And now there is another layer to this conversation.

My daughter has found faith. She speaks about it often. She tells me I need to believe. She says God protects us. She says God has a plan. God forgives. But who forgives him, for turning his cheek and not seeing what was happening to me, every single day for over 10 years?

I listen to her, and I try to understand the comfort she feels in those words. I truly do. Because I know she is speaking from love. She wants peace for me. She wants healing for me. She wants to believe there is something bigger than the pain we carry.

But what she doesn’t realize is that I stopped believing a long time ago.

I stopped believing when I was a child who prayed to be saved and no one came.
I stopped believing when I was pinned to the floor, being punched over and over, waiting for someone, anyone, to make it stop. And no one did. They knew. Every single adult in my life knew. But they believed her. Because she had the “She is such a bad girl. She is like her mother. She is very troubled. She is uncontrollable. She is.. she is.. she is…”

I stopped believing when a bottle of pepper was forced down my throat and my mouth was duct taped shut so I couldn’t spit it out.

I stopped believing when steel-toed boots stood on the tops of my feet, grinding back and forth because I walked on my toes. When I would sit in the bathtub, holding my mouth to muffle the screams as I dipped my feet into the water with the open wounds she left on the top of my feet. It was bad enough the bottoms were constantly cracked wide open. Now, the tops too.

I stopped believing during the countless other moments that felt like they would never end. People say God protects you. So where was He? Tell me the answer to THAT?

Where was He when I was crying out in my mind because I was too afraid to cry out loud? When all I could hear, in my own head, was the loud screams of my own voice that I had to muffle?

Where was He when the house was silent, and the world outside kept turning as if nothing was happening? Meanwhile I was trapped, in a corner, with dim yellow lighting, and a ticking clock on the wall that drove me mad?

Where was He when I was a small child fighting battles that no child should ever have to fight, completely alone?

No light came bursting through the door.
No miracle appeared.
No voice whispered that everything would be okay.

There was only me. Me learning how to survive. Me learning how to disconnect from pain just to make it through another day.

Me learning that sometimes the only person who will save you… is you.

Me learning to gather my nerves, suck them in and eventually fight back. Me, picking myself off the floor every time she knocked me down. Me, wiping the blood from my teeth, my face.

Me, trying to brush my hair filled with knots after she spent fifteen minutes dragging me through the house by my hair, looking for the newest item she said I had hid from her! Items I didn’t have. Items my brother took, for drugs.

And that is a truth that is hard to explain to someone who has been blessed enough to feel protected by faith instead of abandoned by it.