I never thought I would escape the hell of my childhood home life. I thought it was all so much fairytale bullshit.
Why did my mom choose to vouch for a man over her own daughter? She was always busy looking for someone to love her when I was there doing that all along. I guess my love wasn’t good enough. I guess love from an alcoholic ex-sailor was what she was waiting for all her life.
He didn’t start out too bad. Then he was kicked out the navy and blamed it on my mom. I don’t even know how that works when I overheard my grandma talking about how he and some of his buddies were caught trying to smuggle and sell a bomb. Ever since he lost that job, things weren’t been the same.
He hit me. It was always when he was drunk—but when wasn’t he? He would come home from whatever bar at two in the morning. He was always mad.
Every time I heard the heavy thumping of his boots coming up the hallway to our apartment, moving at an inconsistent pace, I jolted awake. I knew what was going to happen when he beat the front door, like the very first time he beat the living daylights out of me.
I remember it so well. He and my mom always used to cover their fights by telling child-me they were playing, but there was no hiding it that time.
As soon as my mom unlocked the door, he pushed her down. I stood, peering from my bedroom door, as my mom cried on the living room floor.
He leaned over her and told her that she meant nothing to him. Then he spit in her face.
Her screams pulled at my heart and, as he raised his hand back, something inside of me took over. I ran out of my room to get between him and my mom. I grabbed his arm.
“Stop!” I yelled louder than I ever knew I could. My voice was strong, but my body shook.
I felt as if I had used all my energy in that one, burst of a word. I felt weak and drained.
He ripped his arm out of my grip as he stepped back from us. His glazy eyes turned to me slowly and a smirk crept onto his face.
What had I done?
He tilted his head back to look at me as he smiled. He told me, “Come here.”
I was in shock, frozen to the core. He took it as defiance.
His nails dug into my arm as he dragged me to him. He turned me around, pulling my pants down as he ripped off his belt.
I held my breath and tensed for what was about to come. I had never been hit before in my life, but I had seen him hit my mother plenty.
He struck me at least twenty times. It didn’t matter how hard I screamed or how blood red my skin turned, one blow followed after the other. The leather slapped my bare skin, the noise echoing through our house, and burning into my brain.
My mother did nothing to stop him.
When he was done, all was calm. He sent me up to my room and told me to shut up—as if I could stop—before he beat me again. It wasn’t like I was crying on purpose, right?
I stayed in my room the whole day. I didn’t go to school and my mom actually encouraged me to stay home. I was so glad I would be able to talk to her alone.
She sat on my bed and hugged me. But she said, “You had no business getting into grown-up matters. He beat you out of love. To teach you a lesson.”
I couldn’t believe it! I thought she came to console me and apologize, to tell me that she was leaving him. Instead, she agreed with him?
I had never felt so alone.
Things got worse, though, when they had a child together. That’s when I knew he was there to stay.
It’s also when I started to get hit a lot more.
They treated me as if I was the parent of my little sister. I thought that having a sister would help, but it only hurt. I was reminded every time I was punished, be it belt, or hanger, or drinking.
One time, my little sister kept asking for milk. Glass after glass. And my stepdad sent me for milk at least five times before I got a bigger cup and filled it up.
I knew something bad was to come when he got that gleam in his eyes. He tilted his head up as usual and told me to drink it. I know it doesn’t sound like much of a punishment, but I’m lactose intolerant and can’t stand milk. He knew that.
As he sat there, he moved his hand to his belt. I knew what would happen if I didn’t do as I was told.
I drank the milk to the best of my abilities but I kept gagging. It was disgusting to me. My body knew it couldn’t handle it.
He told me to shut up, as if the gagging was something under my control.
Seconds felt like hours and teaspoons like liters. No matter how much I drank, I still had a ways to go.
Until I threw up.
He called my mom down from upstairs and said, “Look what your daughter did now.”
Without hesitating, she went back to her room. She knew what she had to do.
I looked over at my giggling sister. She’d never been punished in her life. I hated her for that.
My mom returned with a thick plastic hanger. Then my mom, the person who was supposed to love me most, struck me.
Over and over again, she hit me, dangling me by one arm, until she broke the hanger against my body. Scarring me to this day.
She looked at me through tousled hair and mascara-smudged eyes. Just when I thought it was over, she sent me upstairs to get another hanger.
I thought, if I told them there were no more hangers, I could take my one beating and be done with it. That wasn’t the case though. My mom came upstairs and beat me harder for having to chase after me.
I was punished for everything.
There was the time they hit me for not finishing all of my food. The time they hit me for not watching my sister close enough while they were out. The time they caught me hanging with a friend they had told me not to go around with anymore.
There was another time my stepdad locked me in the bathroom—after he took the light bulb out—until I got a math question right. I was in there for hours. I was afraid of the dark, but I found that if I faded to the black that I would go unnoticed.
Unnoticed was good if it meant not getting hit.
All of these punishments were supposedly “helping to make me a better person.” Tell me how almost being held back in school made me a better person?
My mom and stepdad forced me to stay home from school each time they hit me. The office attendants used to question me, “How did you get this bruise” or “Why are you so quiet?”
It wasn’t long before I started getting called out of class. A social worker was waiting for me in the office.
My mom preached to me about how they were evil people and what to say if I ever talked to one. So I listened, but nothing ever got better.
One time, I tried a different route. I tried telling the truth.
The lady asked me how my ear lobe became infected, so I told her my stepdad ripped it. She was quick to pull out her Polaroid and had me hold a ruler up to my ear, I guess to measure the tear.
The same day, she popped up at my house. My mom’s friend in the office must’ve told her what was going on because the house had a whole new aura to it. This spotless house that smelled of a genuine meal with happy parents was my death sentence. The social worker bought into it and I was left back at square one.
There’s no need to say what happened after that visit.
Days turned to years.
Until the years passed, and the day came that my stepdad left my drug-addicted mom. Life’s ironic because, by then, the beatings let up because he was never around. And instead of wanting him gone, I begged him not to leave me with that woman. He didn’t care about me though, so through beatings first and neglect later, he found ways to punish me and left anyway.
By then, I had to care for my two younger sisters on the days my mother didn’t come home. Well, on days when she came home too high to function, too.
I vented through my poetry, which accumulated over the years until my mom discovered them and threw them out.
I then found consolation in a boyfriend. I dreamed of moving away and never coming back, starting a family that loved in all the right ways.
When I was seventeen, my mom came home high and tried to hit me. I flinched but the blow never struck.
I remember how I looked up and there was my boyfriend, holding my mother’s arm to stop her from hitting me. The same way I had once held a man’s arm from hitting her.
My mom ordered me to get out after that. She tried to take it back a few times, but it was too late.
I left anyway. It was the first time I stood up for myself.
I tried to get into a group home. When they said I was too close to being eighteen, I slept at my friends’ homes and worked my way up from there.
It wasn’t easy but it was better than turning back.
Now I am here: in my own home, with my own job, working hard.
Do I look back? Yes, occasionally I do. Sometimes I wish, after my parents put on a show of how happy and well-adjusted life was at home for that social worker, that I had gone to talk to someone else the next day. Shown the bruises and cuts while they were fresh. If I had kept talking, eventually I would have found someone who could help me.
But I didn’t then. So now, I revisit my past to write a story for the teen today going through what I had went through before. I write to tell them they are not alone.
You are not alone.
You can pull through this.
Take the first step. Then another. And then another.
Because you deserve to live a life free of fear and violence. That life is not a fairytale.