My Broken Pieces : Mending the Wounds from Sexual Abuse Through Faith, Family and Love (9781101990087)

by Rivera, Rosie

  At school I had to take a sex ed class as part of the fifth-grade curriculum. In order to introduce us to the facts and realities of sex, our teachers showed us illustrations of the male and female anatomy, and we talked about reproductive cycles, contraception, unplanned pregnancies, STDs, and so forth. When the teacher showed us a picture of a man’s unerect penis, the other girls started giggling and acting very nervous. Why were they being so silly? I wondered. Hadn’t they seen naked men before?

  I couldn’t understand what they thought was so funny. I thought to myself, That drawing is wrong. It doesn’t look like that, because, of course, I had seen it differently. As I glanced around the classroom, it suddenly hit me: wait a minute, I’m the only one who isn’t giggling!

  I was livid. I realized that no matter how hard I tried, no matter what I did or said, I was never going to be a normal girl like most. By sticking his penis inside me, Trino had made me abnormal and nothing would ever go back to being the way it was. Trino robbed me of my innocence, my memories—he robbed me of my childhood.

  As the classroom laughter swelled up around me, I felt nauseated. I asked the teacher for permission to go to the bathroom, where I threw up.

  • • •

  Every summer, my family would go down to Mexico for vacation. For our parents, it was always very important that we know Mexican culture. Even though most of us were born in the United States, we all grew up speaking Spanish at home and feeling very proud of our Mexican heritage. In fact, for the longest time I felt upset that I wasn’t really Mexican or even Mexican enough.

  I loved our yearly trips to Mexico and during the years in which Trino was abusing me, those trips brought me a great deal comfort. They were a brief break from the darkness that had taken over my soul. Hundreds of miles away from my everyday life, it was almost as though I was allowed to be a little girl again: my brothers and I would spend long summer days playing outdoors with our cousins and the neighborhood kids, running around and having all the fun we had at home, just surrounded by even more kids and family members. Juan and I would use the huge rock behind my grandma’s house at El Cerro de la Campana as a slide. We would feed Nana Lola’s chickens and play basketball until midnight at the park. We’d play video games and watch TV, just like back home, but I loved playing in the street and knowing I was safe.

  We usually stayed at my maternal grandmother’s house but I spent most of my time playing with my cousins, Juana and María. They were slightly older than me, they were real Mexicans, and to me they were impossibly cool so I followed them around like a shadow. Back home, I got to play games only with my brothers, so playing with girls was refreshing and new—a welcome change, especially at a time when I couldn’t stand to be near the opposite sex. Being around them felt comfortable and easy and I didn’t have to be constantly on the lookout for what might happen. I felt safe.

  That’s why when one day, Juana suggested that we play a la mamá y el papá, I thought nothing of it. One of us was supposed to be the dad, another one of us was supposed to be the mom, and she instructed us on how to “make a baby.” María and I would follow her instructions and with clothes on, we lay on top of each other while we fake-kissed on the mouth and on the neck, slowly rubbing our bodies together in fake sexual movements. The whole thing wouldn’t last more than a minute, and after that, pouf! We had a baby and we continued with our game.

  Even though our movements were pretty graphic and somewhat reminiscent, in my mind, of what happened with Trino, I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong. After all they were girls and because they never hurt me I trusted them and knew that it was just a game. We—all three of us—were playing together so I was never in a position of weakness. It was more like an exploration of a topic. I was so confused by my sexuality that I was seeking anything that would help me decipher what I was going through.

  Everything I did with Juana and María felt so normal and nonthreatening that when I got back home from Mexico that summer, I innocently suggested to one of my girlfriends that we play al papá y a la mamá and I taught her what Juana had taught me. Whenever she came over to my house, we played the same game over and over again without me ever realizing what I was doing. In my mind, I was simply replicating what my cousins taught me. Now I realize that my actions had much more serious consequences than I could have ever imagined but at the time it came from a completely innocent place. I never wanted to hurt this girl and to this day, even though we have talked about it at length and she understands the circumstances of what led me to act that way, I feel guilty for what I did and I hope that one day she will forgive me.

  It would be easy for me to look back and blame Trino or Juana or María for what I did, but when it comes to my actions, I know that there is no one else to blame but myself. Yes, Trino abused me; yes, that destroyed my sense of normalcy and clouded my ability to tell right from wrong, but there is a point where my decisions are my own and I have to take responsibility for what I have done.

  Thinking back on this and having read a lot on the topic of sexual abuse, I wonder if Juana and María were two little girls who, like me, knew way too much about sex for their age. Who knows . . . maybe, like me, they were abused at some point and, in the same way Juana and María were innocently replicating what someone did to them, I was replicating what they did to me with someone else. We were children playing grown-up games without even understanding what it meant.

  For years I have tried to keep up with Juana and María and I pray to God that if they have been through anything similar to what I’ve been through, they may find peace.

