📖 Inherited

Yet Another Survivors Story, Chapter 1

This is chapter 1 of my memoir, Yet Another Survivors Story. Just sharing to my first readers, thanks to anyone meandering by. :)

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My father liked them young.
Children, I mean.

But before he could abuse children outside the family, he started with control inside it.

My birth in 1978 wasn’t an accident.
It was a theft.

My mother didn’t want another child.
She’d divorced him. Moved to Florida. Tried to start over.

But he followed her across state lines.
He told her he’d had a vasectomy.

He hadn’t.

I was conceived through that lie.
Not through love. Not even through negligence.

Through deliberate manipulation.

And here I am.

I was taken from her the day I came home from the hospital. She carried me for nine months, birthed me, and then—just like that—I was gone. My dad stole me, and the first six months of my life unfolded somewhere between Florida and Alabama. Nobody really knows what happened in those months.

I wasn’t born from love. I was born from control. And still, they called it family.

But if we don’t name this for what it was—

a forced birth,

a coercive act,

a reproductive assault—

then we keep telling girls like me
that survival is the same thing as

CONSENT.

My adopted mother—whom I’ll call “Mom” from here on out (in quotes for differentiation, not sarcasm as I love her deeply, despite scars) —says she “got me” when I was six months old. Like I was a prize or a puppy, not a human baby already warped by loss.

Some people say the first six months don’t matter much for emotional development, but John Bowlby would disagree. Attachment, loss, the blueprint for love—it all starts before you even have words for it.

At the time, Mom was married to another man. She worked at a local daycare, and I was one of the babies she cared for. My father had returned to his hometown of Dadeville, Alabama—a small Southern town where he was treated like a prophet in the making. He’d been preaching since he was twelve, and people said he had the kind of charisma that could part waters, if not minds. A child preacher, a hometown star. That kind of worship is a dangerous thing to hand to a boy who never learned reverence and lacked empathy.

Once, during a revival trip through Selma, he wrapped a Confederate flag around Martin Luther King Jr.’s bumper—his idea of a joke, or a warning, or both.

That’s the kind of faith he built his sermons on.

My father didn’t want to take care of me. He wanted a toy he could control. He said he had to work overnight shifts, so he asked Mom to start bringing me home with her. She and her husband had four kids together—or rather, two they kept, and two who would be shuffled out when she left him later. At first, I was just an overnight guest. But I stayed. Permanently.

Mom says I reminded her of her own mother, who had recently died. She thought I was her dead mom, reincarnated. Like I was some strange echo or placeholder. A ghost wrapped in baby skin.

Over time, my father’s charm worked its way into her life like a virus. He convinced her to leave her husband, to break apart her family, and to start over with him. Looking back, I think she believed she was choosing love. Or maybe purpose. Or maybe just the next thing that looked like survival.

She packed us for Ohio, chasing the idea of safety with excitement again.

But the story didn’t start there.

It started earlier—before her, before him—in Avon Park, Florida, with my birth mother, Barbara.

I didn’t know it then, but I was already learning which parts of reality I could keep -

and which ones I’d have to give away to stay.