Custom Justice

By Amanda Blackwood and Amanda L Blackwood

It's hard enough to escape human trafficking, but how does someone survive the aftermath of continually being hunted for years to come?

I was young when the abuse started. It came from every angle. Struggling for many years, I wasn't sure I'd ever have a chance at a normal life with real love and true happiness. At the age of 31 I figured I was too old for that sort of thing. I was broken. Then I met the man in Scotland.

 

I'd been abused in the past, but this time I was finally going to have a happy ending. I was moving to a foreign country to get married to a police officer I'd known for seven years. I would finally be happy. I had no idea that my entire life would change once more, and I'd be forced to either subject myself to abuse beyond anything I could ever imagine, or end my life unceremoniously; death by train. The man I thought I loved exploited me beyond comprehension. The damage he left behind will haunt me for the rest of my life. There is no way to seek court justice across international borders against a police officer in a corrupt system. Instead, I seek my own Custom Justice simply by sharing the truth with the world. It's been 10 years since I escaped, beating all odds.

 

Most don't survive. I know that now, I didn't know that then.

 

For paperback options head to Barnes and Noble.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Amanda Blackwood LLC
• Release date: Jun 11, 2021
• ISBN: 9798889925828

Book preview

Chapter One

Juniper  

Richard’s eyes were the kind of blue that would inspire either nightmares or fantasy dreams.  They were of a crystal blue color, almost the same shade as my own fathers.  When I first thought to myself that they were ‘haunting’ eyes I never imagined how right I would be.  I blinked several times to make them vanish and was once more back in the room facing Naomi.

I stared across the musty room at my new therapist, Naomi, telling her all about how my day had gone. As usual, her only response for the next hour would be a high pitched, nasally, drawn out and muffled Hmmmmmmmm with an extra emphasis on the exhalation needed to create the beginning sound. I hated therapists in general.  She was nice enough, and I didn’t have the typical suspicions of her intentions because of how we had met, but I still didn’t trust anyone fully, Naomi included. I’d been through too much to trust blindly.  Naomi knew this.  It was one of the first things I ever told her.  I needed her to know where we stood before we could really begin anything at all.

I’d sat in basically that same spot, in the same position, on the broken couch covered in a dirty blanket, feeling entirely too vulnerable.  There’s no way she could have known that it was in a very similar room in an abandoned mill on top of a dirty blanket when one boy I had known raped me in secret when I was 17 years old.  I’d never told anyone about that, including Naomi.  Instead I told her about the therapist I saw when I was a teen because my parents forced me to, and how the therapist basically told me everything that had happened to me was my fault and that I needed to make the effort to have a relationship with my father in order to fix myself.  Then I was promptly given a prescription for several drugs I didn’t need and sent on my merry little way with my parents.  I had Klonopin, which I understand is supposed to treat seizures and panic disorders.  Paxil was an antidepressant and anxiety treatment.  Prozac, yet another antidepressant, also treats OCD and panic attacks.  If I had actually taken them all I’d have been so drugged up I wouldn’t have known my own name.  Naomi listened to all of this with her occasional high pitched, nasally response of hmmmmm as though I’d said something deeply profound.  Sometimes if I came close to tears, she would make the same exact sound, but at a lower pitch, as though struggling to show sympathy and not really knowing how best to express it aside from a noise instead of words.  She asked finally if that’s where my fear of medications came from.  No, I told her.  That came from when I was four.  Of course I had to elaborate. 

When I was only four years old my mom took both my older brother and myself to the doctor to see what was wrong with us.  She had some friends with unruly kids who had been put on Ritalin and she liked how the kids behaved after that.  Of course she did, I thought to myself as an adult. The kids turned into obedient little zombies.  The doctors diagnosed my brother with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, but they told my mother that I was actually fine, just energetic.  My mother, being the wise woman that she was, decided for herself that the doctors were wrong about me.  There was definitely something wrong with me, she insisted, and the miracle drug of Ritalin would cure it all.  She started breaking my brother’s pills in half and giving them to me.  He had just turned eight in July, so she figured with me being half his age, half his dose would be plenty.  In order to conserve pills, she just didn’t give them to us on the weekends.  As a not-so-random coincidence, that year was also when the sexual abuse started.  My brother molested me.  My much more serious behavioral issues began.

