I Was Just a Good Girl

I used to think the worst thing about my childhood was that nobody stayed.

My mother left my father when I was three. After that, we moved. And moved again. And again.

Between the ages of three and seventeen, I lived in ten different homes.

The reasons were always men.

Every new house came with the possibility that this time things would be different. Maybe this man would be kind. Maybe this time we would stay and I could make friends. Maybe this guy would become the father I didn't have.

The first one I can remember, my mom told me was an "amazing man".

He turned out to be a religious cultist, a physical abuser, and a fraudster. He stole money. He hurt us. He betrayed my mother in ways I didn't understand at the time. Eventually, she gave him back her engagement ring and called the police.

I was 6.

And then, somehow, another one arrived.

It took less than three months.

He was a bar bouncer. He smoked. He drank Moosehead. And sometimes he would take me for drives, just the two of us, out to the reserve to buy cigarettes.

I loved those drives.

Not because of where we were going.

Because someone was taking me somewhere.

Someone was choosing me.

I was a child who desperately wanted fatherly attention, and for a little while, I thought I'd found it.

That is one of the cruelest things about abuse... sometimes it doesn't begin by frightening you.

Sometimes it begins by making you feel special.

When my mother wasn't home, he would take me into their bedroom and tell me we were going to play a game.

The game had rules I didn't understand.

I was told to keep it secret.

I remember the confusion more than anything else. I remember laughing because I was a child and didn't understand why my body was suddenly part of a game. I remember being told I was a good girl. I remember believing that getting him in trouble would somehow make me the bad one.

So I kept the secret.

For more than a year.

Eventually, my mother kicked him out after he punched a hole through a door.

Another man gone.

Another house.

Another lesson I didn't have the words for yet.

I was 8.

By high school, I had already learned that attention could come with a price.

Then I met a boy two years older than me.

He was cute. I remember blushing when he talked to me.

He invited me to Relay for Life.

I thought I was being asked on a date.

Instead, he waited for me at the edge of the schoolyard, where the forest began.

I walked across the soccer fields.

“Don't worry. Follow me.”

So I did.

Because that's what I'd been taught to do.

Follow.

Trust.

Keep the secret.

He pushed me down.

He ordered me to take off my shirt.

I was shaking, but I did what he told me.

He took photographs.

Then he used them to threaten me.

I was 14.

By then, something inside me had already begun to take shape.

Not a belief exactly... Something worse.

An assumption that maybe this was what I was worth.

That maybe attention was always going to hurt.

That maybe being wanted and being used were the same thing.

At eighteen, I had my first stalker who picked me off the street at random. I was also groomed by a man double my age.

I didn't know what else to do.

I had spent years being taught by men, by circumstances, by secrets I was too young to understand that my body could buy me attention.

So I started believing that was what my body was for.

Sometimes, if I'm being completely honest, I still believe it.

And that's the part of this story I don't want people to misunderstand.

Healing isn't always a beautiful upward line.

Sometimes healing looks like knowing exactly where a belief came from and still hearing it whisper in your head.

Sometimes I can look at that little girl and understand that none of it was her fault. Not one of these men faced prison time. Yes I told somebody. Yes I ended up in court for one of them. But a scared 9 year old girl isn't equipped to handle a defence attorney asking "are you sure you didn't want it?"

I was not born believing my body was all I was good for.

Someone taught me that.

More than one person did.

And now I am trying to unlearn it.

Maybe that's what survival actually is.

Not becoming untouched by what happened to you.

Not turning your scars into something inspirational.

Not pretending the past made you stronger.

Maybe survival is simply refusing to let the people who hurt you write the final sentence.

They taught me that my body was something they could take.

I'm still learning that it belongs to me.

And maybe, for now, that's enough.