My earliest memories are not birthday parties. They are holes.
I remember D showing me a small opening in the wall that looked into a bathroom. I was three, maybe four. I remember seeing things I did not understand and feeling confused about why I was being shown.
We moved to Oklahoma before I started kindergarten, but the holes followed.
In the first house, there was another opening that looked into the bathroom. He would tell me to get undressed and dance. I did not understand why. I remember asking him once what he was doing.
“Nothing,” he said.
We moved again, and there was another hole in the bathroom wall.
I cannot explain how hard it is to feel comfortable when all you can think about is someone possibly watching you while you are using the bathroom or bathing. It led to me constantly holding my bladder. I wet my pants well into second grade. I was bullied and teased without mercy.
How do you explain something you do not even understand yourself?
So I buried it.
There are years I cannot remember. Whole places where my childhood should be. Spaces where wonder and safety were supposed to live. Instead, they feel like empty rooms in a darkened house.
For a long time, silence felt safer than truth.
But silence has weight.
It follows you into adulthood. Into relationships. Into mirrors. Into the quiet moments where you finally realize that what happened to you was never something a child should have carried alone.
It took years before I allowed myself to remember and work through some of the pain. Years before I realized families are supposed to protect you. Love you. Make you feel safe.
I carried that secret for thirty years.
Only after my mother passed away, D’s mother too, was I finally able to share the truth with my two full sisters. For the first time, I felt something shift inside me. Not closure. Not peace all at once. But the first crack of light entering a room I had kept locked for decades.
I write this because I know there are others still carrying their own silence.
People who blame themselves. People who question their memories. People who learned to survive before they ever learned how to heal.
To them, I want to say this:
What happened to you does not define your worth.
The things done to you in darkness were never your shame to carry.
Healing is not a straight road. Some days it feels like progress. Some days it feels like grief all over again. But every day you keep going is proof that your story did not end with what hurt you.
I still work every day to overcome the hatred I carried, not only toward him, but toward myself.
But I survived.
Every hard day, I survived.
Every memory, I survived.
The silence, I survived.
And after thirty years, I finally spoke.
Sometimes healing does not begin with forgiveness.
Sometimes healing begins the moment you finally say: “This happened to me.” And then realize you are still standing.