A year later my mom took me back in for another evaluation.  She stopped giving me the Ritalin about a week before that, which pretty much ensured that I would have even more behavioral issues at the doctors office.  At five years old I was given my very own prescription of Ritalin for attention deficit disorder after already having been on the highly addictive drug for over a year.  I was the latest science project slated for observation. 

I told Naomi about some of my fond memories from that time too. I didn’t want to dwell on the bad things constantly, and my automatic defense has always been to figure out ways to add humor.  I’ll laugh at my own pain out of nervousness, but if I can make someone else laugh at something truly funny I feel like I’ve gained a piece of my soul back.  Naomi got to hear about when we would go to the pick your own orchard.  My favorite part was picking strawberries.  I only have a momentary flash of a memory from that, of my mother asking me if I was eating more than I was putting in the basket and me denying it in spite of the red stains all around my mouth.  I’m not eating them, I argued.  She laughed, called me a fibber, and asked if I was eating about half what I was putting in the basket then instead.  I remember I had a hole in the knee of my jeans and there was even a little bit of strawberry juice stain on the fringes from the knee hole.  I wore velcro shoes that day, and I genuinely have no idea what shirt I was wearing, but my mother had on a black and white sleeveless sweater.  My memory from that time is quite vivid. 

I remembered when we would pick corn.  The round laundry basket would sit in a clear area, and my family would go into the corn and start picking ears, then tossing them out to me.  My job would be to pick them up and put them in the basket, being careful to avoid the hurled ears so I wasn’t rendered unconscious.  As I was picking up an ear of corn, another would come at me and land nearby.  I’d run to pick it up in time to have another land near the basket. This went on for a while until one stray ear got a little too much of my attention and I looked up just barely in time to have another land squarely on my forehead, just above my left eye.  I remember falling backward into the trampled earth, and though I don’t remember the tears, I do remember the scream of pure anger that came out of my mouth even before my head hit the ground. 

I remember the little cowboy boots I loved so much. They were a gift from my Uncle in Arkansas. I refused to tell my mom when they were getting too small because I knew they wouldn’t be replaced. We couldn’t afford such things and those boots were an extravagance.  I ended up with an ingrown toenail and mom had to pluck the tissue (I called it Kleenex because I didn’t know the difference) from the corner of my big toenail with tweezers. It was incredibly painful, but she never believed me. She said she was barely touching me.  Eventually I had to be taken to the doctors and they had to give me a shot in the knuckle of my big toe to fix things.  I sat on my fathers lap and screamed in pain, crying in agony.  He cried too. As sad as it is, it’s one of my most fond memories of my father because I could tell in that moment that he loved me.  They took me to Wendy’s for a Frosty afterward, and to this day I can’t have a Frosty without remembering that moment, as my father shook with sobs because someone was hurting his little girl. It brings tears to my own eyes even now. His physical affection was so rare that it will always be a special memory for me, and one I occasionally wish I could recreate, without the amount of pain that accompanied it.

I remember my troubled cousin Kyle coming to visit around then, too.  I might have been closer to three at the time.  I didn’t know what he’d gotten in trouble for, but I remember he seemed shady somehow.  He constantly wanted to hang out with my brother in his room with the door closed and my parents insisted that the door remain open instead.  In spite of my parents' wishes that door was often closed and the two spent many silent hours in that room together almost every night.

I told Naomi that my telling her these things and my desire to write down my memories often triggered something within me that would cause me to remember some detail that I’d long since forgotten.  Until I thought about how I wanted so badly to impress my cousin by showing him how I could fly on the swings by lazily swinging back and forth on my stomach with my arms outstretched, I didn’t remember that he didn’t seem to want to spend any time with me at all and only wanted to spend time with my brother.  I clearly remembered that instead of landing on my stomach on the swings, I landed on my head on the other side of them.  I barely remember Kyle pretending to care. I do remember him laughing and me running off in embarrassment. 

