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8 Jacqueline k Life Narrative “I refuse to be another statistic” I was born in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1965. My parents got married, from what I understand, a few hours before I was born. They were teenagers. My mother was sixteen, and I believe my dad was eighteen or nineteen. I had two brothers and a sister that grew up with me. I’m the oldest. I don’t remember my father living with us. My mother remarried when I was twelve or thirteen. I was the oldest, and I never felt like I was a child. My mother put a lot of responsibilities on me very young. I’ve been cooking and cleaning since I was six years old. My baby brother, I’m like five years and some months older than him, and I remember changing his diapers and feeding him and washing his diapers in a toilet. . . . I’ve been taking care of somebody since I was five years old. I always had to be the one to take care, and I’m even doing it still here in this prison. I’m always putting myself last. . . . And I got beat a lot by my mom. My mother beat all of us, but I think I got more so than the rest of the kids. And I hated her for a long time for that. She would tell us stories. Well, I would hear things about what it was like for her when she was growing up. And what she was telling us was she was abused also, even worse than what we were going through, but we never believed her because my mother come from a large family, and none of the other children went through what she went through so we thought she was making it up. And I didn’t find out until three years ago that everything my mother said was the truth. So she was a victim of abuse that had kids as a teenager, and it wasn’t until she told me, “I raised you all the best way I knew how” that I understood that’s all she knew. So the cycle continued. [When I found out,] I told my mother that I knew she was telling the truth. The oldest boy in the family died almost four years ago, and he went to his grave hating my mom because of the abuse. And I just wish he was alive for me to tell him that all this time she was not lying. It made me understand, and it made me forgive. And we try to have a relationship now. You know, it’s hard sometimes because, I mean, she don’t want to believe that she did the things she did to us. It hurts her that she did that. And I tell her, “If I didn’t forgive you, then we wouldn’t have a relationship.” . . . I do understand now, and I try to tell myself that my mother has some psychological issues because of what happened to her, and so I overlook a lot of stuff. When I was, I don’t know, I might not have even been five years old, my aunt’s boyfriend took me in the basement and sexually abused me, and I didn’t know what he was doing. All I knew [was] it was wrong, and I never told anybody ’til I was twenty-eight years old. . . . My maternal grandfather abused me sexually for years, and I thought that I was bad ’cause I let him do that to me. And then another thing is, I don’t hate my grandfather. I love him. He’s dead, but I thought, how can I love somebody that did that to me? What’s wrong with me? Why don’t I hate this man? Every man that has abused me sexually—my stepfather did it, too, and I don’t hate him either. And I don’t understand why, you know, what’s wrong with me? Because as a matter of fact, when I found out that I wasn’t the only granddaughter that he did that to, I got mad at him. I guess I thought I was his special one because he did that to me. It started probably when I was seven or eight, and it continued until I learned how to stop; when the other kids would leave, I would leave also instead of sticking around. With my stepfather...

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