Linking up with Lisa-Jo Baker, where writers and wanna-be writers are writing for five minutes flat, with no editing, no backtracking. Unfortunately this will take more than five minutes to write, will you forgive me for breaking the FMF rules(again)?
CAUTION: This blog post have a content that might be difficult or painful to read.
GO:
Three years, two months and one day ago I asked Ava Sophie if she ever felt uncomfortable in a situation which she had no explanation for. She took a brief moment where she obviously thought about my question. ‘Yes, in matter of fact I do’, she said with a hint of surprise in her voice. She began to tell me about when she hugged her boyfriend, in their home, just standing there on the kitchen floor. ‘What do you feel when you hug him in the kitchen?’, I asked. He was way taller than her. He had a bad habit of leaning on her when they hugged standing. Being taller and bigger than her, naturally that felt uncomfortable. ‘go on…’ I said gently.
She closed her eyes, encouraged, and proceeded to tell me the story about how she was broken. There was surprise and horror in her voice for as she spoke each word: ‘He lifts me up, but I am no longer grown up. I am just a little girl again, and now he is no longer my boyfriend. He seems bigger, taller, and he`s round and quite chubby. He holds me in his arms straight out from his body, and my feet barely reach lower than his beltbuckle. He holds me uncomfortably tight to himself, and becomes tense and totally frozen. When he starts carrying me out of the room and into a long hallway, I know something bad is coming, and I know i have had this experience before. I just don`t know now at this moment what it is.’
‘Do you want to quit? This might get ugly’, I asked her gently. She shook her head and with a shaky voice and a determined expression told me that she had to get to the bottom of this. I encouragingly asked her to carry on, amazed by her courage.
She continued: ‘I’m being carried into a room at the end of a long hallway. It is a small, rectangular room, with a single bed on the long side wall. He gently lays me down onto the bed and sits down beside me on the bedside. He strokes my hair, smiling gently at me, talking in a soft voice. I don’t know what he is saying, I just know that the softness is not fooling me, not like it did the first time. I know something bad is coming, I know it will hurt, and I know that I want to cry, I just don’t know why. But I know that I can’t. He doesn’t like it when I cry. I can feel his finger softly stroking my tummy. He lets his finger go from the middle of my tummy, a little bit up, a little bit down, and for each time, it travels a little bit further. My thin sweater now is tucked up right under my chin, and he takes off my pants. At first I stare at his red and grey home knitted sweater, but when I saw him unbutton his worn out, light blue jeans, and pull out his… Oh, my God, I cant even say the word! I stare at the ceiling and feel my mind floating away under the intense pain that follows.
I’m sorry, I can’t go on!’ Ava Sophie whispered, tears streaming down her face.
I carefully asked her if she knows what happened next. She nodded, and held her hands protectively over her stomach, obviously in great pain. ‘I remember it all now, let’s just say that it involves penetration of body cavities…(crying) I couldn’t see his face! I don’t know who he is! All I know Is that he was somewhat close to me. I know that it once felt natural to come and give him a hug, that it once felt natural to hold my hands up to him, asking to be lifted up. Oh, my dear God! I want to know who he is! I need to know he can’t hurt anybody else!’, she was now almost screaming, hulking with frustration. It made my heart ache to see her like this, but I also knew she needed to finish this in order to get some answers. Now that she knew, she could start the long painful road of processing the bad memories, and eventually get her life back.
I told her this, and I asked if she remember anything else about him, other than the crime he committed against her as a little child. ‘Yes! His hair is grey/whitish, and he is in the process of losing it. After he was done, I had to get out of the bed so he could change the sheets, but I wasn’t allowed to go out of the room until he was finished, so I sat down on the floor next to a tall cupboard, with my hands holding around my feet, rocking from side to side. Shaking, but too paralyzed to express my pain. It felt like someone had driven a knife up my… and twisted it around all the way to my stomach inside me. When he was finished, he brought me through the hallway again, and stopped just by the door. He stopped, looked down at me and said with a frighteningly sharp voice, from which all gentleness was gone: ‘Now, do you see what happens when you tempt me that way? Do you want me to tell the others what you have done?(I was silently shaking my head with wide, frightened eyes) Well, then you better not tell them either. And don’t you dare show any pain, or I will tell what a bad girl you’ve been!’ I have the feeling that the others were on the other side of that door, or next door. All I know is that those who could have saved me, had they known, were not far away.’
Ava Sophie sat on the sofa staring at me, shaking, her eyes empty looking. She still held her arms around her stomach as if feeling the pain from long ago. She still had tears streaming down her cheeks. I knew that she was in pain, physically as well as emotionally. She unlocked the physical pain hidden in her body for all those years the moment she unlocked the memory. I was so proud of her! She’d remember so much in so little time, she had the courage to pursue her memory instead of running away from it, She had had the courage to say it all out aloud despite the fear of that threat she had gotten back then. She had a long road ahead of her, I thought, but she was lucky to start on that road at such a young age. Eventually she would one day be able to lead a full life again.
Ava Sophie told me that a year ago she had spent Easter reading a book, tears flowing down her face as she read. At the end of the book she came to one sentence that had set her free. These were the words that set her free: ‘It is NOT your fault’. It was not only those words, but it was the whole book, ending with those words. The book is called ‘The Shack’ by Wm. Paul Young.
God restored Ava Sophie from her past that day, through that book.
She was not broken anymore
STOP
This was a difficult post to write, and some may think it is improper for a blog post. I took the chance to post even so, because it is something that is not talked much about in Society, and something that most people are afraid to admit when experienced. I want to encourage people with similar experiences, to tell. You don’t have to tell the whole world. But to tell someone who can help you processing it. But first, tell God. Let God take it, and dare to believe that He can do miracles, and that He wants to do it for you.
For parents: Please talk to your child in the early ages about sexuality. Talk about what it is, who it is meant for, that their body is only theirs, and so on(of course I can’t tell you how that conversation should be like, this is only suggestions). It doesn’t have to be much about detail or complicated conversations, but the more a child is secure, and know that it is allowed to say no, know that (for example) it is not alright for uncle to touch underneath the pants, it might prevent sexual abuse of happening. Knowledge is power.
Sexual abuse might happen very early in a child’s life, It also happen with someone the child knows and trust, in 90% of every case. This is an important fact in which require some afterthought. Nobody wants to think bad about their neighbor, family or friends. But it is important to know the signs and keep an extra eye open for them. In this story the parents were in the next room, or next door. That’s horrible, but it is the truth for one child. Do what you can to prevent it from yours.
I also posted this, to take the power from those people that commit such awful crimes.
avasophie 