The Babysitter

As my next session with Sara drew closer, I again found myself sitting and staring at the timeline I had started. Shortly after my grandpa’s death, a family member began to sexually abuse me. In the middle of the line I drew on my timeline to represent the sexual abuse, I drew a box and labeled it “inappropriate contact with babysitter.” I thought back to the incident with my babysitter. My mother had needed a babysitter at the last moment; neither of my siblings was available. I was about eight years old. My brother volunteered his friend. Not too soon after my mother left, I began to feel uncomfortable with this person – the way he looked at me, the way he’d pick me up and put me on his lap. I got up from his lap to go “find a toy.” He picked me up to put me on his lap again, telling me to read him a story. As I began to read my story book to him, I could feel his hands rubbing me. I got up a few more times, each time – picked up by him and brought back to the couch. I wanted to run, I wanted to scream. I wanted control.

I was noticeably upset at school the next day. A close friend of mine followed me outside to recess and picked at me to tell her what was wrong. I finally told. My friend told the school counselor. Before the school day was over, I was called into the counselor’s office. I didn’t particularly like our school counselor. I sensed that he was indignant, uncommunicative and lacked in the department of compassion and patience – all bad things for a school counselor to possess. After spending time and energy dancing around the subject at hand, I finally gave my counselor a run down of what had happened with the babysitter. I was then sent back to my classroom. No more was said – no words of encouragement, no affection, no one telling me that it wasn’t my fault, that I wasn’t bad.

Of course, those are the things I came out of this experience with. This contact with my babysitter as well as the chronic abuse I was experiencing made me feel that I was dirty, ruined, bad.

My mother looked at me as she closed the front door that night. She had just returned home from work. She said, “Well, Emily…I got a call from your school counselor today.” I looked at my feet. “You did?” I was ashamed. I couldn’t look at my mother. “Yes,” she said. “He told me what happened between you and the babysitter.” “Oh,” I said, still unable to look at anything other than my shoelaces. “Well, Emily, I just wanted to let you know that we’ll have someone else watch you next time.” My mother put her purse down and went into her room, where she would remain for the rest of the night, as she usually did after returning home from work.

About one month later, I was sitting on a bench at the mall when my mother nudged my shoulder and said, “Oh hey, Em…look – it’s your favorite person!” I looked up to see my former babysitter. He passed us both – nothing was said. My mother had sarcastically pointed out a person I was extremely fearful of in such a calm and lighthearted manner that I did not know what to say. I had again been put in the position of being the adult, as my mother had routinely decided to place herself in the position of being a child.

I knew then that I couldn’t trust her to keep me safe, to be an adult, to comfort me. Who will do this then? I had already learned how ugly the world could be, so to come to the realization that I would never be protected by my parents, was a scary experience. I knew now that I could never tell my mother about the sexual abuse that had plagued the last few years of my life. I couldn’t bear to hear her make a joke of it.