We always lived in tiny little California towns that were easy to hide in. The kind that if you were driving thru and you blinked you’d miss it. We never had a television, they never took the newspaper, and we rarely listened to the radio because the news would be on and we weren’t allowed to listen to the news.
When I was seven years old, my Daddy was unemployed again and I guess we got evicted because we moved in with a “friend of the family.” Good ‘ole Uncle Larry and Aunt June and their three older boys. We lived there for six long months.
The abuse with Larry and his sons didn’t start right away, but soon it was everyday, usually multiple times a day. Larry would force me to have oral sex with him and his boys forced regular sex. I don’t know how my parents never knew, but somehow they just didn’t.
Soon after we moved in with Larry and June, the ritualistic abuse started. As far as I can recall, my parents were never part of it. But it was always at night, there was always chanting from people in robes surrounding the altar like stone I was always placed on. I was caged like an animal, cut and forced to bleed and foreign objects were placed into my body thru my vagina and rectum. Multiple people had sex with me while everyone watched and chanted. I was so frightened and so alone. And again, so ashamed. My Daddy finally got a job and we moved out of that house, to another town. Soon, somehow I blocked the memories of that six months, not to be remembered until many years later.
When I was in the seventh grade, we moved to Mammoth Mountain in the Northern Sierras in California. My sister, brother, and I were beaten one day for wandering off in the snow. My father told us he was trying to teach us a lesson about the harshness of the weather and how quickly it could kill us. The threat was real because when he found us, a blizzard had set in and we were all asleep in the snow. We would have died if he hadn’t found us. But the welts the belt left all over our bodies were unnecessary. The next day in school before gym class, I didn’t want to change.
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