I am very nervous about this post. This is something that this year will have happened 10 years ago. It is something that I’m realizing more and more has impacted the way I think and live.
You kind of forget things like this when enough time passes. Like I said, it was 10 years ago, and no one really did much about it when they found out. When I was 12 years old, my oldest brother molested me. There are…many things that I remember very clearly, and others that seem to be gaps in what happened, so things might come to me as I type, and things may seem kind of out of order, but I will do my best to not be confusing.
I remember the day it started. When I was little, I just adored the movie “The sound of music” and there is a particular scene where the oldest daughter wears a beautiful pink dress that I was positively obsessed with. I asked my mom if I could make one since I was learning to sew (terribly, I might add), so she gave me some beautiful pink fabric to cut up and play with. The day that it began, I even remember how my room was arranged. But I was wearing only my underclothes, my door was shut, and I was wrapping a piece of the pink fabric around my chest when my brother walked in. I don’t remember him ever showing interest of any other kind before this. I was obviously shocked when he walked in, and I asked him to leave because I wasn’t clothed. All I remember him saying is “shhh. It’s okay.”. He came in and began to take the fabric off of me until I was only standing there in my underwear. Outside of him turning out the lights so only my lamp was on, I don’t remember. I’m not sure how many times he came to my room. I remember that he turned on music a few times because I had always liked dancing until then. I guess he turned it on to put me more at ease and distract me from what was really happening. I can still see him undressing and pushing me toward the bed. He would whisper things to me to make me cooperative, and on my worst days, I can’t get that picture out of my head. The whole time this was happening, no one in my family (or 2 parents, 2 brothers, and a sister) even noticed. I think they just assumed we were playing. I remember what the notebook looked like that I was writing all of this in. I remember that at the time when I finally found the courage to speak up, I had to climb over a dresser pushed in front of my hallway (my parents were rearranging the living room). I remember the curtains that were hanging in their room, and the blanket on their bed. I remember sitting in front of their closet telling them what was happening, and they asked me for the notebook. I don’t know where it is now, but they never gave it back. They read every entry in that notebook – my entire diary, personal things about me, things I would never say out loud, things I had never wanted anyone to hear. I remember that they called me to their room late that night and asked me about entries that had nothing to do with my brother. When they finally called him and I to their room, they scolded him, told him that he could have impregnated me. They told him that their reputation would have been ruined. That’s it. Nothing else was done except that we were made to promise never to tell anyone what had happened, only they told the pastor at our church, asking me first if it was alright. I was 12, and I didn’t want to let them down again. But to this day, I am never comfortable around that man because I know that he knows what happened. For years after that, if I said something in an argument about doing the wrong thing, or regrets or something, my dad would say “Is that where you want this conversation to go?” And I knew – I *knew* what he was talking about. For obvious reasons, I was never entirely comfortable with my brother. Particularly when we were alone. I would make sure to sit as far away from him in the car as possible, I left my door open after that at night – still I can’t sleep with it closed. Up until about 4 years ago, I didn’t even know if I still held my virginity.
Because of what happened, if and when I ever get married, I don’t know that I will be able to be comfortably intimate with my husband. Even words that were spoken by my brother “sexy”, “beautiful”…they will never sound the same. I notice things here and there that shouldn’t make me uncomfortable – men showing me attention, hands settled on my lower back, being alone with any man, mistrust, I’m not going to be the same as I was. I was only a child and so many things got stolen from me.
I’m writing this here and now because firstly, my brother follows all of my other social medias and I don’t want to have him know I am posting this. Also, I watched a video a few weeks ago about a woman coming clean about this, and it made me realize that…it was never my parent’s place to tell me to stay silent. I was the one who was harmed, not them. This is my own trauma and story, and nothing will be the same because of it. I think I deserve to tell people what really happened.
I’m living a good life now. I have a good job, my own apartment 300+ miles away from my brother…but I will never forget that I can’t overcome many feelings and anxieties because of what happened. He stole so many things from me at such a young age, and I know I will never gain back the innocence that the young me deserved to have. By the grace of God, I am overcoming that sense of mistrust by trusting the Lord and savior who gave me the courage to say something even if nothing was ever done.