I would like to start this story with “Once Upon a Time” and hope to end it with a “Happily Ever After” but we all know that in the real world that just doesn’t happen. I would also like to say that life isn’t as hard as we make it out to be, but the reality of it all is this, life is really hard. It’s not like I am telling anyone out there anything they don’t already know. I am most certain that I am not the only one in this world that has suffered at the hands of fate or another person. I’m sure out there somewhere, maybe even reading this story , sits someone who has it a hell of a lot worse than me. I feel for you, I really do.

Since I can’t turn this into a nice little fairy tale for you or myself, where should I begin? At creation? Not the world’s creation but my own. I was present for my birth but I couldn’t tell you how it went. The woman that gave birth to me left shortly after so she isn’t here to tell you that part either. I can tell you some of my very first memories. That is of the people who raised me, and helped make me what I am today. I can remember crying for my mother. I can remember my real father coming to visit, and I would be scared of him and ashamed. I was taken in by my paternal grandmother and step grandfather. They were mom and dad to me. I can remember how hurt my “Dad” was when my real father came around and I will call him grandpa instead of dad. Once I realized that it hurt him, I never did it again.

My real mother and father had a lot of their own problems and I guess I was just one more for them to add to the pile. My real mother, I can’t and refuse to call her mom, came from a very strange and a little off the wall family. Real bunch of nuts if you ask me, but since you didn’t I am just stating the obvious. My real father, who I can’t and refuse to call dad, unless looking him in the face, came from an off family too. I love them all, but would much rather be on the sidelines when it comes to family affairs. My real father had a very large violent streak in him. He liked to hit the women he was with, and believe me, there were many. So many that I myself have gratefully lost count. From what I could gather over the years, he was very jealous and cruel to my real mother. One day he got arrested for some reason or other and my real mother decided to take her chance and run. Oh, she forgot one little important detail. The child she had. She left me behind rather easily. Even years later, the knowledge of how easily that woman could brush me aside and live as if I didn’t exist is hard on me. The fact that she left me without a word. I suppose I could tell you what I was told by my mom. That she left me in the apartment where my uncle lived, her brother in law, with no clothes, no food or diapers, and no note saying when and if shed ever be back. Now where was my real father during all of this drama? Oh, he was in jail. He later signed the custody papers over to my mom so she and my dad could raise me. I could also tell you the story that my real mother’s family tried to spoon feed me. It goes a little something like this, It seems that I was stolen by my mom, taken against their will, and raised by her. They all loved me and wanted me so much but they were afraid of my mom. Well I was born at night, but not last night. That little tale of woe on their part left me with a bad taste in my mouth, as did their behavior towards me. Bunch of fruit cakes.

To make that story short, I grew up always wondering what was wrong with me, that even my birth parents didn’t want me around. I must have been some sort of freak. So I was a strange child that talked to herself. No matter whose company I was in, I always felt rather lonely, as if I was missing a part of myself. I have always questioned peoples intents with me, no matter how friendly they are. I have always felt left out and left behind. I’m sure a lot of that is from my own doing, but when you grow up knowing your parents just walked away from you, it really messes with your head. I always felt that if I was not good enough for the people who brought me into this world to love me, then why should anyone else? As an adult, with my own children, I have to try very hard to fight back those feelings of self doubt and self hate. In the end, I am not the one to blame for their bad deeds, they are. Its time they owned that, not me.

My real mother went on to remarry, and raise my half brother, who is older than me, with her new husband. Now why was he worth raising and not I? Who cares any more because they really screwed him up too. My “Step Father” didn’t even know that I was alive. He was surprised the day she told him that I was alive. Seems he was under the impression that I was dead. Ain’t that some shit. Well as I was not dead, she decided to step back into my life. I was very happy with knowing she was coming back for me. Well I was mistaken. I soon realized that I was much better off where I was. The grass is not greener on the other side. It is just painted that way, and once your on the other side, the damn paint starts to peel away to reveal the trash heap under it. I will say no more about all of that other than to say, it did not go well and it did not end well.

