A Fight for My Life

A Fight for My Life

Maryellen Hoffman

Copyright © 2024 Maryellen Hoffman

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2024

ISBN 979-8-89315-252-4 (pbk)

ISBN 979-8-89315-227-2 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Heather, for always having my back and supporting me with every decision and encouraging me for every adventure along the way, thank you for always being my chosen family.

Introduction

Parents' Love Story and Beginning

Their First Loss

Conceiving

My Basic Morals

Learning to Live in Fear

The Only Girl

Brothers

Hank

The Year It Changed

Moving On

Losing

Growing Friendship

Morning at Lizzie's

Alabama Summers

Undiagnosed Brother

Absent Father

Sleepovers

My First School Bully

Chief Rainbow

Middle School

Last Alabama Summer

Return to Connecticut

Attention Seeking

Overnight Summer Camp

Flirtatious Little Sister

Fun Club

Losing My Brothers

Getting into High School

Freshman Year

Broken Brother

Upon My Sixteenth Year

Unleash the Crazy

Adding Excitement

My Arrest

Carny

Life Change

The First Letdown

Parenting Classes

The Kidnapping

The Rape

Pregnancy

Daughter's Major Trauma

One Last Hit

Finally Divorced

Maybe PCOS

Being a Better Momma

A Slight Family Gloss

LDS Church

My POV on Christianity

Breaking Point

Learning to Have Faith in Myself

Learning to Enjoy Sex

Reconnecting to the Goddess

Facing Trauma

Loving My Life as a Single Divorced Mother of Two

Falling Fast

Letting Go

About the Author

Heather, for always having my back and supporting me with every decision and encouraging me for every adventure along the way, thank you for always being my chosen family.

Introduction

I'm never going to remember every good or bad experience in my lifetime. It really does not matter in the end. I am sharing these details and events because I feel there are people in the world who have been through similar situations. I hope to help them find their inner strength to fight for themselves, make the necessary changes, and live their best lives. With all this being said, please remember, there are things that are going to be of a very delicate subject matter and triggering for a lot of people. This is a story written from an adult perspective. I do include content about subjects such as molestation, rape, sexual activities, illegal behavior, and overcoming abuse and neglect. If you are easily triggered, do not read this story.

I have been through more trauma than anyone I have ever met. I am a complete open book. As such, I have shared the basics of my story many times. I was raised by parents who did the best they could, although they did let me down. I forgave the people who harmed me, and I have moved forward in my life. I learned carrying anger and hatred in my heart was too much of a burden for any single person. I had to choose to let that go so I could decide to move forward and live my life without fear taking over. I chose to write this story because I want to inspire others to do the same. I want people to know they are not alone. If I can overcome these horrific events that took over my entire formative years, you can overcome anything you have experienced also.

The same boiling water that softens the potato hardens the egg (Russian proverb).

You are not the things that have happened to you. You are not the circumstances you were born into. Finally, you are not the situations you find yourself in. Every single person on this planet is human. We all have faults and make mistakes, and we all aspire to be something better. I consider myself a goddess because inside myself, I have found my inner power to forgive and live my life pure of heart. I am a survivor. I am strong. I am resilient. Among all else, I am who I was born to be, and I hope sharing my story and experiences will help inspire others to find the person they are at their own core. I was not always the courageous person you see me as today. I started my life out being very quiet. I was shy, afraid to make mistakes, and meek.

Even to this day, I will find myself going back to those childlike insecurities from time to time. I will have to reassure myself I am my own hero. I have become my own advocate. I am a goddess. I am a powerful human being. I can do anything I put my mind to. I have come too far in my life to give up now. People count on me to be my best every day even if my best today is not as good as it was yesterday. There will always be days where I would much rather stay in bed crying because my heart is hurting. I may want someone to come take care of me. Yet without all my experiences, good and bad, I would never have become the person I am today. I would never be able to share my story or have the strength to put these words on paper. Most of the names and identifying details have been changed or left out to help keep their identities anonymous. I do not want to affect the lives of the people who do not deserve the pain that would be caused from bringing attention to the monsters in my story.

Every single person is the main character in his/her own story. Each one of us has heroes and villains. I grew up with my teachers asking me Who is your hero? and I never had an answer. Now when someone asks that same question, I can answer without a doubt, me. I have become my own hero because without learning how to stand up for myself, I would have repeated the choices I made as a teenager. I would have continued a cycle of abuse, never understanding why the men I was choosing kept doing the things they did.

