Childhood

Everyone has a childhood trauma, I suppose. The fortunate among us are the ones who manage to accept the pain and learn from it enough to grow into better human beings, the less fortunate are the ones who let what happened before be the defining moment of our lives, covering us in a dark, despised film of shame and ugliness that turns us into what we fight against.


Until I was twenty two years old, I'd been the one to hide behind what had been done to me. Raging against it, fighting against it, yet always making the exact types of mistakes, forming the exact precise excuses designed to keep me right where I was. Miserable, weak, frightened.

In order to explain better the occurrences that lead to my change, I must delve into a yesteryear of hidden pain and forgotten realities. Please bare with me in the retelling, I promise the journey will not be in vain.

As I before mentioned, I was abused at the hands of my mother.  She did it in the name of discipline and a divine calling to "not let you become the slut that made you." I believe in the wholeness of my being that my mother never intended to be cruel or abusive. You see, she tempered that cold, cruel nature with a spirit of giving and camaraderie, as harsh as she would beat me, as venomous as her tongue could be, there was an honest caring and protection of me from both myself and the prejudices of the Philadelphia I'd been born in.

Yet, the fact is, to me and me alone, my mother abused my body, my soul and my mentality. There were many days when I'd get a beating and crawl to 'my room' which was really a storage room that my mother had assigned to me when I'd gotten on her nerves about not having my own room. I would stretch out over the bed and pray to the God who'd allowed her to rule over me, "Take me now! Is that what you want? Take me! I can't bear it anymore!" it seemed even the great I Am wouldn't give me the release of death.

I always felt like I was bad, deserved to be treated badly, could never have a thought or opinion of my own. I always felt like the next beating would be the one that would give my cowardly soul release from the torment of this life.  I never knew what it was like to be a 'good girl' as, try as I might to stick by her orders to the letter, there seemed always to be some secret fault she'd found in me to cause the roller coaster of sickness to begin again.

Before I was old enough to go to school, I knew two words three year old's just don't use.  Biological and slut.  I knew I had a biological father, uncle and grandpa and that the girl who'd had me was a slut. I knew that loving my pretty hair made me a slut. I knew that looking to hard or too long in the mirror made me a slut. I knew that smiling at strange men or being friendly with boys who weren't my brother, and my brother only, made me a slut. I knew that putting on certain clothes would make me a slut, that wearing makeup would make me a slut, that perfume would make me a slut. I knew that nail wanting to play with the pretty nail polish mommy only wore in the summer time made me a slut.  I didn't know what a slut was, just that it was mommy's job to keep me from being one.

I worried more than any child should have, I worried about if my brother was mad at me, he'd tell mommy I was doing something bad and she'd hit me, I worried when I threw up on myself at a visit with my biological dad and had to get a clean change of clothes that she would snatch them off me and beat me for it.  I knew when I was naughty I was going to be beaten, I knew that when I tried to please her I would be beaten. I knew the standards she had for me and that I was doomed because somehow I failed them.

My earliest memory of life is of watching reruns of "Leave it to Beaver", watching the channel six soap line up, watch Sesame Street, watching. I remember watching Mr. Rodgers tell me that if I couldn't tell someone something that bothered me, I could get it out with my stuffed animals and stage a play.

My life was spent in front of the television in the living room with my big brother Carl.  Mommy lived her life in the kitchen, we'd interact when I wanted to play with the pots and pans or when I wanted to help cook and she was feeling gentle.  When mommy wasn't mad at me, she was quite loving and loveable. When mommy wasn't mad at me she was patient and kind. The point of this is that my mother could be sane for days, weeks on end and when she was sane, she was love.

She was never particularly demonstrative, as I said, she lived in the kitchen with her portable television and her pots and pans, coming out to pee or answer the phone.  If we wanted her, we entered her zone. If it was time to eat, we entered her zone. Otherwise, she loved us from the kitchen while Carl and I lived in front of the television.

Carl is my big brother and the only original family I have alive. We were each others playmates, best friends and war buddies.  He is my near twin, a year older than I, from the same birth parents, but when I came to live with my family he was over a year old, non verbal, couldn't walk, wasn't trying to.  I was six months old.  We learned from each other, and we protected each other as much as we could.

