It was the autumn of 1959. I’m sitting in a cafe booth drinking a Coke with a guy my parents wouldn’t rate higher than zero. My friends have coerced me into meeting with him even though I am aware of his ‘Bad Boy’ image, and at eighteen, is two years my senior.
What is it that attracts girls to the ‘bad boys’? And what did he see in me? While he had a certain ‘status’ and confidence oozing from every pore, I was shy and quiet, not among the ‘popular’ girls at school. However, when they learned I was dating Bad Boy, my position leaped up a notch or two. The Message: “The worth of a girl is tethered to the worth of her man.”
My parents are strict, posed a united front with the ‘rules’ and ‘No” is a complete sentence. Therefore, I could only see Bad Boy on Friday and Saturday evenings. The curfew is 11:00 pm.
Seems Bad Boy has rules, too. I was his exclusively.
Bad Boy is quite experienced at the gradual erosion of a young girl’s inhibitions with the underlying and unspoken threat of his absence from her life if she doesn’t soon acquiesce. Being dreadfully afraid Bad Boy would break up with me, I give in.
In June 1960, I walked across the stage, received my diploma, danced at my prom, and went to the all-night grad party. My parent’s buttons are popping! In September, at seventeen, I’ll be off to University to earn a degree as a teacher. As for Bad Boy, he is not happy.
It’s August, my last month at home. Something seems wrong, but I pay little attention until I look at the calendar. My period is late, way late. My face in the mirror has become the color of the bathtub enamel.
Chaos reigns. My parents are destroyed; their pride in me has vanished. Abortion is illegal, I won’t even consider giving away a baby for adoption, keeping an ‘illegitimate’ baby is out of the question, and so a hasty wedding is being arranged.
Instead of heading off to a bright future, I find myself leaving my childhood home and my weeping parents and wearing a cloak of shame and guilt. I will live far away as a teenage wife and mother instead of a teacher. I have failed everyone, especially myself. Never have I felt so alone and undeserving of love. This belief has become deeply embedded in my psyche for decades.
Years later, some information slips into place as if it were the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle. Bad Boy had deliberately tried to get me pregnant. The birth control was rudimentary, and there were no birth control pills yet. His reasoning, of course, would be to stop me from leaving him.
The abuse begins after the birth of my daughter: threatening, pushing, slapping, punching. When I was five months pregnant with my second daughter, he delivered a swift, mighty slap across the right side of my head – causing the air pressure to break my eardrum.
Now, in 1964, with luck, loving people, and a clever lawyer, I can escape to a safe place to await my second daughter’s delivery by C-section. Within ten days of her birth, my little family was on a flight to the refuge of my childhood home with my parents.
Following a divorce, I am now a single mother of two children, without a university degree, and dependent on welfare. All due to being forced to make a lose-lose decision at seventeen, in the world of nineteen sixties’ antiquated laws and one man.
Bad Boy dies three years later, the victim of a drunk driver.
Life is a teacher, and I am a sponge for knowledge, eager to share all helpful insights with others. The path of independence and entrepreneurship fits me. Born with innate talents for writing and teaching, my life is spent creating and operating three successive businesses, teaching English as a foreign language in Nepal, writing and authorship, enrolling in University at age 74 to study psychology, and a fifty-year marriage before widowhood.
I found a safe place for myself, my 2 year old daughter, and my unborn baby. I took personal responsibility for the situation and the protection of my power. I accepted help from very caring people. I studied and gained knowledge of health and human behaviour from books and experts. I practiced raising my daughters by being their role model.
Give yourself healing time as you take ownership of your experience, knowing you are not helpless or hopeless. Ask for and accept help when offered. Realize this time is actually a ‘growth’ spurt, and the ‘meaning’ will be revealed when you are ready.
Heartache is not the end of one’s life; it is the beginning of a better life once you uncover the heartache’s meaning.
“End Heartache, Gain Meaning”
– Lynn Moore
Lynn Moore, Author: “Born to Bounce Back”
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