As a little girl I had noticed that everyone had a mother except me. I never understood why. I must have started to ask about my mother a lot because my step-father (who adopted and then obtained legal custody of me) told me that my mother was a drunk, drug addict, a whore and that she liked to party a lot. He said that I could probably find her in a bar. He later added that she was also a child molester.

I was born in March of 1974 to a single mother who had just told my biological father that she didn’t need him in her life. That she could raise me on her own without his help. I was told that my mother couldn’t find my father when she went into labor with me. They had gotten into a fight a few days before I was born. When she finally found him he was in a bar getting drunk. My mother ended the relationship with him after he saw me in the hospital for the first time.

At some point my mother met my stepfather and they moved to Texas. It was there that they got married. I believe it must have been sometime around Christmas in 1976. Around that time is also when my stepfather formally adopted me. My biological father gave him permission to do so because in his mind he felt that I would be better off having both a father and a mother in my life. My mother was living in Texas and my biological father was living in Wisconsin at that time.

I know that I was young but I have no memories of my mother and stepfather together. Everything that I know is because of pictures that I have seen or stories that have been told to me by my family. But, it also could be because they weren’t together that long either. They were married when I was two and already split by the time I was five.

It is interesting that my step-father being active duty in the Army was able to get full custody of me in 1979 and take me over to Germany. I am still not sure how that happened. There are logically only two ways: He took my mother to court and won or my mother signed off on all of her parental rights. Their divorce wasn’t finalized until 1982.

I did see my mother briefly in 1982 when we we flew to Wisconsin for a vacation and that may have also been the time that my step-father and my mother went to court to finalize their divorce. I have hardly any memories from that visit. I can tell you what my favorite t-shirt had written on it and I can tell you that my step-father and mother screamed at each other. Other than that I have no memories of anything.

In fact, I hardly have any memories until I am eleven years old and I met my best friend. She was German and we went to the same school. She invited me to her birthday party and we were inseparable from then on.

I don’t know if I just don’t have a good memory or the type of trauma that I endured as a child took my memory away but it is so frustrating to me that I can hardly remember anything. I cannot remember things like where I lived, who my friends were, what schools I attended or what my teachers looked like. It’s like half of my life was erased or never even existed and yet here I am.

I remember some things here and there and those are the things I will be writing about. Who knows, maybe by me writing about what I do remember it will jog my memory on the things that I don’t.

Around the age of 11 my step-father started to abuse me in a sexual way. Up to this point he abused me verbally and at times spanked me, yanked on me or pushed me.

Every year on my birthday I can remember how he would lay me over his lap as I was faced down, and then he would spank me the amount of times coinciding with my “new” age and then he’d give my butt a firm pinch in order “to grow an inch” with a smile on his face.

As I look back, I can’t help but wonder if those were excuses for him to touch me so he could “normalize” certain behaviors and mold me into what he wanted me to do as I got older.

I can vividly remember the evening that his behavior changed. We were in the living room watching a movie. He was on the couch and it appeared that he fell asleep. I got up at some point and when I came back he was laying on the couch in his underwear. The next time I got up and came back he was laying on the couch naked. I didn’t know what to think. I reasoned that he did it in his sleep. So I went to bed and tried to put it out of my mind. I was only 11 and really didn’t know how to process or what to even do with that information, but, deep down inside I knew that what he had done was wrong.

The next day after work he started to walk around the house naked. Most fathers would come home and change out of their uniforms into something more comfortable, my step-father just changed into his birthday suit. That was just a “normal” part of living from then on. I would be so embarrassed if anyone knocked on the door and I was careful not to open the door very wide when someone did. I also never invited my friends over when he was around for fear of them seeing him. I didn’t know how to explain what he was doing to anyone. Nor did I want to.

I lived in this state of fear for nearly four years.

• Uncategorized