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I grew up thinking my entire life was normal. I never had any idea that my family was as dysfunctional as they were. I didn’t know that what I was experiencing was abuse. I thought my depression was not fitting in at school or just teenage feelings I didn’t know how to deal with, not that it could be laid at the very foundation of my life.
My mother was in her 40′s when she ‘adopted’ me, long and complicated story, she’d always wanted a little girl. She already had two boys just edging into their teenage years. My earliest memories are from about 2 years old, she ran a little convenience store. I was the responsibility of my two brothers and their friends. Two of which I remember, one I remember very well. He came in boozed up, I wanted to play one of the crane machines and I was being persistent about it. He drew back and slapped me in the face. My mother was outraged, she told him she never wanted to see him around her store again.
That was when I was small, no one could hurt me without answering to her. I was spoiled, I got way more things than any one kid should. I have photos of 3 separate Easter baskets for one Easter, not to mention the other random themed stuff I got that year. I was around 3.
As I aged things began to change, I got less and less attention from her. I spent a lot of time in front of a television screen, at all hours of the night. She had strange sleeping hours and I followed them. My Father worked a job a county over, he was gone before daybreak and home by 6 every weekday. She, by this point, was a housewife.
Around the time I was 5 years old, he decided he couldn’t afford the gas to make the trip everyday. And something about the sunlight being in his eyes the entire trip home everyday. So he had decided to rent a place there and come home on Friday evening and stay until Sunday evening. One morning he left for work, I was sitting in the kitchen floor coloring and crying. I knew when he left he’d be gone until Friday, but to me it felt like forever. I tried to spend as much time with him on the weekends as possible, but I annoyed him more than anything. He was never good with small kids, he didn’t have the patience.
I got my fair share of spankings as a child, I remember one long wooden paddle just for me in particular. I think she lost it in a move, she started taking my broken paddle balls after that and whipping me. Around the time I was 10 my punishments got more interesting. She went from paddles and her hand to switches. She would grab thin ones from nearby trees and bushes, but she’d leave the nubs from where the leaves were on them. She’d stripe my legs and thighs to the point they’d bleed.
I loved to wear shorts to school, I hated pants. She would tell me I had to hide the marks, or they’d take me away from her. I was scared to leave her, I couldn’t handle the uncertainty, so I hid them. It was also around this time she began telling me, repeatedly, that I was a troublemaker. Every time she told me something, but didn’t tell me not to tell anyone, and I let it slip? And it caused a fight? I was a troublemaker. It was my fault.
There were also a lot of family fights in our living room on the weekends around this time. Usually my brothers and Dad, at one in particular my oldest brother hit our father in the face. I don’t remember what over. Also, during one of these screaming matches, I couldn’t take it anymore. I ran outside and locked myself in my mom’s van. I just wanted to get away from it all.
I got a few years older, about 12 or 13, and she started throwing things at me. I’d make her mad and she’d throw vegetable cans, cups of ice water, and anything else she could reach. At one point, while peeling potatoes, she told me through gritted teeth that she wanted to slit my throat. She said that was how angry I made her sometimes. She also kept grabbing me by the hair or digging her nails into my arms when I did something wrong.
One day I shocked the both of us. She had me by the arm with one hand, nails dug in, and had me by the hair with the other. I turned and hit her. She let me go in shock. Then she started telling me how she was going to tell my father, how she would tell my brothers what I had done, like she was the victim.
By this point she was still keeping her strange hours, so I’d often be up until 2am on a school night. I’d be hard to wake up the next morning, then come in after school and take a nap. One afternoon it was around 7, and she’d came in multiple times to wake me, but I still wouldn’t get up. The last time she came in, she brought the broom. She took the metal end and started hitting me with it until I got up. She also swung at me with a wire coat hanger at one point over the same thing.
It was also around this time that my one of my brothers was relentlessly teasing me over a boy I liked. I threw an empty gallon jug at his head. He then proceeded to punch me in the jaw so hard that he knocked me back into the playpen that was behind me. My mother was across the kitchen when it happened, and all she could do was say his name in shock.
