I was three. Maybe four.
My mother was heavily pregnant with my brother. I do not have many memories of her as a person. Not really. I have impressions. Flickers. Dustings.
The soft brush of eyelashes on my cheeks as I smiled.
A childβs smile is a strange kind of magic. It makes adults treat you well. It makes cruelty hesitate, just for a moment. It makes the world look like it has rules.
Back then, I thought it did.
I did not understand anything about the architecture around me. The transactions. The violence. The ownership. The way love could be bartered, and bodies could be treated like furniture.
I only knew: sometimes I was safe, and sometimes I was not β and sometimes those two things happened in the same day.
My brotherβs father, we will call him Sean β was not my biological father. But I called him βdad,β because at three years old you do not know better, and you should not have to.
Sean and his brother, Michael doted on me. They treated me like I mattered.
They were Black men in America, and they were treated badly. Hunted, even. My motherβs family was not just casually racist in that βsmall town prejudiceβ way β it had teeth. One of my uncles was part of the KKK. They drove into our stateβs capitol on Friday nights with baseball bats and lead pipes and beat black men into bloody pulps.
Sometimes they killed them. In their eyes they were putting dangerous wild animals down. Doing a public service.
That kind of hatred is not ignorance. It is ritual.
Sean and Michael came from a country that was constantly at war. They only knew how to fight. Survival had been carved into them so deeply it became identity. You cannot grow up in constant terror and remain soft unless something inside you refuses.
Sean did not refuse.
But his brother, Oliver, did.
His brother became a mortician, which feels important to say out loud, because it proves something I needed to learn later: Growing up inside horror does not require you to become it.
Some people walk out and decide to become caretakers of the dead instead of creators of the dead.
It can be decided that the cycle ends with you.
Sean could treat me with respect, even though I was another manβs child.
He could be kind to me and make me feel chosen. And then he would beat my mother within an inch of her life.
And afterwards β afterwards β he would take me out for ice cream.
That is the part people know do not know how to hold. We want a clean story: villain = villain, monster = monster, love = love and cruelty = cruelty. But life does not stay in its lanes.
Some people are tender to children and cruel to women.
Some people buy you pretty dresses while destroying families.
Some people sing Motown in the car while the world rots in the trunk.
And some children grow up with a brain that learns to split reality in two, because holding the whole truth would collapse the heart.
As a child, you do not evaluate adults with ethics. You evaluate them with survival.
Your brain does not ask: βIs this a good person?β
It asks: βAm I safe with this person?β
And safety feels like love, because children cannot afford to separate those two things.
That is not naΓ―vetΓ©. That is basic biology.
If your nervous system learns that the man who terrifies the house is also the man who buys you ice cream, then your nervous system does not throw out the ice cream. It clings to it.
Because that ice cream is not a dessert β it is proof that warmth exists. And when warmth exists, survival feels possible. As an adult, I keep trying to merge these stories into something coherent. But they do not fit neatly.
I feel conflicted in a way that is hard to explain to people who had the luxury of consistent love.
How do I talk about a man who treated me like a princess while treating my mother like property? How do I reconcile being adored by someone who brutalised the person who gave me life?
The truth is: I cannot reconcile it. Not in the way people want.
I can only name it.
I can only hold it.
I can only stop lying to myself about how contradictions shape a child.
Because the child in me is still loyal to the softness. And the adult in me is furious at what it cost.
Sometimes I feel like the slave and the colonist living in the same skin. Not because I am both. But because I was trained to love in a system built on domination.
And the tragedy of childhood is that it will love whoever keeps it alive β even if that person is destroying someone else.
I am doing EMDR now, and something came up that I cannot unknow:
That my body was born into servitude.
That my body was never fully mine.
That from the beginning, sex was currency and love was negotiation β that affection had a price tag and safety depended on compliance.
And suddenly, the rest of my life makes uncomfortable sense.
Why I became βthe adult” and learned to be responsible.
Why my boundaries have always felt like something I need permission to have.
Why certain phrases make me nauseous, and apologies without change feel like violence.
Why I can I feel loved and used in the same breath and still struggle to name it.
I wish someone had said this to me a long time ago:
Your love does not excuse their harm.
Your tenderness does not redeem their cruelty.
Ice cream (gifts, apologises, etc) does (do not) not cancel brutality.
A child can be cherished and still live in danger.
A child can be adored and still be raised in terror.
A child can have pretty dresses and still be growing up in a system that treats women like commodities.
Both things can be true. That is not confusion. That is reality.
And reality does not become less true just because it is difficult to hold.
The thought of eating an ice cream sundae makes me ill, by the way. I loathe ice cream.
Never understood why until now.
