House on Wheels

Juanita Triplett

In order for you to understand the moment I realized I grew up, you need to know what led up to it. The year was 2004, but let’s go back further, say 1996. A typical person can’t tell what my childhood was like just by looking at me. My life consisted of empty promises, lonely nights, second hand clothes and little love.

My mother favored my older sister and my dad my little sister. Who was left to favor me, see me as a little angel, and tell me everything is going to be ok? The answer was easy, it is the one person I got to see once a year: my grandmother. However, I never got to see her, until she and her boyfriend, Chris, moved in with us.

Boy, did I get attention then; my own friend to play house with. When you’re a little girl, house is the best game to play. Pretending everything in life is perfect, pretending to be an only child. Being as naive as I was, I saw nothing wrong with playing house with a sixty year old man. Hell, I was receiving attention from an adult.

Personal boundaries? When you’re six you don’t know what lines to make with people, people you live with. Chris really played into the husband and wife role. My parents and grandmother were going to be gone for a few hours, leaving this man in charge of my two sisters and me. Chris and I went out to play house in the fifth-wheel. “Finally, I get all the attention,” I thought. To this day I have flash backs of playing house whenever I see a fifth-wheel.

The home on wheels took his fancy out of all other places. This went on for a few months. How could my mother be so stupid not to notice? I always thought that if I told her “He touched me differently than I had ever been touched before,” that she would be ashamed of me. Months went by. Of course she wouldn’t notice a change in me, she never noticed me.

Finally, one day I came home from school and he wasn’t there. This would be the day she would find out. The secret that changed my life forever would now be known. The cops had come and took him away because he had molested other girls and had a warrant out for it. My mother told me “If he would have stayed another day, he would have been on America’s Most Wanted.” Then she asked me if he had ever touched me. Terrified to tell the truth, I did what I never thought was possible, I told her I had been violated by that man. To this day, I am terrified to watch America’s Most Wanted in fear that the past might repeat itself.

For the longest time I believed I had done something wrong and that was the way God punished me. I would lay in bed trying to figure out how I let the big man upstairs down. What had I done to get stuck in this family, this life style? Looking back, I was attempting to blame someone else for the horror someone else caused.

That was the only time he was ever spoken of in our house again. My life had gone back to the way it was before: as little attention as possible, until seven years later. Seven years of hiding the shame. After seven years, I received a phone call that would force me to tell the whole story of what had happened in the house on wheels. A detective had been questioning me about Chris to see what all he had done to me. I told him as much as I could get out at the time. Even after that call, the whole story had yet to be told. However, that was the first time I was told that it wasn’t my fault, I did nothing wrong, that he was a sick man. I decided I was to make better of myself than other girls that went through the same thing. I would not let him make me a girl who thought she was worth nothing. I was going to make myself the best that I could be.

Although, something very special was taken from me at a young age, I would not just give it away. People ask me if I am a virgin. Technically, I am not, but I believe that I am for a few reasons; the first being that I was too young to understand what was going on. Second, permission was never given to him to take anything from me.

 Many girls believe one of two things; that they are the only girl she knows that went through it, or the commercials all lie and nobody gets violated. Both opinions are wrong. One in four women seems like a made up number, however it is much more.

For me to see girls just giving away something that special without a second thought is aggravating. They don’t realize how stupid they are. I had no choice in it and they are just dishing it out. It hurts watching a sixteen year old walk through the halls pregnant because her and her boyfriend didn’t use protection. 

Even though my life changed at the age of six, I realized at age thirteen that I could take control again. I would change everything that was destined for my future. There was no way I was going to let him confine me to being just another number. My life is the way it is because something in me allowed me to crawl away from the nightmare as a better person.