Unlocking Rapunzel

By Anissa Eve

Unlocking Rapunzel is an autobiography that mirrors the fairytale story of Rapunzel. Anissa is a long-haired girl who grew up confined by the walls of her mother's control and her father's absence. Through painful experiences to self-love, this incredible true story inspires a transformation journey. It's not until Anissa discovers her strengths and cuts her locks is when she realizes she has the power to set herself free. Even in times of total despair there is still always hope of a happily ever after.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781543982398

Book preview

Self-Love

PART 1

Long Locks

CHAPTER ONE: Fairytale

Once upon a time in the heart of a beautiful city there was an enchantress named Valentina. She was full of hope and promise but was also wounded for her 19 years. She had come from deep emotional pain and had no concept of self- love. One day, she thought she met her prince charming, so she ran away with him. She always dreamed of having a daughter. One evening her dream came true and she received her wish. She had a daughter named Rapunzel and she decided she would never cut her hair and they would live happily ever after.

My mother, the enchantress Valentina, came from immigrant parents. Her mother was a Mexican homemaker from Guadalajara, and her father an Italian craftsman from Rome. Her father was a tall, handsome, lean, strong, and strict Italian man with dark hair and green eyes. He was an artist as well and made numerous beautiful murals for churches and other businesses. Her mother was a beautiful dark-haired and dark-eyed Mexican woman who was very religious and traditional. Physical, verbal, and emotional abuse was part of normal child raising in that time. Her father would beat her mother and all the children. Her mother would stand compliant when her father would turn the beatings onto the children. When she was 19, she cut her long dark hair into a short bob. She came home, and her father beat her for cutting her hair. As a teenager my mother experienced the first of a series of rapes from random acquaintances in which she believed were her fault, so she just ignored the trauma. Coming from all this physical, emotional, and sexual trauma created unresolved pain that would destroy the deepest relationship she had—the daughter who would be everything she wanted to be and more.

On the evening of March 6, 1980, I came somersaulting into the world with a kind of ease and a full head of dark hair. The eye to eye connection between my mother and I was instantaneously deep. She was beautiful, with large brown eyes and curly dark hair. She named me Anissa which means complete and Eve which means life. Valentina held me in her arms and vowed to never cut my hair nor hurt me the way she had been hurt. She wished for me to have a complete life; However, I would become her Rapunzel.

In the first few years of my life, while appearances looked perfect on the outside, I experienced the beginnings of a dysfunctional family. Control, abuse, and forced codependency were daily experiences. The first few memories I have were ones that enforced fear and lack of protection and safety. As a young toddler of about 2 years of age, my mother, brother, and I would frequently play a game in her bed. My mother would cover the bed sheets over all of us and tell us the monster was coming. She would secretly use her own hand to pretend it was the monster plying at the bed sheets to get to us. She would say take the one with the blue eyes! I would go into a panic knowing that she was referring to me since both my mother and brother had brown eyes. My panic would then subside while she would begin to laugh at the cruel joke. While most parents are trying to convince their toddlers that monsters are not there, my mother was convincing me that not only were they in fact there, but that they were there for me, and she was helping them find me.

At about the same age, my parents bought me a tall bed for me to sleep on. It was so high, and I would frequently roll off the bed in the middle of the night. One night, I fell off the bed so hard and I hit my head. I ran down the dark hall to my parent’s room for help. I knocked, and cried, and cried and knocked. There was no response from either of them. Exhaustion hit, and I finally gave up. Thoughts about being unloved and my parent’s possible death plagued my irrational toddler mind until I fell asleep on the floor. These seemingly small incidents were setting me up for feelings of instability and fear.

The nights I couldn’t fall back to sleep, I remember looking out my window at the night sky and talking to God, asking Him to bring me home. The response was that this was my temporary family, things will be hard but that I will come out on top, and that I can’t come home just yet but to be patient because I have work to do. The restless 3-year-old in me reluctantly agreed and fell asleep.

When I was about 4 years old, I went to a friend’s house for a sleepover. She was my best friend who lived just down the street from us. As my mother and her mother sat chatting, my friend and I decided to play. We were running around, and in no time, I tripped and tumbled down a few stairs and hit a large, sheer glass coffee table. I ran to my mother asking if she saw any blood on my face. Just then, I felt heat on my skin and my mother looked shocked. She grabbed me and ran me to the kitchen sink. She frantically ran water on my face, and I saw chunks of blood pouring all over. My response was that it looked like squished tomatoes in the sink. I maintained a sense of humor until I realized how afraid my mother was. Her eyes widened, and her voice became breathy while she wrapped me in a blanket and rushed me into the car. I began to repeatedly ask, what’s going to happen to me? as I saw my mother’s fear grow. When we got to the emergency room, I remember little. I vaguely recall falling asleep and for a moment waking to see what appeared to be a needle and thread sewing up my face. I received 25 stitches on and inside my cheek. In my first few years of life, I already had many experiences that made me feel unsafe. I remember feeling like life was chaotic, unpredictable, unsafe, and scary.

Around this same year, Valentina decided I was going to read a Dr. Seuss book. I had not been taught how to read yet, but somehow, I was going to hear my mother read it one time and I would then have the perfect reading skills. She sat me down on her lap one night and opened the book Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb. She read it through and then told me to do it. I had not even been taught phonetics yet so naturally reading