I told her that I wondered if something had happened to my brother during Kyle’s visit with us.  Maybe that was why my brother eventually did what he did to me only a year later.  She nodded with her typical hmmmm response and I moved on.  Honestly, memories from so many years ago can be faulty.  Some things stick with us forever.  Others get blurred with time. 

The first time my brother ever pulled me behind the giant evergreen tree on the corner with juniper berries in full bloom, I didn’t know what he wanted.  I wasn’t exactly scared of him.  He was my brother.  My brother looked out for me.  But then he got another little boy and brought him back there with us.  My brother said he wanted to play a game.  I remembered asking if it was a game of hide and seek since we seemed to be hiding already.  No he told me, and the rest of his words are lost in the distant memory; given to a violent desire to forget.  I remember him wanting to ‘kiss’ certain parts of my body.  I remember being scared. I remember the cold air biting at my exposed flesh - flesh that normally wouldn’t have the wind scratching against it.  I remember the cold of the horizontally lined wall of red brick against my bottom.  I remember the bright red shoes on the feet of his friend as he stood there watching what was happening.  And I remember my brother telling the other little boy that they were supposed to ‘take turns.’  I do NOT remember the other little boy’s name.  I’ve never been great with names.

I remember this happening several more times after, but never with the other little boy.  I remember it was always cold, probably late fall or early winter in Maryland.  I remember the crunchy leaves on the ground around that juniper tree.  I remember holding one in my hand and inspecting it closely, trying to ignore what my brother was doing as he told me that it was ‘just a game’ but that I couldn’t tell our mom and dad or we would both get into trouble.  And I remember the day Mom caught us. 

She was so angry. Her entire face turned red and I could almost hear her grinding her teeth, which she hated with a passion.  I don’t remember what she was wearing that day, but I remember her tone of voice.  She was so incredibly angry! She demanded that we come out of the bushes ‘right this instant’ and practically dragged me out by the sleeve of my coat.  She’d come outside calling for us and we weren’t responding because, of course, we didn’t want to get into trouble.  She’d spotted us somehow through the tree branches.  Part of me wonders if she knew exactly what was going on. She had to have known, as angry as I saw her that day.  She had to know.  My brother got between my mom and I so I would have time to pull up my pants.  My undies had little flowers on them that day.  I don’t know why that seemed important to me at the time, but there were little tiny flowers all over them.  My boots were pink. 

Being pulled out of the bushes was frightening, the tree clawing at my face and pulling at my shoe laces.  And as much as I wanted it to be, that wasn’t the last day we ever went back behind that tree.  Mom had demanded that we never go back there again, but of course we defied her.  Or, rather, my brother defied her and I was included in the events.  That particular Juniper abuse ended when winter hit and we couldn’t go outside without multiple layers of clothing anymore. It never restarted.

We had a baby sitter the next year who turned out to be an honest nightmare.  She was a large, heavy set woman with a station wagon and a special affinity for PlayGirl magazines.  While she was watching us, we would go all over the military base in the back seat of her car.  From there, with no seatbelts on, my brother could reach the dirty magazines in the next seat back.  They just sat there, opened, outside of their plastic sleeves, on the vinyl seat as though they were the latest issue of Marie Claire. I remember peeking at the cover of one and being curious, but taking a single look at the inside of one and being thoroughly repulsed.  My brother was far more interested.  The babysitter spanked my brother when she found out what he’d done.  We didn’t tell on her though, because, as the babysitter informed us, our mother would most likely believe her, and we’d have to admit to what we’d done wrong to deserve it.  I don’t remember her name, but I remember when Mom got mad enough to fire her.  I was glad to see her go.  So was my brother.  We celebrated by drawing on a childs’ A-frame chalkboard with pink chalk.  I illustrated how angry I was with a series of lines and my brother asked me to draw what I thought a boy’s private part looked like.  Through much coaxing I finally drew something that looked like a cloud. He tried to correct my drawing but we were called to dinner and I was saved by the tuna noodle casserole. 

