Tw: infant abuse/death I (F 17) am the 6th of 11 children. The rest of my siblings don’t have any more than an 18 month age gap in between each pregnancy but there’s a 4 year gap between me and my older sister and a 3 year gap between my younger brother and I. My entire childhood I just put this down to miscarriages or coincidence but I know that whenever I’ve asked any of my older siblings or my parents they got really quiet.
Recently I’ve been going through old baby boxes while looking for birth certificates and stumbled across a photo of a baby girl wearing a knitted cap that said Delilah. This baby looked exactly like me and the date on the photo was a little under a year before I was born.
I was tired with not knowing so at dinner that night I pulled out the photo of the baby and begged my mum to tell me what happened. my mum Started sobbing and pointing at my eldest brother while screaming “he killed Delilah that demon stole my precious baby girl Delilah”. I was scared and confused and the family dinner just turned to absolute chaos. My oldest brother ran out of the house while my mother sobbed on the couch hugging me and my dad tried to comfort her. my younger siblings were all taken upstairs and my older sister sat with me and mum translating my mums broken sobs into a recount of what happened.
My mum and dad struggled with infertility after my older sister was born they tried for about two years before finally getting pregnant with a baby girl. Delilah. Nothing out of the ordinary happened during the pregnancy or during the first three months of Delilah’s short life but one afternoon Delilah, mum, and my eldest brother who was around 8 were all sitting on veranda on the second floor of our house. My mum looked away for a second and looked back just as my older brother threw Delilah off of the deck. Given he was only 8 my parents lied and said that Delilah had rolled under the barrier and fallen off the building.
A couple months after Delilah had died my mum found out she was pregnant again with me. If she counted back the days to my conception it was the exact day Delilah had died. All through out her pregnancy my mum was getting the same exact symptoms she had gotten with Delilah I was born on the same day at the exact same time as Delilah just a year later. I acted the exact same way as Delilah did with one exception. I would apparently scream the most blood chilling scream imaginable whenever my older brother came anywhere near me.
On the anniversary of Delilah’s death i wouldn’t stop crying my mum drove me to my grandmothers house away from my brother and she sat on the sofa with me for the entire day rocking me in her arms trying to get me to stop crying. At the exact minute Delilah died I stopped. And was a perfectly normal baby after that.
I was in disbelief and cried with my mum and older sister over the loss of Delilah for the entire night. About a week later my brother came back home going on a long story about how he a 26 year old shouldn’t be shunned for something he did when he was 8. My mum being the angelic soul she is let him back in without a second thought apologising for how she yelled at him. The next morning I woke up early and heard footsteps from the veranda. It was my brother. I walked outside and sat with him in silence before finally saying “Thank you for killing her”. He looked at me confused so I added. “If she didn’t die I wouldn’t be here”. He laughed and said “I tried to get rid of you but you never gave me the opportunity” he looked at me smiling. “Guess I’m gonna have to try again”.