holidays are hard for me

I have a hard time during the holiday seasons.

My girls don’t. I made sure of that…I’m a great bullshiter. They know, they just let me lie and move on.

Holidays are hard for me.

I have had some rough holiday seasons.

I had to call out some pedophiles one time.

I had to put them on blast.

They in turn…turned a complete community against me successfully.

My holidays sucked for several years…during the trial days… five years of them.

But I couldn’t let my girls be unsafe.

I couldn’t allow them to be around negative, disbelieving, and unsafe people.

So we, my little family and I did holidays on our own.

Me and two little girls enjoyed the holiday season.

When cousins got old enough to drive…as this went on for five years…they would drive over and spend a little time with their cousins on the holidays.

Such sadness.

I merely stated the facts I had been told…and our entire world turned inside out.

People…professional people kept telling me the same thing…”I have never dealt with this before.”

I understand, I really do understand, your need to tell me this…but this did not help me process the fact that I had never been through this before either. And if you ,who is guiding me, has never done this …then how the hell am I supposed to act or react….hmmm.

I’ve journeyed forward for many years trying stubbornly to not look back at separate issues, but today… today I cry.

The first year on my own…all alone for thanksgiving…was something I had never done before either. I had two little ,tiny girls, who were five years old and just wanted to be excited like their classmates about the holidays. But we were separate, segregated, alone. We were victims. We were hard to look at. We had to much pain to look directly at for to long. No one knew what to say. No one knew how to act. We were untouchable. We were dirty…unclean…we were victims.

It just hit me the other day…We were on the outside because our perpetrators were not the regular perps. Our perps were nice church going head of the nursery, great pillars of the community perps…not your ordinary hide in the bushes, drug induced bad decision making perps. These were Christians for Gods sake. How dare I spill dirty laundry in their church. In their community…in their presence.

A wise women told me years later…after the smoke had cleared…after I had picked up the pieces of my broken life…She told me, “You know that an entire community can be groomed.” yes…yes, I know that. First hand I know that.

I shake my head today as I watch people try to decide if a victim is trustworthy or lying…Sometime it makes me scoff, and sometimes…ok ,sometimes I wanna punch them in the face.

A community can be groomed.

What does that mean though?

What is grooming? Grooming is a word people in the field use to describe how a perpetrator gains access to our children. Sadly I could teach a course on this , sadly I could quote statistics to you…but I’m so tired anymore…it no longer feels relevant to me now. As, I know what I know…and it is what it is.

Grooming though goes beyond getting access to your child…it s getting access to a community of children.

During our FIVE year court battle several less privileged victims came to confess their abuse by those same perps…but since we had been so harassed, ridiculed, and subjected to such hate…how would they fair in the coming forward for justice. You pick it up and move…and that is what they did, they merely wanted to stop by on their way out of town and let me know that I was right…that these people had perped on their kid too… hope everything works out for us, but if the community acted so vehemently against me…how would they ever fair against them.

When we told the truth…

We were asked to leave the house we were renting…we had two weeks.

We were asked to not come back to the church.

I was told by my pastor that he had nothing to say to me.

My family was tore apart…no longer a safe place for my girls. The perps were a part of all those things…and they won the battle. We were the poster child to what never to say or do to victims.

So in the short time between my daughter telling me horrendous life altering things that a five year old should never know…I had become homeless, without family support, with out a church, without a pastor, and without the new friends I had acquired through the gospel of Jesus Christ…

I was utterly, and completely ALONE.

I was forced to live in a one room house. We had been kicked to the curb, and since we were homeless my father had to step in…a little. So the very least because I was his daughter, but he didn’t have to do more then just enough…because he was a great and mighty man of God, and he had to show love to the other victims…the perps. ( I have to inject a thought here, when we finally go to trail these perps had successfully turned the entire community against us and the world saw us as the assailants and the poor accused as the vicitms. This thought was so well groomed that on the day of the trail when their legions of support came to support them they walked into the victims room in the courthouse. because the perps were considered the vics. Go ahead and say wow! Cuz it really is amazing)back to where I was forced to live. There were other rooms but we were not allowed to clean it out…as, we were unworthy of the full use of the house. As a parent he had to give us something as we were about to live in my car, but we were not worthy of the whole house…only the living room and bathroom. There was no gas in the house and yep you guessed it…it was November. I cooked on a hotplate in the living room. I bought a little dorm refrigerator. We had one bed that we all three had to sleep on. The expensive electric heaters merely kept us from freezing to death…we could see our breath as we sat huddled together, licking our wounds. We slept with five heavy blankets on us for warmth.

So when you see us today and you think...wow! Those girls are very close…oddly close…yes we are we went through hell together. And I never disbelieved them. I never questioned the validity of their words. I never questioned the emotions they were going through...I just showed them love and understanding. I was Jesus to them in the worst possible moment in their life.

