No One to Save Me Part 1

No One to Save Me

This story comes with a trigger warning. I'm supposed to add that, so there it is. But seriously, if you are sensitive please don't continue.

"Jennifer, oh, Jennifer," my father called tauntingly upon entering the house. An instinctual fear came over me and I crawled under my bed to hide. I was but a small child, a kinder-gardener, maybe first grade. I listened as this monster walked across our hardwood floors, clonking through the living room, down the hall and straight for my room. He stood at my doorway and laughed, "Are you trying to hide from me?" He walked over to the closet and peered in. I held my breath and focused on the rips in the underside of the old ragged box-spring and found comfort in the wooden planks above me. They offered the only protection from a lonely and frightening world and in my childish mind I would have been content to live there forever. Maybe if I'm really still and don't move, I can disappear and he won't be able to see me. "There you are," he laughed as if playing a game. I turned to see his face and with dread and a sense of futility am drawn back into my horrible existence. One from which there would be no escape.

"Get out from under there," he demanded in a strange and distinctive tone that held the power to mesmerize one to obey. He lifted me up onto the side of the bed and molested me; my own father. As he turned to go, he said with arrogance, “I can do whatever I want to with you because I am your father.” Not for a second did I believe him. It felt wrong and it was a lie.

My own father was a stranger to me. As a child I feared him. With time, the fear would ripen to a deep hatred, so much so that I couldn't look him in the eyes. I couldn't even breathe in his presence. My mother had disappeared from our life, having left when I was four years old. She simply walked away from her children, leaving me, my older brother and younger sister to the mercy of a true psychopath. There would be no further contact from her. She did not visit, call or write. She did not acknowledge birthdays or Christmas. She had simply fallen off the face of the earth. I grieved for her, this beautiful goddess that was my mother. I would lie in bed at night crying, "Mommy. Mommy. Mommy." I resorted to self-soothing by reciting, "Mary had a little lamb, little lamb" over and over until I fell asleep, my pillow damp with tears.

Babies are born helpless and clueless into a ready-made environment, for the good or bad of it. It's a blessing that I did not understand that the man I called daddy was a habitual child molester, rapist, and serial killer. He was all these things long before I was born. It is incomprehensible that his family knew exactly what he was, yet felt comfortable abandoning two little girls and a little boy to their fate. To them, we were just the detestable children of Walter.

Starving. We were starving. And filthy. We were motherless orphans who played barefoot all day and slept in our dirty rags. There was no one to feed us, bathe us, or change our clothes. We resorted to riffling through the neighbor's trashcan for food. One sympathetic neighbor lady, raised in an orphanage, started making sandwiches and throwing them out a side window. This stopped when her grouchy old husband found soggy sandwiches after a rain. We stole ripening tomatoes off an elder lady’s porch. Being naïve, we thought that surely she had left them for us.

Our brother, Roy, learned to ride the elementary school bus to our fraternal grandmother's house to eat. One day, he told us he was going to walk there and we begged him to take us. He hesitated because it was a far and dangerous journey which meant crossing a four lane major hwy. Cars honked as we darted across their path. Grandma was surprised to see us on her porch. We sat eagerly at her table as she prepared a meal. I wanted French fries. “Extra crispy,” I happily chirped. Her tone of voice perplexed me, “I should feed you so many French fries that you would become sick of them. You’d never want to see another French fry again.”

You would think that a grandma would be happy to see her grand-kids, but such was not the case. She resented us being there, and when our father showed up after work she told him that she better not see us down there again, whereupon we were strongly forbidden. Poor Roy was crest-fallen. Seeing that our father was surprised to find us there, it became apparent that he had been driving right past us hungry children at home to lay-up and eat at his mother’s house.

Now is a good the time to expound a little more upon my family dynamics before moving on. This will help shed light on the depth of deprivation and lack of nurturing in the face of repeated abuse and trauma at the hands of our father that led to my Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), formerly known as multiple personality disorder.

My father’s roots go back to Hot Springs, Arkansas from a family with multiple generations of pedophilia. They were extremely poor. Their reputation in the area had neighbors telling their children to stay away. The story is told that as a teenager he came running home to say he witnessed a black girl raped and stabbed in the woods. This would have been his first kill.

Walter, as I call him now, was the youngest of six kids (four girls and two boys). The family later moved to Houston, Texas. Seventeen years before I was even born, Walter raped his sister’s 10-year-old daughter. She had been left alone with instructions to not open the door to anyone. Walter showed up saying he “just needed a drink of water” and pushed his way in on her. The family did nothing. They chastised her for having opened the door.

