changing crystal pt. 1

I’m Crystal and hope that my stories can help others like me…understand why we are the way we are. Society says we are victims but, not all of us. Some of us have sought out the very thing that would be our undoing.

By the time that I was 2 yrs old, my entire life till then was changed forever by my dad getting arrested for having child porno in one of his warehouses. Dad was a thief who always maintained that he had robbed manuscripts from an art collector and that the kiddie pics found at the bottom of an old trunk had belonged to the collector. Dad got sent to prison and his fame for never being caught finally came to an end. He pleaded out and got 15 years. Since he was never around most of the time, I didn’t really miss him but, boy did everything change after that. Without dad’s income we could barely pay the rent. One day, dad’s brother and parents came to the house and convinced mom to move in with them. Mom kept saying that it would only be for a couple of months till she found a job. Two months later we moved to West Virginia or better yet…to an isolated farm up in the mountains.

My first months were full of happiness and freedom. No one knew our story and even mom started relaxing from the past year’s nightmare. A year later my grandparents were killed by a drunken driver. After the funeral, Uncle Bill asked mom to take over the business end of the farm. One of her jobs was to travel to local markets and sell products from the farm. Mom hired a local woman to watch me when she wasn’t home and Uncle Bill stayed on the farm to run the rest. Our farm wasn’t big but, we made enough from our dairy products and crops to survive decently even if it meant long days for mom and Uncle Bill.
The year I turned 5, Uncle Bill started spending more time with me. He was a tall, good looking, 48 yr old well built man. Even though he was bald, a lot of the women from town were constantly stopping by to personally buy from him. Mom had been dating (with Uncle Bill’s approval) a fireman from another county and more and more often, Uncle Bill would babysit me in the evenings she went out.