224: What if they stole your childhood?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. I felt like I was severely robbed of any sort of normalcy and that I didn't get a chance to know who I was or who I should have become and that I will never know that person. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein.

You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 224. What if they stole your childhood?

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My mother, when she was younger, she had cervical cancer. And she basically was told that she wasn't going to be able to have kids.

So when she met my father, she was very much a free spirit, free party animal type of person and liked to hook up with a lot of different people, to my understanding. He was one of these deals. And the day that she found out that she was pregnant with me, she was on her way to go break up with him.

So she ended up not breaking up with him. And they just kind of stayed together until I was born. As soon as I was born, things just kind of went down the rabbit hole. My father is Mexican Native American and my mother is German, Norwegian, Irish.

But my grandmother never liked my biological father. Like there was never like that big Christmas where you have both families in the same household. It was always, okay, we're going to go to this family and then we're going to go to that family. And growing up, I thought grandma's just kind of mean. But now looking back, I can see that she just could see through all the bullshit.

My earliest memory of my mom and my dad, they were both trying to teach me how to tie my shoes. I think I was about four years old. My mom's trying to teach me how to do it one way and he's trying to teach me how to do it another way. And my mother tells my father, stop screaming at her. You're freaking her out.

I remember him pushing her out of the way so he could leave the house. And that was my earliest memory of an interaction between my two parents. And that never changed. I would do something that didn't make him happy and he would snap and she would try to stop him and she would get in the way and she would inevitably be the one who is thrown across the room and into a heater vent.

When I was about five or six, she had to get a job because he was refusing to work. He couldn't hold down a job very long.

And I remember he was the only one that was able to watch me at the time. And his version of watching me was sleeping on the couch, almost comatose because of how much alcohol he had drank the night before.

Him and his brothers very much like to do drugs together and then drink and then fall asleep at someone's house. And they would just be there all day, passed out. Maybe one day per week, Stan wouldn't be completely comatose and he would be working on a car or playing his guitar. And so he would let me out of the room and he would spend time with me and we would have a normal day.

The other four days that my mom was working, I was locked into a room all day.

To be locked into a room and to have food withheld from you is very scary. Especially that young, you don't know when it's going to end. And minutes feel like hours. Hours feel like days. You don't know what time of day it is because you're locked in a closet and you don't have windows or windows.

Because he has literally stapled the curtains to the walls and you cannot open the windows. Because he doesn't want anyone else to see inside.

The only way to keep myself sane was to teach myself how to do things. Like, that's how I taught myself how to whistle. Being locked into a closet, that's how I taught myself how to snap my fingers. And I would recite my ABCs and my numbers and my name, my mom's name, my address over and over again.

When he would lock me in a closet, the other way to keep myself busy and sane, I used to kind of dress up in my mom's clothes. And I used to imagine myself as a grown up. And I used to tell myself, I'm going to have a good job. I'm going to be a businesswoman. And I am never, ever going to spend more than three hours in one room.

I don't know what time is until someone opens that door and lets me out. And the pains from the hunger are just almost unbearable. This is torture. I have never heard of a friend telling me that their fathers locked them in a room all day long without feeding them.

So to me, early on in life, I knew like this is not a normal family dynamic. I don't know why my dad doesn't love me enough to not hurt me. One day, my mom went to work and my biological father, Stan, he was asleep on the couch, very, very out of it.

And I got into the fridge and I started to make myself a sandwich. And when I closed the fridge door, the broom fell and slammed onto the kitchen floor. And he burst up very angry that he got woken up. And he comes towards me and he just starts hitting me.

And at this point, I'm on the ground and he's wearing steel-toed boots like he always did. And I remember him kicking me and then I remember waking up on the floor and I remember him screaming at me, telling me to get up off of the floor and go back into the room. And I didn't know what to do, so I just went into the room and I wrapped myself in a blanket and I didn't make a noise.

for the rest of the day until my mom got home. When my mom got home, I got my toys out and I made it look like nothing happened, that I was just in the room playing. Until the next day when my mom went to give me a bath and she noticed all the bruises on my side. And I just remember her looking at me and her eyes just so wide and she asked me, what the hell happened?

