Priceless Inspirations (6 page)

I had a friend who was molested by her uncle for years and years. She was in her late teens before she told and even then, she could only tell because he was dead. She was terrified of him. He’d told her all kinds of crazy stuff to keep her quiet. He said he would kill her, and that he would kill her whole family. The stress and shame of it made her a little crazy, too. I think she had post-traumatic stress disorder. You could see her just freeze up sometimes or react in ways that didn’t seem normal. She needed some help, but she was scared of counseling. It was a messed up situation. She needed to try some help, but to her, getting help was as scary as the stuff she’d already been through. As far as I know, she never did get any help.

Another girl’s sister’s boyfriend raped her five year old niece. Hearing that story made me sick. Raping a five year old? Young mothers, you have to be careful. You can’t be like, “I want to go out, and so I’ll get Cousin Terrence to watch the baby.” You never know. It might be the person you least expect who tries to have sex with your kids.

My closest experience to any sexual abuse happened when I was maybe nine or ten. I used to sleep on a little bed in a room that once had been the dining room of Aunt Edwina’s and Uncle Frank’s house, but they had turned it into a bedroom. A relative came to visit for a few weeks, and at night, he kept coming into the room, sliding into the little bed beside me, trying to touch me in places he didn’t have any business. I was scared of him. I knew it wasn’t right, so after the first couple of nights he tried that, I wouldn’t sleep in my bed. I went to Aunt Edwina’s room and begged her to let me sleep with her in her bed. Thank God she let me. I don’t know what might have happened if she hadn’t.

I couldn’t believe that guy was trying to do that to me. He was family. He was a relative, someone I thought loved me. I didn’t tell anyone, not even Aunt Edwina. Sometimes you’re just afraid, and sometimes people don’t believe you. Nothing really bad happened to me, but it was still enough to make me catch flashbacks. I can only imagine what could have happened. It must be terrible to have deal with being raped by someone who is supposed to care for and protect you. I can only imagine how much worse it would be to tell your mama, and have her not believe you.

I’m not an expert, but to all the girls and women out there who’ve been molested or who are living through being molested right now, I say find someone you can tell who will believe you and support you. If it’s not your mother or your grandmother or your aunt or a teacher or a counselor, at least tell a trusted friend. You need to get the bad stuff out of your head. You need to rid of the secret and see if you can find yourself again. You’ve got to reach out for help. If more of us talked about these experiences, the guys wouldn’t keep doing it and they wouldn’t keep getting away with it because no one ever tells on them.

Toya’s Priceless Gem: Don’t suffer in silence. If someone’s touching on you, tell someone, and keep telling until you find someone to help
.

When I had sex for the first time, it wasn’t because I was forced. It was because I wanted to. I thought I was ready and I didn’t see anything wrong with it. All my friends were all sharing their stories with me about the day they broke their virginity and stuff. I didn’t think I’d get pregnant, but I didn’t use any protection and I didn’t ask Dream to use any.

That was my second mistake.

Though I wish I had waited, I don’t regret having sex with Dream. He had proved himself to be sweet and thoughtful. The evening we first slept together, he called the radio station and dedicated K-Ci and Jojo’s “All My Life” to me. Every time I hear the words, I think of that moment:

And all my life

I’ve prayed for someone like you

And I thank God that I, that I finally found you

All my life

I’ve prayed for someone like you

And I hope that you feel the same way too

Yes, I pray that you do love me too

After it was over, I was bleeding. Dream joked that he’d “busted my cherry” and told me he loved me. I changed the subject. I wasn’t used to saying “I love you.” I wasn’t used to hearing it either. It wasn’t something that was a regular part of my life. Dream used to get mad at me because I hesitated so much before saying “I love you” and when I finally said it, I rushed through or muttered it, rather than saying it full out.

“We been through all this and you can’t tell me you love me?” he’d say.

I couldn’t answer. He was right. We’d been through a lot. But he couldn’t ask of me what I didn’t know how to give. I didn’t know yet how to give love or receive it. So I couldn’t say it.

I was afraid of the word “love.” I felt almost like if I said it, I’d open myself up to even more hurt than what I felt about not having a home. I just didn’t like to go there.

Even after that first night, when we lay together in his bed at his mom’s house, I didn’t say it. I
did
do something else that was hard for me. I tried to share with him some of the feelings I’d stuffed down deep inside for so long. I told him my most personal stuff. I told him how I really felt about my mother and my father, about how angry I was at crack and the whole situation. His own stepfather had just been murdered and he sort of understood how I was feeling. Mostly I told him how I felt like my family didn’t love me and he said, “You got me now. I’m your family.”

The words melted my heart. They were exactly what I wanted and needed to hear. Still, I didn’t tell him I loved him until months later. Looking back, I might not have been comfortable saying it, but I
know
I was in love. Not just in love, but head over heels in love.

I’d heard my friends and older cousins talking about the feeling of having butterflies in your stomach and I wasn’t sure what that could possibly be like, until I felt those butterflies, flitting around in my stomach every time Dream was anywhere near me. He would come around me and my whole world would light up. He made me feel so good, and so happy. He made me feel like the queen of the whole world. I had never felt like that before. I’d never felt that good with anyone else in my whole life and I knew it was worth fighting for, worth sacrificing for.

I remember thinking.
“If this is what love is, I’m with it.”
I didn’t ever want to be with anyone else. I didn’t ever want that feeling to end. He’d smile at me and I’d feel like I was melting inside. It was the first time I felt like I had someone who truly loved me.

