Childhood Trips and Secrets - Part 2

Chapter 6 : Group Meet-Ups and Performed Family

The MSN group started meeting up in person. The chats turned into road trips, and we were her baggage. Packed up, driven across the state, dropped into homes and holiday cabins with strangers who weren’t really strangers to her at all. She’d met them online, on platforms filled with adult content and conversations that had no business existing near children. But they brought their kids, too. Which made it seem safe, right?

I remember Coffs Harbour, right near the river. Newcastle, where one of the men rode a Harley and wore that smooth-talking charm like a second skin. Next a campground with log cabins, lost to memory except for the smell of alcohol, the loud laughter of adults, and the eerie sense that we were the only ones who felt out of place.

These weren’t just trips. They were adult playgrounds, masked as family holidays.

While the grown-ups got drunk, played their flirtatious games, and recreated their online personas in real life, we the children watched. I witnessed things I should’ve been protected from. I heard things whispered through paper-thin walls that I should never have been exposed to. And worse, we were made to be part of it.

Chapter 7: I Didn’t Make It Up

The drunkenness. The sexual innuendos. The shame.

My mother would make me hug them goodnight.
Men I barely knew.
Men whose gazes felt uncomfortable.
Men whose presence made my skin crawl.

“Give him a kiss,” she’d say, smiling like we were all part of a happy little blended family, but I wasn’t part of it, I was a show thing for display. Paraded like proof that she was doing it all right. That she was the cool mum, the fun one, the desirable one with a perfect little life.

She didn’t see the shame in my eyes. Or maybe she did and chose to ignore it.

And it wasn’t just the public moments that broke me. It was the private ones.
The times I woke up in the middle of the night to use the toilet, only to glimpse her through the open ensuite door legs spread, topless, dressed in a plaid mini skirt, acting out her role on camera for her online group. She didn’t stop. She didn’t hide.

She didn’t even acknowledge the line she was crossing, repeatedly.

This wasn’t motherhood, it was a type of showmanship, and I was being taught, and groomed that through silent moments and forced smiles that this is normal

Chapter 8: The Moment It Ended — For Me

I don’t remember the exact day it stopped. Maybe there wasn’t one. No final curtain call. No clean escape. Just a desperate sprint from one unsafe place to another.

Because it didn’t end because I grew up, it ended because I ran away. Because I had felt I needed to, as staying would’ve broken whatever fragments of me were left.

But I didn’t run into freedom. I was dragged back.
I was forced to move, out of her care, out of her chaos and into another version of control. I ended up in the home of my step-grandfather, a man with a predatory edge that made my skin crawl and my groomed grandmother, along with an aunt who echoed their silence and denial. It wasn’t safety. It was survival with new rules.

The abuse didn’t stop. It just changed form.

And even though I was no longer under her roof, her secrets stayed with me.
The silence followed, The memories remained and when I ran away, empty-handed.
I ran carrying every unspoken truth, every night I watched her become someone else behind a screen, every time I was forced to hug someone who made my body shrink.

Her secrets became my shame.

Affirmation

“I am not their silence.
I am not their secrets.
I am the voice that rose from the ashes.
I choose to heal, to speak, to live — fully and freely.”

🙏 Prayer

God, I bring to You the parts of me they tried to bury — the memories, the shame, the pain that was never mine to carry.
Thank You for never turning away from what others tried to ignore.
Thank You for whispering truth when I was surrounded by lies.
Today, I surrender the silence. I hand back the guilt that was never mine.
Heal the echoes in my soul and remind me that even in the mess — You were there.
Give me courage to keep speaking, healing, and choosing myself.
Because I am no longer hidden. I am no longer theirs. I am Yours.
Amen.