“Never trust men. They have too many reasons to use you.”
Sharon Kena had heard that mantra from her mother all her life. It was one of the first lessons she’d taught her as a kid and she belabored it every chance she got. It didn’t matter who she met or what she did. The message was always the same.
“Avoid men at every turn. If you can’t, make sure you use them before they use you.”
She said it so often that Sharon hadn’t given it much thought in recent years. She made it through high school without dating any men and none of her current friends were men. Sharon still dealt with them, but even the slightest interaction with a man was enough to draw scrutiny from her mother. At one point, she made a scene at an airport when the flight attendant made her sit next to a middle-aged man on a trip to visit her grandmother.
As mortifying as moments like that were, Sharon understood her mother’s sentiments to some extent. She knew, as well as everyone else in her family, that she had a bad history with men. Her father ditched her when she was a baby, her uncle abused her, and every man she’d ever dated found some way to hurt her.