Nicada• Show poetry

Survival and Strength


Childhood was a desperate time. Most days were spent plotting how I could best stay out of harms way. I learned to read others’ moods and stand ready to flee or hide. Nights were spent in terror, listening for any signs of trouble in the next rooms. I lay paralyzed by fear, heart pounding, silent. I learned to think ahead, be prepared for anything.

In our house one never knew what might happen next. Would she come home drunk again, out of control? How hard would I get hit this time? What have I done now? Would I have to helplessly watch as my brother is hit once again for no apparent reason? That hurt the most.

The yelling and screaming, the fights, the shaming and beatings were all too much to bear every single day. Would my step sister have to sleep crouched under the water heater in the basement to avoid my dad sneaking into her room to molest her again? Would I need to hide in the cornfields for hours on end to avoid molestation too?

I always dreamed that someone would rescue me, adopt me, and take me away. I babysat as much as possible for a family with a two year old girl. I was twelve years old at the time and I imagined she was my little sister. I didn’t have the tools to tell them why I never wanted to go home. In an effort to be able to stay over night I would run behind their house into the woods and climb a tree. I sat there all alone until I thought it might be too late for them to take me home. I was desperate. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not.

My favorite teacher came into my life in the fifth grade and what a great time for him to enter. It was my most trying time ever because the molestation had been added into the mix of all the other insanity. His name was Mr. Dunnavan, and oh how I loved that man. He playfully teased me, and though very shy, I craved the positive attention. One day he said he wished he could adopt me and with every fiber of my being I wanted to scream, “Please could you!”

I was very fortunate to have some positive role models through childhood and that is what helped me survive the hell. It also made me aware that my home was not a normal one. As an adult I appreciate the positive role models who have crossed my path at various crucial points.

I strive to remember that though I faced much adversity, it has made me who I am today. I have so much compassion and empathy for others. I am intuitive and attentive. I am well aware of how my words and actions might hinder or help someone, and I choose to help. Everyone needs encouragement and love. It can be a rough and cruel world, but I believe there is still much good out there too. This keeps me hopeful and I choose to be part of that good as much as I possibly can.



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"If you want others to be happy, practice compassion.
If you want to be happy, practice compassion."--the Dalai Lama




"Never part without loving words to think of during your absence. It may be that you will not meet again in this life. "--Jean Paul Richter


"Words without thoughts never to heaven go."--William Shakespeare


"Your mind is a garden, your thoughts are the seeds, the harvest can be either flowers or weeds"--Author Unknown



"Our character is but the stamp on our souls of the free choices of good and evil we have made through life"--John C. Geikie


"If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else"--Booker T. Washington







If Rooms Could Talk


If doors and walls and windows could talk, my childhood bedroom would tell quite a story. It would be sad as the tears of death, and angry as a bull seeing red. It was my room from the age of ten, until I moved out. The bare hardwood floor creaked with a heaviness bearing down upon it. Clothes hanging from pulled open drawers spoke of my only feeling of control. A chair sat directly in front of the only window, and it held my presence the most. This was where my freedom from chaos and fright lay. It was my only escape; my only hope of a temporary, happy existence.


It was nothing more that a room with a twin bed, a cheap wooden dresser, and a closet with metal fold-open doors. Books lay scattered like paper in the wind. It was a messy room, but it was mine. The dark brown, wooden door would speak a language all its own if it could, and it wouldn’t be nice. It was literally a sounding board, and it absorbed all the wrath especially directed at my stepmother. That door made me powerful, and I taught it all the best cuss words. Behind it was my only release. Anger and tears were expressed safely only in that room.


The grey, painted walls were decorated with typical 1970’s idols; Donny Osmond, Barry Manilow, and Starsky and Hutch, to name a few. The dresser top was cluttered with various little girl treasures; a yo-yo, a Chinese jump rope, pink chewed bubble gum, hair barrettes and other trinkets collected here and there. It was a fairly large room, and wind sometimes howled briskly and cold through the leaky seals in my lone window. In the hot summer that same window brought the always fragrant odor of a nearby pig farm. The smell burned in my nostrils and made my eyes water. The slate grey walls held knowledge of the boundaries inflicted upon me. They bore my loneliness and desperation, and they shielded me from the storms brewing in other rooms. In the folds of my closet lay my most secret and prized possessions; pictures of my mother who succumbed to breast cancer when I was a baby, my locked diary, and letters from some of my closest friends. Shelves were littered with stray game pieces, and a few Barbies, some with missing limbs. Clothes that didn’t blanket the floor or my bed, hung on cheap metal hangers in no particular order.


The room reflected the disorder I felt in my life, and it served as the only refuge for a little girl lost. If doors and walls and windows could talk, I know they would have spoken up and defended her when no one else would.