Kristina

I’ve always avoided talking about my sexual abuse, especially the abuse in my early childhood. With my parents it’s easy. Even when I’m processing memories that I haven’t dealt with in years, it feels like covered ground. There’s a distance there, a decision, a sense of time passing and their behavior being firmly in the past. It doesn’t feel that way with Kristina. It feels like it could have happened yesterday. I’m starting to think that not writing or talking about it is precisely the issue, though, and so I’m going to make the attempt.

The trouble is it wasn’t her fault. Kristina grew up across the street and two doors down from me, and we were friends basically as soon as we were allowed to leave our yards solo, which to my memory was from the time we were about five years old. Her family was known for loud arguments, cheating scandals, and child abuse. The details didn’t become clear until I was much older, but we always knew that there was trouble at Kristina’s house. Despite that, my parents let me go over there on a regular basis, even spending the night on several occasions. I think they believed that Kristina’s family had what I would call company behavior, meaning that the abuse going on in their home wouldn’t occur with a third-party present. That was not the case. I witnessed Kristina’s mom chasing her and her little sister around with a belt more than once, and at one point was advised to hide with her behind a couch until her mom grew tired of the chase. Her father was passive, never intervening in her mother’s rage.

What Kristina did to me she learned in her home. It was normal for her. Given how young we were at the time, I don’t think she knew she was doing anything wrong. I certainly didn’t, not until much later.

Kristina started suggesting sexual acts to me when we were very young. I can’t say when exactly, but I know that it started years before I hit puberty at ten, and continued for another year or so after that. I also know now that Kristina lied to me. The excuses she gave me for those acts, the reasons behind them, were fabrications. It feels so obvious in retrospect, but at the time, I was at most eight years old, and hadn’t been subject to the kind of sexual abuse Kristina had been. I was entirely naïve to that experience, and Kristina took advantage of that.

What started with inappropriate touching ended with digital penetration. I won’t go into the specifics, but I will say that there were very obvious signs of sexual abuse that my parents completely dismissed. I often went home with writing on my body in places that no one should have had access to. I had hickies that no one asked terribly many questions about. I started wetting the bed and asking my mom to say no when Kristina called and asked if I could sleep over. At one point, I even asked my mom how two women could have sex, not because I wanted to, but because I was trying to figure out if Kristina and I had done that already. No one asked follow-up questions. No one tried to keep me from going to Kristina’s house.

It ended, not because my parents intervened, but because Kristina’s mom did. She caught us one day in the back of their family’s car and explained to us that homosexuality is perversion and against God’s law. I didn’t know at the time that I’d had my first taste of homophobia. I did know that I was relieved when playing with Kristina became normal, and we went back to digging holes in the massive pile of gravel at the end of the cul-de-sac and trying to get into the tree house that had been built in a long dead tree.

In high school, my mom told me that Kristina’s mom had left their home. Her father had finally kicked her out for good after years of her sleeping with other men in their bed with their children not only present but encouraged to watch. Kristina’s mom had lost custody and had made a scene at her younger daughter’s school by trying to gain access to her there. The poor girl had been dragged into the counselor’s office and encouraged to talk to her mother, and she spent the entire time screaming about the beatings and the sex acts she’d been forced to watch. Kristina had welcomed her mother’s attempts to make contact, but ultimate continued to live with her father. The three of them moved away not long after.

I’d lost touch with Kristina by then. It wasn’t that we had a falling out, or that I’d made an intentional decision to not be around her. My aversion had just slowly made itself known, and I spent more time with my friends on sports teams and in the school band. I never really processed what exactly she’d done or how it had impacted me. I never sat with the shame of my parents finding what she’d written on me or the excuses I’d made, more afraid of punishment from them than of Kristina.

I don’t think I fully understood how much damage Kristina had done until I sat with the lead up to the only surgery I’ve ever had. At around eight or nine I had tubes put in my ears. I had a constant case of strep throat, and my ENT recommended the surgery as a preventative measure. When I was told to take off my clothes and put on that hospital gown with nothing underneath, I had the only true hissy fit I can recall. I was terrified that someone would touch me while I was under anesthesia and screamed and thrashed when my parents tried to undress me. It took a full thirty minutes for my mother to force me to change into it, and even then, it had to be in a shut and locked bathroom. That memory, combined with the bedwetting incident I had at around the same time, became a clear indication to me that I was not okay, that I’d left my friendship with Kristina with clear and lasting damage I’d not yet reckoned with.

The problem is, I can’t blame Kristina. Yes, she had a position of power in that scenario, having been exposed to sexual abuse already, and therefore knowing far more about what sex was than I did. That said, no one had explained to her that what her mother was doing was wrong, that it was abuse, that children shouldn’t be exposed to adults having sex much less encouraged to join in. She didn’t fully understand what she was doing much better than I did. She was only acting out what she’d seen at home so many times over.

I don’t hold any anger for Kristina. If anything, I wish I could talk to her and get a clearer picture of what happened and why. We were children, and as far as I’m concerned, we were both the victims of her mother’s abuse, even if I was impacted indirectly.

I wish, more than anything else, that I could hug her, that I could tell her directly that I’ve never blamed her, and that I understand far too well what she went through in that home. Kristina hurt me, I can see that now, and yet when I think of her, the only emotion I can find is grief for both of our childhoods. Maybe that’s enough.