By the time we moved away from Maryland when I was seven, I’d endured much more than anyone could possibly have known and was living in a kind of fog, not sure how or why all these secrets should belong to me.  I wasn’t good at keeping secrets, but I knew that I needed to, or I’d get into trouble.  They were all my fault, I’d been told all along.  I was a part of it.  I needed to lie.  It was the only way to avoid being spanked for being such a terrible child. There was only one truly safe place for me - the neighbor Mona.  She let me eat pasta and watch The Price is Right with her. She taught me some Spanish.  She never once spanked me or exposed me to things I thought were dangerous or wrong.  I went to Mona as often as I could.  I was safe with Mona.  And then she moved away.  I was crushed. 

I remember leaving therapy that night in a fog.  Some of those things I’d been able to talk about for a long time, but never in detail. A lot of those things I didn’t remember clearly until I was face to face with the need to recall.  Sadly, the memories came flooding back to me because I had nothing else to distract me from the truth when I was face to face with Naomi.  I had no option but to face the facts and the details were as bright and vivid in my memory as the other boy’s bright red shoes were, glowing behind the juniper tree. 

Chapter Two

The Dog House

I’d sprained my ankle pretty badly by the time I went back to see Naomi two weeks later. I hobbled in on crutches covered in a leopard print padding - the leopard print padding was a gift from a fellow survivor and dear friend of mine. The weather had turned cold, even by Colorado standards, and not wearing a shoe over that bare sock was getting to me.  My foot felt like ice.  Naomi looked at me with a pained expression.

Oh my goodness, what happened, she pleaded.  We’d had the first snowfall in the mountains so she assumed what most Colorado natives would assume - a skiing accident. 

Something far more childish and stupid than you can imagine, I told her, quite embarrassed by the truth.  I even have video footage of me doing it.  I was embarrassed, sure, but I’d finally learned how to tell the truth after 35 years of lies.  I pulled out my mobile phone and loaded the video for her to watch as though I was almost proud of it. 

My boyfriend of the month and I were in a large furniture store with a flat dolly cart seeking out furniture for the place we were about to move into together.  The first video I showed her was of him running with the flat cart through a wide, empty aisle, and then flinging himself down on top of it.  It reminded me of the Superman move I tried to show my cousin Kyle. My boyfriend’s arms and legs were outstretched and it seemed like he was flying.  At the end of that video I was heard in the background, holding the camera, telling him that I wanted to try, too! 

The next video started, and there I was at the far end of the aisle pushing the cart. Faster and faster I went until I was jogging.  I was too scared to just fall down on top of it as he’d done, so I jumped onto it at first with the intention of laying down on it after I had my balance.  The force of me leaping onto the cart altered the trajectory and it veered off to the left.  I scrambled down to my knees just in time for it to slam into the metal stanchions anchored to the floor as shelving and bounced off.  At that exact moment my ankle was barely above the metal frame of the cart itself, and my ankle bounced off so sharply that I saw stars behind my eyelids for a second.  The cart bounced off the opposite metal root, and finally settled into place in the middle of the aisle, where I collapsed onto my stomach, giggling like an idiot.  I walked through the rest of the store attempting to be an adult, forcing myself not to limp, and managed to get all the way back home without tears. By the time I got home, my foot was so swollen the shoe had to be completely unlaced in order to come off.  It looked broken.  For weeks my ankle remained shades of purple and yellow.  But, I reminded myself at the time, it was only physical pain. I’d been through so much worse. 

So why do you think you felt the need to do that, Naomi asked me, somewhat uncharacteristically. 

I guess I felt like being a kid, I grinned.  It’s the last year of my 30s and I wanted to be a kid. The year 2019 had been full of turmoil.  I believe I had needed a momentary break from being exhausted.

Interesting, she offered.  So do you think it’s at all because of what you told me about your childhood last week?  You had a lot of your childhood taken away from you, through medications and abuse and trauma. 

That could be, I admitted.  But not all of my childhood was bad.  A lot of it was great.

Tell me more about that, she prompted.

We had dogs when I was growing up, I started.

But you have cats now?

Yes, I had become a crazy cat lady.  I had four cats, all of them rescued, and all of them just as traumatized in their past as I had been.  One was a feral, abused and kicked by neighborhood kids until he lost all of his teeth.  One had been abandoned while pregnant, tossed into the streets to starve, and gave birth to stillborn kittens from lack of nutrition.  One was unloved and abandoned by his own mother because there was ‘something wrong with him’ when his eyes would never open on their own.  The oldest was the product of incest.  In a strangely profound, dangerously unhealthy way, I personally identified with each of them and understood what they’d had to do in order to survive.  That world was a dark one.  We all understood that in a way that only we knew, but each of us could understand.