When I had questions or thoughts growing up, she’d shut me down with remarks on how I was going to hell for such things. She was Southern Baptist to the extreme. When I started to have troubles in school with being teased, crushes, and all that stuff? All she gave me was: “Grow up!”
When I turned 16, she refused to continue taking me to school. She refused to let my friends pick me up to take me to school, and I had horrible social anxiety so I couldn’t ride a bus. The thought made me panic and hyperventilate. She told me that I wasn’t trying hard enough. She said my grades were crap. So I was home all the time…and lonely. My ‘friends’ were growing away from me, they were too busy driving themselves here and there to talk on the phone.
That’s when the internet became a thing in my house, I thought it was great. One day my brothers decided they’d poke at one of my friends online. They were accusing me of ‘carrying on’ with some guy way older than I was. It wasn’t like that, we were just friends. We joked around a lot. They got into an argument with him, threats were made, they blocked him and told my parents. My parents not knowing anything about the internet were bombed by my brothers about the predators online and what have you. I insisted I wasn’t stupid, I knew better than to give out personal information. I had to fight to keep my computer because of their stupidity. I was afraid I’d lose the only outlet I had to be social, I was in tears. My oldest brother stopped me in the hall and yelled at me: “Do you think Prince Charming is going to ride up on his unicorn and take you AWAY from ALL THIS?!”
I told him no, ran outside into and incoming storm to get away. I stayed outside crying in the wind wondering what I’d done wrong.
When my youngest nephew came along, I, my other nephew and my niece were all chop liver basically. We could do no right, and he could do no wrong. She sent him into my room one day to wake me, he couldn’t get me up. She sent him back and he slammed his little fist down into my chest. I jerked up and grabbed his arm. I told him not to do it again, he went down the hall and started crying the moment he got back to my mom. She came in and started swinging at my face with the wire end of the fly swatter. All while screaming at me for upsetting him.
When I got older and tried to speak to my brothers about what I endured growing up, all I got was: We had it worse. And Dad was in on it too. You had an easy time.
And out came one story where our Mom had broken off a chair or table leg to beat them with it. So I gave up trying to talk to them about it.
Around the time I was 18, my father was diagnosed with cancer. My mother would be diagnosed years later. Despite everything else, I loved them. I had religiously snuck in on them for years, while they slept, just to make sure they were still breathing.
Mom was already losing a lot of her ability to do anything, I was going back to school at the local community college. My brother was taking me with him, he was also going to school. His wife would pick me up and bring me home.
I was making all the straight A's my mother had always wanted to see, but now she didn't care. I earned my diploma, passed my classes with straight A's. I came in with the envelope to show her, she wasn't phased. She just nodded and went back to watching Survivor. I was hurt.
It was the same hurt I'd felt years before when I took an interest in drawing dragons during high school, she was less than amused. She would repeatedly tell me how 'demonic' they were. Due to her staunch religious holdings, I also heard my fair share of 'You're going to hell!' in my life time. Usually over asking questions I didn't understand, or trying to lighten this frightening image of God she was trying to instill in me. I'd kept her original teaching, all the way into adulthood. She taunt me he was loving, understanding, accepting, just like an earthly father. So it was inconceivable to me that he'd be angry because I was joking around or asking a question.
It got to the point I was taking care of both of my parents. And I'll admit, doing a crappy job of it. I had no idea how to cook a meal that wasn't prepackaged in some way or another. It led to a lot of yelling and complaining on my parent's parts.
Mom had tried to teach me to cook, I was more interested in being outside on the weekends. I wanted to be with my Dad. I wanted to prove I was good enough, that just because I was a girl didn't mean I couldn't do things in the yard. It later became really obvious that I would never be seen as anything other than his old fashioned misconceptions of what a girl can or can't do.
One weekend when the lawnmower engine was giving him grief. We all stood around the open hood, myself, my oldest nephew, and his Daddy, and our father. I asked what a part was, no one answered me. My nephew spoke up and asked, they started to explain.
