When I said that I had dark secrets in my life, this is what I meant. This is what I kept hidden for thirty years. It is very hard for me to talk about, and for most of my life I didn’t share it with anyone, not even my mother. I just shoved it deeper and deeper behind a curtain of shame.
I was three years old when I was sexually abused for the first time. My mom left me with a babysitter in town, and the abuse happened there. I began having trouble going to the bathroom, and when my mom asked me about it I told her something had happened at the babysitter’s house. My mom took me to see a doctor, and the doctor confirmed that something severe had happened to me – something much worse than inappropriate touching. The doctor also said that because I was so little, I wouldn’t remember anything and the best course of action was not to mention it to me at all. So my mom never brought it up, and neither did I. She never took me back to that babysitter, but otherwise we never discussed it.
We wouldn’t talk about it again for almost thirty years.
When I was five and a half it happened again, in the home of a different babysitter. The babysitter had an older husband, and I remember him making me sit on his lap. I didn’t want to do it, but I felt I had to. My brother Jayson was with me then, tucked away in his infant carrier. I remember looking at him sound asleep in his little carrier and thinking, As long as I stay on his lap, he won’t touch Jayson.
This time, I didn’t tell my mom about the molestation. I didn’t tell her, because I wanted to protect her from more bad news. Even at that age, I knew my mother had a hard life, what with Hank and money problems and all her other headaches. The last thing she needed was another crisis to deal with. So I never mentioned anything to her or anyone else.
But there was something else at work, too. Now, the abuse was happening again. This wasn’t the first person to do this to me, and I wondered, What is wrong with me? How could I let this happen again? I began to feel dirty and broken inside. That was another reason I couldn’t bring myself to tell my mother – because it made me feel so bad about myself. For the first time I can remember in my life, I felt shame.
By the age of six, I’d already seen my mother’s two marriages fall apart and endured horrible sexual abuse. So when I was put in harmful situations after that, I didn’t even realize they were harmful. They were just my ‘normal.’ The reality of being sexually abused at a young age is that it identifies you – it becomes a part of who you are. It causes something inside of you to break, and once it’s broken it makes you vulnerable to even more abuse. That is what happened to me. All the shame and the dirtiness and the brokenness that I felt became my identity. This was who I was.
My mother didn’t leave us with that second babysitter for long, but when I was six, she started bringing us to visit Hank’s mother once a week. Every Thursday night after my piano lesson she’d pick me up and take me to the two-floor condo where Hank’s mom and his stepdad lived with their two teenage daughters. Even after she divorced Hank, she kept hanging out with his family. And Hank’s family was, to put it mildly, really dysfunctional.
The ones who bore the brunt of it were the two daughters, Alice and Rita. As far as I could tell, their parents basically treated them as slaves. They were not allowed to have any friends or make any phone calls, and they had to come straight home from school every day. They spent their afternoons and evenings cooking and cleaning the house.
My mom would hang out with Hank’s mom and stepdad upstairs while we all waited downstairs. Whenever the grown-ups needed something they’d bang on the floor – once for Alice, twice for Rita. The girls had to run up, see what they wanted, and hurry back down to fetch it. I remember Alice and Rita constantly scurrying around with beers and food. The girls weren’t mean to me or Jayson; in fact, they were really very kind. But it was obvious they were severely browbeaten, to the point of having their spirits completely crushed.
It was Alice, the younger daughter, who started acting out her frustrations on me. It began as inappropriate physical touching, and it got a lot worse from there. It didn’t happen every time we were there, but it happened a lot. And it happened for five straight years. For a long time afterward, I felt a lot of anger toward Alice for what she did to me. I didn’t hate her, but I really resented her. Looking back, I don’t know what happened to Alice in her life to make her do what she did, but I do know she wasn’t a predator or a monster. She was basically still a child herself. Today, I feel nothing but sadness when I think about Alice and her sister.
I didn’t tell a soul about what was going on: not my mother, not a friend, not anyone. For one thing, I didn’t know how to tell anyone – just the thought of putting the words together and explaining it made me sick. But by then I was also convinced it was all my fault. If it had happened once, that would be one thing. But three times? With three different people?
I was the common denominator. The problem had to lie with me.
And where was God in all of this? Where was the Creator I had heard so much about? My mom took us to service and Sunday school each and every week – for a while to a Baptist church, and then to a Methodist one – and every week I heard about the greatness and glory of our Heavenly Father. But the concept of God as a loving father had no meaning for me.
You see, I couldn’t fathom such a thing as a loving and completely devoted father. My time with my own father was so very limited, and my stepdad was certainly no shining example of fatherly love. So when the pastors spoke of a loving Father who would always protect me, it didn’t make much sense to me. Nothing I heard in all those sermons and Bible classes seemed to apply to my life at all. And I sure as heck knew God hadn’t protected me from harm. Just as my feelings of shame and worthlessness were taking root, so too were my doubts about the existence or goodness of God.
Now, Jesus Christ – that was a different story. Everything I heard about Jesus made him more and more attractive to me. For one thing he was human, not some celestial being. Plus, he died on a cross for our sins – he died trying to save me. After a while I felt like I loved Jesus and I wanted to get closer to him. So when I was nine years old, I told my mom I wanted to be baptized.
I was in church when I first heard a pastor talk about how baptism cleans your soul, and the word ‘clean’ really stuck with me. I remember thinking, That’s what I want. I want to be clean. So many bad things were happening to me, and the thought of having all the shame and the pain washed away with a simple dunk in the water was, for me, thrilling. I nudged my mom in church and told her I wanted to be baptized, and she took me down front. The congregation prayed over me, and that evening we came back for the baptism.
I went in a room and changed into a simple, white cloth gown. The baptismal pool was high up in a balcony area, and it had a glass front so everyone in the church could see. I walked slowly toward the pool and could barely catch my breath. This was it! I was going to be cleaned! I stepped into the pool and waded in lukewarm water that came up to my chest. Then the pastor put his hand on my back and dunked me in the water, then brought me up and dunked me again. I came up dripping and spitting water. I had accepted Jesus Christ into my life.
And, sure enough, I felt clean. I felt like my soul had been scrubbed. To this day, I can remember that feeling and how magical it was.
Unfortunately, the feeling didn’t last. The baptism, I figured, didn’t take. I assumed salvation meant being saved from all the crud that was happening to me; I didn’t realize it meant Jesus was saving my soul. When all the things that made me feel dirty kept happening, I asked my mom if I could be baptized again. And so, a few months later, I was baptized again.
All in all, I was baptized four times: once in a Catholic Church when I was born, twice in the Baptist church, and finally in the Methodist church when I was twelve. And after each one, I truly felt cleansed.
But each time, the feeling didn’t last.
And so I began to doubt if I could ever be saved – or if there was even a God in heaven to save me. After all, if God could save me, why hadn’t He already? It seemed the path my life was taking was only leading me further way from God, not closer. No matter how much I wanted to feel like a loving child of God, I couldn’t – I just felt unclean and unworthy.
But most of all, I felt like I was on my own. I felt like I had no protector, no hero, no champion. I truly believed that in a hostile world, I was all alone.
Looking back on my younger self now, it breaks my heart to think I felt so isolated and abandoned by God. I wish I could tell young Crystal not to feel so terrified and so alone, because – as I now understand – we are never alone, not even in our darkest hours. ‘For He will command His angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways’ (Psalm 91:11). The truth is, I did have protectors, I did have heroes, and I wasn’t on my own – none of us are.
God is with us always. And His angels are guarding us in all our ways.