Kendra Eager ‘s #MeToo Stories Post 1 of 4
These are My #metoo stories. 8 years in 4 posts. I’m writing these now because staying silent for so many years has been a cancer of the soul rotting away at me and I can’t continue to allow other people’s actions to poison me. And I hope in my speaking out that I can share some of what I wish I knew to do so you don’t have to go through what I did. And so you can fight-for your body and for your rights. No one deserves to be sexually abused, EVER.
Backstory
I need to start with my story because it explains why I’ve waited this long to talk about my metoo stories. I was going to do this in video format but couldn’t get the words out as well so thought it’d be more clear written out.
I’m 35, I was born in Fort Worth Texas🤠 but was adopted by white upperclass catholic parents from chappaqua NY so basically I grew up in this protected bubble that floated above the area snubbing its suds at it. I couldn’t tell if anyone else noticed that we weren’t living in the real world or just preffered it that way . For schools I attended : unwillingly, a catholic girls middle school🤬, then happily-Horace Greeley High School 😎in my town.
My adoptive parents were abusive in their own ways. I’d start by saying something nice but all I can remember about childhood is that I was convinced I was truly alone in this world or maybe I was in a hell disguised as Earth because of past lives’ karma👺. 👨🏼💼🍻My dad tho never really home was regularly drunk and physically abusive. 🥊👊☝️🙏But he went to church everyday and swore that if he didn’t work on Wall Street he’d be a priest and by that logic I think, maybe felt he was atoning for his sins. And maybe that’s why he has never once admitted to any of the regularly given beatings or occasional death threats given to me and my middle brother (only other child adopted out of the 3 of us kids) I growing up, none of which stopped until I was about 20 and finally fought back.
My mom, on the other hand, used 🌬words as her weapon of choice ⚔️. And as a selfish narcissistic passive aggressive anorexic obsessed with control she was heavily armed. To the point where I’m still not sure if she’s a sociopath & an unending quest to understand her motives and why every action she takes is to make my life worse. By age 10 or so she told me she wished she never adopted me and that I was a mistake. 🙇🏼♀️I guess I was a bad investment....Maybe that’s why she was never really home either, although I have no idea where she went with no job, but she was always leaving me to parent my two younger brothers for up to a few days at a time. 🏃🏼♀️That same flight reaction would happen the nights when my dad came home wasted to kick in my bedroom door & beat on me. She never threatened him with the police until I was 16, when I stupidly called him an alcoholic in front of her and my middle brother, then 13, and as my dad ran upstairs telling me I was dead and tried to strangle me my brother stepped in and threw him off me, he fell down the 4 stairs to the landing and for the first time, I saw him back down possibly realizing he didn’t have this one, and as my brother and I ran into the closest bedroom, to barricade the door and set up our pillow fort for safety we looked at each other in shock hearing her say I’m calling the police if you don’t get out. So he did. Then soon after, she left too without ever picking up the phone. I read the definition of gaslighting the other day and have never seen anything so fitting in describing her. Which may be why she’s never admitted to any of this even when I got older & begged her to in a desperate attempt to validate my reality, something which only added to the shadow of lies that fell around our home. A home where no friends were allowed over, a rule my mom made to protect my dad’s reputation, which I came to learn was more important than her three children’s safety. 🚫🗣🆘👮🏻♂️📴❌ ➡️ ⛓🏠🔗
Suffice to say, there were no 🕊birds & bees 🐝talks growing up. The closest I ever got to that was when my mom barged in on a 12 year old me changing my pad six months in to getting my period,🔴upon seeing I was “a woman” told me to be careful cuz that much blood meant I was a “ fertile Myrtle & much more likely to get pregnant”. (We weren’t allowed to have locks on our doors.)🔓
I lived in a constant state of fear and situational depression putting all my energy into pretending I was okay and making sure that mask stayed on. I knew what was happening at home was fucked up but I knew I didn’t have any other options that included my brothers staying with me so I kept going. Plus I was reassured that telling meant it’d be worse for everyone. I thought about running away & I thought about killing myself but I couldn’t follow through with either because I had to be there for my brothers, to raise them and to protect them from my parents. So I escaped into books 📚 hoping to one day find the 🖼painting or rabbit hole 🕳 that’d take me to one of my much loved fantasy worlds.
