Mercy Home Girls Campus Hosts Alum for Talk on Abusive Past and Overcoming Adversity
“He pulled a nail out of my nail bed.”
This is just one of the many horrors Mercy Home alumna Lydia Rossi suffered at the hands of a cruel sociopath who stole part of her childhood. But what eventually became an extended nightmare of abuse and home imprisonment began as a calculated campaign of friendly gestures and overtures from the boy next door.
On a recent visit to her native Chicago, Rossi came to Mercy Home’s Girls Campus to share her story with a group of young women who live with us today. Rossi, who now works and lives on the East Coast, went on from Mercy Home to complete her M.B.A. at the University of Chicago. With Mercy Home’s help, Rossi was able to excel in her education and use it as a springboard to success—and a better life.
During her time with our young women, Rossi offered insights into how they, like her, could overcome their own difficult pasts and build positive futures and healthy relationship. Helping them learn about the traps that can ensnare adolescent girls was Rossi’s way, she explained, of giving back to the place that had given her a fresh start when she needed it most.
“You have an opportunity,” Rossi told them. “By being at Mercy Home, you have the chance to do something different, to turn your life around,” she said.
“If not for Mercy Home I would not be here today,” she told the young women.
Lydia Rossi was just 14 and living with her single mother in an apartment on Chicago’s North Side when an 18 year old man who lived across the hallway began visiting the family often, offering help to her mother, but also, she said, subtly testing the boundaries that shielded the woman’s young teenage daughter from an older man bent on control and domination. Before long, the man took Rossi into his own apartment—literally stealing her belongings from her mother’s home while she attended school, then later announcing to her: “you live with me now.”
For the next two years, he kept Rossi under tight control inside the apartment and inflicting increasingly sadistic and drug-fueled abuse. “He choked me with an extension cord and tried to smother me several times” Rossi explained. And, as she explains in a video interview for Mercy Home back in 2004, he made her watch herself in a mirror as he choked her so that she could see herself nearly die while whispering in her ear: “I’ll tell your mother ‘goodbye.’”.
Formerly a promising student, Rossi’s grades plummeted, before ultimately being prohibited from attending school at all by the neighbor. Finally, after two years, Rossi escaped barefoot from the apartment and ran to a nearby convenience store, where she called police. She was referred to Mercy Home by a school counselor and in May of 1997 she came to live at our Girls Campus, where she now sat before an enthralled assemblage of young women, each with her own, distinct backgrounds of challenge and tragedy. Some of the girls have suffered abuse at the hands of their own family members—people who were supposed to love and protect them. Others have been traumatized by violence they’ve witnessed in their own neighborhoods. But all of them are at ages when they must learn how to construct confident identities for themselves and command the respect from others that they deserve. “No matter how much you love someone,” Rossi told them, “you have to love yourself more.”
At Mercy Home, Rossi received the therapeutic help she needed to rebuild her young life and to come to some understanding about why her mother was unable or unwilling to protect her only child from the older neighbor, or what Lydia had done to deserve the abuse. “Hurting people hurt people,” she said, explaining that her mother had herself suffered abuse as a youth.
See and hear more from Lydia: watch her video story. |
But Rossi wants something different for her own children, and has continued to work hard to create the conditions for a better life for herself. She said she used to pray “Dear God—please don’t ever let me hurt anyone the way she [her mother] hurt me.”
A critical part of healing was to let go of anger, saying that anger—like forgiveness—is not about the other person. It’s about one’s self.
“Pain is pain,” she said, citing the tie the bound her and every young woman in the room. “You’re here because you are in pain, so while you’re here, try to heal…Get your teaching from people who care about you.” Rossi advised. “And take care of each other.”