I had the opportunity to learn how to use resources. I took advantage of them and used each one to help me slowly climb out of the depths of despair I realized I was in, and I chose to make drastic changes before I found myself making the same mistakes repeatedly.

Parents' Love Story and Beginning

All great people begin somewhere; like many, I'm beginning with my parents. They are an amazing couple, great people who went through some bad times. I won't go into their details because that does not matter in my tale, and it is not my information to share. I will say during their worst, most stress-filled times is when I was hurt the most. I do not blame them for not having time for me. As I said before, they did the best they could with the tools they had available to them. They were raised during a time when emotions were not talked about, and what happened behind closed doors was kept there.

I have always felt it was my responsibility to protect my parents from knowing how I really felt about their failure in protecting me. I love them deeply; they did the best they could and tried. Even though they did not have the knowledge required to keep me safe, I was able to obtain it on my own later in my life. Parents' number one job is to shield their children from every type of danger, and mine did not do that for me. They did what their parents taught them.

Their story is one of love at first sight. My father loves to tell us the story, and we grew up hearing about how he saw her and knew right away that that was the woman he wanted to marry and have a family with. Everyone who knew him thought he had lost his mind. If I had been around then, I would have thought the exact same thing. Who sees someone and makes that kind of life-changing decision without even talking to a person? My dad, that's who!

My father saw my mother and just knew in his heart how he felt about her. He lights up when he talks about how much he hoped and prayed she would go out with him and how he had to get his little brother, James, to have his best friend, Jean, who was dating her best friend, Mary, to set them up. Then they went out, and it was a match made in heaven for him. They spent the next fifty-two years together, fifty-one of them married, until she passed away in front of him. My father loved her every single day. My mother was young, just out of an all-girls school, home to start her new career and life. Every day, she was hanging out with her friends after work, enjoying life as it came because that is what you did in the 1960s. It was a time of free love, my mother said once. Each day was a party filled with top-down convertible car rides, friends, a little bit of work, and a few protests from time to time.

My father knew right away he wanted to spend the rest of his life with my mother. He saw her, feeling a lightness he had never experienced before. Their first Christmas together, he asked her to marry him. They waited a year so everyone knew that he did not ask her because he had gotten her in trouble. He has always been an honorable man. He tried to keep his future in-laws from thinking anything horrible of their only daughter. My grandparents offered him a lot of money to leave her alone. His heart belonged to her. They made outrageous offers and threats to each of them, trying to convince them that they were not right for each other and they should not spend their lives together. Nothing they could say or do was enough for the two of them to give up their love. They did not want their daughter to be with this working-class man who had basically nothing, causing her to give up every luxury my mother had been accustomed to.

My father was raised by two alcoholic parents. He went to work in tobacco fields when he was twelve just so he could bring home money to help feed his younger brothers and sister. He was accustomed to hard work, providing financially for his family, and never seeing the people he loved the most because he had to work. When he was fresh out of high school, he began working in construction, building houses.

After gaining experience and knowledge, my grandfather and father decided to go into business together. They started a foundation business. This was something the two of them had dreamt about for a while before they finally committed to it. The business was growing when my parents got together, but my mother's parents thought it was going to be a failure.

My mother was the opposite, basically raised with a silver spoon—that is my opinion—until she married my father, making her family become very distant. My mother was raised surrounded by love. Every single day, her family had most of their meals together. Her father was a retired Navy veteran and was now working in factories because he wanted to have pensions for his retirement plan. Her mother took care of the day-to-day housework and kept the two children on a strict routine of school, tutoring, music lessons, and numerous other things she never told me about. My grandmother made sure both kids knew how much they were loved even though my granddaddy had a difficult time voicing his feelings because he was much older and raised during a different time.

My mother spent weekends with her grandparents. They usually did something special and made memories my mother cherished and told me about as I grew up. She had regular tea parties and had dinners on fine china with special silver. There were monthly parties where she wore beautiful dresses, and her brother had to put on a suit so they could dance and mingle with other socialites. These are details I cannot share because some I do not know, and others I think she may have exaggerated.

My father took care of his siblings,