When I was a junior in high school I met my first love, a sophomore swim team kid wearing a white UVM hat with a phish patch sewn on, he was tall, had dark hair and definitely was handsome. So we dated for months and tho we did get to three of the bases , especially parked at the arboretum, waited on having sex. For me, I was scared due to ignorance on the subject knowing nothing but how to put a condom on a banana 🍌 from HS sex Ed and that I was “a fertile Myrtle”. Plus I wanted to wait for true love, something which my friends thought was hysterical but also seemed to piss them off cuz I was the last virgin left out of the 12 of us-not cool for kids known as the cool kids.
At the end of junior year I was deeply in love 😍and stupidly believed love meant trust. My boyfriend had slipped up early on and told his friends about something we did and I was made fun of for weeks after but he saw how much it hurt me and I thought, how disrespectful his friends were with me afterwards, and said he’d keep what we did to himself.
So I made an appointment with Planned Parenthood and got birth control. This was 1999 and the internet was barely around but luckily I was able to find them. A very nice doctor treated me for free and helped me with how to use it. I felt prepared but I didn’t realize what it would do to my hormones, my weight shifted around -mainly to my stomach and boobs, and my moods went from calm to emotional bitchfits without warning. I think the fear of having sex was being magnified by my hormones but I wanted to fit in and I was probably equally scared of not doing it, convinced I’d
never find love in a relationship again and stuck having to lose my virginity like how my friends had, In backseats of cars in drunken stupors with random older guys. No judgement there but I knew I couldn’t handle that. I had very low self esteem and very little love for my self and I was terrified my boyfriend would realize I wasn’t worth his time at any moment so I went over to his house one night condoms and birth control in my purse bottle of jack in hand and I convinced him we were ready. It took him two shots to agree, not because he was a lightweight, I think he was as scared as I was. So we went upstairs, put Phish’s Farmhouse cd on and we had sex for the first time listening to “wading in the velvet sea” There were only three more times in the weeks afterwards before I had pushed him far enough away to break up with him. Not because I didn’t love him. Because I loved him so much it terrified me and I didn’t know how to handle those feelings. We got back together and broke up again many times over the next year for the same reasons until finally ending it when I was finishing senior year and preparing to leave for college.
In 2001, the summer after I graduated, my best friend and her older brother had a house party to celebrate. This was my second home from age 7 on and somewhere I considered safer than my own home. And the partygoers were my closest friends and people I had grown up with. I remember wearing jeans 👖 with a purple tank top and hoody zipped over.
I remember playing my favorite game , 🏓🍺beer pong, and winning, and that my best friends brothers friend, Rob, came over to the table to play me. He was the homecoming king and football team captain for the year ahead of me so definitely a good looking guy but he was currently dating a girl that I looked up to and respected (& also thought was model level beautiful). So I was surprised when he started flirting with me during our game. After a few rounds of pong, I had reached my shitty beer limit and got that I’m going to puke feeling. So I headed upstairs from the basement partygoers to get to the bathroom before anything came out. I got to the top of the stairs and realized Rob was right behind me so I went to sit down in the kitchen too embarrassed to tell him I was going to be sick. I don’t know how this topic came up but he started telling me how my ex & him used to talk on the bus to swim meets & how he had “told him about me” (Which I took to imply he knew I wasn’t a virgin). All of which made me feel sicker so I told him I was nauseous 🤢and needed to go puke 🤮 in hopes that would gross him out enough to back off. Though I had found him attractive in the past I was not a home-wrecker and I also wasn’t interested. I knew he and his friends were into girls that gave it up and that was not me. Plus I was so pissed at my ex for telling people about us that I couldn’t think about anything other than that.
So I headed off to the bathroom & went to close the door but Rob was already in the doorway coming in behind me and locked the door behind us. He offered to help me throw up and told me if I stuck a finger down my throat it’d come out faster. Or he could do it for me. 🚽Preferring the first option I tried head over bowl but nothing really came out. I think my body was already going into fight or flight mode and shutting down for flight while my head was still confused over what was happening cuz I had that gut feeling that this was a bad situation but had not yet learned to trust my gut.