Now where was my real father in all of this? Going from woman to woman. He remarried or reshacked up one could say. He fathered another child, a son this time. He also drove that woman away too. After she was gone with the child, he easily forgot about him too. He moved on to a few more women before fathering another child with a new woman. This time a girl. He adored her, and at least stuck around in her life until her mother also ran away with her. Its an odd feeling to grow up and know that you have brothers and sisters, to long for them, but to never see them. An even odder feeling is knowing that your birth parents, who couldn’t be bothered being in your life, were happy to be in the lives of others children. To raise another man’s child, but never your own. Great parents huh? That’s not to say that I don’t love them, because I do. I hate them as much as I love them.

Now what was I doing during all this time? I was slowly growing up and trying to find my place in this junk yard we call a world. I grew up and made a ton of mistakes. My parents weren’t the best, but in reality, whose parents are? I love them, plain and simple. They didn’t have to take me and make me their own. They didn’t have to try to give me nice things in this life. They didn’t have to try and make up for what other peoples actions did to me. The point is they did. For that I will always be grateful. I love them and I always will. My dad died in 1997 after a long battle with cancer. I wasn’t there when he died. One of the last things he said was for my mom to make me leave. I wish I had been there. I wish I could have told him I loved him one last time. He wasn’t always a perfect man, hell he never was perfect. Being perfect doesn’t matter. Being there does. When I was sick, he was there with a toy and a smile to make me feel better. If I was hurt, he was there with a cold rag and a band aid. He was a horrid man at times, mostly when he had been drinking, and he drank a lot. There were many times in life that I hated him. Now that I am older, I can understand better and learn from the way he was. There was a lot of yelling and hitting in my family. I don’t recommend that for anyone. You get over it after a while and you move on and try to understand. My dad was in horrid pain for most of my life. The worse the pain was, the more he drank, The more he drank, the meaner he became. The meaner he became the less I stayed at home. That’s where the trouble began for me.

My mom during all of this wasn’t living a much better life than I was. My dad was mean to her at times. He was very sick most of my life and it was my mom who had to work and try to keep us with food on the table and clothes on our backs. When you’re a child you never really understand the lengths your parents go to make sure you have food to eat. Have you stopped to think how hard it is for parents to give their children things in life. Just the things you need to survive are hard to come by. My mom did that all by herself for me. My dad wasn’t able to work, so she did what she had to do. That didn’t leave a lot of time for mother and daughter bonding. My mom worked hard to make sure I had things that other children had. I always got the things I wanted, maybe not when I wanted them and maybe not bought new, but I got them. I never let on as a child that I knew that the doll wasn’t new. That the doll came from the second hand store or a yard sale. It really didn’t matter to me. It never did and it never has. What mattered is that she loved me enough to take me, raise me, and try her hardest to give me nice things in life.

I finally grew up myself and made a lot of stupid mistakes. I went wild a few times and made life harder on myself than it had to be. Don’t we all do that? I put myself into some of the worst situations that a young girl could be in. I caused myself a lot of heart ache, with the help of cruel people in this world. I’m not going to get into that too much, other than to say, girls, take a good look at where your at, the people around you and what they are capable of doing to you. There are a lot of mean people in this world who really like the joy and kicks they get from tormenting others. My mom tried to teach me that lesson, I had to learn it on my own. I hope no one else has to.

