MyStory

It was April of 1979, we were living in a small house 15 miles from town and I loved it there. To my knowledge, life was wonderful. The day had been blessed with all the glory of Spring. It was around 75 degrees with a hint of wind whispering through the tree branches and whisping the soft white clouds across a baby blue sky. The birds sang their love songs and the flowers opened their charm to the bees that happily danced in the sunlight. Life could not be better.
My daughter was 14 months old and as smart as any child could possibly be. She was the delight of my life. My husband was at work and even though there had been a lot of financial insecurity, I was comfortable that everything was going to work out.
I heard our car as my husband pulled into the driveway and the wonderful day was shattered when he came into the house and, like so many times before, started pulling the pictures off the wall and tossing them onto the bed. One more time, we were moving without notice. What could have possibly gone wrong that would prompt this erratic decision. I wish that he would talk to me, there might be some other solution, why do we have to move again?
We stayed with his brother and family for a few weeks until we found a trailer house in a small town in eastern Oklahoma. It was here that my husband started staying gone for days and nights at a time. I was alone. I didn't even have a church to go to. The only one I could cling to was my daughter, and cling I did.
After a few months went by, we moved to a house at the edge of a graveyard. Now, I have always believed that if a person was bad when they died they would go to hell and could not return to earth to torment the survivors, and if they had gone to Heaven why would they want to return to earth? The idea of living beside a graveyard did not bother me, but because it did bother a lot of people, the rent was cheap.
By this time, my husband had gone to work for a man that I will refere to as 38 because that was his age at the time. 38 seemed to be a good person. He was polite enough but had an aire of security that I did not see in my husband. My husband was 18 so it is normal for a full grown man to have an aire of more security, but I was young and naive and unaware of the danger signs that were present in the flashing security of 38.
My husband, too, was impressed by the suave character of 38 and spent, hours and days and nights and weeks, all his time with him. It was like being single in a strange land, my husband was NEVER at home anymore. I kept myself entertained with the neighborhood kids and various critters that I had obtained from my husband's outings in the woods with 38.
Now, 38 had a cousin, who I will call 42, you guessed it, he was 42 years old. Unlike 38, 42 was loud and annoying but seemed to be an extention of 38 so he was tolerated. Here again, I was young and naive, I never had a clue of the pending dangers. I did, however, get a wake-up call, litterally.
It was just after my husband had left with 38 to go to work that I heard the front door open and close gently. I thought maybe my husband had forgotten something and had returned to get it so I didn't bother to get out of bed. I knew that someone had entered my bedroom, I could hear the breathing, but it was irregular, almost spasmodic.
Fear gripped my soul, I knew it was not my husband. I slowly opened my eyes to see my assailant. It was 42. My mind was flooded with questions and a keen awarness of my vulnerability. The man was over 6 feet tall and weighed around 275 lbs. Physically, I knew that I didn't stand a chance of beating this man but that didn't keep me from fighting. I knew that 42 was going to have his way with me and there was nothing that I could do about it but I fought. I fought with everything I had in me until, while I lay on the bed bruised and battered with his hands tight around my neck, darkness swirling around the room as I could feel myself passing out and hoping that I would so as not to be aware of the violation I knew was going to take place, his voice penetrated the fog in my head with the most horrible words, words that echoed through the chambers of my being, "If you won't give me what I want, I will take it from your baby."
"My God!!", I screamed from deep within, "She's not even 2 years old yet". How could he even consider such a thing? She's just a baby. My mind spinning, twisting, grasping the reality that this man would be capable of hurting my baby, I could not let that happen. I knew, that as far as the sexual assault, I would be OK. I knew that I would lose a part of myself that I would never get back, but I could not let him hurt my baby. I quit fighting. I yielded to him with all the passion of an actress, with the cunning of a lioness, I would do what I had to do to protect the pure innocence of my baby. I would play the games; I was woman; and suddenly, I WAS COLD.