Jessica's Way: Conversations With Myself

By Jessica Ways

The emotional impact of child abuse is little understood by those who never experience it. It leaves a dark stain within the child's soul, a tangled mass of negative self-beliefs and emotions that can eat away at the child's happiness throughout their life. Worse yet, is the stain of childhood sexual abuse. No other trauma can leave a child in such a deep state of emotional turmoil and darkness than betrayed by those who are supposed to love, nurture, and protect them.

This darkness consumed Jessica's soul. She managed to survive a childhood of sexual abuse by a psychopathic half-brother, her cries for help ignored by those who should have come to her aid. She gave birth to her son at the age of sixteen—himself a progeny of rape by yet another extended family member. Kicked out of her home by her parents, dismissed as a troubled child by authorities, Jessica found herself staring into the eyes of her three-day-old son, her own happiness buried by a sense of worthlessness and a complete distrust of others. And at that moment, the single most important thought of her life bubbled up through the thick, black morass of her emotions: "He's never seen me smile."

A ball of self-loathing and disgust knotted her gut, tears streaming down her cheeks as she apologized profusely for her callousness. She swore to him that he would never know anything but love, that she would never allow him to feel abandoned, ignored, or abused. It was the beginning of a long journey, one with which she struggled for the first years of his life. Out of desperation, she decided to write a letter to herself. A touching letter in which she asked to find herself, to reach out and end the darkness. She finished and sighed, tears of frustration running down her cheeks. She didn't know what to expect, but it certainly wasn't to look down and see her own hand continuing to write—letters turning into words, words turning into sentences—and her with no idea of what was coming next.

The ensuing conversation—a conversation that continues to this day—offered her deep insights into herself, the human spirit, and even consciousness itself. Her emotional recovery began in earnest, though it took years for her to be willing to see the light within. Today, she is a happy mother of four children and wife to an adoring husband of twenty years. She decided to share these early writings in hopes that they might help others who find themselves in that darkness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jessica Ways
• Release date: May 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463798492

Jessica Ways

Jessica Ways is a wife and mother of four who lived through a difficult childhood. She spent the latter years of her youth in darkness; her emotional-being walled off from the world. At the age of sixteen, she gave birth to her first child, a son. It was an event that shook her out of her despair and put her on a path to an emotional and spiritual awakening.

Book preview

Introduction

Dear reader,

I wanted to start by saying hello and thanking you for taking the time to have a look at my work. At this point, I assume you are just scanning the first few pages out of curiosity, perhaps wondering who I am and why you should care about conversations I have had with myself. You may not care, as I am no one in the overall scheme of things. I am a wife and a mother of four, but so are many other women. I guess I could also throw in teacher—as I homeschool my children, and chef—as I am apparently quite handy in the kitchen. These things are not unique, but they are unique for me. I am my children’s mom, my husband’s sweetie, and my family’s chef. It also seems that I have done a marvelous job with all of these things. This brings me great joy, but it will matter less than a hill of beans to you. So then, why would you read this? Why would you read a couple of hundred pages of conversations that some soccer mom had with herself?

Well, besides the aforementioned items, I am also a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. It was a horrid time in my life, four years of rape that tore my soul apart. I became unimportant, meaningless. I lost all sense of self-love and self-worth. During the very time of life that one should be learning the basics of relationships, discovering the warmth of companionship and trust, I was learning to build walls. Walls that were meant to protect my mind and body from a nightmare from which I could not wake. I walled off my body by learning to ignore the physical pain. It’s just pain; it only hurts a minute, became my credo. It was the emotional pain that challenged me. My emotions were the source of my most profound agony, my darkest despair. Without them, there would be no pain worth worrying over. I became dubious of every word, every kind act. I was skeptical of any show of caring or love. I had sequestered my heart behind thick, impenetrable walls of doubt and distrust. No one was allowed through without constant proof of love and approval. Despite this, the tattered thread of love that lifted me out of that abyss was also born from that darkness.

Statistically, the odds of my living a normal life were significantly against me. At a minimum, I should have found myself passing through a series of dysfunctional relationships with baby daddies doling out child support as I struggled to find some sense of self-worth. Worse still, I could have found myself doomed to walking the streets, turning tricks, using sex as a stand-in for self-love. It feels almost special for me to have avoided those fates. As you will see later, that is a difficult view for me to have of myself—special. I find it difficult to even type the word with myself in mind. Fortunately for my lack of self-importance, I don’t believe that had anything to do with it. For me, my saving grace was the birth of my son. He changed my life. And if you find anything helpful within these writings, then you can thank him as well. Before I get into that, though, I will give you a little background; nothing too intense, just an overview of the milestone events. There is no intent to impress you in some macabre manner with stories of the horrors of my childhood. Nor is it meant to portray me as a hero, a back story to tell of how I was wrought from the horrors and made ready to save all children from their demons by the battle with my own. This compendium of my childhood is here to simply allow you some sense of understanding, some tiny taste of the dark waters of my youth. I mean, if you're going to give any credence to these writings, then you should at least have some understanding of the darkness from which they were born.

I have to start with my father. He was a skilled carpenter building homes along the Gulf Coast for years, some of them worth over a million dollars (or so I was told). He was also a four-pack a day smoker and a severe alcoholic. He had a minimum intake of a twelve pack a day, easily reaching a couple of cases on the weekends. His first marriage resulted in the birth of four children. Their real names are not important, so I’m making them up as I go. Jimmy was the oldest. He left home before I was born, the story being that he was run off for being gay. His next child was Evan. A sad case. A lifelong alcoholic and drug abuser who has destroyed his body and his life with his choices. He now lives in government housing, receiving disability checks as he continues to ravage his body with the same vices. Tammy, his third child, left our house when we moved to the country. I was four at the time. My father and her mother had long ago separated, and Tammy left us to live with her mother. I’m not sure of her age then. I do know that she eventually joined the military and was later discharged for being gay—before the days of don’t ask, don’t tell, obviously. Penny came next. She was the last child my father had with his first wife. She was born a week apart from the half-brother my father had with his mistress. That child I’ll just call Skank. Believe me—it’s a fitting name. The birth of those two was followed shortly after by my father finding his wife sleeping with his mistress. Somehow that was just too immoral for his taste, and he left them both.

