UnBound Collection

Have you ever looked back on life and just thought, ‘Wow things really do change with time.’. This really one of those things. i hate everything pink when I was a teenager. And as I became a mother of two little girls I started to enjoy the color more.

It never donned on me why I would hate a seemingly innocent color as much as I claimed, but as I have gotten older I have started to figure everything out on that matter. 

I hated myself. Myself as a woman. I had been abused as a small girl, causing me to hate myself. I know that I shouldn’t have felt that way over something that I couldn’t help as a child. But anyone that has been hurt in that way can understand where I’m coming from.

For years I was told it wasn’t my fault.

He was the sick man that laid his hands on me. 

But it wasn’t any of that. It was the fact I was coming of age and felt things.

No one ever says its okay that your body reacted.

No one tells you aren’t a terrible person because your body reacted naturally.

No one tells you that you are still a victim even if you enjoyed it.

I was 9 when we started to live with the man that would change my life forever. For 2 years I would be this mans punching bag and slave. I lived in fear of doing anything that upset him. I had loved to go to school. I had loved to play and laugh and giggle. I never knew the meaning of being self conscious. If I had never met that man, I can honestly say I would have turned out to be the stereo typical popular mean girl. 

But my course of life was detoured. I have become I more restricted person by nature. I don’t go out of my way to start a confrontation(unless its with my kids). As an adult I have more struggles coming out of my shell and being the person I know that I can be. 

At 11 years old I was introduced to what sex was. He had made advances and had snuck into my room to touch me since I was 9. But it was the early morning of my first day of 5th grade that ended my childhood and womanhood bloomed.

It is a day that I can never forget simply because of what the day held for me in milestones. 

it was my first day of 5th grade

My first day in middle school.

And

It was the day I got my first period.

It never really donned on that my period started on that day because of the trauma, but as I get older it has. 

For the next year of my life, I would spend my life in fear of a man that I thought was Satan himself. But at the age of 12 I had started to hate myself. 

Even as I tried to get someone to understand what was happening with out him finding out, I was hating myself more and more. 

I hated myself so much I broke my own arm in a door just so that I could go to the doctor. I never made it there. But I did sport a new broken rib, and bruises all over my body.

I hated myself not for what he was doing. I knew that it wasn’t my fault. I had found books in the library to understand what was going on.

I hated myself for enjoying it.

As the weeks went on, and the raping was becoming a sad part of my life. I was starting to respond to it. My body was betraying me. I was moaning in enjoyment as I cried because he was hitting/strangling/abusing me.

I didn’t understand that it was just my bodies natural response. I thought I deserved to be raped and stopped trying to tell teachers/friends/ and doctors. I stopped caring if people would see the bruises. I stopped defending myself. 

I lost myself in the abuse that man inflicted.

I hated myself.

Hated. 

Past tense.

I no longer feel this way as I have had many years to think on what happened.

My demon is dead. He is long gone and rotting in hell.

But that was not what made me realize I was worth more than that.

It was when I had my little girls that I had the realization. 

How would I feel if it happened to my little girls?

Would I want them to hate themselves for something that couldnt stop?

It was this line of thinking that helped me truly heal emotionally against the wrong that was done against my younger self. 

Its not my fault.

It was never my fault.

I didn’t ask for it because I had a orgasm.

I’m still a victim.

I will matter.

My daughter Rora still stands today listed as un-diagnosed. 

I have been going to doctors about her problems since she was 8 months old. 

We live in a society where if I as a mother do not take my daughter to every single “needed” appointment say like a occupational or speech therapy that isn’t really helping at all, then I live in fear that the state will step in and take my loves.

I as a mother in the lower middle class live in constant fear that tripping over her own feet will be the last time I see my children. 

I have spent the majority of the last 7 years going to therapy or doctors or specialists. I have put more miles on a new car from these trips because the rural area that we live in, because the nearest ones are 80+ miles away. 

I am a mother to a little girls with special needs. A mother to a child who can’t walk without tripping and falling. A mother to a child who is all to trusting of adults and the people around her because I unknowingly built a bubble around her. A mother that lives in constant fear of losing her children.

I do everything in my power to go to every single appointment. I can count on two hands the amount of times I wasn’t at one. I have missed hours of sleep. I have lived on no sleep to the point I was driving home and woke up in my drive way because I passed out. I have spent so much time worrying about my children and what the state could do that I totally forgot to take care of myself.

I was obsessed with doing everything for my children. I would not fail them.

In doing so I would teach the world that there was nothing wrong with my daughter. She was different but she wasn’t broken. She needs extra time, needs a little leading and guiding. My perfect little girl was created by God for me to teach every one that we are all perfect in His eyes. 

My course of motherhood has never gone the way that I thought it would.

I thought that I would be handed this perfect little bundle of joy and we would start on this journey to making her the best person possible. I had dreams of her coming to my house with her future(faceless) husband or wife, a gaggle of kids of her own and life would be perfect.

That was what we have been fed my society that we are to expect. But statistics say that the older the mother is the higher the change of there being something wrong with the child.

I was young. probably to young to understand what was really going on with my child and to be the true advocate for her that I should have been.

I was pushed around by Doctors that thought I didn’t know how to care for my child because of my age.

I had my oldest daughter at the age of 18. I was eighteen years old. I was just starting to understand that I was no longer a child myself. I got pregnant with my then boyfriend while we lived with his mother. I was a senior in school. I had to drop out of school because of my health issues in the beginning of my pregnancy.

I was a statistic from the very start.

My life as a mother started with everyone already looking down at me because I got pregnant at a young age.

From the start I felt like I failed my daughters.

Every step of the journey with my daughter in trying to find her underlying issue has been halted until the last two years.

I will be 26 this year and I am not one of those moms that you see that looks like she is still a teen. I am not one of those moms that wears the latest trends. I won’t even where a dress. I’m not girly, and yet God gave me two little girls to teach the very things I myself don’t even understand. I have my own issues with an extremely serious look on my face at all times.

It wasn’t until I found my voice for my daughter that doctors and nurses alike started to take me seriously.

My course of motherhood was a hard pill to swallow, but that was the thing that I had to take because their father and his family never did.

Times today are completely different from when I was growing. To the point its ridiculous to even think about raising my children in the same way completely. I have two beautiful strong little girls that have changed my life for the better of everything. But I see all to well from nearly every source there that parents are having to choose between being parents and providers.

I was one of those people for 4 years before I met my wonderful husband. I would lay awake at night wondering what bill I was going to ignore that month in order to pay another. I wondered whether I would be able to have a decent meal aside from the $1 fries from my work place. My children never went without for anything. There was plenty they wanted but nothing that they ever needed.

I did without for years because it was my responsibility to my children to give them the best life I could. I never knew how stressed and distant I was from my children because of my work. It wasn’t until tragedy struck my little family of 3, that my views fell into the correct order. I thought to be a good mother I had to give my all to my work. To make the money to give them everything.

I was wrong. 

Very. Very. Very wrong.

After that tragedy we moved passed it and I started distancing myself from my work and was more involved in my kids lives, because we didn’t need that cable or internet. I started taking them out on ‘dates’ weekly. Going and watching a early movie at the local theater. I was bettering my life with getting healthy and they were joining in on my exercise jaunts.

I was seeing my children more than I had since they were born. 

I was proud once again to say I was their mother. Because I had lost that right when going to work was more important.

I finally figured out that needed to be done. How to properly juggle work and home.

I lost sight of the meaning of my life trying to keep up with today’s society.