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It was her second year at Downey High School. Tina’s mom and sisters had told Tina she was a whore so much that she started to believe it and take on that label. She didn’t know back then how to fact check stuff she was told about herself. She was told she has blind spots and would never see it for herself. So she started to believe it was true.
She was 17. She was on the outside and didn’t fit in. She just wanted to be liked and accepted. She met a boy who didn’t seem like the other boys. He was goofy and non-threatening. He had a lot of crazy stories. With what Tina had survived in her life, she had stories of her own. The only thing about her stories is that they were real and true while his were made up.
They started hanging out together. Tina was trying to fit in by saving up her lunch money and buying weed and offering it to people. She even smoked it once in a while with them. She gave away more than she smoked. She wasn’t into the intoxication from it but she felt it was helping her fit in. People would smile and be nice when she gave them a joint.
Honestly, it was similar to carrying bacon in your pocket to make nice with a dog. As long as she was giving them weed, they were nice to her.
Bob was goofy and seemed safe. they experimented with sex. It was the first time a boy didn’t try to force himself on her. He wasn’t pushy with it. It felt like equal playing grounds and she felt safe with him.
They dated for a couple of months before Tina found out she was pregnant. “Everyone” was already saying she was a whore. She had nothing to protect but her sanity. She had morning sickness really bad. She nearly fainted in class and the teacher sent her to the nurse with an escort.
The escort didn’t last more than a few steps outside the building for him to disappear, then, Tina made her way to the nurse on her own. Tina saw the doctor and the doctor told her father she was pregnant.
Her mother was angry and called her names. Whore was one of them. Then she told her to have an abortion. She went on for a long time. Tina was so hurt she cried hard all the way to Bob, the father’s house. Her mother was so mean to her with the rejection that it was the opposite of support. That was common for Tina.
Her mother refused to show her how to adult but Tina was being thrown into it. Tina now had to make all of her own doctor appointments and get around on her own without a car or support from her family.
The way the kids treated her for being pregnant was harsh. She enrolled in a program that was for kids with problems who still wanted to graduate. The one rule was that she could only miss three days total in the entire year. She was pregnant. She missed 2 days because of a bad bladder infection. She couldn’t walk there.
The last day she missed was because her mother who knew she couldn’t miss another day, sent her to stay with her sister to help her because Robin was pregnant. Tina couldn’t make it to Downey from Longbeach by foot so she didn’t get to go to school.
But that is the way Mother wanted it. The year before she tricked her into taking herself out of school with promises that they will send her back to the private school. They had no such intentions. They took her out of school to babysit her sister’s kids they had custody of.
Her mother was dead set on sabotaging her efforts toward her education. She didn’t want her to be the successful one. She wanted Mary to be that. She wanted Tina to be nothing but a lowly housewife and mother. To never accomplish her full potential. After all, Tina was a whore.
Tina was very pregnant and it was time to have a baby shower. Tina invited her few friends and family to the baby shower. No one said that they weren’t coming.
Tina’s mom got some chips and stuff and her small group of friends and sisters are all that was needed. The only person who showed up to the baby shower was her mother. Tina knew her mother didn’t really want to be there either.
When she asked her friend and sisters why they weren’t there, they all told Tina they weren’t there because they don’t support Fornication. Something each of them was guilty of themselves. That was a big sign that Kathy wasn’t Tina’s friend and it was a significant experience that her family were monsters and would only tear at her and never lift her up.
It was one of the beginning experiences that helped teach Tina that if she wants support, she will have to be her own support because there is no one else who will ever do that for her.
She was just starting to find out that she was a lone wolf. She would have to stand on her own power. She will have to learn how to survive alone. Little did she know that she had been surviving on her own all her life. Surviving the bad things people did to her since she was a one-year-old baby.
She survived violence which was a part of her life so personally because it was right there in her home. The monsters lived with her. She was not safe.
