As part of me starting to move on, become stronger, grow, and let things out to help me forgive I wanted to write my story.
In the beginning, there was a man and a women who were together as just a fling. My father loved my mother but my mother never really loved him. She cheated on him, beat the heck out of him, did drugs and was just a very miserable person to live with. In return my father beat the heck out of her right back along with all of the men that she had affairs with. It was simple enough until she got pregnant with me and that was when everything started to get very complicated. They constantly fought because my father wanted to marry her and she wanted to be a slut. My father went out and bought a house for their baby to come and filled it with everything they would need to take care of a new baby, while my mother just kept doing drugs and sleeping around. After she had me he took care of me most of the time along with my grandmother while my mother still just played around and did what felt good to her. One night my mother was supposed to have me and my father wanted to visit so he came to her house and all he could hear was me, at 7 months old, screaming. He knocked and knocked with no one saying or doing anything other than me crying. Finally he broke down the door to find me completely black and blue, from where my mother had beaten me, and covered in my own filth. It turns out that she had gotten mad at me that morning for crying and in an attempt to get me to be quiet she beat me and then left when I wouldn’t stop crying. My father from that moment on always had someone other than her take care of me. Around the time I was turning 9 months old my mother decided that she didn’t want either of us at all anymore and she hit the road with her drug-addicted boyfriend. They moved away and my father didn’t hear from her again until I was about 2 years old. When he tracked her down around my 2-year birthday she said that she loved me and wanted to see me. My father believing so much that I needed a mom told her that she could. Well he took me up there for the weekend and dropped me off. I can only assume that he partly wanted me to have a mom but also didn’t want to do it all alone anymore. He was working full-time, going to college full-time and only had my grandmother to help him take care of me. While I was with my mother she beat me, snorted cocaine in front of me, which to this day is one of my only childhood memories of her, and she just put me aside until my father came back to get me. When he came and took me home I cried never wanting to leave him again. He found all of the black and blue all over me and didn’t know what to do. I think I have been there too wanting so much to have another parent for your children that you would almost live with anything just to not have them miss out on any of the 2 parent stuff. Well either way after a lot of thinking on my dad’s part he decided that she really needed to grow up more before he would let her be around me. She agreed that seeing me wasn’t good at that time because she was just too busy with her drugs and this guy she was still with.
Now time has gone by and I have had several different sitters in and out of my life trying to take the place of my dad and my mom who are both way too busy to be around. Then the day came and my father married a women. She was completely horrible. I was around 5 years old and she hated me because I wasn’t her kid and she didn’t want kids. He just kept telling everyone that in time she would learn to love me and well of course she never did. When they split it was because she had taken all of my toys and locked them in the closet for no reason. When he found out about this he yelled at her asking why would she do something like that to a 5-year-old child. Her response broke his heart and the marriage. She said, “I hate her, I hate all kids and I will never ever want her around!” He slapped her across the face and told her to leave and never come back.
All most a year later my mother called on the phone and wanted to see me. Of course him being still so confused and lonely he told her that he still wanted to try and work it out for my sake and if she would come back he would forgive her for everything and take care of her. She refused and said that she loved the way her life was and didn’t want me around all of the time she just wanted to know that I was ok. He at this point really started to hate the fact that he had me. As I was turning 8 I was now allowed to stay home alone so I used to be home all of the time by myself with nothing other than my computer to be a friend to me. I would wake up at 3 in the morning and my dad would still be gone. I was so lonely! A little after my 8th birthday my father got a call from my mother and she wanted to talk to me. She told me that she had sent me a package for my birthday. I was so excited. I think that what happens with the packages is part of the reason why I love getting, even an empty, package in the mail. Of course the package never came. Then almost every 6 months from that point until I turned 11 she would call and say that she sent me a package and I would run home from school every day praying on my way home that a package from her would be there. No package ever came and when I would cry to her she would say that she forgot and had just sent the package and still no package ever came.