We always had dogs when I was growing up. That much was true. When I’d adopted my first cat I had no idea what I was doing and I raised him as though he were a dog.  I didn’t know any better.  I also started out as a rather abusive cat-mom, occasionally striking him for getting into something he shouldn’t.  I’d smack him, open handed, on his rump.  It was how I’d been raised.  It’s what I’d seen my parents do to the dogs.  It was a way of life. If someone did something wrong, they deserved to be hit.  It was that simple.  One day when I struck him across the backside for something I’d simply known he had done, he looked at me with the saddest eyes I’d ever seen on the orange and white tabby, and I knew instinctively he was innocent.  The boyfriend I’d been living with at that time confirmed my suspicions, and I promised Oliver at that moment that I’d never strike him again.  I honored my word to him, and to all others since. 

I remembered Schatzi fondly, but remembered so little about her.  She was still a puppy when she died, I think.  I was no more than two or three years old myself.  She was sick with something I didn’t understand and needed to be put to sleep because we couldn’t afford to make her better.  I don’t remember going into the building or even walking into the room where she was on the stainless table, but I remembered her laying there with a hose down either her nose or her throat and her tongue hanging out like maybe she was already dead.  It was years later I learned that she’d had Parvo, which is an illness common to pound puppies.  It’s a highly contagious virus among dogs and the mortality rate is around 90%, meaning most dogs who get it do not survive.  I didn’t know at the time she was a German Shepherd, but I remember thinking every dog that looked like one was named Shatzi in my mind for quite a long time.  I even remember being corrected once when someone else was walking a Shepherd and I called out to Schatzi.

The next dog we had was Cocoa who hated me as much as I hated her.  I couldn’t even count the number of times my own mother would say exactly that to me, too.  Cocoa would go to the bathroom on my bed or in my closet. She’d drag toilet paper all over the house while we were out.  She loved my mother, she tolerated my brother and dad, but that dog hated me with a passion I’d never seen a dog possess.  I wore my cowboy boots to protect my feet and ankles  from the dog biting me, and though my mother more than once accused me of kicking her with my boots on, in reality I was shoving her away after she’d lunged at me and tried to bite through the tall shaft of my boot.

Then came Shadow.  What a sweet little puppy he was.  He was my brother’s dog, we got him after we’d moved to Arkansas.  He was so tiny that my mom would slip him into the chest pocket of a shirt she would wear and walk with him to the mailbox and back.  For a little while I had a black cat named Winky at the same time, but Winky was savagely murdered by a pair of nasty dalmatians that wandered more than a mile away from their home to eat my kitten. I never forgave dalmatians in general.  Next, after we moved to California, came Lady, Shadow’s best friend.  We got the brindle Great Dane based on a dream my mother had. She became my dog, and my best friend.  My parents gave her away while I was at school one day and very nearly didn’t let me say goodbye to her at all.  I had to beg for hours.

Finally, after we moved to Utah, we still had Shadow, but we adopted another dog named Cookie.  She ended up with Parvo too, but my mother managed to save her life by feeding her a teaspoon of water every hour for weeks on end. My mother was so devoted to that dog that I was in complete awe.  Cookie lived, and became the best friend I never knew I needed in my teen years.  Eventually she disappeared in a massive flood that washed several feet of mud into the backyard of my parents home. Her body was never found.

There were a lot of things that happened to me over the years that passed, and those dogs saved my life in more ways than one.  From an attempted kidnapping at a park to being attacked by a large Akita to running for help when I needed it most, they were the companions who made sure I kept living from one day to the next.  Sometimes they were the only reason I even wanted to keep living at all.

