That’s me with my, once-favorite aunt. She was in her 50s when she died unexpectedly. After being severely abused and neglected by her “significant other”.
She was groomed by her abuser from her teenage years. She stayed with him because he stripped her of her identity for over 30 years. It’s heartbreaking looking back to my childhood. As a kid I remember jumping on her abuser’s back at the age of 10, hitting him so he’d stop beating her during a “fun sleepover weekend”. After realizing my strength was futile in comparison to this 6-foot-something man who reminded me of The Undertaker from WWF, I ran with my brother and sister to the convenience store down the street to use the pay phone to call my mom and 911.
After looking at my aunt’s bruised face, sitting on the bathroom counter in my family’s bathroom, she begged me to never let this happen to me- to stop the cycle of generational abuse. So I swore to myself that I would never be the victim of an abusive relationship.
As a teenager, I begged her to leave him. I tried to take her to the DMV to get her license, file for financial assistance, and redo her resume to find a better job… but he made her utterly dependent on him so that when she tried to leave she would have a panic attack, after anxiety attack, after PTSD episode. Without proper resources, she felt helpless and was convinced she deserved what her lifestyle now consisted of- constant physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, drug abuse, alcoholism, and a now repeated cycle of abuse passed down to her two sons.
After she refused to get help and leave him, I distanced myself from her. I couldn’t stand seeing her willingly stay in such conditions. Her influence had a pull on me, so I had to run. What I didn’t realize was that amid my desperation to help, I too was being groomed by a distant relative.
When I was a kid, you could often find me at my grandfather’s house. He taught me about God, how to stand up against bullies, gave me my love for gardening, and the great outdoors.
The summer I was 11, I met my mom’s second or third 16-year-old cousin. He was up from Tennessee and was 5ish years older than me. His grandfather lived right across the street from mine, so naturally, we hung out with each other and some of our other cousins a lot that summer. Before I left the safety of the home my grandfather, the carpenter, was lovingly tending to with his fancy new staircase he was building, he gave me a warning. He told me, “Do not spend time alone with that young man. Always have others with you and if anything happens, tell me immediately.”
At the time, I couldn’t understand why. He was charming, handsome and so funny! He was like the big brother I never had but always wanted! What I didn’t know, at the time, was that previously in the year his newly 12-year-old girlfriend had just given birth to their first child.
After he left to go back to Tennessee at the end of the summer, we started writing to each other. For 3 years we were pen pals.
If I could have looked ahead to when I was 15, I would have seen that he would end up grooming me- gaining my trust and filling a need, to sexually abuse me.
