Failure

One day you're be-boppin in along in your eighteen wheeler thinking everything is fine and dandy. The next day you get a call from child protective services in South Carolina telling you they've taken custody of your children because your father has abused your daughter.

You cannot even imagine how hard it was for me to wrap my head around this. And at first I couldn't do it. It just didn't make sense to my brain. How could the man that's never even spanked me have abused my daughter? And the nature of the abuse left no eveidence. It was basically his word against hers? Who do you believe? Your daughter who does have a tendancy to fib alot and did admit to being up one night and watch something like this on TV when she should of been in bed? Or your father who you also know isn't a saint but you've not known him to do something like this? It's just not his M.O. (M.O. is short for mode of operation)

My father was a drug dealer and a pimp. His crimes were about money: how to make a dollar, and preferable a lot of them fast. Imagine my surprise when I would learn my father had been accused of something like this before back home in Ohio. But when there's a minor involved, for the protection of the minor it often isn't in the news anywhere. Things are kept quite. And then I would learn that a younger sister of mine had taken the rap for our father, saying she had had the inappropriate relationship with the accusing minor. My sister being a minor herself at the time about the same age as the other girl, what could they do? But I've learned that my father has a habit of getting his children to take the rap for him. That he got my oldest older brother to cop to a drug charge for him.

I guess when you have twenty something children like my father, none of them are special to you. They're just shields you can throw up as needed to protect yourself from being responsible for your own actions. My father told me I was too attached to my children. That my children weren't really his true grandchilren. That children by his sons were like children he fathered himself. But chilren by his daughters, my children, were "some other motherfucker's kids."

Both of my parents are great rationalizers. The laws that the rest of us abide by and follow don't apply to them. And I've figured out my father's rationalization on why it was okay to use my daughter to satisfy himself. Remember, I'm his "bastardly child." My parents were never married and my mother had had contact with other men near the time of my conception. His name isn't on my birth certificate and he's never claimed me legally. There were no DNA tests back then and one has never been performed. So, in his mind there is still the grand possiblity that I'm not his at all. And even if by chance I am one of his biological chilren, it's still alright because I'm his daughter not one of his sons. And somehow that makes it okay for him to molest my daughter because she's "some other motherfucker's."

My father really is a smart man. He was counting on my love and trust for him to trip me up, and it did. I had a hard time accepting and dealing with this, still do sometimes.

I was able to get my son back rather quickly. They let me have him back after about six months. I was very cooperative and did everything the child protective services asked of me. Yet it still took me four years to get my daughter back. It's made us both very different people. She's about hundred pounds over weight now and is the biggest pessimist I know. She was diagnosed with a form of autism called Asberger's Syndrome, but that doesn't explain the loss of the child I knew before this. That four years she spent in the system did ever so much more damage than the crime my father committed and got away with. It left a rift between us that I don't know if will ever be truely mended.

The only consolation I take from this is that I know my father is going to hell. While it might not say so in the Bible, I have it on good authority that there are some things even God doesn't forgive. That some crimes are unforgivable even in the eyes of our Heavenly Father. Doesn't stop me from wanting to kill my father. I think he should die a miserably long and painful death. I would put him down much too quickly and kindly. I really would like to see what would happen if he and my mother were in the same room now.

Ooops, sorry, there's another one of those unsightly holes in me. I'm leaking away. Be careful. You don't want to get any of me on your shoe. I'm really tough to get off. You'll have to toss them out and buy a new pair.

Except I don't do my daughter any good sitting in jail for killing my father, pity that. So, for my sake and my daughter's sake I moved us again. This time instead of going south I went west and landed in Utah. Not my idea, but God's. I wanted to live in L.A. where we would blend in better racially. No one here in Utah has been unkind to us concerning our race or anything like that. The schools here are really very good. I'm quite impressed. But neither me nor my daughter have made any close friends so far.

It's hard to let people get close to you after you've suffered through what we have. And I know all too well how my daughter is suffering. I was molested by a preacher when I was about three. Another one of those people you're supposed to be able to trust. And I really believe child molesters should get the death penalty. Why? Because when an adult violates a child like that, it destroys part of the child. Physical damage may heal and you may find aways to cope with and survive the unwanted and unasked for attention. But part of you dies. It leaves on of those holes I've been talking about where you start to leak away. I guess the lucky ones are dead or find a way to stuff up the hole. But I have so many holes now. I'm leaking away in places I never thought I would leak.

I attended church fairly regularly and go to the temple when I have the chance. My poor broken Betty isn't taking me anywhere lately as she sits at the shop here on Main St. in Layton, UT. Betty can be fixed eventually. But I'm afraid there are too many holes in me now for me to be considered viable. I am on speaking terms somewhat with my mother. But she blames me for what my father did to my daughter. I blame me too. But I still don't know how I was supposed to really know the Lord didn't bless me with at least one parent I could turn to. So, my mother's in Ohio which means I can't go back there where I actually have friends even if I'm a little short on reliable relatives. And the only people I miss in SC are a couple of old bosses. I really didn't leave behind any close friends.

So, here I am in Utah. A very pretty state by the way with lots of nice people. But without a job or a car on top of everything else, I'm feeling like a really big failure. I've failed my children and I've failed myself.