Walter had a reputation of stalking women. He was a predator and the family knew it. When he got in trouble, they defended him. There was a judge from the “normal” side of the family that would be called in if need be. No one dared reproach Walter on anything. I wonder now if they weren’t a little afraid of him. One thing for sure, the family had their reputation to protect and it meant protecting Walter.

Our aunts were strong and independent Christian women. They wore the pants in their family, absolutely. They were hard workers who came through the Great Depression. Theirs has been called The Greatest Generation because they put America back on its feet. These women lived in very large, brick houses with central air and heat. They kept their home not only clean but immaculate, right down to all the beds being made. We, on the other hand, lived in a wood framed house with nothing but an attic fan that drew in the hot air from outside. In the winter it was so cold that our bones would hurt, even under the coats we used as blankets. Once, a glass of water on the dresser froze solid overnight. We had one small gas burner in the living room that we would straddle for heat. It's a wonder we never caught our gown on fire. The paint on the house was long past peeling. The bathtub set on the ground.

You can see why our relatives never came inside our home. They were never over for a visit. They got as far as the driveway, and rarely. I can count the times on one hand. They never even called. If you think about this, it is very strange. Early in my childhood the eldest aunt would come and take us to her house to bathe and feed, then take us back home. She did this for a short while because she had helped our father get custody of us out of spite for our mother.

One aunt, who was a little more “unrestrained” in her behavior with the men, did sometimes remember to buy us Christmas gifts, but then she was taking our dad’s bonds out of the mail box. Another aunt would occasionally donate her daughter’s clothes, clothes that fit my sister but not me. This cousin was “the golden child” of the family. She won dozens of beauty pageant awards. She was a cheerleader in high school, twirled the baton in the marching band, played the piano, sang in the choir, and won Homecoming Queen. My aunt would have her accomplishments written up in the local paper. This cousin had some of the most beautiful clothes and gowns because my aunt was an excellent seamstress.

You may think I have digressed from the story by talking about my cousin, but the effect she had on my self-image and self-esteem was profound. Her fairy tale life of successes and admiration reflected upon my life of misery and it filled me with a sense of self-loathing. I literally hated myself. The disapproving words of my grandmother still ring in my ears today, “Why can’t you be more like Sherry?” If I had realized then what I realize today, I would have answered, “Because, I don’t have someone who believes in me or supports me like Sherry.” No. I knew to never expect anything and to never ask for anything.

Don’t get me wrong, my aunts weren’t cruel to me. They were decent Christian women. They didn’t cuss, smoke, drink, or do drugs. They were kind-spoken and I learned how to be a lady from them. Once or twice, we spent the night and my aunt took us to her church. I still love and admire my aunts (they are all deceased). The only fault I have with them is for not intervening and removing us from that god-awful home. Instead, it was taken for granted that we would never amount to anything, so why bother. It fills me with a sense of outrage. My little sister was only three years old, born with a hole in her heart and sickly, and I was only four, left at the mercy of a dangerously psychopathic pedophile, rapist, and murderer, and they knew it.

They figured Walter was abusing us, that was a given, but they did not know that he was selling us to other men (acquaintances and strangers). And they did not know that we would be privy to many of his murders.

The next chapter will describe the first split in my personality at the age of five. There would be many more, to the point that I had psychogenic amnesia of my entire childhood. I literally lived my life being unaware of what was happening to me. Yet, I sensed that something was wrong, terribly and frighteningly wrong. Even as a small child, I was depressed and sad, afraid of my own shadow. As time went on I could feel my soul dying and shriveling up inside. I felt filthy, repulsive, ugly and vile. I withdrew deep within myself. To be in any type of social situation was agonizing. School was a nightmare. I felt so ashamed, unwanted, and unworthy. No one could possibly like such a strange troll as I that slunk through the halls wearing old rags and crazy wild hair. I didn't understand exactly what, but I knew there was something seriously wrong with me.

The memories I will relay to you came spilling out of the hidden recesses of my fragmented mind after I had a psychotic breakdown at work. Over the course of two years, it took that long, the reality of the childhood I had lived mentally destabilized me, sometimes to the point that I probably should have been committed. Quite unexpectedly, I had been thrown into a deep dark pit of hell as I relived the trauma all over again for the second time. I was not who I thought I was at all.

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