Childhood is supposed to be a time of innocence. Unfortunately, that is not always the case. When I went to bed last night, I thought about this. Now, I don't think I had a bad childhood overall, but I wasn't free of abuse and neglect. My biological father died long ago, 1986 if I remember correctly. I don't remember much about him. I remember him and my mom taking me to the car. It was an old Volkswagen Beetle. But I also remember a taste. When I was a teenager I tried beer. Only I realized when I tried it that I had tasted it before. I think I know why. He gave me beer as a baby to basically make me go to sleep. Mom suspected that as well. I also know that he didn't properly take care of me. He was too busy getting drunk. Between his mental illness (paranoid schizophrenic) and his drinking problem, he was really in no position to take care of a child. Unfortunately, my mother had to work. As I recall, she worked at a bank in downtown Kansas City, Missouri from 1969 until a few years after I was born. It took a while for her to finally leave him. She did not leave until one night when he did something pretty bad. See we lived in a duplex, one where we lived on the ground floor, and our neighbor lived upstairs. Apparently, a liquor store burned down, so he and my biological father took some bottles of liquor from the remains of the store. I'm sure it was quite a steal. Anyway, he passed out from all the booze he drank. Later he woke up in the middle of the night and went back upstairs, but he left the door to our home open in the middle of the night in Kansas City, something that made my mom decide that it was enough.

We moved in with my aunt and uncle. They of course had two sons. The younger of the two used to play these games with me where we would "play" with each other. He was 3 or 4 years older than me, so such games were probably what most would consider inappropriate. I don't know when it started exactly or when it ended. I do remember at the worst was when I was 10 and he basically tried to rape me. So as I said, my childhood wasn't free of abuse, but I feel as though it could have been much worse.

I also have another cousin, well by marriage I guess you could say. My mom remarried in 1985, and his sister's eldest is a real piece of work. Now, in her defense, she was also a victim of sexual abuse by at least two people, my adoptive father being one of them. Ironically, she left her second child at our home in 1997. Unfortunately, he did the same thing to her daughter for 5 years along with her friend. Now, I know what my adoptive father did was downright heinous, but why would she leave her own daughter in a situation where she was subject to the same abuse she suffered at the very same hands? I've always wondered this. She's never done right by her kids. She was negligent from conception. She got pregnant as a teenager, probably 16 or 17. She had twins, but because of her extensive drug abuse during pregnancy, they both died.

The oldest surviving daughter was born with fetal alcohol syndrome in December of 1987. She had a lot of problems, and now she's having a child of her own. It wouldn't take much for her to raise her son better than her mother raised her. She too was sexually abused and also exposed to drugs by my cousin's endless supply of losers. She didn't care what her boyfriends or husbands did to her children so long as she what she got what she wanted, which quite frankly was dick. Her younger daughter (the aforementioned one) was the one who lived with us for several years. It's safe to say she was abused extensively. She too also suffers from the effects of her mother's substance abuse. Her one and only son was born in June of 1992. He was born 3 or 4 months early with cerebral palsy, and she had used methamphetamine during that pregnancy, which was fortunately her last.

The things I've mentioned scar a child for life. Whether the abuse is sexual, physical, or involving negligence, it takes away their innocence in one way or another. Children are supposed to be protected and free from exploitation and mistreatment. Unfortunately, some people find ways of thinking that there's nothing wrong with it. I've even heard someone say that the only reason that sexual abuse messes a child up is because society says it's wrong. I strongly suspect there's more to it than that, but no matter what causes the damage, does it really matter? The fact is that it DOES cause damage. That is the important thing to remember, and it's exactly why our society sends child abusers up the river.