As angry and evil and cold as my mother was to me, that's how warm and loving and giving and understanding she was to Carl.  He was her heart, make no bones about it.  He came along and gave her something she'd never had before. I wish I could understand it, but it was never a secret that I was Herman's child and Carl was hers.  It was such a common state that I never questioned it, I never fought against my favorite person in the whole world's place in the family. I just went along with it.

Then there was daddy. My mother never hurt me as badly when he was around. A spanking was just a spanking, there were no cruel words or retorts when he was nearby.  I was daddy's princess all the time. I could get away with murder and he would smile and laugh and love me.  His mission in life was to see me smile every day. He did this by bringing me endless gifts, "just because", making sure I always had 'the best' in material things. He taught me things and talked to me and encouraged me. We had so much in common. The main being that mommy didn't like, respect, want or have nearly as much use for him than she did for me.  After he died, she lamented that he was the only love in her life, and I let her say this because who I was to deny a woman her pain and remorse, but trust one who lived and watched it happen, mommy loved Carl and there was no room for Daddy in her life.

One of the biggest issues concerning me between them was how daddy would encourage my writing life. He loved watching me create, and he would provide me with special paper and pens and ink, he would read my writing, he would give honest support in the form of answers and praise or criticism. He gave me wings to soar with creatively.  Mommy could not stand it.  She would call it a waste of paper and throw my writings in the trash. She would tell me to get my head out of the clouds.  "What kind of husband wants a wife like you? You'll never make anyone a good wife the way you are." And they'd fight. Him FOR me, her against me.


Every achievement I made she would give criticism on, if I did something Carl didn't, she'd dish out the backhanded compliments.  I was always an afterthought, "My Carl is a straight A student who helps the teachers and is mentally gifted. My Carl is smart and fast and kind and the most wonderful son.  Oh and MaryAnn is right behind him."  It didn't take me long to figure out I would always be right behind him.

When I learned to ride my bike, I'd had the bike for an entire year. Carl had learned over the course of two months to ride his without training wheels. Mommy hadn't wanted to invest in training wheels for mine, and given that I was afraid to ride, it hadn't made much difference.  But when I got it into my head that I was sick of watching Carl ride around with our friends while I was stuck in my yard without him, I got up one morning and without telling my mother took my bike out on the sidewalk.  I'd started teaching myself to ride at six am. By noon my legs were nothing but scratches and dried blood, but I was riding that damned thing in the street! Unbeknownst to me, my father had been in the yard the entire time watching me fall and bleed and 'man up' and get back on the thing over and over, non stop for six hours.

As I rode past and noticed him grinning that daddy grin, I was so happy. That happy lasted all the way til dinner when daddy bragged to mommy and Carl how it had only taken me less than a day to learn how to do what Carl had done in two months.  The table got quiet no sooner than the sentence had left that poor man's mouth.  I closed my eyes tight, begging God to hide me from my mother's fist. NO ONE teased Carl. Not even daddy.

Mommy just cut her eyes on me and said, "Well, it doesn't matter how long it took her.  She only did it to follow those BOYS around so she can slut around like her biological mother."


The only time my mother and father were happy and my family looked like the television families, and were stress free, was when we were in Bayside, New York. Summer vacation, winter break, Easter break.  We were there. The adults would be happy, laughing and calling each other 'dear' and 'sweet heart' and 'my love'.  We children would be relaxed and happy. There would be music and alcohol and we children would be not only allowed out of the house, we were allowed to explore the world outside of our front yard with friends. Real friends who didn't care about our color, the age of our parents, how 'weird' we were.  We could put the stink of Philadelphia behind us and just be children. Care free children who were supported and loved and taken care of equally, children who's parents took equal responsibility for them and took them out of the house and on car rides and into parks and beaches and did family, real television type, family things.

I always tell people I'm from Bayside, because that's when I was alive. Only in Bayside.

So that was my home life from the time I was a baby til the time I turned twelve or thirteen.  Now, that brings me to my school life.  In elementary school I had 'school friends'. The kind you left behind in the school yard when mommy or daddy picked you up and took you to the hell that was your reality.  There were some bullies, but not many because my father would have quite literally with no remorse have killed my brother had one hair on my head been touched.

Then came middle school.  Thinking I wanted to sing, thinking I wanted to do something that Carl couldn't do and do it well, I convinced my mama through Carl to enroll me into G.A.M.P., the Girard Academic Music Program.  It was majority white, majority South Philly, majority evil.  My first teacher there was one I'll refer to as Mr. P.  He was a hateful little man who despised me and told me so to my face.