It was morning. Tina had been in labor for a while but the contractions were too close to sleep now. There was all this commotion. Her parents were at work and Kathy her acquaintance she was visiting with was there to help track the contractions. They all went to the hospital. They called Robin who was going to be Tina’s coach.
Tina had toxemia and the baby was in distress. It was a hard labor and birth but it went fairly fast for a first baby. There were small complications. Tina delivered in the labor room. They didn’t have time to move her to the delivery room.
She had the baby right there on the gurney. There was a problem with the baby. They had given Tina a shot and it was taking effect. They took the baby with them and they took her to a room where the doctor could sew up the area that tore during childbirth.
Later, after Tina was conscious again, the pediatrician came into Tina’s room to explain what happened with the baby. It was a boy and his whole right side of his face was all bruised because he got lodged in the birth canal.
She named her baby Andrew. She held him in her arms and just stared at him. Looking him over and checking his fingers and toes. She smiled when she noticed the hair on his ears. Andrew had so much hair when he was born that he had black hair on the tips of his ears. He was a bit overdue. Tina had turned 18 two weeks before she had him. Tina loved her little baby boy.
She had saved money her dad gave her for cleaning and babysitting. She used that money to buy baby stuff like a bassinet and a crib. Her dad was as supportive as he could sneak around and be by giving her the money against her mother’s wishes.
The harassment didn’t stop and Tina simply accepted that she is a bad person in the eyes of the world. She didn’t think she was bad but it didn’t matter because everyone else thought it. She loved her son anyway.
She eventually had two more children and it didn’t go any different the next two times. Regardless that she had the last one inside the confines of a marriage. She never did have a baby shower with any of her babies because she just didn’t have any friends or family to do that with.
Thinking outside the box
When I take a closer look and examine what was happening to me and why I made those choices, I realize that my pregnancy is statistically going to happen. Girls who are abused are 2.2% more likely to become a teen mom.
I was called a whore by my whole family and then when I got pregnant, the attacks were by everyone who had something to say. All they could do was tell me how much of a whore I was. I had the thought that with the fact that I didn’t have sex with as many guys as the girls calling me a whore, how does my ONE sexual choice make me a whore?
The other girls were fucking every boy they could get their hands on. Yet because I wasn’t on birth control I was a whore. When I was raped, I was called a whore too. I was called a whore because my father molested me too.
I had to really take a look at myself over the following years to determine if I was indeed a whore. The first thing I set out to do was to find the actual meaning of the word Whore. What did it mean?
What does it mean to be a whore? Apparently, for many, any female who has sex is a whore. And for many more, anyone who gets raped is a whore too because it’s commonly thought that the girl caused it somehow.
Sarcasm comes to mind like “oh yeah, I was such a whore when I was a baby that I walked around in my diapers wagging my butt to entice my father into sexually abusing me”. And “Yeah, the earth is still flat too.”
This sarcasm is how I cope with the gaslighting people try to control me with. Gaslighting comes from the little comments and statements that dig into the mind to make you question yourself, your sanity, and reality.
Much like we have seen In American Politics since the 2016 Presidential elections. Many unsuspecting people have fallen victim to the gaslighting. It has been really sad. But people like me can’t be gaslit because of all the gaslighting we survived and we have learned to recognize the manipulative behaviors and now we can’t be gaslit. Well, with the way narcissists manipulate anyway.
But I was almost an adult when I got pregnant. It has been pointed out that some of the accusations and gaslighting were done out of some unfounded jealousy. It had nothing to actually do with me. Unfortunately, I had no clue that it had nothing to do with me. That it was an unfounded manifestation generated by their own lack of self-worth.
The more they told me I was bad the more effort I put into being good and the more “good” I was the more they hated me and attacked me and abused me and gaslit me.
Making sense of it
I read a lot. I read a lot to learn about stuff. Knowledge helps in the healing process. It is part of it. Learning to define the events. Putting a label on it helps. It goes from being intangible like a gas that you can’t grab or pin down to being something solid that can be fought.
