Because of My Abuse, I Could Never Grow Up.

What it feels like to be a sexual abuse survivor

I’ve noticed that other women act differently than me. I cannot put my finger directly on the differences, but I see them from a short vantage point.

I’m looking up, not in admiration or from low-self-worth, but as a child looking up at an adult, tugging on the hem of a skirt. Adults, they just act differently, and when they notice my oddness, they avoid me.

Being stuck feels like many things, sticky things.

I’m still holding the lollipop, you see — the image sits deep within my head. It plays on a projector. I’m a little girl sitting in a swing. I watch myself get the lollipop stuck in my hair. Yes, I’m stuck again.

I’m still playing with my dolls and babbling excitedly during sticky situations, or hopes for good days — it works both ways. I climb trees, cuts, scrapes, and bruises decorate my long legs, the legs of an adult.

I get stuck in the tree too sometimes, right beside my cat. I often wonder who he’s hiding from. Or is it just he’s scared to move…like me.

But I move like an adult

Don’t be mistaken, I still pay bills and raise children of my own. I buy groceries, cook meals, and do other adulting things that real adults do. I look in the mirror and see a woman, but something is missing.

I wear good clothes for school events. I speak with teachers, oversee assignments for my children, and I make sure they always get in bed on time. I speak like an adult when life makes me. But something is missing.

There’s a something stuck in my heart

There’s a slight rattle in my head that distracts me from moving forward. It feels like a betrayal that cannot find the region in my brain where it needs to grow. It’s a love that’s hard to feel, and hate that’s hard to love.

It reminds me of the rattle in my head during grade school that I couldn’t explain, and the pulse I couldn’t feel. I was dead most of those days, staying in school for only two hours. I spent more time with the child psychologist.

“You cannot feel your heartbeat,huh? Trust me, sweetie, you’re not dead.”

Bad names, bullies, and more stuck children

My father always waited for me to leave school early. He sat in the car in the school parking lot because he knew I couldn’t be there all day. We went home again to try the next day — the next day went on and on for a long time.

I learned to act normal, go to school all day, and everything, but I was stuck at that moment until high school graduation. The abused then abused me, calling me names and using my back to stay out of their own mud. Stuck again in the mire of it all.

Adults aren’t real, they can’t be

I was stuck in that loop. No, I didn’t tell my family for many years. it only took a moment for them to do nothing about it…ever. My family looked like empty shells pretending they never heard me. So I screamed!

“He abused me, and every opportunity, he still tries!”

My mouth moved but no sound came out. Their faces didn’t have eyes or ears, but they could speak.

“Nothing can be done now.”

I’m trying to break out of the porcelain doll

I cannot grow up. I’ve tried so many times to feel like an adult, but I still speak with angst and throw tantrums — these are tantrums that lead to severe panic attacks.

During these panic attacks, I sometimes try to scratch away my skin, the skin he touched, and the skin that holds me to this personality and character. I dream I am a robot, unable to feel that skin. It suits me.

I’m a child in terror, crying for my mother, a deaf and mute mother. I’m so still so he cannot find me again. I’m hidden in the brambles. I’m a rabbit with broken legs. Will this work? Will something work!?

A dirty love, a feeling I cannot reconcile

If he finds me, he will ruin me all the more. I’ve transported back decades ago when the bad man chased me through the house and the woods. I thought he loved me, but this thing was not love.

When he caught me, he showed a dirty love. To me, it was a good love. Children don’t understand. It’s not their fault. All children need love, but not this love. I am an adult child that feels the rumble of nausea on a frequent basis. The sickness of loving me.

Is it my fault that I am not an adult?

So, I’m stuck. It’s a difficult process calling it by a name. It’s not having a childlike abandon. It’s more like having a nightmare forever. It’s being the missing child.

I want to destroy every memory

Every night these terrors visit me in my sleep, and I’m running again in that little frilly dress with the bells, those bells that always alerted him to where I was. My child is missing/I am the child/I’m stuck.

It’s like they’ve found my body in the woods, dirtied and dead, but I made a deal with the devil. I left the body of a woman in its place. If you only knew, and maybe you do, the thoughts that I have as a woman child.

I want to grow up. I want to find a stable being. I want to leave those blood-drenched woods forever. I want to burn those closets, those locked bathrooms, and crawl out from under the bed.

I will never forget the truth

I fear this may never happen. Maybe I shall never have peace, and maybe I shall never grow up. But one thing is for certain, I will never forget. I will tell my story until monsters stop eating children.

The abuse has to stop. Children are valuable and they shouldn’t have to be stuck, as in death, trapped and bound to a life of eternal childhood. A dark childhood, filled with tainted and warped ideas of love and devotion.

I once said, “I wish my children didn’t have to grow up and someday leave me”.

Then I looked in the mirror and realized, I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy. It wouldn’t be natural. It’s not natural. We all must grow and we all must die. Most importantly, we shouldn’t have to be a child forever.

So, as my dirt-encrusted chubby fingers pull myself from the rabbit hole, I run.

Maybe I will get away this time. Maybe I will finally grow.