CRYSTAL
CRYSTAL
Aug 27, 2017 · 7 min read

“The more things seem to change, the more they stay the same.”

(Read the previous post, this is a series)

Chapter 3

When I was ten years old I moved from Barbados to Jamaica. Literally evicted by my grandfather and forced to go live with my grandmother in Jamaica. It was rough for me as I left the first love of my short life in Barbados. I was devastated and cried a lot throughout the journey, on my arrival and within my first month in Jamaica. We went from the airport, directly to the rural parish of Manchester. In a community I still don’t know much about as I only stayed there for two years and I never fully immersed myself. I was still homesick. The cultures of both countries had a lot of similarities in food, landscape, values and cultural norms as well as language. The Jamaican patois and accents sounded like music to my ears and I soon mastered it myself. Jamaica was a little more modernized and Americanized than Barbados. There was color tvs and soap operas that I quickly got into because my grandmother and aunts spent days and nights watching them. My grandmother was a loud colorful character. She spoke her mind and she spent most of the early days since we came to Jamaica berating my grandfather for kicking us out. She hated him deeply. She knew of my mother’s promiscuity and she immediately advised her that she should fuck men who have “things”. Wealthy men who can take care or her and her daughter. It was no surprise however when my mother didn’t stay in Manchester for long. She left about 6 months after arriving in Jamaica. She went to Kingston, one of the major cities. She had met a Kingstonian man who promised her riches and she left with him.

I was forgotten again. I was left with my grandmother and the rest of the family. My grandmother had two more daughters who were older than my mother and I lived with my aunts and grandmother for two years. They didn’t have any kids so there was nobody else my age to play with. However, I played with other kids in the neighborhood sometimes but none of them gave me the joy and excitement I got when I played with Kira. I was more and more isolated and depended on my day dreams to keep my company. My grandmother and aunts taught me a lot about growing up and becoming a woman. Not from direct teachings but from my observations. Nobody cared enough about me to directly teach me anything about life, life skills or becoming a woman. I learnt a lot about the darkness of the hearts of men. Both my aunts were single and didn’t have children. They had no luck with men as my grandmother would often say. They had had their fair share of heartbreak and pain from men they cursed constantly. To call them bitter would be to admit that they’re claims of men weren’t true and I can’t wholeheartedly say that. They had learnt their lessons and had decided they would rather be spinsters than be abused. I respected their stances and found myself wondering if my mom would be a better mom if she thought the way they did. I picked up all I learnt from listening in on their conversations. I was very inquisitive and they barely paid any attention to me. I was fed and I was clothed and I was sent to a primary school, that was about it.

I did exceptionally well in my studies in primary school because I had nothing else to focus on. Also, I had the help of a female teacher whom definitely loved me entirely too inappropriately. I spent so many days with her until I started sleeping with her in her own bed at nights especially when it wound down to down to my final exams (GSAT). Her attention never seemed odd to me at first because I thought of her as I thought of Kira’s mom. An older lady who had more than enough for herself, helping a little girl who needed a little more attention at home. I thought she saw potential in me because I was so smart at school and she wanted to help me maintain a good average. I had recently started to discover my sexuality and was becoming aware of myself, my feminity, my body, my beauty. Prior to moving to Jamaica my love and I had experimented sexually. We touched and kissed each other and talked of each other’s beauty. At the time I never knew the words lesbian, bisexual or even sexuality so I wasn’t calling it anything. I only knew the word love and I loved Kira. The word love to me had started taking on a different meaning several years earlier when I watched TV and saw husbands and wives using it or when I went to Sunday school and they told us about Jesus’ love for us. It was a little confusing for me but I never dwelled on the thought because as I got older and learned more and more I realized that there are different types of love and I loved Kira in more than one different ways.

I started spending more and more time with the female teacher. She combed my hair, she bathed me, she cleaned my uniforms for school she took care of me like I was her own child. I was adored in school because, again, colorism, a past-time in the Caribbean. The other kids loved me, they told me how pretty I was. I enjoyed it. She started molesting me by telling me about my beauty and about my body. It became inappropriate fondling and stimulating my vagina and as she made me even more aware of my body, I developed or became aware of having a low self esteem. Despite her telling me how beautiful I was, it felt wrong and I felt worthless. Remember the narcissistic tendencies I had earlier as a child in Barbados. I had these needs to be the leader, to be superior to everyone, to be the one everyone looks up to, responsible for others needs, powerful, stronger and overall better than others. I realized then that deep down I had a very fragile concept of myself. I didn’t believe that I had any good qualities. The only thing people told me was that I was beautiful. And at the hands of my teacher, my beauty was causing me great discomfort. So I sought in others to believe that I had good enough qualities for them to adore me, need me, value me, submit to me in order to gauge my own worth. The more she touched me, the more my mind chipped away any little self worth I thought I had or it was revealed to me that I had none more and more. I trusted her and looked up to her and deep in the back of my mind I knew it was wrong and I felt helpless to stop it. I eventually forced myself to start liking it as a coping mechanism. There might be more to this but I’m not a therapist or anything. In fact, during years of therapy I was zoned out during most sessions. I never hated the teacher for some reason because I associated hate with physical pain a lot more than any other pain and she never caused me any physical pain. I didn’t tell anyone about it. I convinced myself that it was harmless and I liked it but try as I might i could not convince myself that I loved her. She was not Kira afterall. I became aware of my vagina and all the sensitive areas. She taught me touch myself. And I had internalized my abuse and turned it into profound lessons in becoming a woman in order to accept it, knowing fully well it never felt right. I’ve heard of grown men abusing young girls and sexually assaulting them, I always pictured that as something violent and I never imagined a grown woman could do that too. Plus she was very kind, patient and gentle with me. Nothing like what my idea of abuse was. Yet I knew at the back of my mind, something wasn’t right. A thought I fought hard to bring down to a tiny whisper.

As two years wound down I sat my Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT). This was and still is a standardized test done in grade 6 at primary school in order to matriculate to a high school in the Caribbean. My mother came back to Manchester several times to visit. She told me she was proud that I was doing so well in school. She had confidence and trust in the teacher that had took me in. She didn’t suspect I was being abused and by this time even I was convinced I wasn’t being abused. (Nobody in my family knows of this even now). My mother got to choose the high schools she wanted me to go to. She changed my address to her Kingston address and chose several high schools in Kingston. I was elated because this meant I was going to live with her. It also meant I had to do better in GSAT. The schools in kingston that she had chosen for me had higher pass marks and I had to do extremely well to get placed into one of them. Eventually I did well in the exams and passed for a really prestigious, catholic, girls school in Kingston. I heard a lot about that school and was told only the elites and the brightest went there. I felt very proud of myself. Quickly, my mom and I left Manchester. My mom had an apartment with two bedrooms that was paid for by one of her many sugar daddies. I got my own room and I started high school. It was great at first like everything was finally coming together and we could live like a family again. My mother got a car from her sugar daddies that she drove me to school in. Her sugar daddies were politicians that I’d only seen on TV. They were big rich men in Jamaica, some married and she was not the quiet side chick. She wanted status next. All was well that ended well as my mom became the neglectful, free spirit she still aspires to be today and I was neglected again.

Ps. I am not a writer. English isn’t my first language and I have poor vocabulary. I am basic don’t read my shit.

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CRYSTAL

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CRYSTAL

Just using this to tell a story that has to get out of me.