(Me) A work in progress
Worrying my broken front tooth with my tongue, I lined the white aspirin on the counter in front of me in groups of 10. There were 56 of them. With any luck it would be enough to do the job. I flipped my long bangs out of my eyes, and stared at the lines marching across the counter like soldier of death.
My name, Angela, means 'Angelic Messenger of God'. It also means trying to give and giving until I have no more to give.. My parents call me Ang or Angie, I hate that. Trying to live up to my name by being good and not causing problems is a very trying proposition.
My life is staying out of the way of people who want to hurt me. My parents, random men, other kids. Right now, I want to die. I am tired. Life is futile. Living is overvalued, and I want to die. It is the day before my 14th birthday. The year is 1979. It is July 30th.
We live in Colorado Springs, at the Air Force Academy. My Dad is in the military and I am what is called a Military Brat. We move every couple years, and sometimes every year. My Mom works at a real estate agency in town, and I babysit my brothers. Deal was, I babysat for the summer, and I would be trading my hours babysitting for my parents for a 10 speed bike. Just yesterday I found out that they were giving me my bike for my birthday. I worked the entire summer for something I was getting on my birthday, tomorrow. It is my first bike, ever, and I really feel cheated.
That isn't why I want to die though. That is really no big deal. Just something unfair that always seems to happen in my life.
I have tried filling up my life with solitary activities that don't require other humans. Where I can be alone or with kids. Or in control.
On the weekend, I work as a Candy striper and volunteer at the hospital. My Dad says I need to be at home, not working for someone else. "Charity begins at home" I still go, somehow managing to defy my Dad. Some days it hurts to defy him. It really hurts if Mom isn't home. However I go, mostly on the weekend, when they don't want me around anyway. Usually I am not part of the family when my parents are home. I am excluded from family stuff a lot. Sometimes by choice, but for the most part, because I have been rebuffed so much, it hurts to keep trying.
Being a Candy Striper allows me to be alone, surrounded by people.. I have more hours than any other volunteer at the hospital. I have to walk there, almost three miles uphill, coming back to the house was much easier, downhill most of the way. My parents won't take me. They never take me anywhere if they can help it. That is why I had wanted a bike. Freedom.
All day, all the time, I sing and hum to myself. Since I was little, I have loved to sing and there is always a song running though my head. In 5th grade, Junior High, I joined choir. Each time I perform in front of an audience, I have loved it. We have concerts several times a year. I have to find my own rides to the school. Somehow I do. My parents have never come to a concert to see me. You know what that says to me? That I am so not worth it. Somehow they manage to go to all of my brother's (there are three of them) activities.
Ice skating is my passion, moving alone and fast as I can over the ice. I earn the money babysitting so I can go on Sundays. Eye candy in the form of cadets was nice too! I walk up and down the hills to the ice skating rink. It is farther than the hospital. I have two friends I sometimes go with, Olivia Hastings, and Linda Pence. They are the first friends I have had in years.
I know I will never have a boyfriend. I have a chipped front tooth, wild unkempt hair which I try to tame and can't, I haven't gotten a hair cut in years. It flops in my eyes and I get teased about it all the time. My Mom will sometimes sit me down and cut it, but she does a terrible job. I have a lack of clothing, nice or otherwise. My clothing comes from my mother's hand-me-downs, my stomach is flat, but my Mom's pooches out from four kids. So do the pants I have. Polyester pants. Looks like I am pregnant. A lot of the teasing and bullying I take is from other teens about my clothing, hair, tooth and weight. I am now overweight. Years of being told I would gain weight have taken their toll, I eat for comfort now and to keep people, especially men, away.
Skiping school is something I love. Being alone hiking in the woods or watching old movies is the highlight of my days No one harassing me, no one teasing, no one beating me. In the fall semester I skipped school 23 times and only got caught once. My Dad caught me, and I thought he would kill me when he caught me trying to sneak out of my window.
