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When Friendship is Thicker Than Blood

© Tenna Perry

Throughout childhood, my first marriage and well into my second marriage, there was one name I never wanted to be called in my lifetime. That name was "Mother." To me, Mother is a hostile word. I don't remember ever uttering it with a feeling of love in my heart because the one legally entitled to it abused the trust, responsibility and love it would normally generate. She also turned a blind eye to the sexual abuse my cousin and father perpetrated against me. In doing so, she built a wall of resentment and at times, actual hate between us that if she were still alive, would still be standing strong.

Her actions and inactions made me adamant in my refusal to have children. The one time I became pregnant during my first marriage, I knew I wasn't cut from the "Mommy" cloth. Nor was my husband (six years my senior) responsible enough for his own actions to fit into any type of fatherly role. Two rejects, one 23, the other 29 had no business bringing a child into the world, especially when one was so deathly afraid of the chance that she may continue the cycle of abuse on some innocent child. With this in mind, I made the appointment at the local clinic but before the date of my procedure came around, I had a miscarriage and was sparred the burden of carrying out my decision.

Several years, a divorce and another marriage later to a wonderfully loving, supportive man, I became pregnant again. This time, I was still unable to see myself as a child's mother. With my husband David's support, however, I finally began to see a glimmer of possibility. That pregnancy also ended in a miscarriage but I during that time I had changed. The glimmer had become a thought, the thought a desire and in the end we decided to actually try to have a child.

In 1989 our daughter was born. Premature, blue-eyed, bald and only weighing 5 pounds, she quickly made me realize how fortunate I was to have both her and her father. She was a very even-tempered, easily kept child who liked everyone she met and unlike so many parental nightmare tales, made little difference in our lives. She went where we did, soon ate anything we ate and even adapted to my graveyard shift sleeping schedule.

Life went on like it does for everyone until my daughter became 18-months-old, the same age I had been when my cousin's sexual abuse of me first began. Life became not only chaotic and depressing but also so frightening due to flashbacks and nightmares that I became suicidal. With the help of a fantastic psychologist and a support network made up of my husband and closest friends, I was finally able to fight back from the darkness and actually enjoy life again. Then at work in July 1994, my world came to a crashing halt as my husband's supervisor called to tell me David had been burned on the job and was at a hospital near the refinery where he worked.