When I turned 10 my father gave me what he thought would be the best thing for me, a live in sitter. At first it was kind of neat because she would teach me how to bake and up until this point I had been eating only cereal and bread for almost 3 years. She was great! One day her and my father came and sat me down and told me they were getting married. I thought it was great and she was pregnant, with another man’s child, but I didn’t know that at the time, my father did. They got married and several months later this women started beating the hell out of me. I would go to school covered in welts and couldn’t get any help because I was to scared to hurt my dad. Part of me thought that I must have done something to deserve it all and so I never said a thing and my father didn’t find out about the abuse for a long time. When he found out he beat the hell out of her and told her never again would she touch me like that. That lasted about a week until she then sexually abused me and beat me so bad that I couldn’t move off the floor. My father beat the hell out of her and kicked her out of the house and started divorce papers. I later found out that she had a drug problem that my dad didn’t know about until after he married her. I never told my dad about the sexual abuse until I was almost 14 and couldn’t live with it in my head anymore.
Life continued on and at this point my father had started to come home from work and beat the hell out of me. He would beat me with his belts, golf clubs, fists and just about anything else he could grab in a fit of rage. I don’t ever really remember anything that I did to make him do what he was doing but I do know that he resented me in some ways for years. The thing is that one you have been abuse for a long period of time you become dependent on it in some ways. Or at least with me when my father met another women and was going to marry her she said she wouldn’t marry a man who beat his child. She took him to church and then they got married. I was around 13 when they got married. He stopped beating me. I couldn’t live without it at this point for some reason; I started to get really depressed. I used to do horrible things to myself to feel the pain that he wasn’t giving me anymore. I was so lonely, angry, hurt, confused and just wanting him back more than anything else in the world. Well then my father and stepmother said something to me that practically killed me. My father told me that he was going to send me away to be with my mother because my step-mom couldn’t deal with me anymore. This was worse than death to me. It was Thanksgiving morning and I ran to my bedroom, 12 years old, and just started taking pills like crazy. I took every kind of pill that I could find and took the full bottles. I was determined to make him pay for wanting to get rid of me. Once I was gone he would see what he had done and wouldn’t ever be able to live with himself. I wrote this long letter that told him how much it destroyed me when he didn’t hit me anymore and how much I hated him yet loved him more than life. Well that night at dinner I was so sick I couldn’t even hardly move and I kept throwing up all over the house. My family got upset and dad asked what was wrong with me. I screamed, “I took all of these pills and I hate you! I am going to die and it is all your fault!” The horrible thing is that my father then said well I guess you can sit in the chair and die. I will not help you! My family all sitting at the dinner table was at this point screaming at him to take me to the hospital. Finally after around 30 minutes of sitting there so sick and hardly able to even move I got up and was determined to go to my room and die there. All I could hear from my room was my family screaming about how he should take me to the hospital, there is something really wrong with her! Funny thing is they all knew that he used to beat the heck out of me and never helped me at all. Finally after a little over an hour of laying on my bed out of it my father dragged me down the stairs by my hair put me in the car and screamed at me the whole way to the hospital where he left me and went back to his wonderful dinner.
I stayed in the kids psych ward for a little over a month and when I got home I knew I didn’t need him to beat me anymore I just needed to work every single day to get away from all of them. Well so for the years to follow I spent every day working hard at everything I did. I got almost 4.0 GPA in school every time, while taking college classes in high school. I was doing everything perfect! The day I turned 15 I got a job at the new grocery store that was opening. I started working there a little over 25 hours a week while going to school, and still keeping my great grades! This is when I started to grow up and it all leads to me leaving finally after all of the abuse.
I went into the break room at work one night. I sat down at a little table and got all relaxed on my break. I was kind of daydreaming when a very attractive guy sat down at my table and said hello! I almost died with all of those little butterflies in my tummy. I, of course, said hello back and we started talking. There was this very familiar feeling between us. He was OH WOW able to take my breath away with just a look from him. He took me home that night and asked me out to a movie. The problem comes in when my father completely said that there was no way this guy who was 17 would take me at 15 out. I fought and fought this like all hell and finally got to go out on at least one date with him. I don’t think Steve and I really even needed to go out on a date because we were instantly in love. People don’t know if that love at first site exists but I will tell you for people who have had it happen to them it is oh so true. If it happens to you, you would know that it isn’t about looks, it is more about some kind of vibe or something you get from the other person. Well, Steve and I were very much in love with each other. I don’t think that our love could have foreseen what was in store for it.
