Origin story

Hello and welcome! Thank you so very much for being here and reading this. In all honesty, I am terrified of starting this blog and putting myself out there. But this is something that has been on my mind for the last 3 years, and I’m finally building up the courage to do it. I feel like the world is begging for authenticity and kindness. I have been through a lot, but regardless, I find myself holding so much love in my heart for humanity and the world. And I want to do my best to share that love and inspire others to be able to lead more from their hearts.

I want to start with sharing my story. My name is Jinica (pronounced Jen+nick+ah), and I grew up on the central California coast, although I was born in Phoenix Arizona. My entire existence was clouded in hardships in various forms, but I was equally surrounded with love through my loving mother and family. We’ll start at the very beginning, as our entire existence influences who we are to become. 

I was a mistake, lol. My mother didn’t think you could get pregnant shortly after giving birth, so she wasn’t being careful after my brother was born and I “slipped past the guard.” My birth was scheduled. My brother was born through an emergency cesarian section as his umbilical was wrapped around this neck. Because she had the cesarian scars, they automatically said that I too would be born cesarian. I was slightly premature, and because I didn’t go through the birth canal, I was born with ear and lung complications. The doctor also cut me with the surgical knife on the cheek as he was retrieving me. I spent 3 nights in the ICU for babies. 

My earliest memory is going to the doctors to have my tubes removed from my ears. I have no idea how old I was, and the memory is just bits and pieces, but I remember the pain of it, and the confusion, and the sterile smells of the hospital. My mom said I was just over a year old. I don’t have very many memories of my childhood. And the memories I do have, I don’t trust, as I think I created new memories based off of looking at old pictures when I was younger. I do know that I was born into a very loving home. My mother was ecstatic to become a mom. That was her life’s mission, and she was a really good one. Always embracing us with love and affection. 

My father shattered our home when he started an affair with a work colleague. When my mother found out, she wanted to do everything she could to fix and heal the relationship. She forgave him and understood why he was scared and trying to sabotage the relationship - he always felt like my mom was out of his league and felt like he could never provide her what he thought she deserved. My mom was madly in love with him, and only wanted to have a loving family, she didn’t care about material things. But my father always said “I made my bed, I must now lie in it.” And he left us when I was just under 2 years old. 

We moved to the central California coast to live with my grandmother and her newly wedded husband. My grandmother “won” her house in her divorce with my biological grandfather, and it was plenty big. My mother depended greatly upon my grandmother and step grandfather to help raise us and look after us as she tried to rebuild her life. She put herself through school and was working multiple jobs, as well as maintaining a social life and looking for a new man. Needless to say… she wasn’t around much unfortunately. 

My step grandfather, Romeo, started sexually abusing me when I was 3 years old. I don’t remember the first time, all I can remember is that it has been happening for as long as I could remember. When I prosecuted him later, he admitted that the abuse started when I was 3. He said he did it to “punish my mother” for being a single mom. What an asshole. Can’t even take responsibility and instead pushes blame on others. The abuse was a regular occurrence. It happened mostly at night when I was a kid, when my mom was out of the house. The abuse occurred in a shared room with my brother, so he was witness to it a lot, and also suffered verbal and physical abuse from him. Romeo always told us how nobody loved us, that we were worthless, a waist of space, annoying, in the way, a burden. He would warn us to not say anything about what he was doing to us, because if we did, it would be easy to kill us and dispose of our bodies in his constructions sites - he was a contractor and construction worker. Despite these threats, I would try to communicate what was happening to me in the only ways I knew how. Being a child, you don’t have the language yet to understand what is happening to you, or explain what is happening to an adult. My aunt has told me that she remembers times when I would come up to her indicating that my privates were hurting. But she wouldn’t understand what I meant, and would tell my mom, and they would then just put some baby powder on me, and that was that. So growing up, I felt like I had tried to communicate what was happening to me, and nobody cared. It just is what it is, and I had to learn how to live with it. As I grew older, I started to harbor more and more anger, and I started acting out. I would steal things, hide things, lie about things. I became defiant and unruly. It ended with me racking up a $1000 phone bill with charges to a 900 # sex hotline. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and I was sent to live with my father across the country when I was 10 years old. 

