Five Minutes A Day – Day 2

See, this is what happens when you aren’t accustomed to writing every day! I almost allowed the day to slip away without doing my small stones over at A Whispered Wind and today’s FMAD. I promise, I will get back into the flow of this!

Day 2 Prompt: Story

Let me tell you a little story and then, dear readers, you can decide if it is fact or fiction.

It all began back in 1971 on a trip to a fish hatchery in West Virginia. Two young girls joined their father on this trip and from all accounts, it was a glorious time. The youngest of the two, Elle, finished the the evening by drinking from a water fountain before she, her sister Tamara and her father returned home. The next day, while playing outside with Tamara, Elle felt ill and went inside. She had a fever, so her mother called to the doctor to find out what to do. As was the norm in those days, she’d been told to give Elle some baby aspirin and put her to bed. This turned out to be a disastrous decision. Some time later, Elle began to have seizures and her parents rushed her to the hospital. Elle was then airlifted to another hospital on the other side of the state. By this time, Elle had fallen into a coma.

Unknown to Elle at the time, she was in the children’s ward of the UVA hospital in Charlottesville, Virginia with four other children. Three of those children died while Elle was still in a coma. By the time she came to a week later, the other child had suffered brain damage from the high fevers and seizures. The doctors weren’t hopeful about Elle’s diagnosis after what had happened to the other four children, but were astonished to learn that Elle would be fine, just a bit of a “nervous” stomach.

However, Elle wasn’t fine. Elle had no memory. Not of why she was in the hospital, nor of her parents. Nothing was familiar. Elle was assured that, “yes, these are your parents and yes, you will be going home with them.” And so home she went. Once there, she didn’t recognize her sister Tamara and she had a new baby brother. Elle tried to tell her mother that she didn’t recognize anyone, but was told she was just being a silly child. Mother showed her pictures of herself and her family, but they meant nothing to little Elle. At the age of five, Elle would have to begin all over again, in a world she didn’t know and with people she wasn’t sure she could trust.

---

There you have it, dear readers – my little story, but it doesn’t end there. Tomorrow I will continue the story and integrate the daily prompt into it. 

If you’d like to join me for this Five Minutes A Day, please feel free to do so. You can post it on your blog or use my comments below. All I ask is that if you do this on your own blog, that you link to my blog and be sure to give full credit to Kate Montaung (you can click her link to go to her page). Have a blessed day, me lovelies!

The Daily Me (Journal) Memories 1 – 01/02/17

Today’s prompt comes from Journaling Your Way Home via Writing Our Way Home, in which Kaspa has asked us to write a memory from the timeline of our life that we wrote yesterday. (Note: this is taken from an e-book which I purchased as part of this e-course. If you’d like to join in, you can purchase the course at the Journaling Your Way Home address above)

Why’d They Choose Me?

Looking back on my childhood, I’ve often wondered why those three boys back in grade school chose me to sexually harass. What was it about me that made them feel it was okay to do that to me? Did they notice something about me that made me easily accessible to their perversions? Was it even about me? Or were they just seeing what all they could get away with? Twelve-year-olds. I still can’t wrap my head around it.

I do know it made me feel dirty, cheap and insignificant. I also felt like I deserved it. I never reported it at school and I never told my parents. Truthfully, I didn’t want anyone to know. It became my own shameful secret, but it wasn’t just mine. Those three boys told plenty of other students and my three best friends knew because they were there when it began. I was only eleven, nearly twelve. They stole my innocence and childhood from me. No child that young should have to know the disgusting, sexual things I knew. I still don’t even know how those boys knew those things. Probably from porn magazines and/or movies.

It didn’t even stop after grade school. Those three boys harassed me all through high school too. I wanted so desperately to tell my 9th grade English teacher what a nasty son she had, but I never did. Who would have believed me over a school teacher’s son? Years on, the other two became local cops. Can you imagine any young woman feeling safe if they’d know the way those two carried on as teenagers? The school teacher’s son was one of the local potheads, not sure where he ended up after high school. I do know that when one of the other two who’d become cops died last year, he was given a hero’s funeral and people all over the area came to praise him. If they’d only known what I knew.

I know that’s when my psychological problems began. I became a bulimic because I wanted to be thin like all the ‘good’ girls in school, the ones who were fawned over but not sexually harassed. I was no longer the happy-go-lucky kid. I became withdrawn, dark, and couldn’t stand to be around people. I wasn’t suicidal, but I did cut myself often to get rid of the pain I felt inside. I still have scars on my thighs. I didn’t want anyone to see what I’d done, so I hid it away. I hid a lot of things in those years.

