After Thoughts: Chapter 1

Welcome to Michaela Mae's Audiobook Experience for The Barn off of Colfax Lane: an unfiltered memoir about sexual assault and the mixed feelings that come with it. 

In this book Michaela tells her story of the childhood sexual abuse she experienced when she was 12-years-old while taking horse back riding lessons from a horse trainer in Oregon.

BOOK SUMMARY:

I was 12 years old the first time my horse trainer grabbed my left boob and asked me if I had ever had sex. I'm not sure what caught me off guard the most: his question or the fact a 79-year-old man had his hand firmly cusped around my boob while asking me, a 12-year-old, if I had ever had sex. I've blocked out a lot of that season from my mind, but that first day sticks out clearer than the rest. Is it because of the shock? Is it because I hadn't fully remembered my pro-dissociation skills yet?

I have no f*cking clue, but I do remember the green-striped tank top and the dark navy blue jeans I had on that day. I remember watching his lips ooze as the words, "Have you ever had sex?" spilled out of them. I remember the blank stare in his eyes, the black specks of chew stuck in his teeth, and the way his cheeks met his chin like a pillow shoved under fitted sheets.

My eyes left my left boob, flung around the barn, and up to his face. The light coming in from the barn door behind him lit his back, but darkened his face so his face looked as dark as the blank stare in his eyes. My brain raced for answers that made sense. Hell, it searched for a question that made sense too. "No, of course not. Wait, why is this happening? How do I answer? Do I answer? Am I dreaming?" I couldn't speak, so I looked up at him blankly then he turned and walked away.

LINKS + CONTACT:

Get on the Waitlist for my next book: https://thewesternhippie.myflodesk.com/mc5b9wv2ps

Grab a hard copy of The Barn Off of Colfax Lane here: https://amzn.to/3PvBiKN

For inquiries or to connect with Michaela directly, email michaela@michaelamae.com

© 2024 MP Media. All rights reserved.

Narrated by Author Michaela Mae.

Keywords: survivor memoir, childhood sexual abuse memoir, childhood sexual abuse, trauma memoir, healing memoir, horse trainer abuse, equestrian community, read by the author, audiobook, Oregon, Michaela Mae