As a kid I wasn’t cognizant of the term ‘therapy animal’ but assumed any actual service dog would be a dog for a blind person. Even having lived the life that I lived, I didn’t fully understand what it meant to have a therapy animal until I was forty years old with cats.  Dogs could do amazing things, from playing fetch in the yard to finding drugs in an airport, from turning on the lights to fetching drinks from the fridge or a remote from the table. They could attack on command and chase down a bad guy and hold them in submission.  They were great for doing tricks in an animal circus. I’d seen dogs ride horses.  Lady, the Great Dane, used to run down the sidewalk while I was wearing roller skates and holding on to her leash. The dog was smart enough to look both ways before crossing. She’d cross anyway, whether there was a car coming or not, but she was at least smart enough to stop and look first.  Cookie would pick raspberries off of the vine, set one in front of Shadow who had grown too blind to see them anymore, and then take one for herself.  She did the same with walnuts that had fallen from the tree, and always saved a treat for her best bud.  Shadow was too much of a scaredy cat to do much of anything on his own, but could balance a treat on his nose and come on command like nobody’s business.  They were all just dogs though.  They slept outside in the summer and they slept in the garage in the winter.  They weren’t allowed on the furniture, and they were held over our heads as threats if we weren’t good kids.  We’ll take the dogs to the pound if you don’t xyz, we were told.  They were tools of entertainment, threats, abuse, and punishment.  How could something that could be treated and regarded so carelessly be anything but just an animal? 

My cats have proven to me what I knew in my gut so long ago.  Not only did every dog have their own personality from Cocoa to Cookie, but they had their own places in our lives and our hearts.  They were so much more than they were ever given credit for.  My cats now still don’t have all the credit they deserve, but they have become the living essence of who I was and who I wish to become.

Violet, my little girl who was abandoned while pregnant, has fully recovered. She’s no longer a skinny, sickly little cat.  Instead, she’s plump and happy.  When I adopted her I was told she’d never be a lap cat, that she’d been far too abused and neglected to ever be comfortable with that.  Now, if I’m sitting down, she’s either on my lap or she’s next to me.  I had to get her a little ‘office chair’ all her own so she could sit beside me as I write.  She’s hardly ever out of it if I’m working.  She sleeps on my chest.  She cries out for me when I come home whether I’ve been gone for 10 minutes or 2 days. 

Cooper, my toothless old feral, is still quite shy of strangers and terrified of new people or new noises, but he’s happy and comfortable, often laying on his back with his tender, fleshy belly exposed to the entire house in a gesture of extreme trust.  He doesn’t like going outside and rarely ever sits by a window.  He remembers what life was like outside and he doesn’t ever want to go back to that life of abuse now that he’s managed to escape it. 

Calvin, my little Dinky, didn’t trust anyone at first. I think that’s common for creatures who had their mothers turn their backs on them.  If the one person you’re supposed to trust above all others can’t be trusted, what internal instinct is altered to help defend us against predators and abandonment in the future?  He, instead, turned to Violet and she became a surrogate mother to him. 

Oliver, my oldest, became the Daddy Cat. I was there the moment he was born, watching as his mother brought him into the world.  His half brother was also his father, and I knew that meant he’d have some health complications later on in life.  Yet he took in every stray I ever brought home and taught them what it was like to give and receive love.  He forgave me when I swatted him as I’d always been taught to do and showed me a better way to live.  He changed my entire life for the better.

Oliver would eventually understand the signs of an impending Crohn’s Disease attack and would lay on my stomach in order to keep me still and warm, so the attacks might not be quite so bad.  He sought me out when I was crying. He made me laugh when I was sad.  And just like every well trained dog I ever had growing up, he’d even play fetch with me when I  was bored.  Of course, it was only with one particular pair of socks, but he did still play fetch. 

As I talked with Naomi I remembered Oliver and Dinky with great fondness and love.  Both of them have since passed on from medical complications, and have taken with them a great sized chunk of my heart.  Since then I’ve been able to adopt two more ginger boys, litter mates this time, named Jack and Dash.  They had been abandoned in a dumpster behind a restaurant, unwanted and unloved.  Yet again I found cats that I could identify with.  They’ve become the youngest members of my family now, and both have acquired skills that I didn’t know cats could have.  Jack will wake me up from PTSD nightmares by gently nudging me under the chin until I wake up, and Dash will cover my feet with the full weight of his body when I’m feeling as though I’m losing my way.  He keeps me grounded in a way I didn’t know would be possible.  They’re more than just cats, just like every dog I ever had was more than just a dog.  They’re little spitfires of personality and attitude, willing to love those who love them, and always willing to understand what it means to have a very bad day. 

