Forgiveness

"Don't burden other people with your problems." ... I remember hearing that as a kid, but I didn't know what it meant until I was like twelve.

I remember my aunt that I was staying with at the time telling me, (with her long finger all up in my face) "people have their own issues , nobody wants to be bothered with yours... some stuff you need to keep to yourself... what goes on in this house, stays in this house." So what did I do, I told everybody ! But it was then I realized her words were some of the realist I've ever heard. She told my daddy (sisters father) that I had been going to my granny and telling her that she was "mistreating" us, my sister and I, "you better check them heifers... They staying up in my house..." Blah blahh blahh and he did nothing. He never defended us when she called us out of our names, and from then own, I kept EVERYTHING to myself. As a preteen I had developed this attitude that, MY problems were my own and it's not like anybody is going to do anything to help/fix them anyway. 

That very next summer I started being molested. Thirteen years old, Terrified! "I'm going to tell... Who am I going to tell? Will they even believe me? What if he tries to kill me? What if he does it to someone else? My momma will kill him and go to jail" ... So the silence began! This went on for three years. As I got older I kind of saw myself as being "the protector" of my little sister. It sounds dumb, but I thought as long as it was happening to me, it wouldn't happen to her. I use to wrap myself up like a burrito, in a comforter and sleep in front of the bedroom door so that he couldn't come inside the room.

Three years after all of this, I'm a sophomore in college, and STILL holding on to this. Until one week I just kept having dreams about him. In one of the dreams we were physically fighting because he had made everybody think I was lying , and that I was just trying to tear his family part. In another, he was just chasing me the entire time. In the last dream I had that week, I'd walked into my sisters room and he was standing next to her bed. I woke up in tears. I cried for two days straight, trying to piece the words together to ask my sister if he'd ever touched her. Well I finally did it, via Facebook chat (I was too much of an emotional wreck to talk to anyone), and after a lot of beating around the bush, she told me he had been molesting her as well. I was sooo furious. I told her that we had to let our momma and step-dad know. She was not trying to hear that. She did not want to say anything, and she wasn't going to say anything. "You know momma crazy... I'm not saying nothing." I didn't care, we had to let this go. One night when both of our parents were at home , I called my mommas phone and made them go into my sisters room and put me on speaker phone, and I let it all out. Of course she was mad at us for not telling her in the beginning, but both of out fears were that she would try to kill him, end up in prison, and then that leaves us where? ... Exactly !

For a VERY long time I blamed myself for what happened to my sister. Its my responsibility to make sure that my siblings are safe when my momma isn't around. I could've stopped it from happening to her , if I would've just spoken up in the beginning , and I didn't. So that burdened me for a long time but reshaped my negative way of thinking. No, you don't have to sit up and tell everybody every little thing that's wrong with you, but some stuff needs to be told. You never know what kind of blessing you can be in someone else's life, if you just speak up! 

I'm not going to say that I've completely forgiven him for what he has done to me or especially to my sister, but I'm continuing to make steps toward total forgiveness. Not for the sake of him and his family, but for the sake of me and my family. 

If you're reading this, Pray for my sister and I as we continue to forgive.