This was great because it got me out of the house where the abuse was occurring. But it was an “out of the frying pan and into the fire” type situations. My father didn’t know how to handle us. He stepped away from his fatherly duties when he left us as babies. My mom always tried to keep up a relationship between us as best as she could. She saved up her money to send us out to see him every summer. But he would turn around and send us off to summer camp instead of spending time with us. He knew he was getting “a problem child,” and came at me with all sorts of rules and regulations, and lots and lots of religion. I wasn’t allowed to have friends or play outside of the house. I was to do well in school, go to church, and maintain the house. My step mom - the woman my dad had an affair with - just had her first and only child when I moved in. He was just a few months old. She was devastated that I was coming in to ruin her moment. She turned into the quintessential evil step mother, and I was her Cinderella. I did the cooking and cleaning, and learned how to be quiet and subservient. 

After living with my dad for a year, my grandparents of my dad’s side came to visit, and noticed my behavior and the dynamics of the house. My grandma noticed that it wasn’t healthy, and offered for me to move to Arizona with them. I agreed, and I ended up moving in with my aunt in Kingman, AZ. She is in a healthy marriage, and was raising and homeschooling her 2 kids at the time. This was the best year of my childhood. It was the first time I felt freedom and was allowed to just be a kid. I thrived in school, I was put into dance classes that I loved, and I was also involved in a swim team. Because I was in Arizona, I was closer to California, and my aunt, who is basically like my second mother, would come out to visit me pretty regularly. She would take me on many adventures, like going to the Grand Canyon, or to Sedona, or Zion. We would go hiking and spend time out in nature. I loved going on these adventures with her. This definitely sparked a core part of my being. 

After about a year living with my aunt, my mother had gotten into a relationship with a man, and they were moving in together. They had a room in this new home for me to move back into if I wanted to. And I did! So I moved back home. This home was outside of the city limits, and with my parents working full time, we had to take the bus to school. But we couldn’t take the bus home due to various after school activities and responsibilities. So afterwards, we would walk to my grandma’s house, and wait to be picked up by my mom on her way home from work. This gave Romeo access to me again, and the abuse started up right away. This abuse triggered my old coping behaviors once again, and I started to turn back into a being a bad kid. I started lying, and stealing, and misbehaving again. It culminated with me becoming arrested for shoplifting when I was 13 years old from the local Kmart. I was devastated when I was caught. The police came, and I was given a choice. They could take me in and prosecute me, or I can agree to go to counseling. I definitely agreed to the counseling. This whole experience scared me straight. 

When I went to the counselor, in the intake form I had marked that I had been sexually abused. When the counselor read this, she knew of my history of lying, and questioned if I was being honest. She told me that it would be really bad if I was lying about this. This made me nervous and question if I was really being abused or not, I thought I was being abused, but I didn’t really know since my reality has been constantly denied over the years. My counselor had to report it to authorities, and the police became involved. Everyone thought I was lying still, and told me the only way to move forward with this is if I could get Romeo to admit to what he was doing over a recorded phone line. I remember this so vividly. I was absolutely terrified. I had never talk to him on the phone before, how was I going to get him to talk about it over the phone? I was set up in a room full of police and recording equipment, and my mom… and I was instructed to call him up and to get him to talk about it. Luckily for me, the abuse had just occurred again a few days prior, he had taken me into the laundry room. So after I called him up, and talked about causal things for a moment or two… I had asked him why he took me into the laundry room. And to my astonishment, he stared talking about it. He said things like “well, I love you, and this is how I show my love for you. I thought you loved me too. We were having fun.” Gross. Still gives me heebie-jeebies to this day thinking back to it. But this was my golden ticket. Finally a moment the clouds to part and stars to align, and everyone could finally see the secrete hidden world of trauma I was growing up in. 

The court process was long, slow, and hard. It took 2 years when it was all said and done. Romeo was sentenced to 7 years in prison… he served 3 years, and got out on good behavior. I feel like I have been served a lifetime sentence… being a survivor of childhood sexual abuse isn’t an easy existence. I have been struggling for as long as I can remember, although I finally feel like I’m in a place where my struggles no longer define me. But this is something I have to consciously work towards with a lot of effort and consistency. It hasn’t been an easy journey, but it is one that must be taken. I was obsessed with the Lord of the Rings movies when I was younger, and this reminds me of a great quote from it. Frodo is with Gandalf, and he laments “I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.” Gandalf responds “So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.” 

This is my origin story, the cornerstone of the fabric of my being. I have a lot of stories of trials and tribulations. But I will save those for other blog posts. If you are interested in listening to me go into my story with a little bit more detail, you can listen to my podcast episodes that are listed in the podcast section of this website. The podcast interview with The Thoughtroom is specifically just me talking about my story.  Thank you for taking the time to read this post. I really appreciate you being here and for taking the time to see me. It means more than you can imagine.