And I had to sit there and I had to tell her everything that he did. That's when she decided that we were going to leave and go live with my grandma. It was the last straw.

I was so proud of her. You know, I had seen him literally throw her across the room like she was a doll so many times. And I had seen him hit her and her cover it up and make it seem like everything was okay, that we were a fine family until this day. This is great. Like, you are so strong. You're my protector. You're my mom. Like, you're gonna, you know, you're gonna get me out of this.

We went to my grandma's house. We moved in with her. And soon my mother and Stan were in court getting a custody case put together. My mom had told the judge what I had told her. And she had pictures of all the bruises on my side. And the judge ruled she gets partial custody.

I'm with my mom Monday through Friday. That way I stay in one school. And then on the weekends, Stan gets to come pick me up and I spend the weekends with him. And then Sunday night, he needs to have me back with my mom. Every Friday night, right after school, I had to get my homework done. If I had any, I had to pack a bag and then I had to be there ready for Stan to come pick me up.

It seemed like every other day he was doing something to harass my mom. He would show up to the house and then walk across the street to where a payphone was located. He'd call her on the payphone and tell her where he was and tell her, you better not be seeing anyone else. You better not take my kid. But then on the weekends when he was supposed to come and pick me up, he wouldn't show up. He wouldn't call.

And technically by law, my mom had to keep me there at the house just in case he decided to show up Sunday morning and just spend a couple hours with me before I had to be back with my mom Sunday night.

I couldn't enroll in any extracurricular activities, any sports. I couldn't go on any field trip that might extend into the weekend. I couldn't go to sleepovers. I couldn't have friends over because my biological father is not a sane person and not safe to be around. So why would I bring someone else's child into that mix? Even though I knew...

Dan wasn't a good person. I still didn't understand why he didn't care enough to just show up. And when he did pick me up, he would take me to whatever house he was couch surfing at, stick me in a room, and he'd go off into the other room and continue to do drugs with his brothers and his sister-in-law. And at six going on seven, I told my mom that I just don't want to see him anymore.

My mom told me that I had to tell Stan myself because if she told him that I didn't want to go with him, to him, he could use that against her and say, you're keeping my child from me.

I remember being on my grandmother's front porch. He finally shows up to pick me up and he looks like he hasn't showered in days. I'm scared. I don't know how he's going to react. I don't know what he's going to say. And no matter what's happened, it's heartbreaking to sit there and tell a parent that you don't want to see them anymore. You feel really bad and you feel like that's a forever thing. Like there is no going back from that. There is no fixing that.

So I sat there and I told him that I don't want to go with you anymore. I don't want to spend weekends with you anymore. And he asked me if my mom told me to tell him this. And I said, no, that I want this. I don't want to go with him anymore. And he said, fine, I won't show up anymore. And he turned around and he walked away.

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This Is Actually Happening is sponsored by ADT. ADT knows a lot can happen in a second. One second, you're happily single. And the next second, you catch a glimpse of someone and you don't want to be. Maybe one second, you have a business idea that seems like a pipe dream. And the next, you have an LLC and a dream come true. And when it comes to your home, one second, you feel safe,

And the next, something goes wrong. But with ADT's 24-7 professional monitoring, you still feel safe. Because when every second counts, count on ADT. Visit ADT.com today. In between this time, my mom was seeing a man named Derek.

Ever since my biological father left, I have this sixth sense where I can see people for who they are almost immediately. And I didn't really like Derek. Like I knew that he was nice and I knew that so far he treated my mom fine. And he was talking about helping my mom gain full custody of me, whatever she needed.

Either the day or the day after, Stan was served papers to go back to court to lose all custody, essentially. He had been driving around the neighborhood trying to find us. We were at a gas station and I was in the back seat. She was filling up the car. And I remember seeing my uncle's big red truck and they speed up and they pull into the gas station parking lot.

