I’ve thought about this overnight and I feel like God wants me to share my story/testimony here. Maybe there is someone out there also suffering or wondering are they strong enough to survive. I’m here to say you can.
You see, when most people think of abuse they think of a man beating his wife. Controlling her. Using her. But what happens when the victim(s) is a child? A child has no say on where they live, who they live with, what happens behind closed doors, what happens to them.
The problem is that there is still so much stigma around child sex abuse victims/survivors. We are told we will be believed if we tell, but that’s not always the case. So this is my testimony of what I lived, what God brought me out of, and how He has been my comforter and has held me up.
When I was just over a year old, my daddy was killed by a drunk driver.
The cops were paid to put this man on a bus back to Michigan. His company paid my momma and set up an account for me that I would receive at 18.
All my life, I’ve wondered does this man regret what he did? Because if he hadn’t done that, I would have never met my abuser. By the time I was 3, my mom had remarried to my abuser and later that same year she gave birth to his first child, as far as I know, my brother.
I can’t pinpoint the exact time the abuse started; I just remember being yelled at here and a cup flying across the room, literally over spilled milk, there.
My mind has apparently blocked out some of it because I’m told at 4, I was tied to my bed with rope because he was tired of me getting up at night. I can’t even imagine doing that to my child, especially if they had one kidney that didn’t function fully as I do.
Nevertheless, it started out slow. Then at 10 years old, he molested me for the first time.
My mom was at work, and he was in between jobs…again. I pretended to be asleep. I kept telling myself it was a bad dream. When he finally left my room, I was so scared and confused. I remember wearing the shirt I had slept in to school that day just to see if he would acknowledge that I hadn’t changed my shirt.
He didn’t.
For the next five years whenever he saw an opportunity, he took it. It got to the point that if I knew my mom was working late, I would take a bath as soon as I got home from school so I didn’t have to be naked with him in the house. We weren’t allowed to lock the bathroom door because we only had one bathroom. As I got older, I realized the truth was because he couldn’t get in to molest me.
I was the only one he would freak out on, and try to break the door down if it was locked.