Chapter 4. 

Trigger warning: This post contains details about sexual abuse, the effects of sexual abuse on children, and drugs.

 When I was a kid, I was obsessed with cheerleaders. I remember going to the Farmersville football games and staring in awe at the girls on the sidelines. I wanted nothing more than to be one of them. My mom made me a promise; that if by the end of second grade, I could do the splits, she would enroll me in pee wee cheerleading in the 3^rd grade. So, you can bet your bottom dollar that I stretched and practiced the splits every single night until I got them down. It only took me about three months to accomplish the splits and I continued to do them every day until my mom enrolled me. She kept her end of the bargain and enrolled me in cheerleading in the third grade. My favorite part of my childhood was being in peewee cheerleading. I cried every time the season was over and practiced all hours of the day outside during the summer before football season started up again. I grew close to my cheerleading coaches and worked really hard to impress them. We got to wear our cheerleading uniforms to school every Friday before a football game and I felt so cool wearing it. I never wanted to take the uniform off. I would wear it until my mom forced me too right before bedtime. I would get home after school and practice every cheer, dance, and cheerleading jump or tumble that I could do. I was the kid that spent hours making up routines to every Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera song and then forced my mom and all their friends to watch me perform. When I say that I have always loved to dance, sing, and cheer, I mean it. As an adult, I still miss cheer to this day. 

Intermediate school was a weird time in life. My home life was good and bad. I was in cheer which made me feel cool like the other girls, but I was still constantly made fun of by my classmates. Both of my parents were working and financially speaking I thought we were okay. Looking back now, I don’t think my family was very okay financially. This was the time in my life that my parents were always partying and for me as a child, that brought a lot of late-night fun. My mom had a best friend named Dana. Dana had four kids and her only daughter was my age. We were best friends, and we didn’t live far from one another. I didn’t know this at the time, but my parents did drugs with her parents. We were over at their house every weekend and it was one big party. All of us kids were doing things we shouldn’t have been doing but the adults were too busy getting high and drunk to care. This is the time in my life that I remember being absolutely boy crazy. 

I mentioned before that when a child is introduced to sexual activity, it is no different than it is for an adult- the body starts to crave it. Meaning that even though you are a child, the same sexual urges start happening after being introduced to sexual activity even if you are only six years old. The difference is that as an adult most of us can control those urges and only act on them at appropriate times, but a child does not have the maturity or the ability to control themselves in that way. Thinking back, I never really had an innocent view of boys. I was introduced to sexual activity so young that it never gave me the chance to view boys in any other way. I remember playing with barbies and making them have sex. I remember having crushes on all the boys who were twice my age. I remember innocently playing house with my friends but boundaries being crossed between whoever played “mom and dad”. Most of my friends that were girls were also sexually abused so we truly knew no better. It’s this weird cycle where, as a kid you feel so guilty and dirty for being sexual with yourself, with your abuser, and also with your friends but you don’t have the maturity about you to control any of it. Of course, the abuse isn’t controllable, but the other parts of it such as the masturbation and making out with other little girls, are like an addiction for a child. An addiction that is relentless, a strong hold if you will. The times where I was alone, I was ridden with anxiety and panic attacks. Every day I woke up with my stomach hurting, which is a physical manifestation of anxiety for a child. I would come home after school and curl up in a ball on the floor of our living room and scream and cry with this relentless feeling of anguish until I saw my mom pull in the driveway. I just knew something was wrong but couldn’t seem to help myself out of it.  I was trapped with nowhere to go and what felt like no help to run to. 

I definitely had people that I could have talked about what was going on in my life, but the fear came over me like you wouldn’t believe and I just felt like everything was my fault, so I continued to stay silent. These feelings of anguish got better when the sexual abuse stopped which was when I was twelve. The sexual abuse with my uncle bubba had stopped. Also, the older I got the more I learned right from wrong, and I gained more of an ability to do the right thing. That’s part of growing up I suppose. So, I didn’t struggle as much with masturbation, and I stopped being sexual with my friends because somehow between the age of six and twelve I realized that wasn’t okay to be doing or maybe the guilt I felt afterwards became too much to handle. 

I hope sharing all of this doesn’t put me in a bad light. It feels very strange as a 29-year-old adult to be admitting to what feels like such awful activity, but I also have to remind myself that I was literally a child who knew no better. I hope my readers grasp that reality as well. Some might wonder why on earth I would share such deep things. Well, the reality is that I am 100% positive there are other women or people out there who have very similar stories as mine but don’t talk about it out of shame, guilt, and fear. They probably feel alone and if they feel anything like I have felt, they feel like a horrible human for something they did as a kid that was strictly a product of abuse. The bottom line is- it is not YOUR fault. It is not their fault. No child just starts being sexual for absolutely no reason, children are sexually innocent unless shown by someone else whether in the form of media, porn, or abuse. I am also sharing such raw and honest details in order to help open the eyes of adults who don’t know the reality or effects of child abuse. The effects of abuse go much further than the relationship of the abuser and their victim. Every aspect of that child’s life is effected. If any of this helps educate my readers on what to look for, how to spot red flags in children, how to pick up on a possible abusive situations- then sharing these very embarrassing and raw details of my childhood is worth it. This is the real, the dark, the ugly, and the truth about the effects that sexual abuse had on me intertwined with the type of family I had growing up.

Although all of these things were happening in the background of my life, you would have never known. I was doing really well scholastically, I was close to all of my teachers, and I was thriving in cheer. Nothing about my abuse was obvious to the outside looking in; I made sure of that.