He would throw out my homework in front of me, he would rip my tests up, he would allow and encourage the other children to ridicule me and when I dared complain, he would tell me, "Life isn't fair."  His treatment, his permissive attitude, left me open to bullies.  My parents didn't believe me at first.  Teachers just didn't do that in this day and age.

Well, one of my many tormentors was just plain evil. She never had any nice words to say to me, she called me names, she called me ugly, she joined with the other kids to chase me, threaten me, throw glass and bottles at me. She called me half colored, she was leading a group of children on this one particular day that ended up throwing me under a slow moving Septa bus.  If it hadn't been icy that day, I wouldn't have slid straight under between the wheels because the bus would have been going at top speeds like it usually did.

The worse thing she did, was lead the entire eighth grade class to chase me every day of the week.  On one particular day, Mr. P had told me he was going to call my mother to tell her I'd disrespected him and those girls were waiting for me.  I decided I wasn't going to school the next day. I'd decided I was  going to run away from home.  So I packed up my writing, the only things that I had to love besides my brother and I hid in the park at the end of my block.  The girls were waiting for me so I went deeper into the park. Determined that they wouldn't hurt me today!

I ran into six men. One of them had a gun. They ran a train on me. That means that they each took turns holding the gun while they raped my virginity away. I was twelve years old. I lay there and let them take their turns at me, not wanting to die. I didn't fight. Afterward, one of them kissed me. So I got my very first kiss from one of the men that stole my virginity.  I went to the creek and bathed them from me as best I could. I realized I wanted to go home.

It was dark now, my clothes were wet and muddy. I went home and there was a police officer inside my house talking to my mother. She looked at me and said, "You should be happy to have a mother like this. Do you have any idea what could have happened to you out there?" and hugged my mother and left. Daddy spanked me after I'd unpacked, changed and come back down stairs for scaring him. Carl was mad at me. Mama beat the hell out of me.  It was what I deserved.  I went upstairs and bathed.

The next day, my mother took me to school and apologized to Mr. P about my disrespecting him. She told the class that I'd been romping in the park all day. She hit me in front of the class and told the teacher to give me detention for a month. Then she left.

The bullies spent the next few months with new emotional and physical devastation.  I didn't care. I was safe, with my mother coming to pick me up from detention every day. Every night I locked myself in my room.  I couldn't get warm enough.  I got sick sometime during that month. I threw up all the time, lost my bladder, lost my energy.

Eventually, the month was up. The detention over and I was left to come home on my own again. There was a bigger crowd of them than before. They pulled my hair, they beat me so badly. So horribly, so thoroughly.  I began bleeding vaginally.

I wouldn't tell my mother. In my head I just knew she would beat me because I must have done something to these girls to garner such hatred. I didn't know I was having a miscarriage. I didn't know anything other than this was one more hurt I deserved. One more indignity. I came home, sat in the bathroom and lost huge clots of blood into the bathroom. I cleaned up, bleached the toilet, washed up and went to my bedroom, slapping on maxi pad after maxi pad.  In the end, I'd convinced myself I was just having horrible period pains, even though my period had just gone off the week before.

Summer came, like it always did. I spent it in Bayside like I always did. I told my sister and she took me to one of her 'special' doctor friends. She was a pediatric nurse in a hospital where the most pitiful cases of child abuse came.  The doctor told me what had happened, he told me I had genital warts now. He told me I'd had a bad infection and that it was an act of God that I hadn't died, as it was, it was highly unlikely I'd ever conceive a child. To the best of my knowledge, my sister kept my secret.

I hope she did, the alternative being that my sister told my mother and she just didn't care.

School started again, I was healthy. I didn't fight the whims of the other girls. Eventually, they left me alone.  Mama stopped hitting me because daddy was sick with something called Alzheimer's and she needed to tend to him more than she needed to hit me. So she used her mouth instead.  It hurt a lot worse than her beatings.  Her words didn't matter though. Not anymore, I'd learned to go to the safety of my bedroom with my television and radio and books and write. I emerged to go to school and I emerged to eat or pee.

I just barely passed school, and left for high school leaving the evil of South Philadelphia and G.A.M.P. behind me.  I was to attend my brother's high school, majority black, in my own neighborhood.  I was right on track until September of my fourteenth year.