I went inside in tears. I stopped bothering. I stopped asking my Dad to do anything I could do on my own. If something had to be put together, I did it.
Dad was home a lot more, it was looking like he would be forced to retire. My brothers both had families of their owns. They would come, most of the time, if I called them. And they took my parents to doctors appointments.
Mom eventually started refusing hers, then one day in November, she couldn't get up. No matter how hard she tried, her legs wouldn't go. She had an accident, I helped my Dad clean up before the ambulance arrived.
She was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer. Her bones were like swisscheese. She never came back home, her weight and the professional care she would need wouldn't allow it. She was in the 300's which would make it nearly impossible for me to do anything for her without equipment to lift her. She was put into a local nursing home to receive care.
I was left to take care of my Dad, whom I'd never really known. I'd gotten to know him in the past few years, but not to the extent I would have liked to years before. The loving father I now had, and would be losing soon, I'd wanted all those years before.
He eventually refused to eat the premade stuff and became stubborn about eating at all. He started wanting nothing but cereal. My oldest brother would come over and tell him how he needed to eat.
One day after he had brought Dad back from physical therapy, he lashed out. He started yelling at Dad, he said things so nasty that I was in tears. His lashing out at Dad turned into lashing out at me. I don't even remember what he said, I just know one minute he was in the kitchen yelling. He slammed his fist down into the kitchen table, then headed my way.
He yelled at me for what all I wasn't doing, I tried to stand up to him. Then when I 'got smart', he jumped from the center of the living room into my face.
Yelling, "DO I need to remind you who you're speaking to?!"
I said no.
Dad fell in the kitchen one day and I tried to get him up. I didn't know I couldn't pull on him. I had tried to call my brothers and no one was picking up the phone. Eventually one showed up, then the other.
By that point, my pulling had made his watch cut into his skin. There was lots of torn places. They fussed at me for pulling.
I was upset because I'd been so helpless when it came to getting him up, and that in the process of trying, I'd hurt him.
His falling started to happen more and more, he eventually ended up in the nursing home as well. Not too long after, he passed.
I was on my own with no real idea how to do anything. I'd never had a job. I was horrified of driving, and we lived miles outside the city. I could have never walked to a job and my brothers had their own jobs to get to.
The younger of the two, his wife left him not long after Dad passed. So, the day they turned off the power to the house, he offered me a place to live. I took up all the house work. We'd switch off with dishes and cooking. It was great at first, but then it got really bad.
He got angry when something I was doing for myself or my other brother's wife interfered with what he needed/wanted done. He got angry with my cats, with our Mom's dog. He'd get angry with me over the bills.
When he said we had to move, he had me take my dog and both cats to the pound. When we cleaned out our parents house, he told me he didn't want a bunch of crap cluttering up HIS house. So I had to leave a ton of my thing behind. My large computer desk, a bookshelf, books, and things of our parents I would have liked to have.
Thing got worse in the new house. He got angry if his tea wasn't made on time, if something he had specifically bought for himself or my nephew ran low. He never asked if I wanted anything from the store, so I learned to curb what I touched as far as food went.
He gave me $20 to walk to the nearest store and buy my hygiene products. There were a lot of times it was cut real close, I hated to keep asking him but I was afraid of what would happen if I didn't have what I needed.
At one point, our older brother and his wife moved in. They needed somewhere to stay while their house was being renovated. They sent their children to her sister's. One day, during all of this, I went with my sister in law to run errands. I never got out of the house, I was scared to walk anywhere.
I came home and he was angry because I hadn't washed the dishes before I left. After he yelled, cursed and carried on, he reached for one of the bar stools. About the time he picked it up, I had increased my grip on the handle of the frying pan I was cleaning. He dropped the stool and left slamming the door behind him.
Now, I'm 28. I have really bad abandonment issues. I don't now how to deal with emotions or problems without internalizing it. My last relationship ending, opened the flood gates on all of this. I was holding it all back behind a wall where I didn't have to face it. I'm scared, lonely, and lost all the time.