One day, I moved out into the world and found that “Mr. Right” that all of us women and girls are looking for, or so I thought. Yet again girls of the world, if it looks to good to be true, it isn’t true. What I really found was a man who was only interested in himself and his needs. He was a loving man at first. The signs of what to come were there, but I was blinded by his lies and my desperate need to be loved. I was young and thought that if I loved him enough, he would change. I was wrong. I thought “Oh wow, this man loves me so much that he wants to spend every moment of his life with me.” How wrong I was. Its called possessiveness and its one of the first signs that you need to turn tail and run. The next thing that comes is the jealousy. It’s not normal jealousy that we all feel at some time, the green eyed monster that lives in all of us, but something darker and more dangerous. This type of jealousy is with out reason. I never gave this man any reason to feel I was being “BAD”. In these types of cases, you don’t have to give reason…they make up the reasons to satisfy their own dark thoughts. It goes from wanting you around all the time, to telling you how bad for you things that you enjoy are, how your friends and family are taking you away from him, to if you leave this house you can never come back or even if you leave this house I will hurt you. It got to that point in my relationship with this man. I saw the signs, they were slapping me in the face…if you leave I will kill myself…if you leave I will kill you. For some reason, and I’m sure its pretty much the same for most people who have been down this road, you think its all your fault. You didn’t try hard enough, you didn’t love them enough and if you do, you will change them and make it all perfect. Yeah right. It doesn’t happen that way. The abuse gets worse, the lies start to be told, and then your walking around telling tales of walking into doors. It goes from “I love you, your beautiful” to “Your worthless with out me. No one loves you but me, no one can love you but me.” I’ve been there, done that, and got the scars to prove it. The violence never stops, the painful words never go away. It may be hard for someone who has never been in this type of relationship to understand how we let it continue. If your told often enough that your worthless, and your self esteem is on shaky ground, you start to believe it. I did. I let this man run my life. Take all that I am and destroy it to the point that I hated the person looking back at me in the mirror. I never went on to college to become the person I wanted to be. I never became the great pianist I could have been. I became a broken and scared little girl hiding in the corner and hoping not to get kicked in the teeth again. I removed myself from life. I hardly left the house with out “Permission”. As stupid as that sounds to many out there, that was my life. It was an endless nightmare. Never being truly comfortable in my own home much less my own skin.

I’m not going to say that he was always that way. It came in spurts, as in many cases. He would show a wonderful face until I “did” something he didn’t like. Such as the time I didn’t wait for him to go to the store. Now to most people, going to the store isn’t a big deal. Not many people are angry at their spouse for going to the store to do the days shopping. Then there are cases such as mine. When the person who is supposed to love and honor you doesn’t. When that person controls everything in your life, from what you wear to when you go to sleep. Don’t even think of standing up for yourself or you will end up with a black eye and a new lie to tale to those who ask what happened to you. Until you have been chased through your house by a man who is determined to make you pay for disobeying, you don’t have any clue what I am talking about. Until you have been hung from an electric cord because you make the mistake of waking him, and asking him to take you to the doctor, you can’t even contemplate what this life is to someone and how it drags them down into the depths of a personal hell.

I can also tell you from first hand life, that the marks come and go. The pain of a hard slap to the face goes away. The broken bones heal. When they said to you as a kid that words can never hurt you, that was a big fat lie. Words can and do hurt. Being told you are worthless, or that you caused the fights, it sticks with you. You start to believe it. People the spoken word hurts worse than a closed fist, or a large flash light to the face in my case. Being dragged down the hallway by your hair, while being beaten with a belt at the same time, doesn’t linger as long as being told you deserve it, you’re a whore, your ugly, no one wants you….that’s where the real pain starts. You can try to reason with your own mind and heart. If I hadn’t done this…if I had done that….it doesn’t matter. Even if you had done it their way, there still would have been hell to pay. You can’t make it right, you can’t make excuses for their actions, you are not to blame because they are that way, and you damn sure can’t fix them. I doubt medical science and a boast load of shrinks could fix them.

It took me 13 years, two children, and being beaten, picked on, and cheated on before I opened my eyes, picked myself up and dusted myself off. I’m still not there yet. There are days when I start to slide back into the hurt little girl that is sitting in that same corner, hoping to make it out alive if she can. I took me standing up for myself, with the help of family, friends, and a wonderful man, to make the choice to run for my very life. To run for my very soul. To take back what was mine: my smile, my light, my own laughter and my pride.

They aren’t going to change, the people who do this to others. I tried to convince myself for years that he could and would change. I was proven wrong time and time again. I had that beaten into my head and still didn’t learn. Its not easy to walk or run away. It’s the hardest thing I ever did in my life. I am still trying to keep myself from being pulled back into that mold. I have to look myself in the mirror every morning and tell myself, “You are not worthless. You are a decent person. You are not ugly. You do not deserve this from anyone.” More importantly, I have to look into the eyes of my children, who look to me to show them how we are to act. I do not want this life for my children. I wouldn’t be able to look at myself if they thought this kind of life, a life of fights, blood, and tears was normal. I did it for myself, running but I did it for them also. How can I be a good mom if I am hiding in the corner?