Ayn Rand has long been a favorite author of mine. Today, when I was trying to calm myself enough, to not have every word that I write, be a word of anger. I need to tell you what I am thinking, calmly and her quote helps me to be successful with that objective. When I read in the paper, see on the news, the stories of more and more people being charged/convicted of sexual assault, It’s hard not to be frustrated. Please read what I’m thinking today; it’s so important to someone, maybe even someone you love.
When our sons, daughters, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, sisters and brothers find the courage to come forward, they must be believed. If they come to you, to me, to their teacher, grandmother, mother, father….they must be believed. I talked to a friend the other day, who had just found out about someone that was being convicted of a sexual crime. He said to me, “I just am struggling to believe it.” We all struggle to believe, that’s how they get away with it. Children go to adults and confide in them and adults can’t believe.. How do you take what you know and love about anyone and balance it with a deprivation that shakes your soul? How do you come to terms? How do you pick sides? You pick the children…. If not us, not you, then who?
Within the last year, I had someone tell me, that my abuser had told their mother what had happened to me. This person wondered if it was really that bad… The thought sickens me that 48 years later, the child in me is still not believed. I never told anyone, aside from a classmate when I was little, until I was 18, when I told my children’s father. I told no one for another 12 years. I thought about it; I looked around my small world and wondered who I could trust? Who? I had people that loved me, but to believe something so bazaar, so unnatural, so sick…. I told no one, not the pastor that I admired, not my mother, not my favorite teacher and not even my grandmother.. I never had the courage to tell, so never had to sit in a courtroom, talk to a judge, or an opposing attorney… I can’t imagine that much courage in a child.. that much courage in the parents of that child.
Abuse of children is not racist, is not sexist, doesn’t adhere to Christian or non-Christian lines. Abuse of children opens it’s arms wide and accepts anyone and everyone; it is like the anti-Christ of the utopia we would like the world to be.
Believe the children; it’s our job to protect them; if not us, not you, then who?
Peace…
Loving and Surviving 
You are 100% correct. That pain that was inflicted is there all the time and every time something comes back to reopen that wound, it is just like it is happening all over again. If people could just get some idea of what this type of abuse does to a child; it kills the person you would have been.
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I wonder who I would have been sometimes, how nice it would have been to grow up normal, whatever that means. 😊 That’s why it’s so important to love who we are in spite of it. You are enough, nothing to prove. Hugs.
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