Glamour magazine currently has a contest called "Story of My Life". I submitted the one below. It is mostly centered around an event in my life, but I think I did a beautiful job.
Even if I don't win I'll know I tried.
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I was born on October 12, 1974 in St. Louis, Missouri. My mother, Joann was separated from my father. My older sister, Melinda, 10 when I was born, became like a surrogate mother.
Renee, my little sister, was born July 26th, 1977. That year things started to get bad for my mother. Having been severely injured in an accident, my mom was able to do less in the way of providing for us. She was now severely disabled.
We were very poor and we ate a lot of potatoes.
Our home was small. I didn�t know this of course until I was older because it never occurred to me that we were �doing without�. Our mother was very affectionate and loving with us. Our family very close-knit. My grandmother, Lue, was super-involved too, I loved being with her.
We spent a lot of time at Church. My mother played the accordion and my Grandmother sang a lot of solos.
On Sunday nights after church, Grandma would always take us to White Castle�s for cheeseburgers.
We were all pretty happy back in 1982. I was 7, my sister 4. My mom ceased dating and decided to marry this nice man named Jerry. He was tall and skinny with red hair, but he was nice to us. We were happy to have a father figure. My mom was happy too. The only thing making her upset were the occasional phone calls from a man she�d dated 8 months before named Rodney.
Her brother Dan, whom introduced them when they played pool against each other, introduced Rodney to my mom. My mom went out with Rodney a few times. In fact, we went to his house for a barbecue. But I seem to remember it was nothing special in my 7-year-old mind. He disappeared.
Suddenly, he was back. His affections angry, and he immediately started watching my mom. He�d show up where she went, and he�d call and make threats. Then he started showing up at the house, knocking on the door at midnight.
Mom got scared. One night I remember refusing to go to sleep and I told my mother �something bad was going to happen�. That night in April 1982, I remember, my mom was upset. More threatening phone calls. She tried to soothe us children. She smoothed my hair and handed me my bear. The last time I saw my mom alive, she was sitting on my bed. Her long black hair cascaded down her back. She told me she loved me, rose from the bed and was gone. I fell asleep.
I woke up because of a blood-curdling scream and a loud thump. I blinked and rubbed the sleep from my eyes, and right in front of my bed, stood a naked Rodney. I couldn�t quite remember his name, for my mom had known him some months before, but I knew he was a friend. What was he doing in our house? I wondered.
What was this? My mom was lying on the floor, and there was blood on the walls, floor, and my blanket. I didn�t understand. I started to believe I was having a nightmare.
�Why is she on the floor?� I asked Rodney. �She�s sleeping.� He replied. It was the same tone of voice one would use to say, �The bus is late� or �Pass the peas�. He scooped me up. He carried me into my mom�s room. A turn in my stomach told me something was wrong. There was more blood in her floor, and on her bed.
He removed my pajamas. This was bad, I told myself. No man was supposed to see me naked, and yet, he was my mom�s friend. He lay me down, and straddled me. He was a small man, but he was still heavy. I started to protest, and he started touching me. He talked, but very little, and he was very calm. Since he was calm, and not angry, maybe nothing bad would happen.
I remember a pillow being placed over my face while I lay scared and shaking. I kept knocking the pillow off my face. He unsuccessfully tried to smother me. I guess he got angry.
All of the sudden, I saw a glint of light. A knife. That�s when I got really scared. He started stabbing me. Every way I turned, he�d hit me hard with that knife. I played dead. I don�t know why. He didn�t fall for it..he immediately stabbed me in my chest. He was going for my heart, but instead, he punctured my lung and caused it to collapse. I immediately got dizzy. He stopped.
I kept my eyes closed while I felt the bed easing up.
It seemed like a while, but it must�ve been a short time. I gathered my strength to rise up and see where he went. A wave of nausea washed over me.
From my place I could see him washing off the knife. I could see my mom from where I was also. She was exactly where she was when I first woke up.
My sister�s bed was about 10 feet from my mother�s bed. I decided to crawl under her bed. My cuts were stinging, and I wanted to cry but instead I bit my lip. I planned to get my baby sister under the bed with me, but he came back into the room.
I heard a bark, and my dog Trixie tried to bite this man. She had been hiding but was growling at him. He kicked her across the room. With a yelp, she ran to me.