She tells me, put your seatbelt on and duck. And we sped out of the gas station and they were following us and kind of ramming into the back of our car. As a kid, you're thinking like, there's no way that this is happening. I have to either be dreaming or there's some other explanation because A, there's no way that my dad would be doing this, right? Like who does this when they know that their kid is in the car? And who does this to another person?

Especially when it's your parent, you just don't understand. She saw a cop car parked on the side of the road. I remember my mom seeing the cop and she slammed on the gas pedal and that cop came chasing after her. And when Stan and his brother saw that a cop was now involved, they sped off into a different direction.

I remember the cop coming up to her window, my mom frantically explaining to him that we were being chased by her ex and it's my biological father and there's a custody battle and he just got served the papers recently. And the cop just kind of went back to his car and apparently that cop had gone and made a report with her name and his name and that kind of helped her case.

My mom takes Stan to court and I had to be there to tell a mediator pretty much everything.

You basically sit in this room with toys and movies monitored by camera, which was very traumatic for me, too, because at this point, Stan had already put me in a locked room so many times that this just felt like I was being put back in my abuse all over again.

So I was in this room for a good chunk of the day and Derek came down and he came and took me to the food court, got me lunch and he asked me how I was. And, you know, he hopes that I'm OK. And if I ever want to talk about anything, he's always there. And these are all the things that Stan was not providing, not doing literally the opposite of Stan.

I know that once this day is over, Derek's going to be around. Derek's going to make my mom happy. Derek is going to make sure that we're safe and that Stan isn't going to bother us anymore. We were walking out of the courthouse and we had to go into the elevator and go down. And the elevator doors open for us to go down. And my biological father, Stan, walks out and I say, Hi, Daddy. I'll see you later. I love you.

And he looks down at me and then just walks away and didn't say anything. That was the last time I saw him. Almost earth shattering. At that age, you love your parents unconditionally.

And to say goodbye to him and have him just look down at me and then walk away and not say anything was like I did something so wrong that he couldn't even stand to talk to me or barely look at me. Like I wasn't worth two seconds just to say goodbye. When it came down to it, my mom was my absolute favorite person ever.

I knew that she went through a lot with Stan and I wanted to do anything possible to be her sweet little child that could put a little bit of joy into her life or a little bit of light into her life. Derek kind of jumped right in at that point and kind of became surrogate father to

And at that time, he was doing things with us, like taking us fishing. And he introduced my mom to some of his friends from high school. And it was actually kind of a happy time. Around that time, my grandmother was retiring and she had decided that she was going to sell the house that we were living in. So Derek's parents said, why don't all three of you move in with us?

Right around this time, they decide that they're going to get married. I don't think anyone was really for this marriage. And my grandmother especially didn't.

I remember we were at my grandmother's house and she had strung my mother and I each a necklace of pearls. And she is putting my string around my neck and she's clasping it and she whispers in my ear, it's okay, don't be sad. If you ever need anything, I'm always here for you.

It just felt so sad. It almost felt like the end. Like, you know, I got a small glimpse of some happy, normal life, but that didn't last very long because my mother and Derek quickly got into a pattern of very intense fighting.

They would fight and scream and be inches away from each other's faces and just literally screaming at the top of their lungs, calling each other these names and telling each other that they hated each other and that they shouldn't have gotten married. And then an hour later, they would be sitting on the couch cuddling and talking about going camping next weekend.

It just got so bad and so frequent that Derek's parents told my mom and Derek that we needed to hurry up and find an apartment and get out because they couldn't stand the fighting anymore. We were the Brady Bunch family one minute. And then the next day, I would come home from school and literally everything in the house would be broken. It would just look like a battle zone.

Very early on in Derek's life, he was involved in gang activity. And that continued all throughout his and my mother's marriage. That didn't stop. And it also didn't slow down either. And because of this, he had gotten caught for something and he had gotten thrown in jail. And to my knowledge, this was his second strike.

When he first went to jail, my mom was very adamant that she wasn't going to stand for this shit. This is the last straw. And he would call the house over and over and over again. Just all of this stuff to gaslight her and essentially make her feel like by not standing by his side when he went to jail and by not having contact with him while he's in jail, she's doing something wrong.

