She Became Brave After Her Grandfather Asked for Oral Sex

I started L’s story by asking you to picture your elementary school’s playground.

And I’m going to ask you to go back to that scene, because I think it’s really powerful. Fifth grade is an interesting time, because at most schools, you’re the oldest ones out there for recess. But you’re still only 10 years old. Many fifth graders think of themselves as the big kids on the lawn, which brings about an air of responsibility. Some use that to look after the younger kids. Most exercise their seniority to grab first dibs on the best hangout spots.L wasn’t worried about claiming the swings or talking to her friends — at least not this particular day in February of her fifth grade year. Instead, she was listening to her gut instinct, an instinct that told her to look out for herself. She was a brave fifth grader, and I want to tell you exactly how courageous she was that day on the playground, but, first, let’s look at why she decided to be brave. To backtrack, L told us how her grandfather started touching her inappropriately since she was a kindergartener. Once she got a little bit older, her grandfather started sexually abusing L’s best friend Emmy, too. One day in his car after picking up both L and Emmy from school, her grandfather asked the girls for something new they hadn’t ever heard of before. “I don’t remember if he wanted oral sex or if he wanted something that we had no idea what he was asking for, but it was something new,” L explained cautiously. Her pacing sped up as she said, “I had no idea what he was even talking about.” I noticed myself shiver as L kept spurting out the hardest details of her story. “We were like ‘no, we don’t want to do that!’ and he grabbed my arm.” Her little 75-pound frame was no match to for her grandfather who towered above her at just over six and a half feet tall. “And it hurt when he grabbed me, and I just remember being so scared like what happens next?” She paused. Her voice grew soft. “What happens if we do this and he wants more because that’s what it seemed like.”Then there was a change in L’s demeanor. She was thinking. No. She was remembering something, something important. She continued cautiously: “He got super aggressive and it wasn’t the same person. The look in his eyes even when he grabbed my arm, I can still see it.” She paused gracefully as I took a second to notice the goosebumps forming on my own arms. “I can see him in the car. It just shook me.”Something in her ignited. That day changed L’s story forever. She explained how at this point, he had been asking for more and more from the girls. “I don’t know what hit me that day,” she said but when she was on the playground, surrounded my friends and peers, and teachers who had no cares in the world, this little fifth grader walked right up to the social worker and said “I have to talk to you.”“It wasn’t premeditated. It was just this feeling. When you’re most scared, you can either run or you can jump and I just jumped. I didn’t think about repercussions. I didn’t think about what would happen to him, just that I needed to tell someone.”And that right there, is the purest example of bravery I’ve ever heard. But more on the aftermath of that courageous act next week.