  • • •

  “Time is your best friend,” is what people say when you are trying to get over something and while it can be true for when you are getting over a breakup, it’s not the case for sexual abuse. Not only did the abuse affect the way I acted; it all but destroyed my self-esteem and hopes and dreams. As time went by, I became more and more chained to the lies I had constructed in my brain. My sadness grew, my anger grew, and with each passing day, I hated myself more. Just a few years earlier, I had wanted to become an astronaut, a writer; I had wanted to travel the world, learn about art. One by one, I buried each and every one of those dreams, and all I really wanted was to die. In my heart of hearts, I knew God was out there somewhere, but I never really tried to reach out to Him. I didn’t understand why He had allowed this to happen to me. Here was my thinking: if I could not trust the father I could see, and didn’t believe he would protect me, how on earth could I be sure that the God I couldn’t see cared about me? In my mind, I came to the conclusion that He didn’t notice me or love me enough to keep me safe. Alone and depressed, I didn’t know who I could turn to. The only person I knew who loved me unconditionally was my sister, Chay, but I couldn’t bear the thought of telling her the truth.

  For countless days and countless nights, I prayed for something to happen that would make my life better.

  • • •

  Life didn’t get any better but something did happen: at the age of eleven my body started to change and I got my first period. Then, as if magically, Trino stopped abusing me. He told me that he didn’t like girls with pubic hair so the abuse stopped. Just like that. It was a huge relief, of course, but the invisible wounds left behind after those three awful years are something I continue to deal with to this day.

  As adolescence started to kick in, I became more and more unhappy. I gained a lot of weight and felt terrible about my body and myself. I’d look at my sister and my mother, wanting so bad to be as strong and powerful and loving as they were but I knew in my heart that I would never be like them because I had a secret—a dirty secret that made me unworthy of the life I was given.

  About a year after the abuse stopped, Trino and Chay’s rocky relationship finally imploded. They separated and my mom would often babysit Chay’s three kids—Chiquis, Jacqie, and Michael—while Chay worked two jobs. I knew my sister was g
oing through a particularly rough patch but at the same time I was deeply grateful that I wouldn’t have to be around Trino anymore. Even though all signs indicated that he was never going to abuse me again, as long as he was in our lives I continued to live in fear. I was afraid of being near him and given his threats on her life, I sure didn’t want my sister to be near him either.

  Trino continued to have a relationship with the kids and on weekends he would come by our house to pick them up. I remember one Saturday, when I was twelve, I was home alone when he came knocking at the door, looking for the kids. A sharp pang of fear shot through my body—the last thing in the world I wanted to do was to let him in.

  He knocked and knocked, yelling, “Open the door. I want to see my kids! Let me in!”

  “They aren’t here,” I answered through the door. “I promise! I don’t know where they are.” I tried to sound as casual as possible but I was terrified.

  Trino kept banging and banging so, knowing there was a screen door between us and I was somewhat protected, I opened the front door.

  As soon as he saw me, he said: “Don’t worry, I’m not going to do anything to you. You’re much too fat!”

  I wanted to die. After everything Trino had done to me, to hear him call me fat made me feel even worse than I already did. In a twisted way, for all those years, Trino had been my measure of self-worth and part of me had wanted to believe that he did what he did to me because he actually loved me. Of course he didn’t love me but his words were the confirmation of everything I dreaded most: I was fat, ugly, and unworthy of love.

  I plunged deeper into my depression and by the time I turned thirteen, I weighed one hundred seventy-five pounds. I would cry every night because it was difficult, especially at my age and in our family, to be overweight. My father and brothers and sister were the entertainers, but Dad said I represented the family whether I sang or not. He was sure I’d end up in entertainment no matter how much I refused, and in his eyes everyone was supposed to stay in shape, look their best, and smile at the cameras.

  Despite living with the pain and anguish over my obesity and what Trino put me through, I figured that if Trino didn’t want me because I was fat, then other men wouldn’t want me either. And that was okay with me. I would rather take the pain and humiliation of the weight gain any day over the torture of sexual abuse.

  • • •

  That same year, I found out that Chiquis was going through some difficulties of her own. I had always seen Chiquis as my adorable little niece, my first friend, my sister’s princess. To me, she was the luckiest little girl in the world because she was my sister’s daughter and I thought nothing could ever go wrong for her.

  Yet while she had the best mother in the world, Trino—the man who had tormented me for the past five years—was her father. I had grown to hate Trino with every fiber of my being, but I never thought he was anything less than a great father to his kids. Chiquis adored him and I remember that even after he abused me, he would come to church and sit in the front row with Chay and the kids. He’d sing the songs and smile, always greeting everyone so warmly. Although I knew the truth about him (and so did God), when I saw him at church like that, it always made me wonder whether it was all a figment of my imagination. How on earth could anyone be so duplicitous?

  But the nature of his true self was again confirmed during the summer before I went to high school. Chiquis was ten years old at the time. I was on the phone with a friend.

  “Tía, can we talk?” she said.

  “Of course, baby. What’s up?” I answered.

  “I know why you hate my dad so much,” she said.

  I didn’t quite understand where she was coming from, but her statement immediately made me feel exposed. Could it be that after so many years she remembered what had happened in the mobile home?

