TW: Mentions of child abuse
Let me take you guys back to a time in my mind when I start thinking about this. I start feeling this ugly feeling like why I couldn’t have done something. I was a six-year-old child who had two other sisters. One of them was four and a half, and the other was around three years old. So, this awful time in our life began around this time.
Many of us as children have an image of waking up in the morning to the sound of our mom’s voice, which says it’s time for school, and she has breakfast and a packed sack lunch ready for the school day. Well, in this childhood, that was the farthest off from that.
The way I remembered waking up a few times as we had a child abuser in our family, and waking up for me was watching him take my sister. I wondered where they were going and where my mom or grandma was. So, one day I got up to follow this family member of mine. It’s been a few times he’s been doing this.
I thought he was taking my sister and then bringing her back and laying her down on the floor next to the bed. So let me take a breath and tell you what I saw. There was this abandoned yard next to my grandma’s house, and the trees were everywhere, and the grass was tall, but I noticed there was a small trail that looked like someone had been going this way.
I got scared, and I didn’t follow the trail, but when I was waiting next to this yard, my sister and this ugly, gross family member were coming from behind all the trees and fixing her shorts. I thought about what he had done to my sister. Days went on, and I couldn’t let this feeling go.
I kept wondering where he took my sister. So, one morning I got brave, and I went through that trail with all the trees and big, tall grass. I had this gut feeling like there was nothing good I would find when I got to the end of this trail. So sure enough, I saw this clear patch, but what has haunted me since this day was that old beaten mattress lying there.
It was gross, like with pee stains and ugly odour. My heart dropped, and I started thinking about what my sisters had been going through. One is three and the other four and a half. I’m a six-year-old child with all this in my head.
We did get together and started telling other family members about what was happening, and a few years later, the cops got involved, but nothing was ever done. Now being 46 years old, the vision of my sister fixing her shorts and just being three years old and the vision of that beaten up and stained mattress, I can’t seem to get out of my head.
It’s so much to endure as a young child with things like this that go on behind closed doors. Yes, we grew up and had our own families, but that doesn’t change the ugly childhood that we went through.
And also, the sound of the truck coming through the driveway, knowing that he’s coming to continue to steal the innocence of my sister, that’s the worst feeling ever. So that’s one of the reasons why I didn’t like Ford trucks for a long time.
And the colour orange was one of the worst colours. Those were constant reminders of the awful things I witnessed as a child. How could families have these monsters look like ordinary people taking advantage of little girls to satisfy their own twisted needs?
So, when I see a dirty old mattress or an abandoned yard or an orange old Ford truck, those are all triggers of how bad our childhood was. And to be going to school and trying to live an everyday life that’s the hardest thing ever to do.
This was one of the hardest things for me to write about. This has many tears and a broken heart that threw the years, never mended because we never got to tell our story. It was always said maybe that never happened. But, as a survivor and furthermore, a witness than a victim, I was still a helpless child.