The other side of this was my mother, a narcissist, and a hypochondriac. She wore rose-colored glasses when it came to everyone around her, ignoring the pain of others because it would take attention away from her own. She applied for a job with my father’s construction company when she was nineteen. He was looking for laborers. The story goes that he had rolled his eyes and proclaimed, I ain’t hiring no damn woman!. At that point, she had cussed him up one side and down the other until he finally relented. I guess she impressed him. They were married a couple of years later. She bore him a son first, Lucas, and then twins five years later; Jenny and Jessica. As you may have gathered from the cover, I am Jessica.

As I mentioned before, we moved to the country when I was four. That we included my mother, myself, Jenny, Lucas, Evan, Tammy, and Skank. Penny was also there on an occasion though she bounced between alcoholic parents. Notice this list does not include my father. He refused to move. The property my mother had purchased was rural to say the least. The closest town had a population of three thousand, hardly large enough to supply him with the volume of work he was use to, and it was a fifty-minute drive to any urban center. He stayed put where he was at, and, as such, became an absentee father, showing up to make us work or to punish us for the latest perceived wrong—depending on his mood. What I didn’t know then was that that simple act was probably the greatest gift the man ever gave me.

The early years in the country are mostly a blur. I was young, and the early memories are sketchy. I do remember all of us living in a small camper for the first year. It contained a single room designed for three or four people for a short time. The seven of us lived in it for most of a year. Sleeping arrangements were a challenge. We eventually replaced the camper with a trailer that had seen better days. We also began raising pigs and chickens every year. I was made caretaker. I was never certain how that decision came to pass. I was the smallest child of the bunch—even my twin was larger than I. I was lugging fifty-pound bags of feed around by the time I was seven. Not Skank, not Evan, not Lucas, not Tammy or Jenny, just me. I was also assigned to be the chef around that same time. Again, no one else, just me. My brother and sister’s childhood was joyous by comparison. Their only chores were the occasional yard work, perhaps peeling bark off some logs for fence posts or running some fencing—but that was rare. Most of their days were spent freely, doing as they pleased. To this day, they look back on their childhood fondly. Those days were the beginning of my feeling unimportant. I was my mother’s slave, destined to carry the workload for the house before I had even hit puberty.

During those years, my favorite fantasy became the idea of being a mom. I had no reasoning for it. It was simply a dream that I held close to my heart. I wanted to care for a child. I wanted to nurture. As a means of practice, I would put sand in my cat’s eyes just so I could remove it. I know, weird, huh? I’m not sure why the cat never clawed my eyes out in return, but she didn’t. She would quietly lay in my lap while I cleaned the sand away. Perhaps she sensed my needs.

The universe must have heard my pleas because it responded by placing a niece in my care at the ripe old age of nine. Her name was Jasmine. She was the child of Evan and a girl from down the street – Audrey. Evan and Audrey married when they were both in their mid-twenties and shared their passion for alcohol and other drugs from the outset. After a few miscarriages, Audrey managed to carry Jasmine to term. It wasn’t really a point of celebration. They were not trying to have a child. As one might guess, neither of them were parent material. Jasmine was only days old when they began dropping her off with whoever would take her, leaving her with babysitters for days or weeks at a time. In the process, I became little momma, caring for Jasmine more often than not. For me, it was a dream come true. It was also about that time that my mother began calling me a streetwalker. Again, I never understood why. I seldom understood my mother.

The closest thing I had to a caring parent was my fraternal grandmother. She was my Granny, and she was the only adult in my life that treated me with any sense of being special. What I did not know then was that she and my mother were waging a constant emotional battle with me caught in the middle. Granny made me feel special, yes, but she also made sure that I knew no one else felt the same, especially not my mother. Of course, Granny’s attempts as subverting my mother’s love for me might not have worked if my mother had not been a self-centered narcissist. As it were, I felt no one else loved me but Granny. She died when I was ten, and I was inconsolable, save for one person. For reasons unknown to me to this day, the only person I wanted to be with on the day of her funeral was Skank. He hugged me tightly the whole day, carrying me with him everywhere he went. We had never been close before that, we certainly aren’t close now, but on that day I needed him. That bond grew over the next year.

There was something I didn’t know at that time. I didn’t know what being close could mean to those of lesser character. Apparently, Skank saw our closeness as the beginning of some sick and twisted relationship, though I was a child, and he was twenty-one. He raped me for the first time when I was eleven. It quickly became a regular occurrence. I was his sex toy, raped at his whim. I made the mistake of telling my sister about it the day it first happened and told Lucas a few days later. Skank quickly corrected me on this. He had seen me petting his dog and realized that I had a soft spot for it. He created an opportunity to get me alone and showed me what could happen. He called his dog over and smiled as he shot the poor thing in the head. His only words were, Don’t do stupid things like talk. He made his point well. I did not say another word about it for two years. He continued to use me as he pleased, and I suffered in silence. The following year I missed two consecutive periods and feared that I might be pregnant. I told him. I think I was too afraid not to. For that crime, he killed my dog and laid it by our steps as a warning. He was such a lovely man. Fortunately for me, I miscarried that child. I’m not sure what he would have done if I had carried the