After dating only a little over 2 months my parents said that I couldn’t see him anymore. They didn’t like him because he was older and made me want to have friends. Up until this point I really hadn’t had any friends to speak of, all I had was schoolwork, work and all of the household chores. (Cooking for the family, cleaning the house, doing everyone’s laundry, doing all of the dishes, the floors, the yard work and everything else that needed to be done.) Steve and I hadn’t seen each other in almost 2 months when my parents told me that he was like a CD player and they were grounding me from him for another 6 months until I started folding the laundry properly. I flipped out and screamed with tears in my eyes. This was like a knife into my heart. I was so madly in love with him. I wished he would rescue me from them and this hell of a life I was in. The next day which was a Thursday I went to school had a little bit of a problem and ended up crashing into 14 cars which got totaled in the school parking lot. Well for the first time ever I had done something completely horrible and my father didn’t even yell! I was so scared that I couldn’t hardly breath; I mean this is the man who would ground me for a month if I ate the last pop tart. I was just waiting for him to go crazy and beat the hell out of me but when Sunday morning came and we were all getting ready for church and still not a single sign of anger out of him I was sure that maybe things would be ok now. Then we got to church and everyone was talking about my car accident. My family blamed me for everyone knowing and I kept insisting that I didn’t say anything to anyone. When we got in the van on the way home my family insisted that I said something to someone and had started all of this with the church. I was crying and said that I hadn’t said anything and that it was my step mother, whom I had overheard the night before telling her church friend about it all, and she of course said that she wouldn’t tell anyone and hadn’t. Well as we were continuing the argument on the way back home she finally admitted that she did tell the people at church! I flipped and started screaming, “See dad I am not a liar! It is her! She just admitted that she was lying!” Once I finished that statement my stepmother was screaming at my father that he needed to deal with me when we got home. He looked at me in the mirror and said “When we get home go to your room and I am going to come take care of you! Even if she is wrong she is still right and you will always be wrong. You are the child!” Knowing what my father was meaning when he said he would take care of me I decided that when we got home I wouldn’t go to my room! I was done with that and wasn’t ever going to take it again. We pulled into the driveway, my family got out and I followed. My father was standing there telling me to get to my room and he would be up in a few minutes. I for the first time ever told him where to take it! I said, “Fuck you! I am not going inside, I am leaving and I hate you!” I threw a shoe at him and walked away. As I reached the corner towards my friend’s house I felt a huge yank from behind me. My father had chased after me and grabbed me by my shirt and started trying to drag my back to the house. As he was dragging me back home my clothes were ripping off of my body until I was lying next to the tree in front of my house with only my bra and underwear on. My father was screaming at me “Please get in the house!” and my stepmother was on the porch screaming “Let her go, she isn’t worth it!” After a little over 5 minutes of me crying and telling him that if I went back into that house I would jump off the roof and kill myself, I also told him that I really had to go because I was going to go so crazy if I went back. He finally backed off and let me put my ripped clothes back on and I walked away from that house in tears.
