COAPN Volume 41: Her
By B.L. Aldrich
“Brenna!”
I froze, pleading with the shadows to mask me from the occupant beyond the open door.
From my angle, crouched against the baseboards, she lay in the bed, her bulk mounded beneath the covers like deflating bread dough. She was naked under the quilt she’d pulled up to her chin. I knew that from previous mornings spent trapped beside her in the bed, the exact scenario I’d been attempting to sneak past. If I could sneak past the door without the wicked old hulk seeing me, then I could escape into the basement where her limited mobility stopped her from descending.
Had she spotted me? Her head wasn’t turned toward the door. She was glaring, dead eyed, at the ceiling, lying still as a mannequin or a corpse. She must have heard me trying to creep past. Again.
By this particular morning I was racking up a plethora of ineffective tactics for escaping this gross and uncomfortable morning ritual. Tip-toe past. Nope. Make a small leap across the slab of light from the open door. Nope. Squirm past flat on my stomach. Definite nope. Today I’d tested out crouch-walking against the wall opposite her door.
“Get in here!”
I trudged in, resigned to the childhood edict of, “Do as adults tell you.” All adults. Parents. Teachers. Church leaders. Youth pastors. Kind adults. Cruel adults. Fun adults. Grotesque ones. I was four. There were no caveats in my child brain’s construction of the world that suggested I could say no to an elderly relative when they’d given me an order. Adults were to be obeyed. Never questioned. Never refused. Should I choose the path of defiance, I could expect a spanking.
So it never occurred to me, standing there at the side of the bed, looking at the beady eyed old predator lying recumbent in her usurped bedroom, that any reply except compliance was open to me when she snapped, “Get in bed with me.”
I walked around to the opposite side of the bed, lifted the blankets and crawled in.
It could have grown darker from there, but her visit was too short. In my still developing brain it was a six-week stint in hell, but she left before things could progress from being ordered to scoot closer to her until we were pressed together, flesh to flesh. And no matter how many times I tried to crawl back out of bed, inch by inch, she called me back. But, curiously, whenever my parents finally woke, she’d release me and tell me to go play, so it was clear she didn’t want my mother or father to catch her at asking me to lay in bed with her.
The mornings were the worst, but I also endured her during waking hours. She would insist that I sit on her lap while she watched TV. If I got tired of sitting with her, she’d put an arm around me and trap me against her and only let me go when my mother allowed me to get up, some hours later. I spent hours upon hours in physical contact with that woman. The whole time, I was uncomfortable. It didn’t feel like cuddling with a grandparent or a beloved family member. It felt wrong in some intangible way my four-year-old brain couldn’t articulate. And while I could tell my Mom I didn’t like sitting with the old bat, her response was, that she was sorry, but I needed to be polite to her because she was old and that the visit wouldn’t be that long. This response I received before the morning crawl in the bed stuff started, so I never thought to question it.
As an adult I learned that woman was sexually assaulted in her own childhood by a family member. I also learned she was one in a long line of generational victimization by multiple members of that branch of the family against multiple children within it. She was a product of abuse and silence. She didn’t victimize me. But I’m fairly certain she was grooming me to attempt to.
It didn’t get worse. But it might have.
Teach your children to respect adults, but also teach them that not all adults are good.
Teach your children about their bodies and when it is and isn’t okay to be unclothed around other people.
Teach your children what is and isn’t appropriate physical contact.
Listen to your children when they say they don’t like something and ask them questions when they are too little to know how to tell you what’s wrong.
Please don’t assume keeping them ignorant is the same as keeping them innocent.
Thank you for reading,
B
