By Survivor Kaylene
*Content Warning: This article discusses childhood abuse, domestic violence, and trauma. Reader discretion is advised.
Growing Up With Hidden Trauma, Betrayal, and Breaking the Silence.
Surviving Childhood Abuse: The Truth I Was Forced to Hide
My earliest memory is of my father coming to pick me up from the home of one of his relatives who often babysat me. I was only a year and a half old, but I remember the excitement and joy of seeing him. Even now, decades later, that moment is still clear in my mind.
Sadly, my childhood memories quickly turned dark.
Another babysitter—a man who was not related to my family—followed me into the bathroom. I blocked out the details of the childhood sexual abuse that occurred, but my next memory is of his wife suddenly bursting through the bathroom door to check on me. Forty years later, when I finally read the police report, I learned the truth: she hadn’t made it in time to stop what had already happened.
I was the victim of childhood sexual abuse, yet my mother hid the truth from me for my entire life. Instead, she told me that another little girl at the daycare had been molested. For years, I lived without knowing the reality of what had happened to me.
As I grew older, the abuse in my life took other forms.
My mother often treated me less like a child and more like a source of income. She entered me into a baby photo contest and later pushed me into beauty pageants as soon as I could walk. While I was far more interested in singing, one of the pageant judges convinced her that I should pursue acting instead.
My mother even invested in a business with my agent and remained involved for years after I stopped acting. Eventually, the physical abuse at home became so severe that I ran away just to escape it.
As a child living with abuse, I was terrified to tell anyone what was happening behind closed doors. I feared speaking up about how my mother beat me in private. The few adults who suspected the truth chose to look the other way.
In the early 1990s, I once heard a story on the radio about a young boy who had legally divorced his parents. For a moment, that story gave me hope. I wondered if maybe one day I could escape my own abusive home.
By the time I turned thirteen, I was old enough to choose to live with my other parent in the state of Florida. But by then, my mother had already convinced me that my father didn’t want me. When he remarried my third stepmother, she made no effort to get to know me, leaving me feeling rejected and confused as early as ten years old.
Years later, when I was twenty, I finally reached out to my father. When we spoke, he broke down in tears and told me that he had always loved me “from a distance.”
Even then, I never truly felt welcome in his life. My stepmother openly told me she had “never wanted children.”
Two years ago, my father died by suicide. After his death, I made the difficult decision to finally report the years of abuse I had endured.
My mother has since turned nearly everyone in my family against me. Many people in the church I grew up in and throughout my hometown now believe her version of events.
The last time she assaulted me, she punched me repeatedly in the head. I filed a police report for aggravated assault, hoping someone would finally listen. But because I could not remember the exact date the attack occurred—only that it was about two weeks after my eighteenth birthday—police said they could not investigate or press charges.
For most of my life, silence protected the people who hurt me.
Now, I am breaking that silence.
I have already lost nearly everyone I love. And the one person I once hoped might protect me—my father—is no longer here.
My Daddy isn’t coming to save me.
So I am finally telling the truth.