From this location, I could see my mother. She was just a few feet from me. She lay face down, in a pink nightgown. A pool of red liquid surrounded her. Blood. I saw his feet walk over to her from the kitchen. He unceremoniously stomped on her head. She didn�t move. He kicked my mother�s lifeless body. I watched the feet walk into my mother�s bedroom. A quickening in the step..he was looking for me. I saw the feet coming toward my sister�s bed, and I started to cry silent tears. Why couldn�t someone help us?
Rodney spoke to my sister. She had been pretending to be asleep, as to not warrant his rage. When she couldn�t tell him where I was, he attacked her.
Little drops of liquid hit the floor and spattered. Blood. Her blood rained down onto the linoleum. He slit my sister�s throat. He did other things to her that I know of, but my mind will not let me remember. He threw her, back onto the bed, quite like a rag doll. I imagine, at 4 years old, she weighed 30 pounds or less. Not really heavy, but heavy enough.
Trixie stayed at my side. Sometimes during that night I cried, sometimes I slept. Quite possibly I passed out. The blanket saved my life and kept me warm. The wounds clotted.
One time, when I came to, I smelled smoke. My mom didn�t smoke. I could see into my mother�s bedroom. The TV was on. Maybe this was all a bad dream, and Mom was up watching TV.
Mom was in the same place, on the floor. And Rodney, naked, perched on the end of her bed, was smoking and watching TV. Eventually, he left.
I crawled out from under the bed. I wanted to get help, but I was just so tired. Everything hurt. I crawled into my bed.
When I awoke, my baby sister was crying.
�Sissy, sissy..�
I slowly sat up and fought off a wave of dizziness. Renee said, �I�m thirsty�, so I went to get her some water. As I walked into the kitchen, I stopped to wake mom. �Mommy, � I shook her but she wouldn�t get up. I knew she was dead. The phone was ripped out of the wall. I walked into the kitchen. So helpless. The door�the latch was too high. So, I got my sister some water in a tin cup. Later, the police would find my little bloody handprints on the sink.
Weakly, I teetered back into our room and took Renee the water. She took a drink. It started coming out of this huge slit in her throat.
I got back in my bed. My mother was dead, and my sister was crying for Mom. I couldn�t help her. I couldn�t stay awake.
My uncle Nate found us. Renee was moribund, which means, cold and blue. Renee and I, after multiple surgeries and blood transfusions, survived. Mom died after, I believe, 30 or more stab wounds. She was also raped and sodomized. She fought this killer, losing her own nails, in the battle. She knew he�d kill her children.
What is surviving? I am blessed I know, but I don�t always feel it. After all, the trauma to my mind alone is something I battle every day. I�ve had therapy. I�ve talked about it over and over. I�ve filled many journals with my thoughts. I have my spirituality. And yet, there is no balm for my soul. It is sometimes jagged and raw.
Sometimes, I am scared. There are many Rodney's out there. I am protective of my own child.
My sister Renee, well, she is an angry sad person. She never really felt like anyone understood her. She is bitter over the loss of the only person that loved her unconditionally.
I have lived with 13 scars; evidence that once, a man tried to kill me. A man I knew as a friend of my mothers. One of these scars is a large abdominal one. Rodney did not stab me with the knife there, but he did cause it. At the end of the attack, he knifed me in my private place, and it ripped me inside out. When I was later taken to the emergency room, the doctors determined that I would not be able to have normal bowel function, and I also was going to need vaginal reconstruction surgery. So, at a later date, I was opened up, and my bowels were temporarily relocated to my abdomen. I also had to endure the surgery for vaginal reconstruction. So much pain was associated with the very essence of being a girl, and was to later convince me that I was a dirty disgusting person.
As if the shock of surgery were not enough, for a period of months I had a colostomy bag on my side. The incisions, known as stomas, quite often became raw and hurt.
This scar, where they eventually closed the stomas, is an ugly reminder that I see every day, that I was savagely attacked. It, like my soul, often becomes raw and irritated.
Then we have, the search, the fear. I have been traumatized, and I cannot remember his name. I call him, �Billy� because we know a lot of men with that name in our neighborhood. The nightmares..they started the day after, and continue until now. do a sketch with the police artist. My aunt recognizes it as being Rod, a man my mother had dated some months before.
The detectives, Sambo and Burgoon, take me driving. Somehow, we find the park by Rod�s mother�s house. A little detail I gave them turned out to be the defining clue.
Rod is found. He is in jail. Thank God.
This happened 22 years ago. In the immediate years after, I seemed like I was emotionally healthy. I moved on with my life. I lived with my aunt and uncle. But my aunt died 4 years later of a cerebral hemorrhage. My uncle then became physically, emotionally and sexually abusive. My sister Renee and I lived in our own private hell for the next 3 years until we got up the nerve to run away.