He carried/pulled me into the den and started kissing me but I kept pushing him off hoping someone would come upstairs. After a few minutes of this, & realizing no one was coming, I pushed him off harder and got up to leave. This is where my memory gaps for a moment I don’t know why but all I know is that my next memory is him pulling me into the outdoors garage and pulling the garage door closed. And I started yelling for help. He pushed into me and pushed us up against the garage wall and started ripping my clothes off, tank top then my favorite white Calvin Klein bra. I kept saying no & that I didn’t want this but he didn’t listen, the more I yelled the more aggressive he got and shoved me on the concrete floor pulled my pants off and raped me while on top of me holding my arms down to stop me from scratching at him and trying to hurt him enough to get him off of me. I think I started going into shock because I don’t remember putting my clothes back on. I do remember he told me I had to drive him home because he couldn’t and to this day I don’t know why I agreed but I did. Maybe out of fear or just to get him somewhere away from me I don’t know but I’m shocked we didn’t crash. I was in a daze, shocked and hurting and still way too drunk to be driving. I hate myself the most for agreeing to drive him, it felt like way too normal of a thing to do after what had just happened. But maybe that’s why he told me to do that. We didn’t talk. He did remind me that he had a good thing going with his girlfriend like I gave a shit but that was it. Getting back to my house is a blur the only thing I remember was putting my bra -white cotton with “ Calvin Klein” written around the band -on top of my lingerie drawer with the ripped off clasp in hopes my detective level snoop of a mom would notice it and ask me about it.
It sat there for years a constant reminder and a desperate hope with nothing said until my mom told me to throw it out one day and my heart broke a little. I wanted to report what happened but I didn’t know the process and all I had was my word against his and I thought no one would believe me. In my mind, I saw a judge asking why a good looking guy with a girlfriend would need to force sex to get some and it was a question I couldn’t answer either. I didn’t know sex and rape were two different things based on two different needs, one intimacy, the other power & control over the victim. We didn’t learn that in school but we should have. I didn’t know what rape kits were let alone that I should’ve gone straight to whichever local hospital offered them. We should have learned that too. I didn’t know there was a national hotline to call ,
RAINN,
or local ones, through the National Sexual Violence Resource Centers’ directory -
https://www.nsvrc.org/organizations
I didn’t know any of that and I was scared that none of my friends would believe me cuz we had the same circle of friends and that people would hate me for what they’d see as a false accusation. I tried telling my best friend, next door neighbor who I knew from 5years old and had a different circle of friends and she told me I was being ridiculous and dramatic and that it didn’t happen. And before I knew it, word got out that Rob and I had “hooked up”, something I’m sure he told people to cover his ass so there would be no question of consent. When my friend from soccer team first brought it up to congratulate me I started arguing that was not a hook up that he had taken advantage of me being drunk and alone but I saw the look in her face go from impressed to freaked out n disgusted with me and I don’t know why but I just said to forget it and left it at that.
I tried convincing myself it was only a nightmare and I stayed in a state of shock so long that it almost felt true after awhile. I knew I had no witnesses or evidence. I knew if I kept saying it aloud it meant it really happened and I couldn’t handle that. I felt weak and alone. I had grown up in a home that had taught me to bottle up my emotions and never speak your truth so that is what I did. There was a cultural stigma at the time that if a woman was drunk she was to blame for whatever happened to her so that was also a reason I never spoke out, however wrong it may be, and I hate that it influenced me.
After awhile I started believing I live in a world where the only justice we make is our own. and I convinced myself that if I ran into him again I’d make him pay for what he did to me.
But I did run into him again over the years. and I didn’t do anything and for that I feel the most shame. The last time I saw him was probably ten years ago, my dad and I were going out to eat, sat down at a booth, and I saw him waiting tables. I picked up my butter knife and started shaking outta fear and also rage and I really was considering stabbing him before my dad asked me what was wrong with me and I folded, started crying and asked to leave. We drove off and I remember wanting my dad to ask me what happened, I wanted him to protect me and go and kill this guy for me but he didn’t ask. All he said was “ whatever happened it’s not worth you going to jail for. “
I still can’t believe I live in a country where a woman has no real rights. Where reporting gets ignored, cases dropped because the offending rich kid has a good lawyer, where not every state allows abortions, and high schools don’t educate kids on sex or rape and how to protect themselves , where Plan B isn’t readily available. And where my dad was right that if I got my justice and hurt the man that raped me I’d go to jail while he walked free. All of that is why I’m finally speaking out -my silence that I thought was protecting me has only helped the men who have attacked and assaulted me remain free-physically free and conscience clear -and I will not give them that peace anymore.
This is the first story of nine, and I’ll be posting each story in 4 posts and also links with resources for survivors