Despite skipping, I was still on the dean's list all of last year. I managed to keep my grades up. School is boring. Moving so often has made it so that some years I am ahead, and some so far behind I can't catch up. So far I have attended 8 schools. Or 9, I forget.
Reading is a passion. I love to read. Sometimes as many as 7 books in a day. Everything I can get my hands on. Especially biographies, fantasy, science fiction, westerns and romance. Escaping from my life into another world that I would like to live in. I didn't used to like to read. Really couldn't read well until I was in 5th grade and my social studies teacher read us Shane. Not caring to wait until he finally got to the ending, I went to the library and finished the book during lunch.
Taking care of kids is fun. Babysitting. Little kids are innocent. They don't care how I look, just that I pay attention to them and play with them. So I babysit when I can get the work, and I have for a long time. Now I am making $1.00 an hour. it adds up to being able to go ice skating each week.
My brothers are like brothers everywhere. A bother, a pain in the neck. Love them, a lot, but don't always like them. I love my brothers Mikey who is 3, Bobby who is 9, and my brother Sammy, 12. They are all younger than I am. I am 'in charge' all the time. when my parents aren't home, I am the go to person. Problem is, Bobby and Sammy won't listen to me, ever. Sam and I fight a lot. Knock down fights. Me being in charge aggravates them. They don't help in the house, and I have to get things done before Mom and Dad come home. When Mom and Dad aren't home, I am 'in charge' Cleaning, laundry, starting dinner. It gives Mom and especially Dad, someone to blame if things around the house aren't done, or if something goes wrong.
All that is over. I want it to be over. Not just because of having to help around the house. For the other stuff. The harder stuff. The secret stuff we don't talk about. That I am not allowed to bring up. The skeletons that are me, in the closet that is our family.
****
Three year old brother Mikey comes into the kitchen for a drink. After he gets his drink, I get mine and I send him back outside to play with my other brothers and his friends.
I put my drink on the counter, scoop the pills into one hand, my drink of water in the other, and head to my room. Ignoring the dishes in the sink, laundry in the hall and the boys crap everywhere, I walk slowly up the stairs to my bedroom. My thoughts tumbling around to flashes of my horror of a life. Putting the pills on my dresser, with the water, I start thinking about different times that led me to here. Why do I want to die?.
One of my earliest memories was falling out of a window. I wasn't yet three, probably closer to two. I had climbed onto a table in my room, then looked out the window. I leaned on the screen, not thinking it wouldn't hold my pushing on it. I fell 5 feet to the ground. I wasn't hurt. I just sat there, stunned and not crying at all. Crying gets me in trouble, and spanked. "Shut up unless you want me to give you something to cry about" Is a motto in our home. Even today, at 14, I still get walloped.
When my Dad found me, I was sitting in the grass, in my diaper, with my legs held high to keep them off the grass that made my skin itch and tickled. He swooped me into his arms, and started yelling at me. He turned me over and spanked me for going out the window. Most of the spanks landed on my diaper and but the ones that landed on my back and legs hurt a lot and his yelling hurt my heart. I have always known I was "no good" and a "trouble maker", "stupid" and "worthless". Those words rebound over and over in my head and in my life. I still hear them, over and over, echoing in my brain, because I have heard them over and over all my life.
I was put back into bed, crying, I was told to shut up. It was late afternoon. He got my brother Sammy out of his crib and took him in the living room. They played together until my Mom came home. I had to learn. To be better. To not get in trouble.
I was alone. Seems like I am always alone.
When my Mom needs to go somewhere, I am taken into the base day care. I am very little, still in a diaper. The daycare is dark and shadowy. I am afraid. Each day I am taken in there and each day I cry. One time, a big dark skinned woman there becomes impatient and throws me to the floor. She puts a bin in front of me. I sit in front of a bin of wooden animals with paper bodies plastered to the wood. I sit alone, crying silently, not trying to interact or play with anyone.
When you are left by yourself, with strangers, you are alone.