Around the age of 12, I started showing signs of an OCD. I was suicidal at the age of 12, and have been 4 times since 1982. I began feeling very sad and hopeless.
I grew up feeling sad, unwanted, and ugly. We could never find a home where we didn�t drive people crazy. Renee and I had so much baggage. We don�t blame our family, we blame Rodney. He was the one who started this snowball of negative life events for us.
Now, my life is more positive. I�m on medication to regulate my moods. Without them, I am a scared, paranoid, angry person. I have love in my heart. It�s hard to trust anyone. Those I love, I sometimes test them. I�m mean. I don�t mean to be, but it�s hard for me to get close to others. I�m working on it. I want to be well for my own daughter. She�s 7. She�s my life. I�d give my very life for this child. When I think about it, this must�ve been the way my mother felt about me. She tried to protect us, and her very last thought, I�m sure, was that this man was going to hurt her babies.
I have night terrors, which is unusual in someone my age. I�m being treated for them, but sometimes I have another night, where I am running. In another dream I am still 7. My sister is still 4. My mom is still here..and we are happy. Rodney never hurt us. We live together. It�s a happy dream.
After we ran away, we lived with another aunt and uncle. They couldn�t take care of 2 teenagers, even though they tried. Eventually, Renee and I wound up separated. She lived with our mother�s sister Abigail and her husband. I was �adopted� by my friend Maggie�s mom Cindy.
I did a bunch of self-destructive things. I was so angry at myself and at the world that I took it out on myself. I started college but quit after a year. When all other avenues were exhausted, I joined the Navy in 1995.
For the first time in my life, I was happy. There was so much anticipation at starting a whole new life. San Diego was beautiful. When I wasn�t in training school, I was at the beach. Toes burrowed in the sand, the warm wind on my face. I sat and stared at the ocean and thought about everything. I thought about how unfair it was that I was doing something with my life but my mom wasn�t there to see it. I spent hours on the beach alone.
I got married to the first sailor who said, �I love you�. There was this song that was playing a lot, especially on the barracks TV. It was �Don�t go chasing Waterfalls� by TLC. I remember saying to myself that it didn�t apply because I was marrying a nice Mormon boy. He couldn�t be a �Waterfall�.
He was. I just didn�t see it then. I had no business marrying him, but I really adored him. We got married in San Diego. None of our families were there.
16 months or so later, Jackie was born. I cried because my mom wasn�t there to hold her grandchild. I think that my mom must�ve held her up in heaven, before she was born. I think she must�ve had some influence up there because my daughter was a prayer answered. I had spent a lifetime being told that I probably wouldn�t be able to have kids because of my injuries from the attack.
A lot has happened in the last few years.
I�ve done a lot of growing up. I got out of the Navy, I moved back to St. Louis. I work for the government now. It�s not what I want to be, but a means until I get to where I want to be. In my mom�s memory, I want to do something with my life that one can be proud of.
Maybe not now, but soon, I plan to go back to college so that I can work in the criminal justice system. I want to help families like ours, scarred by crime. I want to help someone feel not so vulnerable and alone.
The killer�s case was reopened by the Justice Department in May of 2003. Because of the age of the case, they decided to test the evidence to confirm Rodney�s guilt. Unfortunately, there were multiple pieces of evidence so it has taken 9 months to test everything.
I thought it the beginning that I could deal with this but it became too much. September of 2003, I became suicidal. I think in a person�s life, you have to decide at some point whether you are going to just lie down and die, or get up and fight. I didn�t want to fight anymore. I began having flashbacks and terrible nightmares. I went to my doctor and in desperation asked him for help.
I was diagnosed manic-depressive. While the diagnosis is hard to swallow, I�m relieved that I have a name for what I feel. Even though I�m on medication, I still have fears about the killer walking free.
I�m working hard on keeping my mother�s killer where he belongs. I want her to not have died in vain. I�ve talked to the media it. I did an interview or two with Channel 5 news about what happened to us. I don�t think many people understand the long-lasting effects of crime on a family.
I guess it�s time to move on. Not that I�m moving away from my mom. I�m just really starting to grow up.
I have said before, I�m not afraid of dying if it means one day I will be in her embrace again. In the meantime I guess I have to live this life to the fullest and be the best mom I can for my little Jackie. I want to live a full happy healthy life.
13:29 - Wednesday, Mar. 24, 2004
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