His possessiveness continued to escalate and it got to a point where I was allowed to be only at school, at home, or with him. Anything else was strictly prohibited. And boy, did it get worse. One day he said to me, “I don’t want you to brush your hair anymore,” and when I dared to ask why, I was told that it was because he wanted me to look unkempt and ugly so I wouldn’t be attractive to any man.
It’s easy to think that a man is possessive and jealous because he loves you so much when in fact it’s the opposite—he’s seeing you only as a possession and not an independent person with her own life. The truth is, fear is the opposite of love and while Pedro thought he loved me, he was just afraid to be alone.
I did everything in my power to show him he could trust me, but nothing I said or did made him feel secure. What was most disconcerting was that each day started with, “You are the most amazing woman I have ever met,” but by nightfall, I had turned into the most despicable woman on the planet. That is, unless it happened to be a night when he wanted to have sex with me, in which case he’d pour on the charm.
I was completely lost. Yes, he professed his love for me, and I believed him, but at the same time when in a fit of jealousy, he called me a whore, I believed him too. If my sense of self-worth was already shaky to begin with, Pedro’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde routine was managing to destroy the little self-esteem I had left. In so many ways Pedro’s behavior confirmed everything I had ever suspected about men yet I didn’t have the willpower to leave.
• • •
I remember one incident that took place just a few weeks into our secret marriage. We were spending the night together at a hotel and Pedro had been drinking. I was doing my best to stay out of his way by burying myself in my books but soon enough he started touching me and kissing me, wanting us to have sex. His breath was heavy with the smell of alcohol and he was a complete mess. I didn’t want to sleep with someone who made me feel like trash.
As gently as possible, I pushed him away and said, “No, Pedro. Not tonight.”
That wasn’t what he wanted to hear, of course, so he quickly grabbed me by the arm, pinned me to the bed and forced me to have sex with him even though I was crying and begging him to stop hurting me. As soon as he finished, he opened the door and literally threw me out of the room.
There I was, standing in the hallway with barely any clothes on. I was so ashamed. How could it be that I was married to someone who was capable of doing something like this to me? I felt absolutely worthless. Here I was, reliving my past, but this time with a man who was supposed to love and cherish me.
I immediately started banging on the door, begging him to let me back in. But he refused to open it.
“Pedro, I beg you, please! Open the door!” I screamed. “Someone is going to see me, please let me in!”
I banged on the door for a while but since he still wouldn’t answer, I had the brilliant idea of going down to the front desk for help.
“My husband is in room two thirty-two,” I said to the night clerk. “I lost my key and now I’m locked out. Would you mind letting me in?”
The man stood there staring at me for a minute or so, and then said: “Your type isn’t allowed here.”
“Excuse me?” I replied, thinking there had to be a misunderstanding.
“Prostitutes aren’t allowed here,” he continued. “Please go away—if not I’ll have to call the cops.”
Humiliated beyond words, I thought, Is this what it has come to? I’m being mistaken for a prostitute?
I ran back to the room as fast as I could and started banging on the door.
“Please let me in!” I shouted. “Please, Pedro, let me in!”
Eventually Pedro was kind enough to get up off his butt and unlock the door. Still furious from what had happened before, he tossed the car keys at me and demanded: “Get out of here, you filthy whore. Just leave. I want nothing to do with you.” He threw my clothes at me and told me to go home.
The next morning, the phone rang. It was Pedro, and he couldn’t remember a thing from the night before. When I tried to refresh his memory, he began pleading and asking for forgiveness, promising me the world.
“Please, baby, please don’t leave me,” he begged. “I love you so much, Rose, I promise you I’ll never hurt you again.”
So, like a fool, I drove over to the hotel and picked him up. I prided myself on being an intelligent woman who had made it into law school, but I was falling into a “break up to make up” cycle without even realizing it. Every single time he mistreated me, the next day he would beg and promise he would never do it again, but then he would. The next time we got together, the ugly scene inevitably repeated itself and he became more and more violent toward me.
After three months of this emotional roller coaster, I began to drop a lot of weight. I wasn’t wearing makeup, and my mother, always in tune with her sixth sense, said to me: “Rosie, this isn’t you. A woman who is engaged is supposed to be completely happy and wanting to look her best. Here you are, planning your wedding, and you look like you’d rather die.”
“Mom, don’t worry, I really am happy,” I’d say. “I’m just tired from all the work at school.”
But my mother knew better than to believe me. She looked into my eyes and said: “Hija, listen to me when I tell you this: Pedro is not the one. And that’s okay. I am praying for you to break up with him.”
Her words reminded me of earlier days for I already knew my mother had clairvoyant powers. Whenever a boyfriend broke up with me, and I’d run to Mom and complain, “You were praying for us to break up, weren’t you?” And she always admitted that she was.
But this time I told her, “Sorry, Mom, this is the one—no matter how hard you pray.”
“Hija, there is something wrong here, and I can’t put my finger on it. But I am telling you, it’s best if you just call this whole thing off.”
