The Scary Truth of Being OK
And that’s when it happened — the moment brought me spinning to the past.
Without my control, without my knowledge, without awareness, the past yanked me to nearly a decade prior. My mother-in-law morphed into my mother, my father-in-law into my father. Instead of my feet standing on my lawn at my chosen home, I’m back there. I stand in the breezeway of my childhood home, swimming in my parents’ disapproval. My father sits down, my mother remains standing.
“I’ve never felt so disrespected in my own home,” my mother yells.
I’m sixteen again, a survivor of sexual abuse at the hands of my brother, believing myself to be moments away from being cast into the streets.
I’ve wrestled with feelings of self-doubt, conflict, and confusion. I’ve followed the house rules, and abided by their religious structure and testaments. And yet, at the word of an ex-boyfriend, they believe I have been drinking and doing drugs.
They say this, my mind whirring, calculating, computing, trying to understand how they could be so callously and terribly wrong. I got good grades, attended all the church sermons and youth groups, volunteered at the local library and horse farm, and worked since I was fourteen.
And all of this that I believed would make me “good” in their eyes meant nothing.
