Refugee

by Jennifer Bell-Lang
(Grand Isle, Vt. USA)

Jennifer

Ok, so here I am sitting at the computer at 5pm Sunday evening, February 17th 2008 with a half smile on my face. Has it been hard to heal? Hell yes. Has it been worth it so far? Hell yes. I have come so far in the past two years since the recovery of my visual memories and am learning daily how to incorporate them into my life in a "healthy" way. Is this even possible? That is where the answer "There has to be a healthy way" comes in. There is no option other then to face my experiences dead on and deal with what has been done to me so that I may live and in return help others to get stronger.
My story is a long one, and at times it might seem like I am going in circles or that I repeat myself, I repeat myself alot. When I was a young girl my Uncle Licked my vagina until I had an orgasm, that pretty much began my introduction into the world of sex. Not nice. In high school(I graduated in 1990) I was very promiscuous and built up a reputation as a fighter and a whore. In 1997 I gave birth to a bi-racial boy and moved to another state to try for a better life for the two of us. I went back to school and obtained my associate degree in fine art and became more and more interested in the relationship between Art color and skin color, the physics of color and race relations. I won't get into it now but whew!, it can be pretty intense!. Well, still in denial of my abuse and labeled with many different medical diagnoses, I began to withdraw more and more from life and my son was suffering. I made the decision to call in help and ten years later my son now lives in a very healthy and happy home with my sister and her family. I have no regrets and still speak with him, but it was better for him to have a childhood than to be my caregiver. I probably will fill you in on the details later but other than crying, drinking and smoking cigarettes alot there's not really much to tell, yeah I lost my son but I allowed him a chance to become a man.
I started to remember my own story when I went to the local coffee shop I used to hang out at in high school and met up with a guy who was in the circle of abuse I was in. It was pretty weird looking back at the events now but damb, so is this bloody story. I actually had grown up some, believe it or not, and although he hadn't gone to college and wasn't the type my "artist" friends would hang out with, I began a relationship with him anyway. I do not think it was strange that I found him to be good looking, or that I was sexually attracted to him. The fact we were severely abused together as kids is awful and having met up with him as an adult was put in front of me for a reason. So here's how I began to remember, One day out in front of his mother's house she came out to his truck and said to me, and I quote "So You're the British Tart"., Uh...What? I said to myself. What did you just call me? and now I like to use the visual analogy that the polaroid memories began to fall into place like dominoes. Yeah, I know base awful. Well I had pretty much zero advocates left and when I tried to get others from another different state to listen to me they just made my situation here in the United States unbearable. Listen to this, I was regrouping, again, in my umpteenth hospitalization when I noticed they had me filed as a male on my chart. Yeah, some typo. So, this is when I began to think about getting myself out of the United States, and I actually drove myself up to the Canadian border in Quebec and asked for amnesty, asylum, refugee protection whatever it wants to be called, and was able to write a 10 page paper giving names, dates, and details to the Canadian government. It gets worse(not really, but you all are the first to actually listen to me) Well after a year of living as a refugee, oh and get this the slang word for garbage in Quebec is pu-belle(my name is Jennifer Bell, remember) Well the Canadian Government said no. I did not need protection and was to go back to where I came from. Enter...my knight...a friend I met and was living with there followed me down into the US and we got married this past July. LIFE...to be continued.