And, of course, my mother takes him back, lets him right back into the house as if he was never gone. Nothing ever happened. I somehow think that if I am there, physically there with my mom, then nothing bad is going to happen or I can prevent whatever is going to happen. But if I leave, then something bad is going to happen. I'm not going to be able to take it back. I'm not going to be able to stop it. And I will lose my mom. So my attendance level was not great.

You very much feel like cattle at this point. Like your life was meant to just be in this cage and there is no out and you just need to find a way to deal with it.

I came home from school one day and it was another one of these toxic fights where everything in the living room is being broken. And my mom stopped screaming at Derek long enough to ask me, do you have homework? Are you going to do your homework? And I, with my little sassy attitude, said, I don't have any homework.

That just enraged Derek. He told me that I was a little piece of shit. How dare I snap at my mother that way? I need to speak to both of them with the utmost respect. And I said to him, I don't need to treat you with respect. You're not my father. He pushed me up against the closet door and grabbed me by the neck and lifted me up a few inches higher.

And I can't breathe. And I'm trying to pry his fingers off of my neck and it's just not working. He's holding on to me tighter. And my mom is behind him and she's not doing a single thing. She's just watching it happen. I remember him calling me a piece of shit again. And then he spat in my face and dropped me.

And I remember falling to the floor, trying to get my breath and not knowing what was happening. And I thought that my mom was going to at least come to me or see if I was okay. And they both just walked out of the room, shut the door, and again left me in the room. I remember just going to sleep. I didn't eat dinner that night. I just kind of cried myself to sleep. And I woke up the next day and I went to school.

But I couldn't understand why she wasn't doing anything. I have literally seen this woman stand in front of another person to prevent them from hurting me. And I've seen her get hurt herself to protect me. Here's this person who is strangling me. And I don't know if they're going to let go or if I'm going to be alive by the time that they let go. But she doesn't do a thing.

When it came to Derek and Derek's antics, it was as if Derek could do no wrong and anything he does do wrong, I will quickly forgive. It was like this immediate flip, you know, two completely different people. All of her values changed. All of her beliefs changed. She stopped talking to certain people because he wanted her to stop talking to certain people. He could do no wrong. She completely changed.

What did I do to deserve this? If my mother agrees with this, then I must have done something terribly wrong. And I need to deeply evaluate what I have done wrong and never do it again. I was about nine years old. And this night, Derek wasn't in the house. I don't know where he was.

It was actually a really good night. My mother tucked me in. She told me that she loved me and she says goodnight to me. And I fell asleep. Some point in the middle of the night, I heard this loud, almost explosion noise. And it was our screen doors. And he had opened it so hard that it made just the loudest noise and immediately woke me up.

I remember being wide awake and I could hear everything, but I could not move. I was just way too scared. He's screaming. He's, where is he? Where is he? I know you're fucking around on me. I know you've got another man in this house. Where is he? And he's ripping through cupboards. She's trying to tell him, Derek, Derek, calm down. Candace is sleeping in the other room. You need to calm down. Don't wake Candace up. What are you talking about? I don't have another person in here.

And then I could hear him kind of get on top of her. I could hear them wrestling on the couch. And he held a knife to her throat and told her that if he couldn't have her, that no one would. And that if he couldn't have her, that he was going to bring his friends over to the house and he was going to rape and kill the both of us. That way, he would be the last one to have us.

And she told him, go ahead and do it. I'm tired of living this way. Go ahead and do it.

I've recently learned what the fawn reaction is, and I understand that sometimes when you're in those situations that you just say whatever you need to say to get the person to leave or to stop or to get off of you. But who in their right mind says that, knowing that it also puts their child in danger?

To this day, I can't fathom it. I can't accept it. I can't find an excuse for it. I can't condone it. It was almost confirmation that I needed to let me know that I was going to be the only one that was going to truly protect myself. I was going to be the only one that had my best interests at heart. This is the moment that you are alone.

I think from that moment on, I don't remember being a kid. I became a mini adult. You need to keep going because if you stop and if you do think about it and if you do break down, that's going to be the end of it. You're not going to survive this. You are not going to be the person that you need to be to get away from these people.

