After years of abuse, I finally spoke up when I was a teenager. Once I spoke up I could not be quieted. I told anyone who would listen. Unfortunately, the problem back then was, no one listened. My school counselor sent me right back home to the same situation and then it got worse. I was threatened…even threatened to be killed if I ever spoke about it again.
Little did I know, that my courage in speaking out would ruin my life. Since I still refused to be quieted, my mother told people I was mentally unstable and that I told lies. It worked, because anyone I tried to tell after that, treated me as if I was crazy. Even my one brother who I was closest to called me a liar and our whole relationship changed. I guess I finally gave up after that. I felt like I had no other choice but to become silent once again.
When I last wrote on here, I was talking about my father dying and how it affected my family. Well, I ended up staying another 3 years to be near my mother who wasn’t doing well after he died. No one in the family seemed to mind that, because I guess no one else wanted that responsibility. They never even came to see her.
But then she died, and I was practically ordered out of the house. I wasn’t allowed to be there unless someone else was there. My siblings all treated me like I had no right to even be there at all. Their animosity was far worse than I had seen after my father died.
One day I was there when someone else was there and the unspeakable happened. My older brother molested me. Right there in the very house where it happened so many years ago. This is so hard to even grasp in my mind, that something like this would happen to me again. I thought I had finally come to terms with everything that happened and that it was all over. But no, as I was talking about my mom and crying, my brother said, “Come here,” and held out his arms as if to give me a hug. That shocked me, because he wasn’t the hugging type of person, but it kind of touched my heart to see a little bit of humanness. But as soon as I went near him, his hands were all over me and it was filthy and disgusting and unbearable…
I became that child once again, crippled by fear. I could not scream, I could not do anything. Here I am a grown woman and I was paralyzed, just as I was so many years ago. He was so brazen because he knows that no one would ever believe me, just as no one had believed me about my father all those years ago…
And he knows I will be silent once again.
