My Story – Birth till the Abuse Starts

My name is Rose Smith. I was born July 15, 1978 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I am the oldest of two children, although I never felt like it. Due to my mom’s inability to say no I grew up with three older male cousins, it was like having three older brothers and all that that entails. But let’s start at the begin.

My parents, Eve and Adam were married in Oct of 1970. They both came from large families, especially my father. So when they failed to produce children in the first few years of their marriage, it became a huge topic of conversation at family get-to-gathers. Before my parents’ married they had decided they didn’t want to have children till my mom was at least 30. So it wasn’t a question of them trying and not conceiving, but of them not wanting children right away. The family pressure got to the point that my father got so tired of being asked when they were going to have a child, that he lied and told his most gossipy of his aunts that he was sterile. After that got around the family shut up on the subject of children. Of course, there was a lot of explaining to do when my mom got pregnant with me.

From the very start my father wanted a girl; due to his issues with his father he didn’t think he was ready to raise a boy. I was born at two twenty two in the morning. I was early. I decided to come into this world on the way to my baby shower, so my mom missed that. I was the apple of my father’s eye. I’m not sure that my mom wanted children or that she was ready for children so I always felt that I was not as special to her.

I was 18 months old when we moved to Florida. Soon after that my uncle, Abel, my mom’s oldest brother got divorced. When they say that sometimes life is better than a book I think they had my family’s life in mind. You see not only was Able getting a divorce from his wife, not only was his three boys’ family being broken up, but the reason was unbelievable. The reason for the divorce – Abel’s wife was leaving him for his brother, Cain. So not only was the family being destroyed by a messy divorce but the family was also being pitted against each other. Whose side would you choose? It was literally one brother against the other. In the middle of this were 3 boys that were very young and a family that loved both their sons.

After many court dates, lots of testimony and a wicked battle in which we were pulled this way and that. Abel got his sons and his house. This meant that my mom, not being able to “abandon” the one brother she felt she had left offered to take care of his boys while he worked. Suddenly I went from being an only, oldest child to having three boys that were all older them me. About this same time my mom got pregnant again and my father got jealous.

My father is very possessive when it comes to my mother. My mother on the other hand is very flirtatious. Due to her abuse, she needs the adoration of men to feel good about herself. I don’t think she would ever follow through on her flirting but she likes the attention. Also this was the time that she started acknowledging her abuse and getting therapy for it. So not only was my father having issues with my mom’s flirtatiousness, but she was having issues with sex due to her abuse, plus a lot of her time was being taken up by my uncle and his three boys. We add to this another child, one that my father is unsure is even his, and I become just a four year old that gets lost in the crowd.

Then the abuse starts.