It is the late 60's at some point. I am little -- two or three. My Dad is overseas. In a war. I know it is a war because someone told me, while I was watching television of people shooting each other, that my Daddy was there. I start having nightmares. I can't sleep.
At night when I cry from fear, my Mom gets angry and sometimes spanks me. She takes me to the doctor and they give her medicine to give me. I can't tell her in words what I am scared of. What the nightmares are about. Mom is grumpy all the time, and I am by myself dealing with the fear of the unknown.
I was still two, maybe almost three. I was walking with my Grandpa G. Grandpa lives in Virginia. That is where we live when this happens. Grandpa is my Dad's father. He is old and smells disgusting. Dirty and I realize now that it was the Whiskey or booze on his breath that smelled, and his mouth was just rancid.
On the sidewalk outside of his house, there was a rusty brown brillo pad on the ground and I started to pick it up. Grandpa yelled at me to not touch it. Told me it would eat my fingers. His loud yelling scared me, and I didn't touch it. I walked a long way around it, and have never touched a brillo pad again. I can't stand the feel of them. They scare me. In a weird way, what I feel about brillo pads is all tangled up with what happened next.
We walked back into the house. We were alone. He is drinking alcohol from a big brown bottle. He walked me into the bedroom, and began undressing me, touching me in between my legs and making it hurt. Then he took off his pants..
He laid on top of me, and I started crying and fighting to get him off. I couldn't breathe. He put his penis in between my legs and started moving up and down. Suddenly there was wet all over me. Then, I wet myself and he started hitting me, I think because now, the bed was all wet too.
Laying on the bed crying, I felt bruised and couldn't catch my breath. Returning with a cloth, he roughly wiped me down, changed the sheets and my diaper, dressed me and told me to take a nap. He yelled at me to shut up and be quiet. I wouldn't stop crying so he hit me over and over. Then he left. I laid there smelling the urine odors and the smell of him, and cried quietly.
I was alone. Sometimes it is safer to be alone.
My Mom used to go to my Grandma's (her Mom's) apartment complex. A huge place called Concord Village. When I was at my Granma's house, I really wanted to go to the park. I was 3. No one would take me. I didn't know the way and the apartment complex was huge. I started out, and got lost. Very lost. I was found by some people who knew that a little three year old shouldn't be alone. A tiny lady who seemed like she was older than anyone I knew in my lifel gave me some vanilla ice cream, in a blue bowl, not a cone and someone else went to find who I belonged to. My Mom finally came and she was furious. Mom grabbed the ice cream bowl from me and spanked me. The people there tried to get my Mom to realize she didn't need to be angry. It didn't work. I couldn't finish my ice cream, and then when we went to the apartment, Granma was angry with me. I wasn't allowed to go to the park again until the summer I was 9 and stayed with my Granma for the summer.
At some point when I was 5 and 6 we were living in North Carolina, close enough so that I could see my Granma a lot. I remember Mr. Constantine being my first 'dentist' and pulling a front tooth with a string. He was a neighbor of my Granma's and good friends. When I was 5 I was dared by Mr. Constantine to spit on his car window. So I did. So did my 4 year old brother Sammy. Suddenly Mr. Constantine was no longer joking around and having fun, he was furious and went to tell my Granma.
We ran. Sammy hid and so did I. In one corner of the apartment complex there was an area we would one day use as a fort. Blocked by bushes, if you pushed your way through, it was built on a hill, surrounded by bricks, with a balcony area overlooking the hill. It smelled of the berries and holly that grew in a line by it and dry dust. For hours we hid, with my Granma calling for us. When we finally went home, she washed our mouths out with soap, and then used a wooden spoon to spank us.
Running away just delays problems and punishments
Before I was 6 we had already moved more times than I could remember. We had by then moved more than seven times, between four different states. We were back in Texas, in an apartment complex. My Dad is overseas, in Korea or Vietnam? It is 1971. My brother Bobby is just a year old. My brother Sam is 5. I am 6.
