Anonymous
Sibling Sexual Assault (“Anonymous” because I have already given enough personal details in this story that I feel sure that I would be further ostracized by my parents if I put my real name.
I am the product of parents that gave my second oldest brother full responsibility of me when they were unavailable. The abuse happened during the 1970s and did not stop until my brother joined the Marine corp.
Anonymous
It’s hard to know what to write about when you remember so few specifics. My childhood is largely a haze, with few specific incidents breaking through the blur.
Was I sexually abused? There’s no way to know. My mother suspected I might have been. A college friend of mine anonymously approached our RA with similar concerns about me. I was certainly more sexually aware than other children my age. I had night terrors. I wet the bed even throughout high school. And yet…I have no memory of molestation and with no memory to back up her suspicion, there’s no way to know for sure.
Untypically Jia
It was supposed to be to protect me.
That’s what they said.
Taken from my home by my own extended family.
They said it wasn’t safe there anymore.
They didn’t know how safe it really was compared to where they took me.
They said I would be moving to California with my aunt in two months.
For Francie and Letitia
It is Independence Day, July 4, 2011, and Letitia Jowosimi is sitting right where she was on that day, two years earlier, when the world caved beneath her. Right there in her west Madison living room on the far right side of her couch, next to the lamp, facing the window, near the phone. The phone that rang to let her know that her aunt Francie Weber was dead. That Francie’s husband and partner of 30-some years, Steven Weber, had finally killed her.
It’s a strange thing, grief. Everybody does it differently. Experts try to quantify pain, to plot out a helpful map with a bright red YOU ARE HERE arrow so you’ll know just exactly where you’re supposed to go on the road from denial to anger and onward. But right there on that couch in a matter of minutes, Letitia sped straight to acceptance. “It was very immediate for me,” she says, as she sunk to her knees and she gnashed and she wailed and she grieved, she grieved, because for her there was no denial, there was no bargaining, there was no doubt. She knew it was true. Some part of her even knew it was coming.
