In Search of Protection

Adia Writes
6 min readJun 21, 2021

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Baby girl had no idea what was in store for her, but now, she’s thriving.

TW: Molestation & Suicide

“I don’t hang around girls that much. I prefer hanging with guys.”

I repeated this to myself and others in my teens and early twenties, convincing myself that I could only form bonds with male humans. My first best friend in elementary school…a boy. One of my favorite humans and my best friend from college until this day…a man.

In elementary school, high school, and college, I had female friends, but I felt most comfortable surrounded by the guys. These guys ran the gamut. Loud, boisterous, reserved, introspective, all intelligent, who let me go into my shell when needed, and who brought out the crazy in me when also needed. They loved me, let me be me, and I did my best to be a listening ear to them. Life problems, love problems, school problems, drunk problems, I made myself available.

As I’ve gotten older, and as I reflect on Father’s Day, which just passed, I’ve realized that what I was looking for was protection. Protection that I know I didn’t receive as a child or teen. Protection from the daughter of a family friend who, tasked with being my babysitter while my parents participated in a Friday night bowling league, regularly took me into the bowling alley’s bathroom and molested me. Protection from the favorite older cousin who, when 5- or 6-year-old me tried to explain what had been happening in that bowling alley bathroom, decided to start molesting me as well, under the guise of “playing house,” with me playing the part of his loving wife, required to always be excited when he was “coming home.” Protection of my heart when, over the years, I looked for and expected love from so many that refused to give it or just didn’t know how.

For a long time, I was angry at my father. Angry that he didn’t seem to love my mother the way I thought she should be loved. Angry that he didn’t seem to have much interest in my life. Angry that when he did come around and assert himself authoritatively, I responded out of fear of a stranger, as we had no connection, and I really didn’t know who he was as a man, let alone a father.

Out of desperation, I once attempted to get him involved in my life. On one of the rare mornings when he was home, coming in late the night before and sleeping in the living room, I asked him to speak to my fifth-grade teacher. That teacher regularly singled me out for punishment in a class of twenty-seven students, one of the larger classes in the building that also held the largest number of Black students in any grade level at the time. I was a bored, angry kid with straight A’s, acting out because, in retrospect, I was hurting, and no one engaged me in a way that benefitted my development. At that time, I was also one of the biggest kids in the class, both in height and size, so no matter how small I tried to shrink myself, I couldn’t disappear.

On that day, my father brought me to school, walked me to my classroom for the first and only time, and asked me to tell the teacher that he was in the hallway to speak with her. After dropping my things at my desk, I proudly walked to the teacher and announced that my father would like to speak with her. She rolled her eyes, and after giving the class instructions, stepped out into the hall. I smiled to myself, thinking: Finally, someone will see what I see and check her. Instead, she walked back into the classroom and right up to me, bent over my desk, the odor of coffee and cigarettes pungently attacking my senses, and said, “So you thought sending in your dad was going to intimidate me? Nice try.” My father left without speaking to me, and when we did finally talk, I was simply instructed to follow the teacher’s directions at all times and to stop acting out in class. I was devastated. I thought that he would at least want to get more information on my perspective of things. I was his daughter, after all.

After a while, I became numb to it all, in a sense. While I can now recognize that I looked for that protection from the men I loved and befriended, I developed numbness to any emotions related to my father. I’d invite him to the celebrations of big milestones in my life, solely so he’d take pictures and be able to say he was there. In elementary school, when I gave my valedictorian speech and gave out roses to those who had inspired and supported me, a rose was notedly absent for him. In high school, I only contacted him when I needed money, something he lamented about to my mother, who, in her almost saint-like spirit, relayed his lamentations to me and encouraged me to talk to him on occasion. I tried, but the conversations always left me angry and regretful for wasting energy that I could have focused somewhere else. That exhaustion would boil over into a long battle with insecurities and self-hatred and multiple attempts of taking my life, one which ended with my grandmother holding me tight as I cried that I “just wanted my dad.”

Healing while married has been a journey. Early on in my marriage, I expressed to my husband that I wanted to confront my father for his absence in my life. I needed to have a conversation with my father, hoped that he’d express some remorse about our relationship, and would work to change it. Instead, I sat across from him in a diner one Sunday morning crying, with him telling me to stop crying in front of other people, me telling him that I didn’t care who saw me cry, and him making excuses for his absence, blaming the way my mother looked at him whenever he came around as the reason for staying away. I left that meeting exhausted and drained but also relieved. Relieved that I was able to say what needed to be said through my tears. Relieved that I had taken a step that, ten years prior, I would have balked at attempting.

I’m no longer angry at my father, but as one of my fitness buddies recently expressed on Facebook about her own father, I was spared by not having him truly around. The image of fatherhood that I wanted, I saw in some of the relationships friends had with their fathers. As an adult, she said, she’s affirmed in recognizing that she has a choice, and that choice includes choosing wholeness, peace, and sanity. That choice is me choosing to protect myself. I choose to engage with my father not when I feel pressured or out of obligation but because it is in a moment when I’m most at peace. Therapy has helped me find ways to center myself. Now that my therapist has begun to encourage me to discuss my father in sessions, I imagine I’ll find a different level of wholeness, peace, and sanity despite my father’s absence.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nayesha A. Pruitt is a licensed therapist, School Counselor, adjunct professor, writer, mentor and entrepreneur. She’s also the Co-Founder, Consultant, and COO of Project Restore Initiative, an organization dedicated to supporting schools and other institutions in creating safe spaces for staff and those they serve.

You can contact Nayesha via Medium or LinkedIn. If she ever decides to get back on FB or IG, she’ll let you know. 😬

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