True Trauma

When I was 2 years old my parents divorced. For the next three years I split my time between my mom in Midlothian and my father in Chicago while they went through a custody fight. During that period my father began sexually abusing me. It was horrifying! He threatened to hurt my mom if I told anyone about it. But it was too hard to keep the secret – I had been having nightmares about him and I shared it with mom.

My mother was simply furious. She made the abuse documented by doctors and than she filed police reports. However, it didn’t seem to help the custody case. Neither the judge nor my dad’s lawyers believed me. I was scared when dad was still getting unsupervised visits with me. Once when he tried to take me to his house for a visit I tried to jump out of the car. By law my mom still had no right to object dad’s visits. Seeing how scared I was convinced my mom to do something about it. One night she told me she had decided that the only way to keep my dad away from me was to run away. For the next nine years my mom and I were fugitives.

My mom said that we had to leave town without telling anyone – not my grandparents or my aunts – where we were going. So with only few clothes in a bag and my Barbie dolls we went to the airport.

I was young then and it felt like an adventure. For more than a year we traveled all over the country, by bus and plane and lived in motels in the places we stopped. And since we figured that dad and law enforcement would be trying to find us we both changed our identities and got new birth certificates.

To make ends meet my mom took restaurant jobs while I stayed with the babysitter or when I was old enough went to school. I attended schools only for a few weeks or months before we would move on again. My mother worried that if we stayed in the same place too long we would get caught. So in a single year we lived in about 15 different towns. It was hard to erase the past but it felt good to be safe.

By the time, I was six we were in Tucson and my mom said we would stay. We had been running for so long that she felt anyone who had been looking for us would have given up. I was psyched. By this time I was desperate to have a normal home and family. I enrolled in a school where I could stay long time.

Soon my mom met a guy. She confided him about our past and he understood that running was the only chance we had to be safe. When they got married my life seemed to get back to normal. We were a great family. For the next few years I spent time like any other girl, writing poetry, watching TV shows, making good friends. No one suspected a thing.

Then, when I was 14, my past caught up with me. One day we got a flyer in the mail from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The question “Have you seen us?” was printed above pictures of missing kids. I was shocked to see one was me there. There was a childhood photo of me with my real name. I looked different from what I did as a kid. My mom asked if I wanted to run again but said no. I didn’t want to change the present state of things because I haven’t lived normal life for so long. Still my mom thought we should go away for a few days. And we did. But when I returned to school the next week, three cops were waiting for me! While I was out talking with friends, a girl showed the flyer to the principal and said she thought the picture was of me. I kept denying being a girl on the flyer. I never felt so helpless. The cops took me to the police station and interrogated me for five hours. They thought I was brainwashed to hate my dad and run away with mom. The policemen said my mom had run off without me again. That night they sent me to a group home for troubled teens. It seemed crazy that I was being treated like a criminal. I knew my mom hadn’t left without me. She had always said that she would turn herself in if we were caught and the next day she really did.

The following eight months were a nightmare. My mom was charged with kidnapping and was sentenced to three years in prison. Meanwhile I was sent to a group home and then into foster care in Illinois, since that’s where the custody had to be settled with my dad.

I had to meet with my dad weekly and seeing him was disgusting. He still denied the abuse. Even though 10 years had passed I still didn’t want anything to do with him. I loved my mom and missed her a lot.

Eventually the judge gave my stepfather custody of me, allowing me to return to Tucson. I was so glad to be back. I was still supposed to visit my father but he knew I hated him so he agreed to stop visits.

Then, when my mom got two years’ probation instead of jail time I finally felt free of past. I’m so grateful that mom did what she could to keep me safe and grant me a new family.