I could never be considered "innocent"

I don’t think I’ve ever been what you could consider ‘innocent’. When I was born, maybe. But that was short lived. There are men who like babies in ways that put them on a list. My mother had a nasty habit of not only finding those men, but also selling my body to them. Again, I was a baby. I’m not sure how old I was when this started. Maybe a few days. Maybe a few months. I just know I wasn’t yet a year. 

Mother taught me to keep my mouth shut about how those men played with me at all times. I wasn’t to talk about it with her, with my brother Robert, and definitely not with anyone outside of our immediate family. I personally think it made her queasy to think about what they were doing to me, but she didn’t want to let go of the drugs and money she got out of it.

Robert often went behind mother’s back and encouraged me to talk to him about what happened. If I didn’t want to talk about it, he would invite me to his room to play video games to help me decompress instead. I loved Robert. I trusted Robert. Robert was the only thing keeping me sane.

So when I was three and he ran away from home, I couldn’t understand what I had done wrong. I couldn’t understand why he would abandon me. I asked mother.

“Robert is thirteen, sweetie. He wants to live on his own.” Was her response any time I asked. I asked every day for almost three months. I knew better. I knew he ran away. I just didn’t know why. 

When Robert left, mother trashed his room. She broke his TV, she flipped his bed, she tore his curtains down. I knew she missed him, too. I spent most of my free time in his room, curled up in his broken TV, crying myself to sleep. Mother called this a waste of time. As I got older, I would call it grieving. When I was three to four, I didn’t have the words to describe what was happening to me emotionally. 

The visits from the men got more frequent. Several in one day for months at a time kind of frequent. Until I started school.

School was the only respite I got. I’d wake up every morning, put on my outfit for the day, grab my backpack with my unfinished homework, go to the bus stop, do my homework on the bus, get breakfast at school, get bullied, then ride the bus home. Once I walked through the door, I’d drop my bookbag at the door, then go to my room, where there would be a man waiting for me. Sometimes, they would still have clothes on when I would arrive. Usually, I wasn’t so lucky that they’d have the patience to wait for me. 

At least I didn’t always have to take my clothes off. Sometimes, they’d be okay with just playing with my mouth or my hands or just exploding on me somewhere. Sometimes, though, they wanted me to take my clothes off so they could touch me wherever and however they pleased.

Mother always told me that doing this was helping keep a roof over our head and food on the table. I wasn’t sure if I wanted a roof and food if it meant I had to do this every day.

I was in pain often, usually from urinary tract infections. I got them chronically as a kid. Mother would give me home remedies and never take me to the doctor. I now know that she was afraid they would notice the obvious signs of abuse, not only all over my body, but also in how I acted. At the time, however, she told me it was because doctors never took girls and women seriously and would just tell me it was all in my head, or I should lose weight (even though I was severely underweight and malnourished), or any number of other things to keep me from asking to go to the doctor, to keep me thinking that doctors were bad.

So the list of people who were bad as a kid was;

Any stranger

Doctors

Police

 So that’s why it was so surprising to me that she allowed me to leave the house at all. Why was I allowed to go to public school? Wasn’t she afraid that the teachers would see my obvious signs of abuse and report it? Wasn’t she afraid that the councilor would catch wind of my injuries and flinchy behavior and report it? Or was she confident that she had trained me well enough that no one would question any of that because she knew I’d never tell a soul what was happening at home? Was she certain that I was trained well enough to act like nothing was wrong when everything was falling apart around me? Did she think that because this was normal to me, and she told me not to tell anyone, that I’d assume nothing was wrong and would never bring it up with anyone for any reason?

I guess, whatever she thought, she didn’t expect what happened to me next. As much as I didn’t expect it either, it made sense to me, which is I guess why I didn’t fight it nearly as much as I should have.