• • •
As hard as I tried to block my mother’s words from my mind, I had to admit that she was right. I wasn’t the same person anymore. I was attending classes, but I was far from being the warrior I had once been when I was in my senior year of college. I was working on getting a law degree because I supposedly wanted to be a lawyer, but my heart wasn’t in it. I was so far removed from myself that I wasn’t even being a good mother to my daughter. My mother took care of her most of the time, thank God, because I was barely able to keep it together myself. I was a shadow of my former self, but for whatever strange reason, I couldn’t bring myself to make a clean cut.
It wasn’t long before I went to the dean’s office and told him, “I can’t continue with my studies.” I used the excuse “I’m a single mom and my daughter cries because I am gone so much.” It was true, Kassey was miserable without me. But the thing I didn’t share with the dean was that I had been interviewing attorneys and judges for one of my classes and had noticed that most were divorced, separated, or had a bed in their back offices because they were too busy to go home to sleep some nights. My daughter saw her father only on the weekends and if I became an attorney, her mom would be gone for at least eighty hours a week. I was confused about so many things, but I was certain that I couldn’t do that to her.
I’m sure it wasn’t the first time he had heard those words, because he seemed to genuinely understand. “I fully appreciate what you are going through,” he responded graciously.
And just like that, all my dreams, all my hopes for the future were flushed down the toilet. I dropped out.
• • •
Not too long after my meeting with the dean, Pedro’s mother took me aside one day and told me, “I love my son, but I don’t think he treats you right, Rosie. I know my boy, and can see that he is possessive and jealous. He hurts you and is killing your spirit and your soul.” She added, “I’ve known you since you were a little girl and I love you like a daughter, and I can’t le
t him destroy you. I know he’ll hate me if he ever finds out what I’m saying to you, but I can’t stay quiet any longer. For your own good, Rosie, please, please get away from him. If you don’t, I really fear for what might happen.”
Whoa! I couldn’t believe what she was saying. Even though I was capable of recognizing that Pedro’s behavior was in no way normal, I guess part of me thought he acted that way because of me. I thought there had to be something intrinsically wrong with me because I always ended up with men like that. But hearing his own mother speak of him that way, I realized maybe it wasn’t me.
Still, I was incapable of leaving. At age twenty-five I had already had an abortion, become a single mom, and dropped out of law school. I didn’t want to add “divorce” to my long list of mistakes.
I remember thinking, What is wrong with me? Can I get nothing right?
Life was just too grim and all I wanted was for the pain to stop.
nine
i lift my hands
Lying on the street with my head on the curb, half naked and drunk tired from walking and asking God to kill me, I thought I would never wake up on this planet again. But then, I heard a voice coming from deep down inside me. It wasn’t a voice I could actually hear; it was more of a vibration or a presence, and I can’t explain it other than by saying that my soul heard it.
“That’s enough,” the voice said. “Go home!”
Immediately, I opened my eyes and looked around me. I had no idea how much time had passed but I was lying in the street at the exact same spot. And I was alone.
As I sat up, I heard the voice again. It was firm, but not angry: “That’s enough,” it said. “Go home!”
My mind flashed back to that morning, many years earlier, when a visiting speaker at our church had called me out and said God told him there had been an attack against my life. As far as I could remember, that was the last time I had heard from Heaven. I said to myself, Rosie, ever since the abuse eighteen years ago, you have tried everything in this world to be happy. Has any of it worked? Do you feel any better now than you felt back then?
The sun wasn’t even up yet and I was half-naked, sitting in the middle of the street, completely alone. The answer was pretty obvious.
Then suddenly I thought: could Mom have been right all along? She has never stopped telling me that God loves me—I’ve just never made the effort to really listen to what she is saying. What if He really could fill this gaping void inside me?
Sitting on that pavement, my life had sunk to its lowest point. I was expecting to die yet instead, I had clearly heard the words, “Go home!” So I looked up into the dark sky.
“Where is my home?” I asked. I didn’t want my home to be going back to Pedro, who raped and hurt me. I didn’t want my home to be back with my mom—I didn’t want to continue to make her suffer. Where was I supposed to go?
In the darkness, the Holy Spirit reminded me of what my mother had been telling me for all those years: “Jesus has His arms wide open—the way He was on the cross.” That meant God loved me and He would receive me no matter what I had done.
Suddenly everything became crystal clear: my home wasn’t with Pedro or with my mother. It was the church—that church whose door was always open. I had spent so many years looking for a way to heal and the church was the only place I hadn’t looked yet.
I stood up, took a deep breath, and said to myself, What do I have to lose? So instead of continuing to walk toward South Central L.A., I turned around and started in a new direction. I spoke to God and said to Him, “I am tired. My feet hurt. Can You please help me find a ride? I promise I will go home and tomorrow I will come to Your church.”
The sun was starting to come up and no more than twenty seconds after I uttered those words, a car honked at me, pulled up to the curb, and out of the passenger-side window, a young man asked me, “Hey, do you need a ride?”
