I am a child sexual abuse survivor. I was a teen mom. My mother was a teen mom and I found out later also sexually abused. Now my granddaughter is pregnant. She also abused by her mother’s boyfriend. Is this a pattern or a curse? Is there cause and effect in play?

My mom’s story goes a like this. She was raised in an upper middle class family in south Texas. She had a stern strong father figure who dominated the home and a subservient mother the traditional 1930’s and 40’s.

The family did many recreational things together. Her father owned a boat and they spent many weekends out on the coast of Galveston enjoying the sun and sea.

When my mother was 14 her life was uprooted and turned around. Her father met another woman and divorced her mother after 23 years of marriage. This sent her mother into a state of mental decline. She took my mother and went back to her family in Virginia but long before my mother left for VA there were family secrets. She had been sexually abused by her oldest brother.

In VA she was as lost as her mother, no friends, insecure, in a new place, no emotional support. It was then she met a handsome young man just out of the Navy, seven years her senior. She was looking to be loved, looking to belong, looking to escape. They eloped when she was only 16. She became a mother shortly after her 17th birthday.

Me: Raised in a poor southern home with no memory of that tall veteran my mother married. After years of battery and abuse she left him and returned to Texas. Her father, now wealthy, helped out meagerly by doling out dribs and drabs of support. There she met and married a “good old country boy. “

Raised in East Texas he had no education but left home and hit the road as a bull rider. He was a hard worker. He did odd jobs and dug ditches and gave all he earned in support to my mother and her 3 children. He also was a strict southern raised disciplinarian… spare the rod spoil the child. Do not answer back, do not speak up, do not question or you will be beat into submission. I was a shy compliant child that made straight A’s in school, even so, I was “whooped” regularly with a belt.

Just like my mother I had two older brothers. However, unfortunately, both mine sexually abused me along with other family “friends” starting when I was young, very young; it began long before I started school. I have always had an old soul and at the time, I felt a huge responsibility to keep this abuse to myself. Along with the fact I was told to keep silent. My mother was also emotionally fragile and I knew it would destroy her. After all, how could she know or imagine what was going on? Imagine my anger and disappointment at her failure to protect me when I found out, many years later, that she should have known.

At 14, the “good old country boy” left my mother for another woman. Really the only father I had known was now gone. My mother, like her own, went through an emotionally tail spin and remarried very quickly (6 months) to the first man that paid attention to her. Problem was he paid also paid attention to me. Grabbing, kissing, inappropriate speech and once again, I was silent and protecting my mother.

Around that time a tall young man, 18, appeared on the scene. The son of a local restaurant owner who was a friend of the grabber. He offered an escape, perhaps he was looking to escape too or in search of an unspoken need. Many of us had wounded souls. I don’t know for certain but at 14, I was pregnant; we quickly married and left Texas in the rear-view mirror.

When I look back the driving force behind my actions, I see I was just getting away. Getting away from the creeper and the emotional suffocation; longing to just be free, protected and to breathe.

I was a mother at 15.

As much as I longed for one, thankfully I never had a daughter, but three sons. Possible this curse of abuse, looking for love and escape was broken.

At 48, I became a grandmother to a beautiful blue-eyed blonde. Her parents unmarried, were raising her jointly. I prayed for her divine protection. Her mother emotionally unbalanced on bipolar medication did some very strange things. Her father, my son, a military veteran and police officer offered a strict but loving solid foundation. She was shifted uncontrollably through the whirlwind of these two very divergent worlds.

My heart was once again broken when I learned last year that my beautiful granddaughter had been abused by her mother’s boyfriend. This abuse going back several years was revealed when she was 16. When her mother was confronted with evil, she defended her lover. She called her daughter a liar and many other things as she denied this evil. Now because of legal issues there is no contact between them. My granddaughter mourns for her mother, she still loves her (hard for a child to forget the good memories) but she is heartbroken over the betrayal that her mother has chosen her abuser over her.

Abuse, pain and loss. It repeats, and now a one year later my 17-year-old granddaughter is pregnant.

Was she looking for love and acceptance? Was she looking to escape? My heart breaks for the difficulties and trials that lie ahead for her.

What is this? I often wonder is there a family or generational curse? Women abused, taken advantage of by men who walk away and leave their victims to pick up the pieces. Searching to fix our brokenness. As adults we try to put the pieces of what we lost, the innocence, our childhood, our sexuality back together into a life that can bring happiness and success. Some of us succeed better than others.

Look around, listen to the news it is prevalent. A shame and stain on society that many turn their back on and refuse to see. It is a societal curse rooted in the most vile evil. How can we break this cycle?

See us, save us.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2722133/