The shack they allowed us to stay in was placed right next to their brand new three bedroom house they had just had built. So I could hear family and friends come to them…to give them support in THEIR time of need. My girls ,like any other five year olds would get excited to see someone they knew…”Mommy, Mommy….this person is at grandmas.” and I would answer, “come inside Fate, they aren’t here to see us…we got a lot of stuff to do here…lets make a collage.” The pastor came to pray with them…not us, my poor parents, their church friends came to help them stand up…and family came…to stand with the parents….not the victims, because somehow my mother had made the entire debauchery about her…so each time I redirected my babies and we sat huddled under piles of blankets and cut out pictures to glue on paper…I made hell fun! Because I am the SHIT mom…and I would and did fight the world to save them.

Holidays are tough for me.

Easter was no better. By this time I died inside a little each time one of the great and mighty church members came to fellowship (can you see my sneer when I say that?) with my parents…so easter we spent in a hotel hiding eggs inside the hotel lobby…cuz my babies did not understand why their life, their family and their everything had changed. So the very next time you hear that a victim ‘recanted’ don’t get all jumpy with the idea that they had lied the first time…persecution is not a warm ,fuzzy feeling to have and when you’re a five year old you cannot fathom why things are very strange now. Still it would be another 3 years before our lives calmed down enough to even get to that level of process’ that a rape victim goes through. These were the very early days of the telling.

Did I ever tell you that the police department threatened to take my children if I did not produce them to be interviewed? I continued to hold them hostage anyway…I KNOW my fucking rights! I refused to take my tiny, delicate babies to big scary police department to be locked in a room away from me all alone to tell a secret to three… THREE police men...in uniform something that had made her mom so sad that her mom could no longer function as a rational human being.

I knew I looked like a raving lunatic…I resembled a hurt mamma bear striking out at anyone daring to come close…cuz so far no one had been rational to me…so far no one had ever said, Its ok…I’m going to walk with you through this fucking scary process…no one said I know what to do…NO ONE tried to make me feel safe. So I could make my babies feel safe…everyone just kept attacking me, threatening me…

So I called bullshit to their vacant threats…

…and we had no dearing house…we had no child advocacy…we had no real concept of a victim yet in this area… we were the first…

Did you know that for five years…the sound of me throwing up EVERYDAY was the sound that my children woke to? Five years like clockwork. My damn eyes would open again and reality would hit me…it wasn’t a nightmare I was enduring all alone…this was real and I had to deal with it, so every morning that wave of reality washed over me and bile rose until I couldn’t swallow it down and I ran to throw up…each and every morning of our lives for five years. Sickness and sadness were my only feelings for five years. Oh and manufactured laugher…I’m a great bullshiter.

I light another Marlboro and I ponder…what else do I need to cleanse to make this delirium moment pass from me.

Mostly I see fates huge brown eyes…

I see her remarkably great brown eyes watching me.

She wouldn’t tell for three years…she wouldn’t tell until she knew I could handle it…until she knew I wouldn’t disappear into a dot and cease to exist anymore…cuz that, my friends and neighbors is what I wanted to do.

She would just silently tend to us, her twin and I, as we suffered through the worst of it. She brought throw up bowls and wet washcloths to us as I held my limp, life less child after she had gone through yet another round of horrendous panic attacks that threatened to take us all away. The utter, sheer and complete panic on my 6 year olds face as she clawed at her throat because she couldn’t breath…her body suddenly rigid from my mere touch…her eyes would suddenly glaze over and the whimpering began…the whimpering/howl sounded like an injured animal…and she fought like hell to get out of it…valiantly she fought…it always ended in bile emitted from her tiny mouth…like clockwork fate and I had it down…miraculously fate would appear with the bowl….throw up…then the wet wash cloth to lay on her wet head… so no Fate didn’t tell me for a long time.

…we missed a lot of school…

She was so tiny…

Dark circles under her eyes…

I can’t recall now how she looked as she lay in my arms...I really don’t think I could look for to long…I watched Fate…watch us.

Today….today…we are relaxed and comfortable in our own skin…Lyric has so much grace and integrity that I am blown away by her enduring faith on a daily bases. And Fate, well Fate never wavered…even though she was so frightened she had to break 30 seconds into the trial. And she ran wailing into the back room to be calmed by the ADA and the victims asst. she stood boldly and told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth…

….so today in live in awe of the graceful splendor that they wrap themselves in. Today s a brand new day. Today is freedom. Today is peace. Today is laughter.

They saw their perps the other day…

Riding down the street in a car on their way home from church, A church they had chosen on their own…(I still suck at church.) My ladies were riding along and looked over at the persons next to them. It was their perpetrators…

Lyric used words like...mesmerized…transfixed…to describe her moment. She said she didn’t know who they were or why she couldn’t stop staring…she just felt transfixed by their utter sadness…she said they, the people next to her looked so dark black and sad….then she slowly realized who they were…she turned to look at her twin and she was looking too…and she was just as surprised…they both excitedly exclaimed…hey that was them! Did you see how dark and sad they look… Lyric later told me that she had prayed for them cuz they looked so lost and miserable. Yes that’s right…their victim prayed for them…because they looked like they were in pain…

…That’s MY God…My God makes your enemies your footstools! My God calls you out of your death clothes and brings you back to life! My God will give back to you seven fold what the enemy took from me! That’s My God, merciful, giving, enduring, loving, ravenous…yes, that’s my God…He made victims victors!