In the car were two African-American guys. As friendly as they seemed, this went against everything my mother had ever told me. Don’t hitchhike, Hija, and never get in a car with strangers, she’d always say. That day, however, I had the feeling that somehow everything was going to be all right.
“I do,” I answered.
“Where do you want to go?” the man asked politely.
I figured it was best to go back to my brother Lupe’s house, which was the closest from where I was, so I said, “Would it be possible for you to drop me off on the corner of Lincoln and Manchester?” I didn’t want to give them my brother’s exact address in case it turned out they weren’t such good guys.
“No problem!” said the driver, so I hopped into the backseat.
“You look cold,” one of them said and turned on the car heater. And for the rest of the ride, they didn’t say anything else.
Riding in the backseat, I was astonished. Tears welled up in my eyes as I thought, Didn’t I just ask God for something and He answered? He must have been paying attention all along.
The two young men dropped me off at the corner of Lincoln and Manchester and as I made my way toward my brother’s house, I couldn’t stop asking myself, Did this really just happen?
To this day, I am convinced that those men that picked me up that night were angels.
• • •
Moments later, another car pulled up alongside me and I started to walk as fast as I could. The guys that had just given me a ride had turned out to be angels, but I doubted I could be so lucky twice.
“Rosie! Rosie!” I heard a voice shout out from behind me. “We’ve been looking for you like crazy!”
The fact that they knew my name reassured me.
“Who are you?” I asked as I turned around to make eye contact.
“We’re friends of your brother Juan. We’ve been out here looking for you for hours.”
Juan had tried calling me after he finished performing that night, but when I didn’t answer, he started dialing all my friends. No one knew where I was, except a girl who remembered that I had gone over to Lupe’s house.
A few hours went by and since my brother still hadn’t heard from me, he started to get more and more worried. He got a bunch of his friends to drive around the neighborhood with him and, sure enough, they found some of the clothing I had discarded. They even found my cell phone on the street near a steep hill.
Juan, who is a big, muscular guy about six-feet-three and two hundred eighty pounds, climbed down that hill searching through the rocks, afraid of what he might find. His buddies called him with the news that they had found me and Juan came to meet us as quickly as he could. When he saw me standing outside Lupe’s house, he broke down in tears.
“I thought we had lost you!” he said.
Seeing my big brother cry came as such a surprise. Could it be that he was actually crying for me?
“Don’t ever do this to me again, Bubba. You’re my baby sister and I love you. I have no idea what this guy Pedro has been telling you—or what he has been doing to you—but forget it, and forget him. He doesn’t love you. But I do!”
I knew it was my brother speaking, but I thought, Is God hearing this? Somebody loves me, and he even sent out a search team to rescue me.
I was in such a daze that Juan had to tap me on my cheek to get my attention.
“Listen, Bubba,” he said, “you’re going to be just fine. We’re gonna get you some help. Just tell me what you need—I know you called us and we were all busy, but I promise it won’t happen again. What do you need? What do you want to do? Tell me—anything.”
What I said next must have come as a huge shock to him; in fact I could hardly believe I was saying it myself:
“There is one thing I’d like to do,” I answered. “I’d like to go to church today.”
My big brother was in tears. He himself had stopped going to church after the scandal with the person in our congregation, but he kn
ew me well enough to be moved by my request.
“You bet, Sister. I’ll get you there no matter what.”
I slept at Lupe’s house for a couple of hours, and when I woke up, I picked up the phone and called my mother.
“Mom, this is Rosie. What time is church today?”
I could almost hear her surprise on the other side of the line.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because I want to go with you. In fact, I’ll come over and pick you up.”
There was a long pause—and I could only imagine what was going through her mind. For years, I had been so reticent whenever she suggested I attend church. Now not only was I going—I wanted to pick her up. “Don’t play games with me,” she said. “If you’re going to be my ride, you better show up because I can’t miss church. So if you change your mind at the last minute, you still have to take me.”
“I’ll be there, Mom,” I answered.
She was attending Primer Amor Church in Whittier, where my brother Pete is still the pastor.
It was the first Sunday in November 2005, and I have to say I didn’t look my best—especially after surviving one of the worst nights of my life. My clothes were a mess, my hair needed brushing, and my head was throbbing with a massive hangover.
Mom was half-expecting me to have changed my mind when I drove up.
“Wow! You are really coming,” she exclaimed, with a big smile on her face.
“Yes, Mami,” I said quietly. I was quite nervous about having to face God after having run from Him for so long. I wasn’t sure He cared, but for the first time in my life I was ready to pull back the curtain and let Him see everything that was inside of me. I wanted Him to see me for exactly who I was.
I walked through the doors of the church a nervous wreck, thinking, These people are going to take one look at me and instantly assume that I am a good-for-nothing tramp. That was clearly what I thought of myself and I assumed it’s what everyone else saw. However, the moment I stepped inside the church, an unexpected sensation washed over me. I suddenly felt, This is where I should have been my whole life. I’m finally home.
My Broken Pieces : Mending the Wounds from Sexual Abuse Through Faith, Family and Love (9781101990087) Page 12