I had seen the person that Derek was. Derek was very much a person of action. And the fact that he was part of a gang, I very much did not see that as a threat. I saw it as a promise. So I thought, this is the moment that you are either going to die or you're going to fight for a few days, but then you're going to die. I remember my mom called the cops and

They had pinned to our house a couple of times up until that point. We had one police officer tell us that this is it. You know, now he's threatening you with a deadly weapon. And he also threatened the life of a minor. We're going to find him.

So it took about a week for them to eventually find him. But during this week, he was harassing us, spying on us, threatening us. One time, my mom was in the bedroom with a friend and my mom looked up and she saw Derek staring at her through the window.

They eventually catch him, and when they caught him, he was at a friend's house, and he was in bed with their 14-year-old sister. Because of that, he also got himself some sexual charges with a minor. So when we were told that they caught him, I remember just feeling so relieved.

It's literally like you're trapped underneath a car and you can't breathe and you can't move for a whole week. And then all of a sudden someone comes and lifts the car up off of you and puts you on the most comfortable bed you've ever laid in your life. They told my mom that this was going to be his third strike. And in the state of California, you got at least 25 years to life. And with all the charges added up, that's what he was facing.

But one day my mom and I are outside of 7-Eleven. She tells me to stay in the car. I'll be right back. Just lock the doors. And these two guys step right in front of her and they were talking for a couple of minutes. And then I see my mom rush into the car, tell me to put my seatbelt on and keep the doors locked. And then we sped out of there as fast as I think she could have gotten out of there.

I later found out that those two men were sent by Derek to threaten my mom and tell her that if she testifies against him at his trial and makes his sentence longer, that they will come back and they will follow through with his promise. So she didn't testify. She didn't show up to any court hearings. She didn't read a victim impact statement. Nothing. Nothing.

So because of that, the only thing that they could really get on him was the fact that when they caught him, he was in bed with a 14 year old and he only served eight years with parole afterwards. And at the time I was nine years old. So I believe he was supposed to be out around the time that I was 16.

How do you go from being a fighter to literally doing anything that you can to protect your family with one man to then experiencing a far worse hell, in my opinion, with another man and doing absolutely nothing? I was just so angry. I had a problem with everything. I felt the world was not fair.

I felt like I was severely robbed of any sort of normalcy and that I didn't get a chance to know who I was or who I should have become and that I will never know that person.

I started to notice that I had a lot of trust issues. Like, it didn't matter what you told me. It didn't matter who you were. It didn't matter how long I knew you. If you told me something, in the back of my mind, I'm kind of like a detective trying to figure out whether or not that's actually true. And I also had a real, real hard time with trusting men. For a while there, I kind of viewed all men as inherently evil people.

All men wear wolf's and sheep's clothing. You know, eventually, after all this happened, my mother eventually got into a relationship with another man. His name is Ron. She moved in with him from seventh grade till graduating high school.

Ron is the best person that I know. There, I got to experience some stable home environment. He never really wanted kids himself, but then when he got into a relationship with my mom, he kind of took me on and we became buddies. He, I feel, taught me all of the things that a father should teach a daughter. And I think that was probably my saving grace.

He kind of taught me, look, you went through hell. It means the world is messy. It means the world can be scary. It can be unsafe. But there is beauty in life. Just because you experienced these things in the past doesn't mean that you have to continue experiencing them in the future. You have the opportunity to go forward in life and make it something completely different.

It wasn't anyone else that was locking me in a room. I was locking myself in a room by not allowing myself to slowly try to heal and realize that just because this person or these two people have done these things to you does not mean that every single person, every single man is going to do the same thing to you.

And that goes back to Ron. He was kind of that saving grace and that he's physical proof that there are good people. Not all men are wolves in sheep's clothing. There are good men out there. And you went through something very traumatic and it is okay to realize it. It is okay to cry about it. It is okay to talk about it.

It does not make you crazy. It does not make you a bad person. It doesn't mean that you're not loved. That was the other wonderful thing that Ron taught me.