  “Oh, yeah?” I answered somewhat on the defensive. “Why?”

  “I know because what he did to you he does to me.”

  I’ll never forget those words. My heart simultaneously sank and exploded in rage. I wanted to kill Trino, right then and there, but at the same time I also felt incredibly guilty—how was it that I had been so wrapped up in my own drama that I didn’t see what he had been doing to my sweet Chiquis?

  We danced around the subject, but it took only a few minutes for me to understand exactly what was going on. Trino was abusing Chiquis whenever the kids stayed with him over the weekend. I was appalled. I couldn’t believe what she was telling me. I thought there was something wrong with me, and that was why I’d been abused. But how could he be doing such a horrible thing to his precious little daughter? How could he be hurting Chiquis?

  My mind was spinning. I didn’t know what to do. If I couldn’t defend myself against his abuse, how in the world was I going to defend Chiquis? Who was I going to tell? What was I going to do? The questions kept piling up and yet no clear answers emerged.

  Chiquis and I were both extremely uncomfortable so we didn’t discuss too many details, but from what she told me, it sounded as if Trino hadn’t touched her in a while so we both hoped that meant it was over. Instead, we decided to pray for him because it was clear he was sick or emotionally damaged. Chiquis was just as afraid of telling her mom as I was, so we made the promise never to say a word. I made her promise to tell me if he did it again and we would confess to our family. Maybe that’s why she stopped telling me and maybe I blocked it out and fantasized that he had stopped because I couldn’t handle the guilt and pain of knowing that her own father abused her.

  That was the last time Chiquis and I really talked about the abuse. I think we were both terribly embarrassed and even though there was some comfort in being able to confide in each other, for many years the memory of that conversation brought me—and continues to bring me—an overwhelming feeling of guilt. I couldn’t shake the thought that maybe, just maybe, there was something I could have done to stop Trino from doing what he did to Chiquis. Perhaps if I had just spoken up about it, things might be different. I tossed and turned at night, thinking about how foolish I had been to allow Trino to threaten me into silence. Chiquis and I never discussed any details, but in thinking about the chronology of events, I came to the realization that he had probably started to abuse Chiquis around the time he stopped abusing me. Her nightmare started when mine had finally reached its end.

  I thought about something else—to a certain degree my abuse was easier to process: Trino had assaulted me and I could hate him for it. But for Chiquis, it was different. Trino was her father and she loved him. In her eyes, we couldn’t tell anyone, not only because of the threats he made (in her case, he threatened to send her away to live with her mean grandmother), but also because this was her father we were talking about, and as much as she hated what he was doing to her, she loved him nonetheless because he was still great to her in many other ways.

  Chiquis and I have never discussed any of this, but when I read her book Forgiveness and learned the details of what she went through, my heart broke in a million pieces. How she endured all that is unbelievable to me. She is every bit as strong and powerful as her mother, a beautiful, extraordinary soul that no amount of evil or despair will ever crush.

  • • •

  My depression grew deeper as years went by and I managed to push everyone in my family away. They figured I was going through my rebellious teen years so for the most part, they’d leave me alone. I was so angry, I’d take it out on them but the truth was, I never, ever blamed my parents or my siblings for what happened. My mom and dad were always the most loving, caring parents in the world. They adored me and took care of me in every way they could. They were very involved in all of our lives but when it came to me, probably because I was a girl and the youngest, they always made a huge effort to give me all the time and attention I needed. Yet how did I thank them? By pushing them away and asking them to leave me alone.

 
My poor parents. They didn’t know what to do with me those years when I was so angry. I spoke to them in ways none of my brothers or sister would have ever dared to speak to them. I cursed and yelled, and locked myself in my room for hours at a time. They had no idea how to control this strong-willed, super-intelligent, moody child. By that time I was the only one living at home with them and while I would have never dared to disrespect them if any of my siblings had been around, now that it was just the three of us, I’d lash out at them on any occasion. They loved me so much but I was so different from my older siblings—more “American,” less acquainted with the traditional Mexican values of honoring and respecting one’s elders—that they simply took a step back and let me be.

  One day, my mom and I were on the couch watching an episode of El Show de Cristina that was about girls and sex. We were watching in silence but I remember that under the surface, I could feel my blood boil, I was so angry. The way they were discussing the topic was so naive and simplistic and had nothing to do with my experience. It was the confirmation that everything that happened to me was abnormal and I was so angry I felt as if I was going to explode. Suddenly my mother turned to me and asked:

  “Hija, what do you think about girls who have sex at a young age?”

  That’s all it took for me to go off on her.

  “Why do you ask me? Am I supposed to know?” I yelled at her. “Do you think I’m doing it? Leave me alone!” And I just ran into my room and slammed the door.

  My poor mother was baffled and I think after that day, she never tried to get close to me again. She never ceased to be there for me, she was always a support, always insisting that I come with her to church, but she no longer tried to get close. I think she shut down because she had never had to deal with anything like this with my older siblings. She simply couldn’t believe I’d behave that way.