Texas State Historical Association - My Texas

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Invisible Child

Invisible children are more noticeable in a small town. Ignored by most of society, they stand out simply by surviving.

When I was a little girl I didn't have a father, but I wasn't impressed with the need to have one either. Men weren't very visible in my world. Fathers didn't often visit our orphanage. Besides, I had a mother.

Only when I was older did my parents' personal history, because it was so mysterious, interest me. By then my mother and I had moved to Harlingen to live with my stepfather.

I wasn't in pre-primer before he began to sexually interfere with me. The abuse continued and intensified over the years. I look at a photo taken when I was four or five years old; a bright-looking child smiles back. You can almost smell the starch in my crisp dress. My hair shines in neat ribboned braids.

Nothing there identifies me as a seducer or a liar or as crazy. I grew into a lonely child, not allowed to socialize much with school friends. My walk to Mass and back was timed. Arriving home later than usual resulted in accusations and sexual insinuations I didn't yet comprehend. Innocent notes from school friends found in my dresser drawer by my stepfather incurred threats of incarceration and reform school. I was terrified and I grew up feeling different, isolated from other children and the community.

I've since discovered that invisible children, like battered housewives, are deliberately prevented from making social contacts because they might interfere with the status quo.

Sometimes I wondered if all fathers abused their daughters, if it was a well-known secret contained within all homes. I was a bright child who loved school, possibly because I was freer in that environment and because my teachers gave me a warmth and encouragement that sustained me.

Once when Mother was shopping, we bumped into one of my second grade teachers. To my discomfort, Miss Dawson proceeded to compliment Mother on my artistic talent, creativity, and imagination. These comments were to be used against me years later.

I was rummaging through an old handbag when I came across my birth certificate and discovered the name of my biological father. One word in that document blazed like a flare:

Illegitimate!

I had a name, but I wasn't legally entitled to use it. It was an immense relief to know someone else was my real father because I had begun to doubt I knew what I knew. I was becoming convinced that I was dumb, ugly, dirty, and worse; my abuser's daughter!

Seeing Santa wave from the top of a fire truck and wearing my peasant costume watching Charro Days parades were among my happiest memories. I wanted to relive and share these, but I was under strict orders never to discuss our previous life. Our meagre meals, my nightmares and bullying at the orphanage, hadn't been forgotten, but comparatively speaking these things were of little consequence.

My stepfather took pleasure baiting me into tearful rages by pretending to remember childhood stories describing me covered in faeces, having a snotty nose, and such. I cried because I knew he hadn't been around then, and because I was being asked to accept a lie as a truth. Well-behaved children are expected to obsequiously accept all parental behaviour without question, sometimes to their detriment. I could not prevent being abused but I could not gracefully accept the breaking of my spirit!

My request for help was ignored within the family. And as is often the case, when charges are made, the family rallies behind the powerful adult, and he is perceived as the victim to be protected. I was accused of having made up the charges; after all, I was a creative and imaginative child--my teacher had said so herself!

Ironically, it was another teacher who noticed the bruises on my face and arms when I was a student at Vernon Gay Junior High in Harlingen and alerted the school principal and welfare authorities, exposing the home situation. I'd never forgotten the years Mother and I had been alone, when I was left in the care of various women and later with the Sisters of Charity in Brownsville.

To this day I know little about my own father's family history. I never met him, but I recognised his name in the Valley Morning Star on the morning of my seventeenth birthday. He died in a car/train accident in McAllen.

No one pats the abused child on the back for being brave, for saving herself. Speaking out cost me the share my mother eventually left me of her estate. I am still estranged from Mother's second family. Child abuse is an insidious secret that poisons all family members.

I'll be forever grateful to the teachers who instigated the investigation that released me from an abusive environment and helped me to free myself from the mistreatment and denigration I did not deserve. My successful and rewarding life I owe to the teachers who believed me, and believed in me. In one of my published poems I've addressed the women of my lineage whose genes survive through me, the ones I never got to meet:

"I have a name, and I am here!"

Alma Iris Ramirez
Adelaide, South Australia
Published: November 20, 2005