To me, the word family is very loose. Family is someone who is there for you, someone who shows you unconditional love, someone who helps you through the trying times and celebrates with you during the happy times. And sometimes the family that you find in life is the best family that you have.

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What has been the hardest are things like being in a closed room. To this day, at night, I cannot sleep with the bedroom door closed. It has to be open. I cannot feel like I am being closed into a room. I have to make sure that my blinds are perfectly closed. There cannot be a crack where someone can see in.

My door needs to be locked. I have locks in my windows. I'm still trying to get over the invasion trauma that I experienced with Derek. I have realized now that I'm older that I have a little bit of, it's kind of turned into paranoia, but I'm working on it. And at this point, whatever I need to do to make myself feel safe, that's perfectly okay.

If mentally I'm working on myself, then great. But I need to make myself feel safe. And if that's what I got to do, that's what I got to do. So that's what I did for a while. Graduated high school with honors. I got into college. I stayed in state. That way I could still be around Ron and my mom and kind of live in the college life for a while. And that's when I met my partner.

I was very guarded. Just didn't want to tell him too much about myself. I didn't want to accept a lot of his niceties or his flirting at first because A, I thought that I didn't deserve it. And B, I thought that it was all false, that it was just going to be a way to get me into his trap. That way it could all go south.

So at first, I wasn't really giving him the time of day and eventually got together and that's actually been great. My partner's family is absolutely wonderful. His father and his grandfather are very much in his life and they love me and I love them. They make me part of everything, every family event, every holiday. They have very much been my found family forever.

He knows a lot about what I've been through in my life. And he's seen the roller coaster that is my mother. I still kind of had contact with my mother at that point. She just recently sent me a message through Instagram talking about how she wasn't feeling well and how she might be dying of an undiagnosed heart condition, which is very hard to believe.

According to my grandmother, she's been claiming one way or another that she's been dying since 1989. So it's not anything that really can be taken at face value.

So just to figure out what was going on, I finally decided to download an app that gives me a local phone number that allows me to text her and call her without actually giving her my real phone number. So I did that and I called her while I was at work. She...

started talking to me about why did I sound weird and I had told her that I thought that I was catching a cold but it wasn't COVID and she started talking about how she had caught COVID and she still had to work through it and then...

The conversation trailed off into how her family doesn't talk to her anymore and no one talks to her. No one reaches out to her anymore. And then she said to me, ever since you moved out of my house, my mother hasn't wanted anything to do with me, which kind of made me snap. And for the first time, I kind of stood up for myself with her. And I said, that's completely untrue.

The fact that you don't talk to your mother anymore is because of the relationship that the two of you have always had and the fact that you always take advantage of her. And me moving out has nothing to do with it.

She just completely went on a tirade of, well, my mother doesn't talk to me and my brother doesn't talk to me. And why is it that none of my family has wanted to talk to me ever since you left my house? And then I reiterated, you know, one has nothing to do with the other. I have nothing to do with that. So she hung up on me and I tried to call her back and she wouldn't answer my phone calls.

And then she blasted that phone number with a barrage of texts talking about how she was done with the entire family. They have done nothing but mistreat her and take advantage of her her entire life.

Then she told me that she was going to burn all of my pictures, all of my baby pictures, everything, and let it burn with her when she dies and that she will enjoy burning my graduation photos that she paid for, which is just absolutely absurd for so many reasons. I can't imagine burning a photo of my child to actually enjoy doing that

On another note, it's completely messed up because she didn't even pay for my graduation photos like she claims. Ron paid for my entire graduation package. Him and my grandmother. She's had nothing but help the entire way from multiple people and she's also taken advantage of those people.

None of the family members have done anything except for protect their own mental health and sanity when it comes to her. That's the reason why they don't talk to her. And they have come to that conclusion on their own.

I think that she has this narrative of, you know, everything is my fault. The family doesn't talk to me. It's all my fault because she needs someone to blame. Nothing is her fault. She is a narcissist. Everything is about her. And if it's not her fault, then it has to be my fault because I'm the only one that's left.

