My name is Ntando Maseko, and I used to stay with my parents as the only child at home. Everything was perfectly fine until my parents started to fight every day.

My mom used to say that my dad was an abuser and a manipulator, but I never understood all of that because I was very young. At the age of 5, my parents got divorced. Things fell apart, and we later had to move from the suburbs to the township with my grandparents.

A few years later (10 years, to be precise), when I was 15, my mom got a new boyfriend and we had to move in with him. My mom’s boyfriend was very sweet and kind at first, and my mom got a job at a pub, so she used to work until very late most of the time. One day I decided to sleep early, and when I woke up, I felt weak and dizzy, like I had been drugged or something. I found my step dad with me in bed, and this bastard had raped me!!

He told me to take a bath and act like nothing happened, and I did what he asked because he had said ‘I will ‘kill your mom” and I was very scared. He would do this to me every day when my mom was at work, and I eventually fell pregnant. He then give me abortion pills that would damage my womb, and my stupid mom didn’t even notice anything.

I was tired, and so I committed suicide. I left a note for my mom that said “I’m tired of your rapist HUSBAND, you couldn’t even see that your child was suffering right under your nose, mom.”

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