and I was lost.
* {I had explained to my sister the whole procedure of this so-called abortion that I thought I had. She had explained to me that I had a DNC and not an abortion, and that it was a generated procedure to procure funding. I believe my sister's explanation and realized instantly that my son was meant to be born. In which all the opposition with my first pregnancy kept me strong to defy my first husband's family to keep my first- born.}
Part II
Moving On
My first marriage was a rebound of being rejected from the momma’s boy that dumped me after a three- and-a-half year relationship. No one else wanted me I felt, so a latched onto a thirty-one-year-old man with lower self-esteem than me. There was actually nothing between us other than me chasing him and I was up to a good challenge so I pursued him until I once again became pregnant. His family convinced him I should have an abortion. A family meeting decided that I should, and I refused in front of all of them and walked out. His brother convinced him to follow me to persuade me to do an abortion, which again I refused, telling him I wouldn’t abort my child. The same brother showed up at my door and said to both of us he was wrong to try and convince him to terminate the pregnancy, his mother had changed his thinking, and he apologized.
They were all against me from the beginning because I brought shame upon their family name. I didn’t try and cover up what they thought was a mistake. I had made a promise to God and I had meant to keep my promise at any cost. I had no support, no acceptance, and no love in the marriage that I thought would work in spite of all the mental abuse that I had experienced from the beginning through until the end of the marriage.
I gave birth again two years after my son was born and even after my little girl arrived I still wasn’t accepted. I did my best to help out but their treatment of me was still uncaring. I started going to bars looking for a way out of all this misery. I still felt that I was alone and couldn’t turn to God; my free will was biting me in the backside. I was straying even further away from my Brother Jesus who at one time for ten years was the positive source of my entire decision-making.
Part III
A True Beginning
I met a man when I was 26 and still married. I lied to him and said I was divorced. When it came time to move out on what was an emotionally and mentally abusive first marriage I lied again and told him I was separated. I had become pregnant again and ended the first marriage to go live with this man I had only known less than two months. By then I wanted nothing to do with marrying anyone so I was gladly willing to live with a man I wasn’t married to. I was told once by him that I was ‘an answer to his prayers.’ At the time he said that I didn’t believe it. How could someone like me who was spontaneously doing everything possible against God in her life be an answer to prayers?
Shortly after the relationship started there was conflict and turmoil. After a year of living together we moved to another location in California and lived in that house for ten years. With the stress of me being me and still going against God I spiraled into the abyss of despair and started to break down in mind and body. I left this man for three months with my three children and went back to my home state but returned to him through audible words in my head from God to ‘go back and make it work’. Even though I had four horrific psychotic breakdowns in three years which finally brought God back to me, my life didn’t start to have a dramatic change for the better until I turned 35. That day in August I gave my life back over to Jesus and through the course of 15 years that one Believer has turned to two along with our three children. It has been a growing of a mutual understanding of a combining togetherness in Christ for our whole family.
Before considering a second marriage, I inquired of God if I should or go back to my first husband. I was instructed by Him not to go back because the first marriage was an offense to Him. I married my second daughter’s father in a Southern Baptist Church and I was in one in Our Lord’s teachings and wore white during that private ceremony. Our relationship together since our marriage has been close and we compromise when need to. We know each other and it has been a true beginning of love and respect with continual Blessings within Christ. I had changed anew toward my Brother Jesus altering everyone’s life around me.
Now within our empty nest He has continued to nurture us within God’s Love and Guidance. Through it all we will forever be in His Arms for I submit to both God’s Will now and my husbands.
Positive Spirit
Winnemucca, Nv.