Dealing with childhood abuse

As a child around ages 6-14 my sister and I were physically abused by my mother, I won’t go into too much detail but it was bad enough that my sister and I still have scars.

It started when her and my dad officially broke up, she would get drunk all the time and use drugs. As my sister and I were young we didn’t really understand why this was happening or what was actually happening.

There were times when my mum would leave me and my sister in the house from Friday night to Monday morning, (she would come home an hour before we had to leave for school). The fridge was alway broken, we had no microwave and the oven did not work.

We had a ‘leccy key’ so you would have to go to the nearest shop to top it up. When she would leave us there was little to no money on the key. She would leave us for the full weekend with no heating, no food and nothing to drink. My mum worked in the primary school I was in and in her position no one would believe us and she’d always come up with a covenant reason as to why we were covered in bruises or looked meek.

At times my sister (older than me) would barricade us in her room when our mum wouldn’t stop hurting us, she would stay up all night to keep me safe and I’d get some sleep, being young I didn’t understand this. Fast forward a few years my sister was 12 and I was around 9-10. She told her school and child protection team what happened and when social services came to speak to me I was too afraid of losing my mum or what she would do to me if I told the truth. Social devices never fully took us away from my mum, after that my sister would start fighting back and the police would be called.

When I was around 11 her abuse calmed down but was never dormant as we officially became homes less and ended up moving in with our next door neighbour and it’s kinda hard to beat your kids with other people there. By this time I had already contemplated and tried to take my own life, as I now understood what was going on and I didn’t feel like living a life like this. During this time at the age of 14 my sister got pregnant, later at the age of 15(I was 13) (2 weeks after she turned 15) gave birth.

She was a good mum for the first 6 months of my nephews life but after that she stopped being present in his life. Leaving me and my mum to look after him. This is still the case to this day, the physical abuse has stopped but mentally it still plays at my mind and I haven’t actually talked to a real person about this as I am too ashamed what they might think of the situation.

My nephew now lives with me and my mum full time. I would like to get away but I am only 16. And I wouldn’t want to leave my nephew in fear of what might happen. Granted she hasn’t done anything on the past few years but the memories and scars are still there.

To this day she denies that she ever hurt me or my sister and said “you imagined it” or ‘you jumped on my back and I tried to get you off, it was not my fault you hit your head in the radiator’ because I as a child would have definitely been able to jump that high. I have a lot of resentment for my mum and my sister. I do however feel partly to blame for my sister abounding my nephew as if she didn’t have to mother and protect me would she have been a good mother? Would things be different?

I also don’t have the best relationship with my dad he is narcissistic, violent with bipolar tendencies. I was 12 and sleeping at his house, it got broken into, the car was stolen they stole my jewellery. They locked us in the house with our own keys.

The keys were right next to my face on the pillow, as I would always be the first to leave the house on a morning and we only had one house key.

~~~ I know this probably won’t get read but it feels nice to type it out and have it there for people to read and to discuss this with someone other than my sister.