An Unsuspecting Child

Who is an unsuspecting child? Probably most of us, in one way or another. We are born an innocent bundle of love, expecting and trusting the adults who care for us to keep us safe. And then sometimes our lives change abruptly, unexpectedly, due to the choices made, paths taken by those same adults. Maybe our stability gets rocked when Dad or Mom accepts a job in a new state and we have to move, leaving our home, our friends, and our relatives behind, and our entire sense of security slides out the door with the furniture. Maybe our parents went through a divorce and the new life without one of our parents leaves a hole we don't know how to fill. Maybe we were sent to a religious school, private school, or public school, depending on our family's religious beliefs or net worth, and our way of seeing the world is shaped by that decision. As we mature into adulthood, we take what we've been taught and make some rules of our own that we break as we learn about life.
Sometimes adults make decisions that affect children in terrible ways. The overt act of abusing a child sexually or physically can cause lifelong effects of devastation. There is a third type of abuse, rarely talked about, that also changes a child's life forever. Known as covert incest, it often occurs in dysfunctional families where a parent needs to replace the emotional ties that they are missing due to an alienation with a spouse. Because of that lack of hands on abuse, those of us who have experienced it are often dismissed. "It that even a real thing?" "Why can't you just forget it?" Living through the mental trauma of covert abuse is difficult and may take a lifetime to overcome with out help. Some of us become alcoholics, prostitutes, drug addicts. We find ourselves acting out, making awful decisions. We ultimately survive, but the damage we cause ourselves along the way extracts its own steep toll.
I've made many mistakes in my life. It took me a long time to realize that it wasn't enough for me to know how it happened, but more importantly, WHY? I had to go gack in time to discover the seeds that began with the generation before me and grew in to a troubled lifestyle that I didn't understand, couldn't seem to control, and lived in the dark with most of my adult life. In the wake of the courageous #MeToo movement, which has shed light on the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and abuse, there must be an orrportunity for those of us who were unsuspecting children when tragedy struck to say: #WeToo! Wee, for the little ones.
I was An Unsuspecting Child and this is my story.