Two things happened shortly behind each other. The first was, I'd finally discovered boys and had a crush on one who lived around the corner from me.  The second was my brother got comitted because he couldn't deal with mama or daddy anymore.

What became of Carl? He rested, came home and grew up to be a good man.  What happened to the boy? One day I walked home from school, adjusting directions to be sure to pass his house so we could banter and I could go home.  He took my banter, then he took my arm. I didn't want him to touch me, having become adverse to being touched by anyone who wasn't my brother, sister or father, so I pulled. His grip tightened. I started screaming and fighting as much as I was able. No one came to help me.

On his porch, he pushed my skirt up, the skirt my mother had told me was too slutty to wear out of the house. That she'd said was inviting a rapist to grab me, that I'd worn in defiance against her. He pushed that skirt up, he tore the waist, he hit me in my breast and stomach and he held my arms over my head as he raped first one hole then the other.

When he was done, his words were, "You're my girl now. You loved it didn't you?" I nodded furiously in agreement. He demanded a kiss. I gave it to him. He held the door for me and kissed me again as I moved past him.  As I ran down the street, I never noticed that my neighbor was right there, watching me leave. That neighbor told my mother he'd seen me leaving that boy's house and kissing him. My mother never asked me what happened.  She never questioned her source. She never noticed my torn skirt.

As soon as I ran in the door with tears streaming down my face, she assumed I'd seen Mr. B seeing me. For the first time in months, she gave me the last beating she would give me until I turned up pregnant five years later.  I took it, thinking it was what I deserved for wearing that skirt.  Then I ran to my room and cried myself to sleep.

It's been many years since those things happened to me.  I've grown and moved on.  When I was twenty two, my mother and I had it out and all that had happened to me during my growing up years came out.  All the pain, all the anger and suffering.  My mother opened her arms to me and gave me what I'd been waiting my whole life for. She apologized. She held me like a mother holds her child. She told me how sorry she was and asked my forgiveness. I felt whole for the first time in my life. And I cried.

Our relationship was finally perfect and as horrible as she'd been when she was horrible, that's how wonderful she became from that moment on.  I finally rested and felt love....six years later, she died in my arms, loving me with me loving her right back.

This brings me to today.  I belong to a bible study group that brings me peace and closer to God.Today, they came to my house just to see if I had time to receive the word today.  All my little soldiers were down with fevers and I didn't want to leave them. The group leader had forgotten an article she'd wanted to show me in her car.

She went to retrieve it but never came back.  You know who brought it to me? The ring leader from that evil time in my life all those years ago.  "You know me?" she asked, as if I could ever forget her face. "Yes." "There's something I'd like to say to you, if you'll let me."
I went out the door to face her with the thought that I could take her now, I'm a grown up. She can't hurt me anymore. But my heart wouldn't stop pounding. I couldn't stop my hands from sweating. I couldn't catch my breath.

Just then, I noticed tears in her eyes. "MaryAnn. I understand if you never speak to me after this point. I understand that you may never want to lay eyes on me again, but of all the things in my life, you keep popping up. I happened to look out of Cheryl's car window and see her talking to you. I recognized you and had to come here today.  So I grabbed this track for the excuse to bring it to you.  MaryAnn. I am SO sorry! I was a child and I was going through a hard time of it and I took it out on you. That's no excuse, there is never any excuse to treat anyone like that.  Please forgive me."

Just like that, I was comforting this crying woman who used to be the ringleader of a group of children I believed would kill me and no one would care. I reached to her and she reached to me and we embraced like long lost friends. Her forgiveness came from my mouth.  I could forgive. I didn't even realize I wanted to forgive, but I NEEDED to forgive.

She asked if she could call me sometime, I gave her my number. She asked if we could get past this, I responded that it was done. She asked if we could be friends....I said, "That's all I ever wanted when we were children. To be your friend. Right now, we can pray together. Welcome to the group.We'll see how it goes."

I wonder, if I were to tell her exactly what her actions had caused me to do.  If I were to tell her the depth of her hatred and it's affect on me, the sexual disease I will never get rid of, the lack of connection to real people, the dead child. The difficulty of conception. If I were to tell her all that, so that I could fully forgive her with all the love in my heart....would that be selfish of me? Would it please God to have truth come to light? Would it change me?

So this is me, being honest about me.