Even Danny Choi would have been surprised at the level of self-loathing the 23-year-old dancer named Delilah suffered. She was the only brunette dancer on the stage, and like her peers she knew how to play the crowd. Work them up and hook them in.
That was only part in parcel why she hated herself...why she hated life so much she desired death.
Delilah's childhood was one Danny would have understood. Like him, she was abused...but not by family. At least, not right away. Her mother had become a widow when she was only four, a husband and father lost to cancer. Delilah's mother, a devout Catholic, wanted her daughter to have structure in her life; however,
she was kept busy providing for them both, and so she felt she had to have her daughter go to her neighborhood's local Christian day care center during her working hours. However, what should have been a time of promise and learning, religiously oriented or not, would become a living nightmare for the little girl.
Delilah caught the eye of a priest who regularly taught at the center...just as a young injured deer would catch the eye of a wolf that prowled in the wilderness. He began molesting her in his office nearly on a daily basis. In his Halloween mask guise of a man of religion, he remarked to his colleagues that Delilah was a special little girl. Delilah felt anything but special...after the first incident, she was confused and hurt. The man who seemed so nice at first did the strangest things to her...he touched her in
ways she couldn't understand, and he made her touch that was under his pants, she could only call it a thing because she didn't know WHAT it was, but after a few moments it burst and suddenly her hands were sticky. She never told her mother what happened after that day. She wanted to, but she couldn't. She didn't know how.
Delilah, like a few other boys and girls at the center, held a secret she knew at her very core was wrong...but she never spoke of it.
Days in the center turned to months, and the 'special time' took place every other day in the priest's office for Delilah. After some time, the priest began to have
intercourse with the little girl. Confusion and fear turned to searing pain for Delilah, pain she never could have imagined. The terror and agony and helplessness coalesced and she knew once and for all what evil was. Delilah, through tears, said she would tell her mother what he did to her. But the priest said she couldn't talk to anyone about this, the secret times he and Delilah spent together. He was doing God's work, he said, and He would be so angry if the little girl said anything to anyone that her mother would be struck dead by lightning.
Months turned into years. Delilah became even more withdrawn and sullen as she began parochial school. The priest followed her and became a teacher there. Yes...
Delilah was special to him. Her mother didn't seem to notice her daughter's moodi-
ness...in fact she did, but she had so much to worry about providing for them both, and she was sure her daughter was being HANDLED well by her teachers. Then, a few months before her thirteenth birthday Delilah's mother, an accountant, was given a lucrative job offer...but to accept it, she had to move to another town. Enroll her child in a public school. Delilah, who felt like she was dying inside for so long, finally knew the meaning of hope when she and her mother moved.
In public school, outside of the cloistered atmosphere she knew for so long in life, Delilah began to learn many new things. In her fourteenth year, one of those things was sex education, and it took all of her self-control to not scream in front of her classmates as she learned about the penis and the vagina. She never understood the evil that was inflicted upon her, but at least she now knew how to describe such things. The teacher said that sex was something adults do...and if one day those in class wanted to do the same, they should learn to use protection. How could she possibly want to go through that kind of pain and horror again? How could anyone thing of such a thing as good?
One day her school's counselor approached Delilah, noticing her depression. She was a kind and gentle woman who had experience as a psychologist, and felt someone should talk to this girl. At first, Delilah didn't want to talk to her...she still didn't know how to talk to anyone about this, but at least she realized the threats the priest made toward her mother were bullshit. With patience and surprising grace, and more than a little experience in helping abused children in the past, the counselor gently questioned her. Delilah told her as much as she could bear...she told the counselor she always felt it was her fault the priest did those things to her, that there was something wrong with her. Her guilt more than her fear was what kept it inside for so long. The counselor quietly contacted the principal, and after a brief discussion Delilah's mother was summoned to the school.
But when the principal and counselor informed her of what her daughter said, even when Delilah herself spoke of the abuse, her mother refused to hear it. She immediately called her daughter a dirty, filthy liar for calling a holy man -- a man she knew, a man she trusted -- a child molester. But the counselor had experience in such things, she knew the signs, everything Delilah said rang true. Unfortunately after much heated discussion the principal, a man who feared bad publicity and the possibility of legal troubles, erred on the side of cowardice and instructed the counselor to drop the entire matter. She was so furious with the principal she served her two weeks' notice the next day.
Things didn't improve for Delilah after her mother took her home. They argued...
the anger of those words escalated, and for the first time in her life her mother hit her.
She slapped Delilah across the face. Her mother was prideful and adamant: she would never hear such nasty, horrible lies from her daughter again, ever. Delilah once feared her mother would die...she never knew until that moment that something worse could happen. There was something wrong with her, the fragile young girl realized. What happened was her fault, she had been and always would be bad. Then and there she truly began to hate herself...to hate life. The relationship between Delilah and her mother frayed almost beyond repair. It was the natural consequence of trust lost between a parent and child.