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Chapter one afterthoughts. I honestly I don't really know what to say so much about the afterthoughts on this one. I do remember that writing this book was the first time I realized like how much I went through when I was 12. And writing the first few chapters that actually got cut a lot. The first few chapters were a lot longer originally. And a lot of it was not necessary for the book, which is why I cut it. What it was necessary for was me processing a bunch of emotions that I didn't even know that I had left under the surface. And throughout this whole book, it was when I cried the most when I was writing. I actually mainly worked on chapter one and chapter two during Thanksgiving, I believe, of 2023. And I spent the whole Thanksgiving just bawling. Like I just cried the whole time because I I cried over my dog. That was like there was so much just grief and stuff about him that I still didn't realize was under the surface. And then I also cried mostly about my teacher. And what I had realized in that writing process was there were a lot of needs that I wasn't getting met at home, that I was getting met at school because of how powerful like my fourth and fifth grade teacher was. And when I say powerful, I mean powerful in the way of how much she like took care of the class and how much she cared. I mean she came to, I played club volleyball and she came to some of my club volleyball games. And I I hate to say this, and this is something I've I've wrestled with a lot in my adult years of is it true? Like I hope to break this, and I think this there is just a part of this that's a part of life, but that whole saying of, you know, you never know what you have until it's gone, because we we don't know fully the you know the depth and capacity of what we'll miss until it is gone. And so when I didn't have my fifth, my she was my teacher for fourth and fifth grade, actually. When I didn't have her anymore, and I moved to where it felt, you know, the sixth grade teacher, it was very much just a job for her, which, you know, to be fair to her, she had her first kid, she was postpartum. Like there was so much stuff that again, a sixth grader maybe couldn't fully see or uh grasp or understand. But it was this teacher who teaching was just a job coming from a teacher who teaching was her life. I mean, she coached track, she she I actually I lost my first horse um in fourth grade when I was in her class, and my mom had emailed the school just to say, like, hey, this is what's going on, you take it easy on Michaela, kind of a thing. And so my teacher knew about it, and when I I got to school that day, she had put a desk and like, or she put a card and flowers on my desk. And she always, like the first day of school, we had to fill out a form, and she would give us a card, like she asked what our favorite candy was, and we always had a card and candy, like, and it wasn't that was the other special thing. Like, it wasn't because I think I always said Hershey's, and it wasn't like the fun-size Hershey bar. Like, she always got us a full-size Hershey bar. The school never paid her for that. That was just something she did, like, out of the goodness of her heart. The kids that had summer birthdays, she always gave them their card and their candy on their half birthdays. She literally, like, I feel myself getting emotional just thinking about like how much she cared. And even, you know, after my horse died, I ended up crying. Be there was a whole situation with the janitor that I got upset about and I was crying. And I just remember because the janitor had told me to wipe my feet and I didn't wipe them. Our janitor was just a jerk, and I didn't wipe my feet properly coming in from recess, and he made me wipe them again, and then I didn't wipe, but I was so out of it, and so he'd yelled at me like three times, and I started crying, and then he's like, Why is she crying? And you know, my teacher, my fourth or fifth grade teacher, just ran up to me and gave me a hug and like took me into class, and she looked at him, she's like, She just lost her horse yesterday, and that dude never talked to me again. Um, but that was just the kind of person she was, and so as I was writing this book, there was so much grief around losing that, and then my dog, and it's interesting because like I've never I've never felt that that grief. There's been so much things with the you know, the sexual assaults that obviously we'll talk about more. I don't want to talk about them all right here, that come up, but it was so interesting to me that that was where I was the most emotional was talking about Hootie, thinking about Hootie, and then also with my with leaving my elementary school, which was called Catrell Elementary, and I didn't really realize that I had all those feelings towards it until I was writing the book. I didn't realize that I did feel like I lost my family, and yeah, we were really dysfunctional, but we always loved each other. Like the girl that I didn't use people's real names, I I use pseudonymes in the book, but the girl's name is Tracy, like she was always lying about something, and we never knew what Tracy was gonna lie about, but it was always entertaining and it was always interesting. And guess what? We like we still loved her anyway, and that was the beauty of it. Like there was all these other kids that yeah, we had our problems, but like we still all loved each other anyway, and we were always there for each other. And even on our fifth grade field trip, our teacher, the one that I'm talking about, had talked the school into doing just a one-day trip to the coast. We ended up doing a three-day trip to the coast, and no one, I from what I remember, like no one really fought. Like, we all, yeah, there were issues, but we all got along so well. And even there was one kid, like his family wasn't gonna be able to afford to take him. And he had never, like, we only live like an hour and a half from the beach, and he had never been to the beach just because of his family's financial situation. And again, we all knew this, like we all knew what kids like had money, we all knew what kids struggled, and yet all of us would always come together, and so we all did fundraisers to make sure that every single I don't think there might have been one kid who couldn't come, but I don't think so. I think all of us kids went on that field trip and we all made sure we all had the money to do it, and the parents that had more money pitched more money in so that we could have these extra experiences. I mean, we went to the Tillamook cheese factory, we stayed in Yurts, we did Lewis and Clark experiences. Um, we went down to the Newport Beach and we got to stay, we all got to sleep in the aquarium and the tunnels, and it was just great. And and that was, you know, the first time writing this book was the first time I really grieved that loss of, you know, we were never gonna have that again. And we were so lucky that we went to this really small elementary school because we were all able to do that for each other. So yeah, that that was the most interesting thing about writing chapter one was all these emotions that I didn't expect to come up, all this grief that I never expected to feel over things I never expected to feel upset about, like all came up. But then it also, like the beauty of it was realizing like how loved we were and how all these like love can come from places you would never experience or expect, and and not just love but care, like very intentional care by you know this teacher. And I do really think about the you know, they say one teacher can really change and impact your life. And when I think about her, and I also sh I so she had a a yellow lab and then Hootie, the dog I lost, was a yellow lab. And when she found out, because my sister, I believe, was still in was in her class at that point, or it somehow uh my teacher that I've been talking about, I'm trying not to say her name for just respect, but she found out my dog she emailed me. Like I wasn't even her student anymore, and she emailed me saying she was sorry about my dog when she came and watched me play volleyball later. I was no longer her student, and it wasn't just me, like she always said, if you have a sports game, like I want to come and I want to support you, and she would bring her papers that she had to grade, and she would go watch kids play baseball, she'd go watch kids play basketball, she came and watched me play volleyball, and it was like a couple hour drive. Like my club tournaments were never close by, and she came and just it really reminded me that one person really does have the power to change our lives, and so um I wasn't really expecting to talk this much about her, but she deserves the airspace, she deserves the mic time, and she really just had a very special impact on me as a kid, and it was really beautiful and hard for me to like have all those emotions and all that grief come up, but then also um I just felt so special that I gotta get my life got touched by someone like her. So that's really my afterthoughts about chapter one, and so without further ado, let's get into chapter two.