Each day I walk alone to and from school. I am in first grade. On the way home from school each day I walk along the side of the apartment complex, next to a closed-down carnival. I had never been taken to the carnival, but it was a dream for me to go to ride the rides. Mom never took me, though she took my brothers a couple times in the afternoons while I was in school.
One day a man approaches me and asks me if I want a Bunny. He asks me my name and tells me he can catch me a bunny if I come with him. Unconvinced, I ask where his carrots are. I tell him to wait and run home to get carrots. When I come back, he is gone.
A few days later, he is back. Again I run to get carrots or lettuce, and again he is gone when I get back.
The next time I see the man, he has carrots, and I am with my little brother Sammy. He tells Sammy to leave that he is going to catch me a bunny rabbit, but Sammy tags along he wants a bunny rabbit too. He leads us into the wooded area next to the side of the apartments. Deeper and deeper we go, until we are out of sight of the apartments. I am worried because we aren't supposed to leave the playground area. The man stops and pulls out his pockets and he begins to laugh. He says the rabbit is in his pants.
At the time, I don't understand, and I don't see what is funny.
I start getting worried and scared. He tells us to take our clothing off. Sammy is wearing a one piece khaki outfit, and he takes it off quickly. Sammy is naked, and I refuse. The man forces me to touch him. With my mouth and hands. I do it, then self preservation kicks in and I get up, and start to run, fast, towards home. I get home and all my Mom wants to know is where is Sammy. Fear keeps me quiet about the man. Sammy walks in a little bit after me, and he doesn't talk either. We know we would be in big trouble. I get the belt because I left my brother alone, and because we were supposed to be on the playground.
I start having nightmares again, they continue to this day. About bad men hurting me making me do things I don't want to do. About being naked in school. About being alone, with no one to protect me.
Running and being alone. The keys to safety.
My brother and I go to the playground to play. There is a girl there, about 11 years old. She is a mean person. I play alone and stay away from her and her friends. Not trying to make friends, or be with others. She comes over and tells me to get off the swing. She and her friends want to swing. I tell her no. She starts hitting me, and pulls me off the swing and I attack her. She grabs me by my hair and pulls me away from the swings. She keeps pulling me, across the grass, across the parking lot, past my building. I am kicking, screaming, my body is twisting on the ground ruining my clothing. There are holes all over my pants. She suddenly stops and kicks me. She tells me to never come back to the playground. She leaves me laying on the ground.
After I caught my breath. My Mom comes over to me. Sammy had gone to get her. Mom makes me march over to the girls apartment, and a man with no legs and in a wheel chair answers the door. She tells him what the girl has done to me. Then he yells at my Mom. Asks her what can he do about her? "Nothing" he says. She is wild. Stay away from her.
My Mom doesn't let me go to the playground after that. She doesn't want to have to be there to watch me, so she doesn't let ME go. Sammy can. I can't. I am to 'stay away' from that girl. Suddenly, somehow, it is my fault that I got dragged by that girl. For the next few weeks I am made to stay inside. Play alone in my room. Mom is busy, she can't be bothered. She reads, does crafts. I play. Alone.
My 7th birthday, my Mom throws me a surprise birthday party. Mom makes me a strawberry cake with pink frosting and plastic pink flowers on top. Kids I don't know are invited to the party I don't want. They aren't my friends. I don't know their names or who they are. They are kids my Mom knows through her friends. They are strangers. I get angry during the party because I don't want to be around all these people. I want to be alone. My wish was granted. I had to go to my room. No cake and ice cream. No presents. Just my room.
Alone.
When the party is over. The belt comes out. I didn't act nicely. I wasn't polite. I misbehaved. I was bad. I got a spanking. With the belt. The belt is a thick leather, There are cut outs of circles on the belt with grommets every other hole. They leave circles, big and little on my legs, back and butt. it is summer time, so no one sees.
