I'll never forget those harsh words spoken to me when I was five years old (the summer I turned six) by my oldest half-brother as he paced angrily back and forth through our hallway while I was being given a bath by my mother when she came home from work and found out that he had sexually abused me.
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Those words struck me harder than the actual sexual abuse itself, I believe, almost to the point that I had blacked out the incident until I reached puberty and I was painfully made aware by my twin sister and my other older half-brother that, yes, it really happened, that it wasn't just a horrible figment of my imagination. The only part of the abuse that I remember was being put to bed in a twinbed with him, who, by the way, was 17 and a half at the time, and my twin sister was put to bed in the living room with my older half-brother in the fold-out bed that served as a couch during the day, and my older half-sister, instigating it all, slept with her boyfriend in my mother's bed until my mother came home from work. My half-brother lifted up my white cotton panties and that must be where I blacked out. But, my twin sister reminds me that I was later taken to the hospital for a urinary tract infection while she waited at our aunt and uncle's house across the street from the hospital. And the family talk my mom had with all five of us in the living room, later, that if it ever happened again she would kick them out of the house.
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My two older half-brothers joined the army not too long after that and my older half-sister got pregnant about a year later when she was only 15. Thinking back on it all I wish my mother would have put all of us in family therapy or individual therapy. I know it must have been humiliating for my older siblings, not to mention my twin sister and me. I don't blame my oldest half-brother, because I know he had been severely abused as a child by his father. My other half-brother was abused too and my older half-sister was sexually abused. However, I was 17 once, and even though I suffered abuse as a child, I knew better than to inflict any pain on a child and even if you would put a gun to my head and try to force me I wouldn't, not then, not now.
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I was driving from New York back to North Carolina with my twin sister and a mutual acquaintance. I say 'acquaintance' because that was only the second time my twin sister and I had met her. We had taken her on a mercy mission to Mount Sinai Hospital to get proper medical help that she somehow felt she couldn't get here in North Carolina. I was listening to a radio station somewhere outside of Washington D.C. and the person speaking on the radio, who, I believe, was a preacher, was saying that we are all born liars. He said every child who comes into this world is a liar, a mother will hear her baby crying an awful cry, then all of a sudden when she picks up her baby he or she will stop crying and start gooing. I was in total disbelief. I couldn't believe what I was hearing and how disturbing those words fell upon my ears.
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I quickly changed the station!
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I believe exactly the opposite. A child is not acting out or being selfish or lying when he or she cries. Such propaganda gives a license to pedophiles and those who like to prey on children. A child is innocent at birth. It takes a sociopath to believe otherwise.
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I only have learned this through my own awareness and by reading books by Alice Miller, John Bradshaw, and Christiane Northrup. A child isn't being selfish when he or she cries or is hungry or needs his or her physical needs met. It's very simple.
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It's strange that I was affected more by the name I was called than the actual abuse itself. And I even recall thinking back on that time later, when I was a young woman only 22 years old and I had an emotional breakdown ending up in a psychiatric ward and later diagnosed with Schizoaffective disorder, that Satan, himself, had entered into me at that tender age of five. My brother must have doggedly repeated "Liar" a hundred times while I was being bathed and crying.
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What a prophet he was. I set out, unconsciously, to be the best liar I could be. Just look at me now. My whole life has been one, big, fat lie.
