He was a fantastic baseball player. At age ten, he was pulled up to majors in Little League, which is unusual. He was so much smaller and less developed than the other kids on his team, but he held his own on the field. I remember thinking how different he looked, as some of the other kids were so much more muscular, and even had voices that were already changing. He was skinny and undeveloped, but lightning quick, coordinated, and agile. He deserved to play at that level. He was playing two years above his age level.
I remember having mixed feelings about him being moved up to majors. I wasn’t sure that it wouldn’t be better for him to play on minors and wait one more year. I knew he’d be a star on minors and wondered if moving ahead would shake his confidence any. He’d still be young for majors the next year, even as an eleven-year-old. But the coaches insisted and said he’d do great. I finally stopped worrying when the coach asked my husband to help out as an assistant. I figured at least he’d have his dad there to help him navigate any nerves he might feel. I think it did help to have his dad there.
He spent the year playing outfield, even though he’d always been an infielder. All in all, he did pretty well. It was a stretch for him because the other boys were so much older. He played well that year. He was friendly and out-going, and gradually I began to worry less. He made friends with kids who were two years older than he was and began to enjoy playing at such a high level. I think the challenge of it excited him.
Things seemed to be going well, and so I was very surprised near the end of the season when he suddenly began to ask if he could quit baseball. He said he just wasn’t interested in it anymore. We were kind of shocked because he had always loved baseball. All the way back to age four, he had insisted we find him a team to play on. We had to go to a neighboring town where they had a tee-ball team for four-year-olds, and from that moment on, he loved everything about baseball even including the practices.
When he suddenly asked to quit, we blamed ourselves, figuring maybe it had been a mistake to allow him to play in the majors. We figured that we had unwittingly killed his love for baseball by letting him move ahead too far too fast. We told him to finish out the year in order to not let his team down and said that he could quit the following year if he still wanted to, and the next year he did. After seven years of baseball being his favorite sport, he suddenly inexplicably quit.
He went on to play football and basketball in high school and basketball in college. We never really thought much about his quitting baseball, thinking that it had really been our mistake all along. Every once in a while we talked about how good he had been at baseball and wondered if it would have been his best sport if we hadn’t messed it up, but we just figured it wasn’t meant to be. We had a lot of fun watching him enjoy other sports instead. Life moved on.
Then three years ago, at age 30, he went to counseling after a failed marriage and a DUI. One day he came over for a visit and asked us to come into the living room because he wanted to talk to us about something. He sat us down some twenty years later and told us that in his ten-year-old summer he had been raped at a slumber party by members of his baseball team. Two or three of the boys on his team had held him down and raped him. Our sweet, amazing, baseball-loving baby boy had been violated in the worst possible way. That was why he wanted to quit baseball that summer. He had never told us, never told anybody until he was in counseling over twenty years later and dealing with the aftermath of that violation.
The boys who raped him were never named or caught. They were never punished. As far as I know, they never suffered any consequences. They took something from him and wounded him in ways he continues to deal with over twenty years later. I didn’t even remember the sleepover he went to. It was completely unremarkable to me and his dad. I’ve thought so many times that if I could go back and just look at his sweet little face the day we must’ve picked him up after that party that I don’t even remember, I might have been able to see it in his face that he had been violated. It makes me feel like such a failure as a parent to not have noticed the most horrible thing that ever happened to him. I’ve wondered if he just seemed tired, or sad, or grumpy, or if he just stoically hid his terror.
So yeah, sexual assault victims don’t come forward, even to their parents. He told us twenty years later that he just couldn’t bring himself to tell us. We were super close as a family, and we still are, but he never told us. It wasn’t because he didn’t think we’d believe him. He knew we would. He said he felt safe at home with us. He said that he thought maybe if he just forgot about it and never spoke of it, he could make it be in his mind that it hadn’t happened. He buried it, and never talked to anybody else about it. He literally pretended that it never happened. But it haunted him and had effects of causing him to struggle in ways he couldn’t even know were related. He struggled with trust. He struggled with relationships. He’s still dealing with those effects even today.
When I hear our senators and our president asking why she didn’t come forward over thirty years ago, I think of those boys, who are men now. I wonder if they ever did anything like that again. I wonder what they would say if my son suddenly named them and told a story from twenty years ago. No doubt they’d also say it never happened and they were never at that sleepover. No doubt they’d say if it had happened, surely he would’ve told somebody long ago. But I’m living proof that no, he wouldn’t and no he didn’t. I wonder if they buried their guilt the same way he buried his pain.
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