Truth Be Told

It’s about time I talk about this, mostly for my own attempt at healing but hopefully me using my voice will help others use theirs.

Trigger warning: abuse, drug and alcohol use, pregnancy, sexual abuse.

When I became a teenager, things got really difficult. We had just moved a long way away from everything and everyone we knew and we had to start over. This caused a lot of stress throughout the family and it was the beginning of my depression. I craved excitement, love and purpose since I’d had to leave my hopes and dreams behind when we moved and because I wasn’t receiving those things my depression became increasingly worse. As my depression worsened, the urge to lash out and rebel came and sent me into a downward spiral of self destruction.

I started allowing peer pressure to capture me and caved into smoking, drinking and seeking romantic attention just so I could feel wanted. Home life was hard with so many very young siblings and overwhelmed parents who were trying to adjust at the same time we were trying to. It felt like a constant fight for any kind of attention and after a while I think I convinced myself that negative attention was still worth it to feel noticed. I think craving any attention, even negative, was the thing that pushed me towards getting mean boyfriends who hurt me and made me want to starve myself which only made my inner rage and hatred of the world worse.

After a while things got so bad everywhere I used to want to be that I started moving towards a new crowd, an adult crowd who I thought could give me the nurturing friendship I thought I needed. My teenage naïveté thought that their attention was good too, now I realise I was being treated like a fake piece. A bunch of adult men trying to get the teenage girl to give up her innocence. I wish I had adult me to protect teenage me from that.

These men started sneaking me into nightclubs when I was 14-15 and buying me drinks. I thought I was just seen as mature and wiser than most my age because that’s what they told me when the reality is that they were predators trying to intoxicate me so that I would “willingly” give in to their sexual urges. When I was 15 I met a man (25) in the nightclub who was wearing a skirt over jeans and nail varnish and he intrigued me as he was the only one there who wasn’t trying to get women to sleep with him or kiss him which was refreshing to see. While I was out back having a cigarette, he came over and we started chatting and it felt really nice to have a conversation that wasn’t sexual in nature for once.

We decided to walk part of the way home together as we were both walking in the same direction, this is when I told him I was 15 and that I just wanted to go out for the alcohol and nothing else. He told me that was fine and that we would just be friends. From then, we started meeting half way between our houses to chat about random things that sprung to mind. That turned into him buying alcohol so we could drink together at his house. I used to drop by after school in my school uniform and sometimes my friends would come with me (14&15 years old).

A lot of the time after that was quite a blur as the amount I had to drink was increasing and increasing, which is when he introduced me to narcotics. I told him I wasn’t sure and I was really scared to take anything and he decided to show me how and teach me to take them and persuaded me to give it a go. This was about the time he started getting more and more flirt with me and jealous any time another man was showing me any attention. I started sleeping over at his house (his parents house) because where things were so chaotic at my house, his house felt like a safe and calm place for me at the time.

I can only remember snippets from the night I lost my virginity to him as there was alcohol and drugs involved (provided by him). I remember not knowing how to do it and I remember him being on top of me but that’s about it. Being a child and only knowing of sex being between people who loved each other, my undeveloped brain made me believe that because it happened, it meant that we were together and that we had to be in love. I wanted to introduce him to my family because I thought that I was supposed to be in love but he didn’t want to (adult me now knows why he didn’t want to meet them).

In the next few months we carried on hanging out, drinking, doing drugs and having sex while intoxicated. I overslept on a day I was supposed to do a GCSE exam and it turned out one of the school faculty knew where I was staying and collected me from his house. Still no one raised any alarm bells about the situation - the school didn’t even tell my parents. Not long after this, I found out I was pregnant and I was completely tortured on what to do. I was a child myself and I didn’t know whether I’d be good enough to be a mum. There was a voice in my head however that told me that it was right for me to become a mum and I trusted that voice and I’m glad I did because I love being a mum to my child.

I suppose a small part of me knew that what my sons dad did was wrong (giving me drugs and alcohol and statutory rape) but I was too young to understand exactly how wrong it was at the time. I told everyone who needed to know when I found out about the pregnancy and I’m still surprised that no one raised concerns about the age difference. His parents didn’t treat me very kindly… if I showed any joy or excitement over anything his mum would shout at me for being “childish” and they always turned their noses up and me and my family which in hindsight is ironic considering they raised a rapist but anyway, I spent my pregnancy walking on eggshells around them.

My sons dad during the pregnancy spent most of his time sleeping or out drinking/doing drugs but I didn’t know that I had the option to leave him so I stayed and just waited for him to come home while I sat in his room on my own most of the time. He would walk ahead of me knowing I was struggling to keep up with him whenever we did go out the house together for appointments and by this point he had never even taken me on a date. I felt so incredibly lonely but any time I would go out to see family or the few friends I had left, he would get upset with me.

