Innocence Lost Part 2

It seems like after the first time I was abused my earliest memories seem to be fragments from molestation to molestation. There was always a different perpetrator and different location but always the same act, robbing my innocence. I am sure there were some good things in between but certain events and traumas have a way of searing themselves into your memory becoming part of your inmost being, damaging you from the inside, and changing what you were meant to become. At one point in my life, I imagined that there was an invisible sign across my forehead that only molesters could read and it said, “Please abuse me, I’m no good.”

I don’t think that mothers, especially those that are young, consider the risk they put their children at when they are in and out of casual relationships. These mothers allow access to their children without knowing or intending to because they don’t really know the person they have given their trust to. My mother was only sixteen when I was born and I remember many men from my earliest memories until I was about four that she was involved with and at many times I was left with different people so that she could enjoy her freedom. I did not know back then how damaged my mother truly was, or what her life had been like when she was becoming what she was meant to be.

Things changed somewhat when I was four. My mother had met my future stepfather. He was a biker and an ex con. He was frightening with tattoos covering most of his body, dark angry eyes, rippling muscles, and towering at about 5 “11”. He was only nine years my mother’s senior which was nothing new to my mother. At that time the older, the better was her motto. When they first got together, we spent a lot of time at a biker house. A house full of bikers, I wasn’t old enough so I don’t remember whose house it actually was but I do remember there were more people that lived there than there rooms. I remember my mother staying over a lot with me and I remember being molested by a “friend” the people of the house had let stay there one night. I remember waiting until the “friend” fell asleep and then completing an army crawl from the front room where I had been sleeping towards the room where my mother was. Grabbing the carpet to pull my self inch by inch, in pain from the abuse, inch by inch toward the doorway where the bathroom light shone across the floor and then falling to sleep in the light. My mother never knew until much later about what occurred that night and even if she had no one could undo what had already been done. I remember feeling ashamed and dirty as if I caused it to happen. How could a four-year-old feel the way? Why should I have ever had endure this pain? Where was my childhood, where was my innocence? Why was I so bad?



Now, I had parents. I mean, I went from having a teenage mom who had many “friends” to having a mom and a permanent male figure in the home, Reno. That was the name he called himself and for the longest time I refused to call him anything else. I had never called anyone dad that I could remember. My mother dated him exclusively, as far as I know, after they first got together. Shortly after they met, they started living together, which began another agonizing chapter of my life.

I’m not to sure when exactly but I know that not too long after my mother and Reno got together they decided it was time for me to call him dad. I do remember not wanting to, fighting against and ultimately being threatened into conforming and calling him dad. I can’t honestly say that all my memories of our more than dysfunctional family life were negative actually during this time my memories are either really great or really terrible. However, this is probably the same for everyone. The mundane is not really memorable. We moved around a lot. Before I even finished first grade we had lived in Nebraska, Iowa, Alabama, Texas, and then ended up in California. I learned much later, what the moving was all about.

Life for once started to feel safe. My mom wasn’t gone all the time leaving me here and there. And I didn’t yet know how truly frightening Reno could be. He bought boxing gloves and taught me how to box one afternoon. He never had a daughter or a stepdaughter. Just one son he didn’t see from a previous marriage and a stepson. He rather treated me like a boy, which at that point in my life treating me like anything was good enough. I even remember one of my birthdays; I think it was my fifth. We were living with my grandmother and they had bought me a cake shaped exactly like a three dimensional train engine. I remember putting my finger in the cake and rubbing it on his face and him quickly pushing my face into the cake. That was a good memory and those are sometimes hard to come by.