She never had a chance...

She never had a chance. An empath from birth, her trusting child heart exclaimed her experiences.... which were squashed as so much imagination...."Never talk about such things." She turned inward and when saddness emerged she cried and cried unable to bury her broken heart. Then she turned five years old. Her father suddenly died. Someone who should have protected her used her tiny body as a sexual object. She tried to tell her mother, but was treated with distain. "Never say this to anyone!" She would not know who smashed her innocence for 35 years.
    She never had a chance. No one ever said,"I love you." "Good job." "How are you?" There was never a word spoken about her father or about what had happened to take away the safety of her childhood bed, to make her nights times of fright.
    She never had a chance. She was pretty enough to attract attention that she did not understand. But it sure was nice to be hugged! She was smart enough and deep thinking enouhh to hold her own in conversations with adults. But this made her even more attractive. At the age of 12, a 19 year old man who had been holding her and kissing her for weeks at a friends house, came over in the night. Her mom was at work. He said he loved her.  He knew what to do. He took her 'virginity", which in her nieve mind meant he would marry her. The next day he left for basic training for the Marines. She never heard from him again. She could not speak to her mother ; her mother was emotionally absent. Her mother never prepared her in any way for being a woman, about advances of men. She could not tell her friends. She was ONLY 12 YEARS OLD!
     She never had a chance. She had become a sexual being, a person who thought her only value was in giving boys sex. She deliberately became pregnant. She wanted a baby to love, to love her, just like her older sister. She became pregnant. Her mother, a nurse, saw the signs before she did! But she never asked why. Her mother never discussed it with her, not like a mother who loves her daughter. Her mother would be 95 years old before her daughter told her why she got pregnant. Her mother always just thought she was 'a bad girl.' That was the story her mother told everyone.
   She never had a chance. When she was 37, she was told that she had a measured IQ of 187. She was told at 37 how she "could have been anything she wanted to be! But she chose to be a bad girl. She chose to join a commune, to have children and give them up to a cult that told her she could not properly care for her own kids because of "skin disease." Two of those children would grow up to be severely mentally ill adults. She would carry gulit for her children's suffering to her grave.
      She never had a chance. Her health was destroyed by her own mental illness. She would take care of her mother without sibling help for 8 years. Her mother continued to chide her, to tell her she is going to hell, to tell her she is fat, to remind her that she failed her children. Her mother continued to speak ill of her to folks at the nursing home, to extended family, even to her husband. Yet her mother continued to expect her to be at her beck and call.
    She never had a chance. Her hair is gray. Her body racked with pain alk the time. Only medicine keeps her from taking her own life. Her few friends don't understand. How could they?  It is not fair to expect them to.
    She never had a chance. Through all this she kept going back to college. She really wanted a degree. But caring for her special needs son, battling her own demons, her poir health, she could not achieve it. Now at 62 she has one dream, that her high IQ be acknowledged via Mensa...but her brain is fogged by age, medicine, physical damage. She is sad about this. She even prayed, "I never ask You for anything. But today I ask for this one thing. You are the source of all memory, knowledge and forgetfulness. Please let me have this one thing. Give me what I need to be a member of Mensa."   But she never had a chance.
     No. She never had a snowball's chance in hell. She never had a fucking chance.