I got to Jeremy’s house, who lived like 4 houses away, and asked him to please give me a ride to Steve’s house. He drove me to Steve’s house and dropped me off there. Steve came to the door looked at me and just held me! We then went for a nice ride and ended up at some large field behind a school in the beautiful dark with the stars so shiny. Steve and I laid in the grass under the stars for hours just talking about everything and anything. We didn’t even realize what time it was until we saw lights coming towards us in the distance. They were security for the school that was a mile or so away. I guess we were on their property and when they saw someone on the grass they needed to check it out and it was us. It was completely embarrassing when they walked us off the property to Steve’s car. Steve took me back to his house where I waited outside in the pouring rain until his parents went to sleep and then was let into his room to sleep for the night. I was 15, so innocent, and sleeping in this completely wonderful guys bed, while he slept on the floor. Well after a little over an hour of him sleeping on the floor and me on the bed I was feeling so bad for him that I invited him to come sleep in the bed with me. He got up on the bed with me under the covers and cuddled with me all night long, until around 7 am the next morning, when it was time for him to take me to school. Steve snuck me out of his house and then took me to school where we kissed and talked about when he was coming back to pick me up. We had no idea yet what I was going to do but I did know that I would never go back to my dad’s house no matter what. That night I slept at his house again, this time with his parent’s permission.
After spending almost a week at his house we came up with a plan for me to live with my grandmother long enough for me to get my GED, since I had gotten expelled from high school, due to the accident in the parking lot. My grandmother let me move in but told me that my father’s rules would still go which meant I wouldn’t be allowed to see Steve at all! He was not allowed to even call the house. I agreed to all of this while thinking that it would be really easy to get around it all. After a month of going to night school, for my GED, and working full time, I was ready to find my mom again. Steve helped me to find her and once we did him and I made plans to go see her. My mother at this point was living in Pennsylvania with 2 kids and married to the man she left my father for. They seemed really happy and settled so Steve and I planned our trip and then fought like crazy to get my parents to allow me to take it. Once they finally showed me that there was no way they would let us go, Steve and I packed up and went there without my father’s permission. Steve and I got to my mother’s house and stayed there for a few weeks, having a blast getting to know them all and getting to be with Steve at the same time. By the time Steve and I decided to come back to NY it was the middle of winter and snow was completely piled up all over the place.
We got back into NY at around 2 am on a weekday morning and neither of us had any place to go at this point because his family had disowned him for leaving with me and my family had done the same. That was the week before he asked me to marry him. He took me, on Thanksgiving Day, to the canal, which was completely iced over; everything was white, so beautiful and pure looking. We stood on the edge near the water and as the snow started to fall he pulled out a beautiful ring and asked me to marry him. I was just so in love with this guy that I said yes not even giving it a half of a seconds thought. For the rest of the winter him and I lived in his car together some nights being the only thing that kept each other from freezing. It wasn’t until early February that I worked things out with my grandmother and moved back in with her.
After I moved back in with her my family started to pressure me that at this point I must have slept with him and should think about protection. Now I was still completely a virgin! Him and I didn’t even get close to sex at this point yet but by the time July came and I had been hounded about how I shouldn’t have sex with him since February him and I finally did! It was completely incredible and he was so amazing but from that point on I was a huge sex addict and nothing else mattered. I wanted sex morning, noon, night and every other time in between. I couldn’t get enough to save my life.
I found out a little over a month later that I was pregnant which was very horrifying to me. I called my father and told him and asked him to please come and talk to me about it all and he screamed at me while agreeing to come to my grandmother’s house to talk. When he got to my grandmother’s house he asked me to come outside and talk to him, which I agreed to. When I got outside with my father he asked my grandmother to leave us alone for a few minutes at which point she walked away and shut the door. My father then began to beat the hell out of me until I was whimpering on the driveway like a dyeing dog. He then began to scream at me to get up and stop screwing around and as I tried to get up all that he could see was blood. He had killed the baby I was pregnant with and I was hemorrhaging all over the driveway and yet so beaten that I couldn’t get myself inside for help. My father then told me he never wanted to talk to me about any of this again and he left me in my own blood to rot until my grandmother saw what was going on and had my aunt come help her to take care of me. I ended up seeing doctors and stuff until everything was ok but from that moment on neither I nor Steve would ever even consider trusting him in any way.
I then started to shut down again towards my grandmother and this year when Thanksgiving Day came around Steve and I had great plans for my grandmother being out of town. Steve was going to spend the night with me for a change and we had everything planned out and the food ready to eat! Well that night went great but everything else went right to hell basically and I ended up moving out of my grandmother’s house the next morning. Steve and I then moved back to my mothers in Pennsylvania and stayed there for a few weeks until I got in touch with a friend of mine who I made arrangements to live with.