Discovering little things that answer questions like, was I a teen mom because I was sexually abused? I believe it was when I look back over my life and at my sexuality. I wasn’t oversexed. I was quite shy but as a teenager, I was curious about sex considering it had been being forced on me since I was one year old.
Boys were buzzing around me. All they wanted was sex while I was looking for love and acceptance. That too told me I was a whore. It said it was true although I said no a lot. I rarely said yes.
I said yes to this guy and although he was not a good guy, he wasn’t threatening and I didn’t get pregnant during an attack. That is why I said yes to him. He wasn’t like the other boys. He seemed different. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t have the skill to identify healthy people. I didn’t recognize that he had a problem with lying until much later.
Keep in mind that as an 18-year-old mother, who was still living in the abusive house with her abusers and now with a child to protect, my anxiety rose through the roof. I became very protective of my children. And it was this fear of not being good enough that my ex used to get me to leave my kids behind.
As I look for answers, I find things like this that say:https://www.cc-cac.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/all_statistics_20150619.pdf Darkness To Light
“The risk of teen pregnancy is much higher for girls with a history of child sexual abuse.”
And it says: “What are the long-term consequences of child sexual abuse? Child sexual abuse has lasting consequences for victims. The real tragedy is that it robs children of their potential, setting into motion a chain of events and decisions that affect them throughout their lives.”
I have to consider that as far as being a teen mom, I had outside circumstances that contributed to the decisions that lead to me having Andrew. One, I had been told that I am a whore. And whores have sex. I was conditioned by my sexual abuse to let it happen and I was a teenager and I was curious about it.
I’m glad I did that experimenting with Bob. I’m glad he wasn’t abusive in the same way as the other boys. His abuse was more mind games. I had a good experience around sex for once that let me know that sex wasn’t totally bad.
But because of the sexual abuse and the stigma of me being a whore I never had the ability to express myself through sex. Sex was nothing but a tool used against me with everyone except Bob. Bob used it against me later in other ways. I never did become a real whore to the disappointment of my current boyfriend, although I wish I could be, I will never be.
There are lots of ways to express love or to be intimate. There are physical things, emotional things, and mental things that can be shared between two people that isn’t sex. Those are the things I cherish.
I have a hard time hearing the words “I love you” because those words were used to extract things from me. Those words are used in love bombing and have lost their meaning.
There are so many things around relationships and sex that have bad connotations for me now. It was the conditioning during the most formidable years of my life that has ruined love and sex for me.
The narcissistic abuse the gaslighting did more damage than any of the physical events no matter how bad they were. The gaslighting and other manipulations were the most damaging.
I’m spending way more time healing than I am any of the physical stuff. I have to live with permanent damage to my body from the abuse and traumas but that isn’t nearly as damaging or horrible as the narcissism has been.
I loved my child from the second I laid eyes on him. Well, actually before he was even born I had formed my attachment to him. The others I have had to condition myself to detach from my adult sons directly because of their gaslighting from all the abuse. Their gaslighting is an extension of the abuse on me. They used my kids to abuse me. And to survive it, I had to condition myself to be able to let go of any and all hope.
The one thing I learned from healing from the narcissistic abuse was how to condition myself into what I want to be, how I want to think, how I want to feel, and what I want to do and accomplish such as writing my story.
It has been a tough and shitty bunch of life experiences for me. This is just the beginning of my journey. This is the beginning of Adulthood. I had a lot more shit to experience in my future. Way more heartbreak in store for me now that I was an adult. This is the beginning of what it’s like to survive child abuse and how it carries into adulthood.
It’s easier to gaslight people who don’t have a strong sense of self with immense trust in oneself. Anyone can become gaslit. It isn’t an insult be gaslit. Gaslighting is a form of abuse. If someone tells you they think you might be gaslit, take heed, they are warning you of the most insidious of all abuse.
Don’t judge others. You haven’t walked an inch in their shoes.