I was an addict when it came to him. He was so sweet, so charming and as far as I could see, had not a single fault or flaw. I wrote my name and his all over my notebooks and on every sheet of paper inside them. I wrote it over and over, even when I was supposed to be listening to my teachers. I wrote our names and then the word “forever.” I used my money to have our names airbrushed all over t-shirts, printed on my book sack, and later had them tattooed on my body, not once, but twice. I did the first tattoo when I still lived with Uncle Nat and I had to hide it from him for the longest time. When he finally saw it, he was so mad.

“Are you crazy?” he said. “Why you wanna go and do something like that? Don’t you know that one day y’all gonna break up and you’ll wish you didn’t have that boy’s name all over you like that?”

I never thought of being old or of breaking up and having to look at my ex’s name tattooed on my skin. I couldn’t imagine a future like that. Of course, that’s exactly what
did
happen, but I was young, crazy in love and no one could tell me anything.

I know there are some young girls out there, feeling that same crazy-in-love feeling and all I can tell you is, I know
exactly
what you’re dealing with. I know nothing I say, nothing anyone says, would make you believe that this love might die one day. I won’t bother to try to tell you that. I do ask that you at least try to avoid one of the mistakes I made-Don’t get his name tattooed on your body.

I’m telling you from first-hand experience that having a tattoo removed hurts worse than getting the tattoo. You have to keep going back, and keep going back while they burn your skin with lasers until it’s gone. Trust me, it’s awful and it’s expensive. From where I’m standing, I would say do everything else to express your love, make t-shirts, write his name all over your notebooks, put it on the license plate of your car, whatever, but no tattoo. I got a lot of tattoos when I was in that relationship because he liked them, but most of them I wish I hadn’t done. The last thing you want when you go into a corporate environment or when you have to put on a fancy dress, is to have marks all over you that make you seem like a straight up thug. I don’t hate tattoos, but I just think they should be things you really, really like and believe in. If I had it do over again, I wouldn’t do any of them, except maybe my daughter’s name and the “I love me” that I put on my finger to remind myself to have confidence in myself when I need it.

I don’t know if my younger self would have even listened to that advice. When I tell you I was crazy in love, I mean it.
Crazy
. And crazy people don’t have the best judgment.

Not listening and not having good judgment were causing me other problems as well.

Dream was grieving his stepfather, but he had his mother and they were tight. My situation, though, was really messed up. I had been living with my Uncle Nat again after Aunt Lisa got mad with me for going to Houston with Dream. Uncle Nat didn’t like me spending so much time with my boyfriend. Like I said, he was strict. He probably knew me and Dream were going to have sex, and he didn’t approve. I didn’t think anything would be wrong with it, and once we did it, I wanted to be with Dream all the time. I moved out of Uncle Nat’s house again and in with another relative who lived in Bunker Hill, just to avoid living under Uncle Nat’s rules. After a while, I wasn’t living there either. I was staying at Dream’s house almost every night as we got closer and closer.

With Dream in my life, everything was different. Dream was different. He wasn’t like most of the boys I knew. The more I got to know him, the real him, not the performer he was becoming, the more I saw what a sweetheart he was. He was the kind of guy who’d do anything for the people he loved and he genuinely loved me back then.

After we had sex, I started feeling different. I couldn’t believe that I had finally broken my virginity. I kept thinking about it all night next to him that first night. I remember thinking it was something special. I remember feeling more grown up.

I was also thinking about my aunties’ warnings. They had been discouraging me from having sex by telling me about the consequences.

“Guys change after sex,” they said. “As soon as he gets what he wants he’s gonna move on to the next girl.”

I was happy to be with Dream, but I was also worried and afraid about our future. Would what my aunts said be true for me, too? Would Dream lose interest in me now that he’d “had me”? Would he stop calling me, stop talking to me, and not want to see me? Would it start right away? Would it start tomorrow morning when he woke up?

To my relief, it didn’t happen the next morning. He was the same sweet guy. He was also the same sweet guy the next day and the next day and the next. Several weeks rolled by and there wasn’t any difference in how he treated me. My aunties’ warnings faded to the back my mind. Dream was making me believe that what they’d said wasn’t true, or at least it wouldn’t be for me.

In the end, though, he did change. He changed because his career took off and he was hot. He was traveling and doing things, meeting all kinds of women, more women who would do anything to say they were with him. He changed because fame changes you, and he changed because I changed.

I changed in a way that I never expected.

I missed my period, and a few weeks later, after a pregnancy test at a local clinic, I knew I was pregnant.

It was 1998, and I was 14.

The Mistake I Made That You Shouldn’t

I won’t make a big speech about waiting to have sex. Everyone tells girls to wait, and most of us don’t. It’s hard to wait when everyone else is having sex, especially if you’re with a boy you like.

I wish I had waited, and I hope my daughter will. The bigger mistake I made was not using protection. After a certain point, I knew I was going to have sex. I’d even started talking about it. I told my cousin, Akeeli, and she was really helpful.

“Let me know when you’re ready and I’ll take you to the clinic for birth control pills.”

She did take me just like she promised, but it was after Dream and I had had sex, not before.

I didn’t tell her that. She didn’t know we’d already done it when I asked if she would go with me to get birth control. We went down to the clinic and the doctor did an exam before writing the prescription. They had already given me a supply of pills and we were just about ready to go when the doctor asked,