I moved in with Alida a week before Christmas and went back to work. Steve and I were still working at the same place and having a great time now that I was renting from a friend of mine. Things with him and I were going so well for a long time until we both started to resent each other for what we had given up to be with each other. I then broke up with Steve due to a problem with pot that he started and I moved away.
I was now completely on my own, renting a room from a women in a nearby town. I was still working and starting college when I got home one day and saw a girl and her boyfriend in the kitchen. The women I was renting from had a daughter and her boyfriend was Brett. Brett and Venus had been dating for a while and were living together. That night the phone rang and it was Brett calling to ask me out for coffee. I was so lonely after breaking up with Steve that it was so great to be asked out so I went. He was so cute looking and we sat at Perkins having fries and pop for hours. Another good point was that he drove a tow truck which I loved being in. He dropped me off that night and we had a great time together. When I went inside to the house Venus’s mother had told me that Brett and Venus had been broken up for over a month but that Brett couldn’t kick her out of the apartment, because she wouldn’t let her daughter come and live with her. I thought wow this is great maybe him and I can date and she agreed that it might be nice; he was a good guy. Well, Brett and I started dating and things were crazy because his ex, Venus, just constantly called him and I, paged him, and just for the most part went crazy. She would constantly call me at my house and scream at him, her mother, and myself. It was horrible and she just hated that he moved in with me! The thing is that she admitted that they weren’t together for a while but I guess with them living together she thought that maybe they would work it out sooner or later. Now that I look back I see that I wasn’t right going out with him or having him move in with me while they were living together, in a relationship with each other or not, it still wasn’t right. Brett and I were great together! We had a ton of fun; drove tow trucks together, and just had some great sex. After we were together for a while he asked me to marry him and I was stupid and said yes even though him and I both knew that I wasn’t in love with him. After all that had gone on I was still very much in love with Steve.
The day came and I found out I was pregnant! Now he really wanted to marry me and I was so scared that I tracked my mom down and ran to her in Arizona. I didn’t know what to do and I guess that maybe having a relationship with her would help me to decide what I was going to do about everything.
In Arizona things weren’t good. My mother wanted to keep me there so bad that she actually had the nerve to lock me in a room not letting me eat for days. One day when she left I broke the window and climbed out at 3 months pregnant. I walked a little over 3 miles in sweats with temperatures a little over 100 degrees. I got to a laundry mat and needed help because I couldn’t walk anymore, I was starving, boiling hot, sick, and pregnant. This women there helped me and got me to the welfare agency and they helped me and got me on a bus the next morning. I had to leave all of my stuff there at my mother’s house but I got to be free again.
The bus pulled back into NY at around 7 am and Brett was there waiting for me. At this point I was so sick that I couldn’t even get off the bus and Brett had to come carry me off the bus and put me into the car. I thought of him as a savior for that. I still wasn’t going to marry him at this point but after him rescuing me I did want to be with him. I didn’t doubt that anymore. The only thing that I knew now was that I had to tell my father about the baby and ask him to be around.
Now up until this point I hadn’t talked to my family in almost 3 years and I wanted them to be around for this child so I ran to my father. When I told him I was pregnant his response to me was that if I didn’t marry Brett I would forever be banished from the family. Well the next day I married him. At this point I still wasn’t in love with him at all. He would always tell me that he loved me and I wouldn’t ever say anything back other than to smile. I couldn’t tell him that I did because I was still in love with Steve. Yes after all of that time I still loved my first love. He was still the greatest portion of my heart.
The day after I married Brett the abuse started. We had a minor disagreement and he kicked me in the belly, I was a little over 6 months pregnant. He cried and I forgave him. From that moment nothing would ever be the same. The beatings began and never really ended except for brief days here and there. At this point I felt I was in way to deep to get out so I stayed and then on September 22nd he pushed me and my water broke. I had our daughter the next day and it got so much worse after she came along.