Transcript
Host 1 (0:00)
What is Daddication?
Host 2 (0:01)
The thing that drives me every day as a dad is Dariona. We call him Dae Date for short. Every day he's hungry for something, whether it's attention, affection, knowledge. And there's this huge responsibility in making sure that when he's no longer under my wing that he's a good person.
Host 3 (0:17)
I want him to be able to sit back one day and go, we worked together.
Host 2 (0:20)
We did a good job.
Host 1 (0:21)
That's dadication. Find out more@fatherhood.gov brought to you by the U.S. department of Health and Human.
Host 2 (0:27)
Services and the Ad Council.
Host 3 (0:29)
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Host 2 (1:28)
I wanted to share something that happened to me a couple of years ago. It's 100% true and it still haunts me to this day. I'd be really happy if you shared it, but please keep my name private. Thanks for taking the time to narrate it. The story happened to me a couple of years ago in Canada, in a pretty major city. I'm keeping the location and names anonymous for my own privacy and safety, but I can tell you this much. The area where this took place has had some problems before. Violence, complex beefs. It wasn't a place where you just chilled around at night, and this night made that fact all too real. It was around 2am when my ex boyfriend and I took an Uber from my grandma's house to his place. The plan was for me to stay over, but when we got to his front door, he realized that he'd left his house keys back at my grandma's. Neither of us really felt like calling another Uber right away. It was late and we were both kind of on edge. Not with each other, just in that weird, restless kind of way you get when you're overtired but not quite ready to go home. There was a small park just A two minute walk from his house. So I suggested that we just sit there for a bit before heading back. He agreed. We walked over and sat on the teeter totters. This park was totally empty, dimly lit by one flickering street light. And the air had that heavy stillness that just makes everything feel a little wrong. Now, to give you a better picture of the layout, because it actually matters for what happens next, the park was located on a street that splits off from a main road. His neighborhood kind of forms a complex with two small dead end streets. One on the left where the park sits, and one on the right with more houses. Both dead ends. One way in, one way out. We were only there for maybe five minutes when I had noticed a black car pull into the complex from the main road. It had fully tinted windows. I remember that detail so clearly I couldn't see a single thing inside of it. The car slowly drove toward our side of the park, down to the dead end, did a U turn and then drove to the other side of the complex. Another U turn. Then it came back. By this point, my stomach was doing backflips. The way the car kept circling like a shark was giving me the worst feeling I'd had in a long time. My ex felt it too. He leaned over and whispered, get up. Start walking. No hesitation. I got up and we started fast walking toward the roundabout on the opposite end of the park. The car suddenly stopped, the windows rolled down. Inside, I could see maybe two or three men. They yelled out to us, yo, yo, yo, where you guys from? Now if you know anything about certain areas in Canada, especially places with complex beefs between neighborhoods, then you know that question isn't innocent. It was aggressive. It was bait. And it meant trouble. We didn't answer. We didn't look back. We kept walking. And then we heard the doors open. They were getting out. That's when we started running. The adrenaline hit so hard I barely felt my legs. My ex was yelling at me to just keep going. I remember the crunch of gravel behind us. Fast footsteps. Then I saw something that still gives me chills. A small red laser skimming across the ground near my feet. I don't know if it was attached to a gun, but that's what it looked like. And if it was, they weren't just trying to scare us. They were trying to hunt us. We bolted out of the park, ran across the main road and darted into someone's backyard. At that point, I could barely breathe. I thought any second I'd feel a bullet in my back. We called 911 from that backyard. I don't even remember what I said. I was shaking so bad that I dropped the phone twice. The cops showed up eventually, but by then the car was long gone. To this day, I don't know who those guys were or what they wanted, but I do know one thing. If we stayed in that park even one minute longer, I might not be alive to tell this story. Let this be a warning. Trust your gut. If something feels off, it is off. And never ever get comfortable at 2am in a neighborhood that you don't fully know because someone might be watching, waiting. Warning. The following story briefly mentions sexual abuse with a minor. Please skip this story if you do not want to hear that type of content. I am currently a 22 year old female living in Toronto, Canada, but this happened to me when I was 12 years old living in a small town two hours away. I have always been a quiet and reserved child. So much so that I didn't have many friends and those that I did call my friends had many other people and to them I was more of the third choice. It was summer and school was let out. Just the day prior I had made plans with one of my friends to meet at the park. We'll call her Maya. She was a popular girl and she was two years younger than me, so oftentimes we would make plans to go to the park or the lake. This was like no other day, but unfortunately it was one of those days. Even though we had plans, she had canceled at the last minute to go do whatever. Since I lived about a 45 minute walk from the park, I just decided to play around. After a little while I had heard a sound and it was an ice cream truck. So I ran over and went to go buy a milkshake. I believe a vanilla milkshake. As I went to hand him the money, he told me that I didn't need to. He then asked why I was by myself. I told him and he felt bad so he offered to let me come inside to look in the truck. I thought that I was the luckiest kid in the world. Hey, let me play the sounds, sit in the driver's seat and just have the best day of any kid's life. Then I went back to the park and of course the story doesn't end there. We became friends and after like two weeks he gained my entire trust. But then one day he started to get handsy. He put his hand on my thighs and he gave me tight hugs. But I didn't think too much of it. Even Though my gut was screaming at me, I ignored it. But one day he got more touchy. Much more touchy. He started asking me really weird questions, asking what color underwear I wear, if I started wearing a bra, and if I wanted to see his private parts. This was strange to me, but he would always follow them up by saying, don't worry, we're friends and friends talk about this kind of stuff. And I believed it. Then one day he got more than a little touchy. He started to convince me to undress and that we played around. We did a lot of things that I'm really ashamed of in the last two months of the summer. But the very last day we were together, I had started to grow distant and I wanted us to not continue these things. But that didn't work out. He got angry and he forced himself so hard on me. I was screaming and I begged him to stop. He didn't. And there was a moment where he stopped and he had his bag turned to me. My fear, anger and disgust fully took over and I didn't think I saw a knife on the counter and held it. Soon after he turned around. He had laughed at me and walked towards me. I didn't think, I just drove the knife right into his manhood. He then fell to his knees, crying and pleading with me, wondering why I did this. I ran out of the truck and I just kept running until I ran into the forest that was next to a field. And once I couldn't run anymore, I collapsed and I passed out by a tree. I woke up several hours later. I never told my friends or family. I didn't get the cops involved or anything. I blame myself for that. Who knows if he did that to anyone else. He could have been in jail now or dead. Not a day goes by where I don't have regrets. If I see or hear an ice cream truck, I get flashbacks. I'm dizzy and scared. I have a current diagnosis of PTSD due to this and many other horrible things too. Thank you all for listening. And thank you to Southern Cannibal. I've been wanting to post this for a few years now. I'm getting help and I told some of my close friends about this and I've spoken to a psychiatrist about it too.