After going back to Virginia from Ohio the summer my cousin raped me I was hopeful that my life would get back to “normal”. My sister had promised me that she would help me tell our parents what happened in Ohio but my life would be far from normal. My sister started dating a guy in the Navy. She ran away from home and got married. So I was never able to tell my parents.
My dad cheated on my mom. The cracks in their marriage were starting to cause a shift in the foundation. My dad got orders to go to a base in California. I and my mom followed dad to California. My mom filed for divorce shortly after getting to California.
To this day I am not sure why my mom decided to move to California Was she hopeful things would get better? Was she giving him a second chance? The whole time they lived together in California the fighting and arguing were constant.
My dad ended up moving into the barracks and me and my mom moved into a house. Even 22 years later I can connect with the feeling I had at that time. I felt lost, alone, confused. I felt like a ping pong ball between my parents. I was bounced from one place to another.Life as I knew it was gone. In a one-year time frame I had been raped, my sister moved and my parents got divorced.
I remember literally feeling like a zombie. Just trying to trudge through life. Trying to make sense of what the purpose of my life was. I truly believe this was the moment that I learned to just keep everything to myself. I learned to take each trauma in my life and just put it in my emotional backpack and keep moving. It worked for a little while. I was able to carry that backpack even though it was heavy and overflowing for about 30 years until it just got too heavy, I lost my footing and everything came falling out.
It has taken me about 10 years to go through everything that I had been carrying. I have purged a lot of that baggage. Now I only keep what is beneficial in that backpack and everything else I just leave it where I found it. Take Care Much Love.
