And so with all of the gained wisdom and knowledge of a traumatized seventeen year old girl, I started dating my rapist.
It is at this point that reading this story might feel a bit like watching a bad horror movie, and you want to yell at the screen and tell the girl running up the stairs to go out the front door instead. I promise you that in the retelling in my mind, there is a full MST3K lineup mocking all of my ridiculous mistakes. A lot of things seem obvious to people who aren’t traumatized 17-year-old girls.
I’m not even sure exactly how this happened. I remember breaking up with Bradley. I remember sitting on my bed the morning after the rape happened, making that decision. But between that and me being with David, there’s a big blank space.
I remember him telling me the rape didn’t happen. I don’t know if this was over the phone or in person. I don’t remember agreeing to anything. I just remember him saying I wasn’t really saying no and that obviously I wanted it. And since that fit right along with the story I had made up for myself to cope, I had every reason to go along with it. But there was also another incentive. David offered to find me somewhere to live.
So, maybe it didn’t happen how I said it did? And why would someone who forced themselves on me be willing to help me? The mental gymnastics of survival are exhausting. I just wanted to get out from under my father’s terror, and the grass looked greener on the other side of the street with the rapist.
This is how I eventually came to a bit of peace about my mother’s choices. My rage and frustration with her inability to leave my father and protect me from him has lessened over the years, as I was tripped up time and again by the abuses around me.
I know she felt guilty every day about the situation we were in. I hope she had friends that told her it wasn’t her fault. I hope she knew how much she was loved. I hope she had secret lovers. I hope she didn’t actually die, but was beamed back to her home planet for some emergency and one day she’ll show up like “Hey, what’s up?” and I’ll be like “Fucking hell, mom, where the fuck have you been?” And she’ll be like “Oh wow, I thought I was gone for, like, an hour. Darn you space/time travel! Also, please stop using that sort of language.” And then it’ll all work out and we can go back to the alien planet that we are from and live in peace.
I did the best with what I could, and had my rapist help me find a place to live.
I packed up what I could, said goodbye to my cats, and left. David found me a one bedroom in a converted farmhouse that was still kind of a farmhouse because there was a goat that lived out back with the washing machine, and it was surrounded by small fields of cows. The building was livable, though it had mostly peeling paint, some exposed insulation, and drafty windows that were warped with age. The bathroom ceiling once collapsed from shutting the door too hard.
I never met the landlord; they just took my name and a check every month for $400 and that was that. It was only a 20-minute drive from my dad’s house, and I still had to go back for my tutors to finish high school. But this was a space that only I had the key to, and that felt like safety.
I was the tallest kid in my class at 8 years old (I’m only 5’1” as an adult so I pretty much peaked), started wearing a training bra at 10, and got my period while I was still in elementary school. I went from dressing in boy clothes and being friends with boys to immediately wanting to kiss the boys at what seemed a much earlier age than all the girls around me. My mom didn’t think allowing me go over to a boy friend’s house at 11 years old when their parents wouldn’t be home was an issue. How was she to know we’d spend about 20 minutes looking at his Star Wars toys and the rest of the 3 hours making out in the woods behind his house rolling around on dead leaves?
Boys always kind of liked me. Even when I wasn’t “cool,” since I didn’t adhere to social hierarchy in junior high, boys were still interested. Bradley and I started dating when I was 14 years old. He was quiet, kind of anxious, not very tall, and only talked to me because I started flirting with him on the bus home from 8th grade. It took us 6 months to get to the sex part, and although he was older, I was the one making the moves first.
The luxury of having a boyfriend that lived down the street (which really meant multiple streets, some woods, and no sidewalks or street lamps) was that I was able to sneak out and see him in the summer months. When you live in the woods, you don’t often have people you can visit without needing a parent with a car to drive you, so it was exciting on multiple levels.
I already had a history of sleeping in a tent in the backyard during the summer months. Our backyard was huge and my parents’ bedroom faced the front yard. This left me the perfect escape plan where I was already outside the house before the lights were out and could simply wait until my parents were asleep, sneak around the perimeter of the yard, and be right on the road.
When the first week of summer vacation rolled around and I had gotten out the tent from the garage and announced I was going to sleep outside that night “for fun,” my mother was paying attention. She wasn’t oblivious and knew that me sleeping outside when I had a boyfriend who lived nearby was very different than previous summers. So that night around midnight or so, she quietly padded across the grass to the tent and pulled a “just checking in.”
