🛑Trigger warning: sexual abuse🛑
On Buckingham Street, I was the only girl ever playing with a group of boys. Though there were other girls in the building, I didn’t feel like I fit in with them. Everyone called me a tomboy and expressed how I should be behaving. If it were up to them, I would’ve been wearing dresses and having tea parties with my stuffed animals. Only I had already been that kind of girl, leaving me vulnerable.
I felt safer being one of the boys, especially since it kept me out of the house. But I still hated hearing the comments. It made me insecure and reminded me that I didn’t fit in anywhere. No matter how hard I pretended, I was never going to be a boy, and even though I was a girl, with my mom’s scarcity, I didn’t know what that even meant.
I hated being a girl, so I traded my dresses for my brother’s clothes to get dirty. There were so many restrictions being a girl that made life miserable. When I was dressed pretty, I wasn’t allowed to get dirty. Being dressed pretty also prohibited me from moving around how I wanted. I loved to climb trees, which was virtually impossible in a dress, or at least it was highly frowned upon.
My favorite outfit at the time was overalls. While I don’t recall the actual event, the fragments still live in my memory. I haven’t come to a place yet where my repressed brain will allow the full memory back to light. Historically, the retrieval of these traumas shatters me. I know enough that if my brain keeps the memory from me, it is a way of protecting me until I’m ready for it. I’m both grateful and annoyed.
Overalls kept me safe from prying hands. I don’t know whose hands I remember attempting to unbuckle my overalls, but I know I was incredibly relieved that they were too complicated for the drunk/high adult. Girl clothes were tight and short, allowing perverted men in the building to comment on what they saw; my age did not stop the comments. I was six, maybe seven, and grown men told me they couldn’t wait until I got older.
I attribute living at Buckingham Street to the fallout of our family. My older brother went to live with a family friend after getting arrested. My older sister was essentially traded for drugs and, at 14, was pregnant. An overdose would leave my mother half dead and in the hospital, leaving me and my brother with his father, who would then get arrested at the train station.
The police took us to the hospital because of our condition. Clearly not taken care of, I recall sitting in the Hartford Hospital emergency room as the day slowly turned to night. My brother and I sat so close to one another you couldn’t tell where I began, and he ended. We were filthy, our clothes with visible stains. Knowing my mother had been admitted, I wanted to ask someone if they would let us see her. It pained me to know I was so close to her, yet she was so far away. I never got to see her, and it was devastating. My family had finally fallen apart; I knew this was the beginning of the end.
What I had suspected happening had finally come to fruition. Even from a young age, I knew my mother’s presence was fleeting. I remember being at the park with her one summer, watching as the sunlight lit up her face even more as she laughed during a conversation. No matter how much they told me to play with the other kids, I refused to leave her side. I just wanted to be around her because I loved her so much and knew moments with her wouldn’t last forever.
What felt like hours later, my brother’s uncle came to pick us up from the hospital. He was a bachelor in his twenties and had no idea how to raise children—especially children who had just gone through what we had, but he did his best to comfort us. Reluctantly, I left the hospital with him, fearing I would never see either of my parents again. Life as we knew it, as a family, had ended.