I've been the only one to hold out this long. And now I'm the last remaining one that's sitting there and taking her abuse. And she thinks that if she makes me feel guilty, then I'll continue to stay and she won't be completely alone.

You grow up idolizing a parent and loving them, thinking that you'll do anything for them. You would say anything for them. You'll defend them against anyone. And then you grow up and you look back and you realize none of that was true. That was just this fantasy that I built up for myself. I just decided, you know what? This is it. You constantly take from me. You do nothing but hurt me.

So I told her that this was going to be the last message that she had received from me and that I didn't want any contact with her and that I was going to be blocking her from everything else. And then I deleted the application that gave me the fake phone number. So I have fully deleted her out of my life completely.

And I could not feel any better, to be honest with you. When I did that and I deleted everything and it was all said and done for the rest of the day at work, I felt so proud of myself. I finally stood up to her for myself. I completely deleted her out of my life for good. And now she's alone and she has no one to blame but herself.

The last time, to be honest, that I want to hear her name is from someone telling me that she's completely gone. I very much feel like an orphan. I don't have contact with my biological father anymore anymore.

His wife found me on Facebook and we got in contact again and I found out that I had six sisters. That was a big surprise. Unfortunately, now he is in jail and will be there for quite a long time.

And now I've completely cut my mother out of my life. And now I've got Ron. And you know what? I am happy with that because I've got Ron and I've got his beautiful girlfriend that he's been with for a couple years now, actually. And she's lovely. She's wonderful. I love her. They're my parents. And we both found family in each other. And it's one of the best relationships that I have.

I did operate with full guilt for my entire life because I also thought that if I took the blame, then no one else would have to take the blame. And I think that goes back to when I was very little. And I think it goes back to when I knew that my biological father was hitting her. I saw it most of the time.

I thought if I took the blame for something, she wouldn't get hit or she wouldn't have to face the punishment. I could face the punishment without it actually being a worse consequence for someone else, i.e. my mother. I could perpetuate the cycle.

the cycle of abuse. And, you know, I choose not to. I choose to remove myself and I choose to have a beautiful, happy, healthy, fun, non-abusive relationship with not only the adults that I have in my life, but more importantly, my niece and goddaughter. My goal is to break the cycle with her because I don't necessarily intend to have my own children. I want to make sure she has nothing but the best and nothing but

healthy, happy environment. And so far, so far, so good. I'm keeping that promise. It was almost a, I don't want to say a blessing, but it kind of is a blessing that I got to experience all of this at such a young age because I get to walk through the rest of my life with this knowledge and come to a mental peace with humanity and my surroundings and kind of have a normal life.

I don't know where Derek is in life. I don't wish to know. I don't want anything to do with that person. I don't wish any harm against him or ill will, but I just don't want to know. It wasn't like I ever felt like life owed me anything or turned its back on me. It was almost as if life was just never there to begin with.

So when I was given the opportunity to be happy, once my mom met Ron, it was like this overwhelming sense of relief. And once life kind of started with Ron, that was when my childhood started. That was when I was able to breathe in life. In a weird sense, it was almost as if that was when Derek let go of his grip around my neck.

I was able to finally be free of all of this bullshit and trauma and I can just focus on being me, being a kid. And that was the best thing in my life. Just that sense of normal. My life is happy and none of my abusers could take that away from me.

Today's episode featured Candice. You can find out more about her on Instagram at the underscore healing underscore road. Or you can contact her through email at ms.healingroad at gmail.com. From Wondery, you're listening to This Is Actually Happening.

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In January 2022, local woman Karen Reed was implicated in the mysterious death of her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O'Keefe. It was alleged that after an innocent night out for drinks with friends, Karen and John got into a lover's quarrel en route to the next location. What happens next depends on who you ask.

Was it a crime of passion? If you believe the prosecution, it's because the evidence was so compelling. This was clearly an intentional act. And his cause of death was blunt force trauma with hypothermia. Or a corrupt police cover-up. If you believe the defense theory, however, this was all a cover-up to prevent one of their own from going down. Everyone had an opinion.

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