Call Me Cockroach

by Leigh Byrne

Hundreds of men would have to tell me otherwise, hundreds of times, to even begin to silence her voice inside my head.

You begin to think you’re crazy when everyone around you pretends something never happened when you know damn well it did. Makes you think you’re viewing life through a dirty window. You question yourself—your memory, your sanity. Did it actually happen?

She proved that what goes on inside your head—despite what you are on the outside—is one of the key ingredients in a happy life.

Talking openly and honestly helped me to understand that the most significant hindrance to my healing process had been my inability to discuss the details of my childhood abuse. Telling Dani was a positive step, possibly my first on the path to healing.

As a child, all I wanted was to be loved. As an adult, all I wanted was to be loved. But it was hard for me to believe in happily ever after when the one person I should have been able to count on to love me unconditionally had failed me. If my own mother didn’t think I was deserving of love, how could I expect anyone else to?

But that’s the danger of isolation; it lures you in with the deceptive promise of protecting you and then it feasts on your spirit.

As soon as I got home every day, I collapsed on the sofa, drained from having held up such a heavy façade.

I learned through further research that the family scapegoat is usually the most sensitive and most vulnerable of all the children, and often the one who reminds the abusive parent of something within herself she cannot accept.

I was a scapegoat child, born of my mother’s need to blame something outside herself for all the awful things that had happened to her, chosen to take on her guilt, shame, and feelings of inadequacy. This was my answer, my truth—or as close as I was ever going to get.

My ability to trust has been fractured, because I know, first hand, evil can exist even behind seemingly kind faces.

Children—and perhaps the elderly—are the only true victims of abuse. As adults, we are only victims when we allow ourselves to be. The instant we make the decision to strike back, we become warriors. When the fight is over, we will have either won or lost, but one thing is for sure, we will not have been victims.