Sometimes I wonder if I ended up with so many cats because I was trying to fill the emotional void of having lost my only child.

Chapter Three

Busted

I’d gotten off on a tangent with Naomi telling her about the pets of my life and how they’d influenced and changed my life so much over the years.  She, of course, saw this as a form of avoidance and knew that I was avoiding something that would be difficult for me to talk about.  She pointed at my ankle again and urged me to continue talking about why I would need to feel like a child and why I didn’t seem to be upset over severely injuring myself.  She was shocked when I told her that I’d forced myself to walk around in the store the rest of the afternoon without limping, and how much I was hurting by the time I got home.

Why didn’t you say something about being hurt?  You could have gotten off your feet faster probably. It would have hurt less. Were you afraid your boyfriend would think less of you?

Maybe so, I thought to myself.  But that would have been showing weakness.  I couldn’t show weakness.  That wasn’t permissible.  I was also embarrassed that I’d gained so much weight over the last few years that I wasn’t as athletic as I once was.  Never mind the fact that I was getting older, that was somehow irrelevant. But honestly, my issue was that I knew the damage had been done, and the best thing I could do was pretend that it didn’t exist so that I could continue on with my life. It’s how I’d lived through everything so far, and it seemed to be working for me.  Except it wasn’t.  That was the problem. That was why I finally found myself sitting across a musty room from a therapist in a rocking chair. 

I guess that’s what I was taught to do, I told her honestly.  Over the next few minutes I regaled my tale of my broken foot from when I was a teenager.  As I did, my memory took me back to that day as though it were only yesterday. 

The ball sailed through the air and I leaped up to catch it in mid-air. My feet landed on the ground and I ran with everything I had. I knew I could run faster than the boys, but they were bearing down on me pretty fast. I needed to grow wings if I was going to score a touchdown.

I spotted the satellite dish on the ground in front of me. The yard was pretty small, so it wasn't out of bounds. I was smaller than anyone else I ever played with, both shorter and thinner, and I knew I was far more agile. I could just duck and run under it while anyone else would have to either slow down or go the long way around it. I headed straight for it.

We were playing two-hand touch, so what happened next really took me by surprise. Bryan soared through the air and suddenly I stopped running, my stride cut short with an abrupt stop. The ball slipped from my arms, coursed through the air and bounced out of the middle of the satellite dish, flying erratically from the awkward angle at which it bounced in the rounded shell.  I lost all track of it as I focused on what was going on with my own body.  My body fell to the ground with a sickening thud and coursing pain. I was pinned down with my foot under the chest of a young man, easily 50 pounds heavier than I was.

Bryan rolled off of me and asked if I was ok. I sat up and looked around. I knew my foot was hurting, but I figured I could just shake it off.  Admitting to pain was a weakness. 

Give me a minute, I said. It kinda hurts a little. I cradled my foot in my hands. The pain grew. I didn't hear the words coming from my mouth for a minute, but as I sat there I became more aware of hearing myself saying Ow, ow, ow over and over in a surprisingly calm and relaxed manner. I took my shoe off and slipped my sock off of my throbbing foot to shove it into my empty shoe. My foot looked fine, nothing in the world wrong with it. I didn't even have a bruise.

Bryan ran for the house. My mother and his were friends and we had been in their backyard playing. He ran inside and both moms followed him back out fairly quickly. My mother was complaining of a migraine headache and had a no nonsense approach toward me right then. That was common if I had something to complain about. 

If your foot hurts then get up and come inside, she said harshly. It wasn't until then that I began to gently cry. I was 15 years old and had gone through amazing amounts of pain in my life up until that moment. It wasn't the pain that caused me to weep, but rather her tone and complete lack of compassion for my pain. The Saturday sun blazed down overhead and the heat only made it worse.

I can't, I said. It really hurts, Mom.

Bryan's mom, Gail, leaned over to give me a hand up. Come on inside, Hon. We'll put some ice on it.

Mom, I said matter-of-factly, "I