“In the moment, it was hard… I was angry, really angry,” Rhondalyn said. “Because I felt like all of them should have made it out unscathed… I felt like I made the sacrifices so that it wouldn't happen. Yes, that was my expectation.” Rhondalyn started questioning where she went wrong as a parent and interrogating how she could have done better.
“Really, I was reliving my trauma… I internalized it instead of being present and at the moment for her,” Rhondalyn said. “But I had to remove myself further, you know, getting back to the sacrificial love because it's not about me.”
When Victoria got pregnant, Rhondalyn was forced to confront how she had not healed from her own experience as a teen mother. Watching Victoria go through similar experiences was an opportunity for Rhondalyn to be there for her daughter in the ways she wished someone would have supported her.
“It's about her, it's about her needing me. It's about her health, it's about her stability," Rhondalyn said. “And that's when I had to really pray, and my faith came into play with that.”
Victoria is the baby of the family, and every one of her family members affirms that. Because she was always younger than her siblings and had a different dad than them, she spent a ton of time with Rhondalyn. The two were extremely close, they both said, but things started to change around the time Victoria was molested.
“As I grew older and I was able to make my own decisions, and I didn’t always make the right decisions, our relationship grew apart.
“I started having issues with her and I didn't understand where it was coming from,” Rhondalyn said, “I thought, I could love it away, buy it away, give her incentives,” but nothing was getting through to Victoria.
“Having a child at sixteen caused me to grow up a little bit sooner than most teenagers had to, and then with my molestation, I went through emotions and mental things that you shouldn't go through at that age,” Victoria said. “I had PTSD, I had anxiety, I had depression.”