I knew we needed our own place to raise our baby in so I tried getting help from the council but because I was too young to open a bank account by myself, I had to get him to be my guardian so that I could open a bank account and get financial support from the government. I was on the housing register for a while but it was getting close to the baby’s due date so I had to find a different solution so I found a private rental and my parents paid 99% of the deposit, first months rent etc for us while his parents chipped in a fiver (and then got extremely mad when we forgot to pay it back immediately). I couldn’t sign the original tenancy agreement because I was too young so at first it was only in his name, same with all of the bills.

I felt truly trapped because I had to rely on him for everything because I wasn’t of legal age to have anything be in my name. I couldn’t even get myself my own phone and he wouldn’t get me one either. I gave birth 3 days after moving into the new place, I almost died giving birth because my body couldn’t handle the trauma the human body goes through during labour and birth. After I’d given birth, had compressions done in my stomach and then drips put in my arms to stop me from bleeding out I blacked out for 7-9 hours. Apparently I was awake and talking nonsense, he didn’t raise concern and neither did a single medical professional.

After I came back to, trying to figure out what was going on, he left me. He complained to me that after I had spent 3 days in a slow labour and traumatic birth that HE was tired and left me alone with our baby in the hospital with no food, the wrong bag (I packed a hospital bag and he brought a bag with clothes I bought for when our child grew and no clothes for me). I had nothing and no one and had to try and figure out how to breast feed all on my own within about an hour of consciousness on an empty stomach and severe lack of sleep.

The next day, he brought his family to see our baby and his sister complained that our baby was “boring” and she completely ignored me. The only person that brought me any kind of food was my best friend who brought me some chocolate (the hospital didn’t provide me with any food either). In the afternoon my dad took me home with my baby and all I wanted to do was sleep. I was exhausted but that didn’t seem to matter much.

Fast forward a few months I wanted to start going to the gym to lose the baby weight (at this point I had a rubbish slide up phone) so I left our baby with his dad. Within a few minutes of me arriving at the gym, I get a phone call from him whining that he can’t handle the baby on his own and I need to come home. The next time I did this, I was relieved to not get a phone call only to find that when I came home the house was covered in poo, the baby was covered in poo from his nappy not being changed and my baby was crawling around the flat unattended because his dad was asleep. I cleaned up my baby and went to my parents house, telling him to clean up considering he was the one who let that happen and he got mad at me.

Not long after this he started getting upset with me if I hung out with my friends or with my family (even though I had our baby with me) and tried to stop me seeing them. My phone stopped working around this time and I was back to having to share his phone. I felt like I wasn’t allowed to do anything and he kept trying to stop me seeing my family and friends, he even started hanging out with my friends so they wanted to be around him instead of me. I felt completely isolated.

Day by day it felt like his controlling nature was getting worse, I couldn’t clean the house in the day time because he was asleep and I couldn’t clean it at night time because my baby was asleep. I couldn’t have a social life without him getting mad at me and guilt tripping me but he also wouldn’t spend time with me either. I applied for college and got accepted but he guilt tripped me into declining the offer. I was miserable, lonely and depressed. The next year I applied for a different college course and got accepted again - he pushed back again but this time I stuck to my guns and went to college. It wasn’t long until I was accused of cheating on him.

The biggest cheating allegation came when a classmate of mine had a seizure and I accompanied him to hospital as my finger was in his head stopping the bleeding. That night he cornered me in the living room and shouted in my face which made me fear for my safety. That was the moment I decided that enough was enough. We were on and off for a few months after this, trying to make it work for our child but I didn’t want to stay with someone who made me feel so worthless and scared. He told everyone that I committed adultery (which wasn’t true for many reasons) and people started hating me for it.

Since then I realised more and more with every year of life how messed up the entire “relationship” was and how I was merely prey to a predator. I was supposed to just be a sex toy for him, he never planned on being a dad but had to go with it because I chose to be a mum. He just wanted control over someone because he always had his mum controlling him so he felt powerless and wanted some power for himself. I was just a plaything, I was his “dirty little secret” for a while and when he couldn’t keep me a secret anymore I was just his property. He still thinks that way, he still refuses to talk to me and talks over me, talks to any man in the room instead of me and disregards every word I say.

I’m still dealing with the trauma of being used and preyed upon whilst having to deal with knowing that people know what he did to me and still defend him over me, knowing that he still has power over me and knowing that I will never be allowed to live my life without him in it again. I will never be free from him unless I were to give up my whole life, my child, which is not something I’m willing to do.

One day us teenage victims will be able to share the truth without judgement and blame being placed on us instead of our abusers. I hope that my sharing what happened to me helps others realise that they’re not alone and that their feelings are valid and they are seen.