That Summer of ’79 only confirmed my suspicions that it must have been something about me. That was the summer that my sister’s then-boyfriend backed me into the alcove behind the staircase at home and molested me. It was 4th of July and it was supposed to have been a fun time with family and friends.

Dad was barbecuing in the backyard, mom was making salads in the kitchen, my sister was outside with family and my brother was upstairs. I remember mom had put on some Elvis music. I went through the hallway from the living room headed toward the kitchen. I got to the doorway of the dining room and got pulled into that alcove. I remember Little Sister was playing and J whispered into my ear, “Big sister does. Does little sister?” I can’t even listen to that song anymore without remembering his hands all over me and his tongue down my throat. I hate to think what might have happened if my brother hadn’t come down the stairs. He let me loose and I fled to the backyard. I never told a soul what he did and he acted like nothing had happened when he joined my sister a few minutes later.

I think the shame I felt in those days led me to be promiscuous later on in my life. I was looking for love and acceptance, and I didn’t care what sleazy guy I ended up with to get them. Of course, I never found either and I only hate myself more because of it. I learned self-loathing at the tender age of twelve and it persisted until about three years ago when I decided to be celibate and start loving myself.

 

The Daily Me (Journal) Memories – 11/26/2016

Today’s prompt comes from 100 Inspirational Journal Prompts by Melissa Bolton @ The Mogul Mom

Your favorite childhood memory.

I’ve explored this before on my blog, but I will do it again. All of my favorite childhood memories involve my paternal grandmother and my two aunts, Jo and Betty, who lived with her. For many years in my early teens, I spent a month every summer with them. At home, I was mostly ignored, but with grandma, I felt wanted and special. She taught me how to tend a garden, how to can food, and how to be one with nature. She was an amazing steward for the Earth.

Since I was a quiet child, they’d often come looking for me and find me curled up in a corner somewhere with a book in my hands. Jo supplied the books. She had shelf after shelf filled with them. Betty provided the music we’d listen to. Usually Neil Diamond. Evenings were spent listening to a talk radio show on AM radio. Life was simple, filled with hard work, and peaceful evenings.

I always dreaded when the month was up and it was time to go home. Some summers, I’d be home a week and beg to go stay with my Aunt Jenny, my mom’s sister. That would only last a couple of weeks and I’d be home again. Back to being ignored. Then soon after, off to school again and being harassed.

Creative Questions 16 – Childhood Memories

CQ 16:  Please share a sweet childhood memory?

All of my fondest childhood memories come from the summers I spent with my paternal grandmother between the ages of ten through fourteen. Grandma was a loving, giving woman. She enjoyed simple, yet hard-working things – gardening, milking cows, raising chickens, canning and cooking. Leisure for her was snapping beans on the back porch or listening to her favorite am radio shows in the evenings after cleaning up the kitchen. Anyone who showed up at grandma’s house would be welcomed with a hug and a cooked meal. I don’t think there was ever a moment that a kettle of something wasn’t simmering on the stove.

Grandma also made me feel important. She made my favorite dishes, saved me jars of chunky applesauce, and whipped up batches of pistachio pudding for me every single year that I stayed with her. There were no televisions in her house, but she knew I loved to read and I was always welcomed to browse my aunts’ bookshelves for something to read (two aunts lived with her). Early mornings, I’d help her with the chickens and cows. By mid-morning, we’d been in the garden weeding or picking vegetables. When it was too hot to be outside, we’d go inside, drink lemonade, listen to music on the radio and I’d read while grandma prepared food. She didn’t like anyone fussing around her stove. Evenings were spent snapping beans or peeling and coring apples. At night, we’d gather in the living room to listen to her radio shows and of course, I’d always have a book in tow.

My memory isn’t what it used to be and it fads more and more each day, so I don’t have any specific memories. Just the lingerings of my time with grandma and what we routinely did each day, because with grandma, each day was a routine. She never swayed from her daily chores, even when she was tired or ill. That’s just the kind of woman she was. Always going about the business of doing things. She taught me that and to this day, I function better when I have routines and something to always be doing.

I didn’t get to spend the last summer of her life with her. In 1981, she moved from her farm back to the small town where she raised some of her kids. That summer, her kids refused to allow her to plant a garden because they said she was too old. I did visit a few times that summer and autumn, but I saw how “wilted” she’d become. Gardening was her life’s blood and she was cut off from it. By the following April, grandma passed away in her sleep. I still cherish the values she instilled in me and I’ve missed her every day since.