She was relieved to find her only daughter sleeping peacefully in her sleeping bag. I blinked open and gave a “huh?” as she replied with a quick, smiling apology and went back into the house. Mom wasn’t someone who enjoyed losing sleep or staying up late, so it was obviously a deliberate attempt to catch me doing exactly what I was planning on doing.
But I was crafty enough to know not to leave on the first night. I had a friend over later in the week and we slept outside as well. After a few nights of tent sleeping, I was free to sneak out whenever I wanted without suspicion to go make out with my boyfriend on a blanket in the woods somewhere. I didn’t even like sleeping outside. I just really liked hooking up with my boyfriend.
Affording the luxury of my own place to live meant having a job again. I didn’t want to go back to the department store and decided to make my way up in the world and get a job at the video store in the same mall. This was for two reasons. The first was that I knew about “the anime,” and this made me very valuable to a small down local mall in the 90’s. The second was that the video game store wasn’t hiring.
The manager was a typical type-A boss who was only fun when he would talk to me about guys he liked, and sometimes musicals. The assistant manager, Ryan, was a rather decent looking dude in his late 20’s or early 30’s who was very friendly, and a bit of a flirt. With me.
And we’re back to watching that horror movie and screaming at the screen for me to get out of there.
YOU ARE A CHILD.
HE IS AN ADULT.
AND ALSO YOUR BOSS?!
WHAT THE FUCK, RUN!
I was currently dating my rapist so it’s not like I was doing great in the decision department, and trauma is blood in the water as sharks are to bad men.
But wait, it gets better.
Ryan had a 3-year-old daughter.
We’re taught to believe that men with families are inherently good. A single dad with custody of his kid? That’s a state-approved man right there. So instead of seeing a blatant red flag, I saw a man who was being friendlier than others because he knew exactly where the boundaries were, and I trusted he knew not to go beyond them. If you are able to follow me with that line of logic, congratulations, you were also brought up in a patriarchy.
I liked kids and couldn’t say no to extra cash, so I started on-call baby-sitting for him. Shauna, his daughter, loved me. Kids always loved me. Like, clinging to the leg and begging for more bedtime stories kind of stuff. And my need to care for other people as a coping mechanism only made me even more receptive.
It would usually be late at night, sometimes until one or two in the morning. The first few times he came home, paid me in cash, and I went home. Then after the third or fourth late night session, he came home and he didn’t offer to pay me right away.
Shauna was asleep on the couch, and Ryan just walked past her and kept talking to me while walking into his bedroom and turning on the TV instead of reaching for his wallet.
I couldn’t tell you what was on the TV. It was just moving colors. He suggested a massage. I know he was touching my shoulders and neck, but I don’t think anything happened beyond that. My memories don’t feel complete but I’m pretty sure I made it home okay that night.
Oh, whew, just a friendly massage. That’s okay. A little weird, but okay. I got paid and I’m home now so everything is fine. This is all above board and completely reasonable. Definitely nothing to tell anyone about.
It escalated. Ryan used his daughter to get me to do all sorts of things. He needed help on a trip to pick something up for her. He needed company to visit his daughter’s mother. He needed an emergency sitter, oh no wait, his plans were suddenly canceled. Thank goodness I was on-call for him, what a good “friend” I was.
Soon after that, he started to be critical of how I spent my time when I wasn’t around him. I was dressing too provocatively. I was wasting my time with friends if they weren’t girls. I was so much “better” than everyone else, but he was the only person who could appreciate it.
All of this while still working for him at the video store, while spending the rest of my time with my rapist and his friends, while trying to keep up with tutors and maintain a “normal” facade. I went into autopilot, like how you can drive home and not remember it, except for whole weeks. I had to be okay because there wasn’t another option. I spent time with friends. I watched movies. I ate food. I didn’t drink. I didn’t smoke. I had a job. This meant I was okay. This meant I was an adult. This meant I was going to survive.
I never felt bad about my body or my sexuality. That’s a whole chunk of self-esteem that most people fight their whole lives to acquire. You would think being raped would have set me back, made me close off and quell that part of myself. But instead it just killed the love I had for the rest of me. My worth wasn’t in my personality, my intelligence, my kindness, my wit – my body was the only thing that was ever going to matter to anyone. I was only as valuable as the men around me appraised me to be.
I had to look good, but not too good.
Be different, but not too different.
Don’t be like “other girls.”
Don’t complain.
Don’t tell.
The only thing I had gained from my mother’s death was the ability to escape my dad. I felt like if I spoke up, if I admitted what I had done or was doing, that I wouldn’t have that freedom anymore. That something worse would happen. That something else would be taken away. There was always something else that could be taken away.