Epilogue

I was right when I said that Parris would continue to haunt me. I have seen him around town, in his truck; I do not know if he saw me, but I definitely saw him. But that is not how he has haunted me, oh no. He has haunted me through many defines the term abreaction as an “emotional release or discharge after recalling a painful experience that has been repressed because it was not consciously tolerable”. In my opinion, abreactions are like nightmares, but worse. They are worse because you feel like you are there, living the events over and over. But, in a sense, it is a little like a movie because sometimes, it will stop on one bad event and just replay, and you will feel how you felt then, over and over. You feel all those same emotions over, reliving it, like the first time wasn’t bad enough. Unlike in a nightmare, though, where you wake up and think, “Oh, thank God, it was just a dream.”…In an abreaction, you don’t have that luxury. You wake up, and know that everything you “dreamed” is the truth, it all really happened. You’re only hoping to wake up one day to “It was all really a bad dream, a nightmare I was stuck in.” That is how he has haunted me…for five years now. Well, one example.

I also had to sort through all of his lies, and the ones that mother helped to confirm. After we broke up, I was so confused: I didn’t know up from down, or right from wrong; all because he had filled my head up with so much of his bullshit. He made me doubt my feelings by saying mean and hurtful things, and then saying “You have no sense of humor; it was a joke!” By doing that, and other things, he made me question, and eventually doubt my own feelings. By doing that, I doubted my sense of reality. It took forever, and a lot of strength I never knew I had, to get it straight, and sometimes I think I still have to get some of his shit out, because he got me at such a vulnerable time and age.

I am now twenty years old. And I see a lot of the repercussions that those six months took on me. I understand a lot of why I am the way I am has to do with Parris and what he did to me, and with my mother. Why her? Because she encouraged it. It took me a long time to figure that out. But I finally figured out what she actually did to me. Up until then, I had been making excuses for her. And I never quite understood. But I think I come to understand more and more everyday.

My mother sold me to him. She used her precious alcohol to blind her eyes and to numb herself to what Parris was doing to me and…for the bargain price of $300 every two weeks, she sold her fifteen-year-old daughter to a twenty-eight-year-old man. And she didn’t care what he did to me; like I said she simply closed her eyes to it and numbed herself to it…and every single one of my cries for help. She pretended she didn’t know what was going on; her and Laird, both pretended they didn’t know what was happening.

It must have been nice to be numb all that time; to be numb to what all was going on. I found a way to numb myself to the after effects of all that abuse…I found a way to numb myself to feeling, too. One of the other “repercussions” of this whole thing, is: not long after, I started cutting myself on my legs, those same legs that Parris thought were so sexy. At first, I figured that if I made my legs ugly then if he did ever come back and try to get me: he would take one look at my ugly legs and never want me again. I started cutting when I was fifteen-and-a-half, and I just stopped at the age of twenty, after lots of therapy.

I finally got so fed-up with her and Laird; I had someone call social services on them. Social Services called us and said we needed to come in on this certain day for an appointment. Of course Mom made me clean the house up extra good in case they came back to look at the house. We only cleaned the downstairs though. (I did have the person tell social services about my mother’s filthy house. Even when I tried to clean it, it was beyond cleaning.) We went in for a counseling session.

They told me the whole way, “You better not say anything. You better not. You better tell them what they need to hear, tell them the right thing.”

Yeah, I knew what that meant: no, I never had anything to do with Parris; we were friends; I never had sex with him; my mother is good to me, so is Laird…blah, blah, blah. We went in there and I went in to see the social worker first, since it was all about me, mainly. I went into her office and at first I didn’t want to say anything, but then I realized that maybe this could be my chance to make things better, and I had to say something. So I did, I told her about Parris, and everything, and that my mom and Laird knew, that they wanted us to be together, even that they harassed me after I left him. She called my mother and Laird in.

When I came out they were whispering to me, “You better have told them what we told you to tell them!”

They came out and we all, including the social services lady, went to the house. She said she had to take a look at the house. So she followed us to the house, came in, and looked around. She only looked at the downstairs. Had she bothered to go upstairs she would have seen how really filthy it was.

In the end, social services did nothing. I needed their help, and they did nothing. I went to live with my grandmother, because I could not take living with Mom and Laird anymore, the constant harassment about Parris, the drinking and the arguments, and the filthy house.

When I left, my Mother and my relationship pretty much dwindled from there. We tried to hang on, but she resented me for leaving her. Not long after that, Laird went out on the road, trucking too, and she was left alone in the house. Then she really resented me. In September 2000, when I was sixteen, she suddenly died, of a blocked artery to her heart and pneumonia.

Three years later was when I finally stopped making excuses for her and I realized the extent of what she and Laird had done to me. I have a lot of consequences from all that, and they have a lot to do with who I am today and why I do a lot of the things I do today.

But like the old saying goes, “That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.” Such is true with my life and all the experiences therein. I am here to tell you the story of it all, and therefore, stronger because of it.

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