Each time, after the belt, there are bruises in a few days. It hurts to sit, and when the fall comes, teachers see, because I wear dresses all the time and can't sit. They never ask me about it, they just shake their heads.
Even in a crowd of people, I am alone.
[shop lifting by Sammy, getting caught]
My Dad is almost always gone. He works long hours, and he has served two overseas tours, while we stayed behind. He plays softball all the time. He smells like Grandpa a lot after softball games. When he is home, he plays with the boys, watches television and doesn't want me near him. He never hugs me. Never picks me up and swirls me around like he does the boys. Any time he is wrestling with the boys, I have to leave. I can't play too. One thing I dread is when my Mom says "You wait until your father comes home" Then I know I will be getting beat with the belt.
I am almost 8, and Dad is home from Vietnam. We are living outside of Randolph AFB. on Straight Lane. Dad and Mom bought a house. There are boys down the street that want to play with me. They are from Mexico and speak Spanish. They are 11 and 12. They take me to a drainage pipe in the park and we play hide and seek. It is the first friends I have tried to have since I was 6. One of the boys catch me, and pulls me into the drainage pipe. He wants me to show my privates. He lays on top of me with his penis out, and humps me.
I start crying and try to leave then the other boy does the same things.
I spend the summer trying to avoid them. I stay in the house, or the backyard, alone. Every time I see them I get scared again
TBC
My name, Angela, means 'Angelic Messenger of God'. It also means trying to give and giving until I have no more to give.. My parents call me Ang or Angie, I hate that. Trying to live up to my name by being good and not causing problems is a very trying proposition.
My life is staying out of the way of people who want to hurt me. My parents, random men, other kids. Right now, I want to die. I am tired. Life is futile. Living is overvalued, and I want to die. It is the day before my 14th birthday. The year is 1979. It is July 30th.
We live in Colorado Springs, at the Air Force Academy. My Dad is in the military and I am what is called a Military Brat. We move every couple years, and sometimes every year. My Mom works at a real estate agency in town, and I babysit my brothers. Deal was, I babysat for the summer, and I would be trading my hours babysitting for my parents for a 10 speed bike. Just yesterday I found out that they were giving me my bike for my birthday. I worked the entire summer for something I was getting on my birthday, tomorrow. It is my first bike, ever, and I really feel cheated.
That isn't why I want to die though. That is really no big deal. Just something unfair that always seems to happen in my life.
I have tried filling up my life with solitary activities that don't require other humans. Where I can be alone or with kids. Or in control.
On the weekend, I work as a Candy striper and volunteer at the hospital. My Dad says I need to be at home, not working for someone else. "Charity begins at home" I still go, somehow managing to defy my Dad. Some days it hurts to defy him. It really hurts if Mom isn't home. However I go, mostly on the weekend, when they don't want me around anyway. Usually I am not part of the family when my parents are home. I am excluded from family stuff a lot. Sometimes by choice, but for the most part, because I have been rebuffed so much, it hurts to keep trying.
Being a Candy Striper allows me to be alone, surrounded by people.. I have more hours than any other volunteer at the hospital. I have to walk there, almost three miles uphill, coming back to the house was much easier, downhill most of the way. My parents won't take me. They never take me anywhere if they can help it. That is why I had wanted a bike. Freedom.
All day, all the time, I sing and hum to myself. Since I was little, I have loved to sing and there is always a song running though my head. In 5th grade, Junior High, I joined choir. Each time I perform in front of an audience, I have loved it. We have concerts several times a year. I have to find my own rides to the school. Somehow I do. My parents have never come to a concert to see me. You know what that says to me? That I am so not worth it. Somehow they manage to go to all of my brother's (there are three of them) activities.
Ice skating is my passion, moving alone and fast as I can over the ice. I earn the money babysitting so I can go on Sundays. Eye candy in the form of cadets was nice too! I walk up and down the hills to the ice skating rink. It is farther than the hospital. I have two friends I sometimes go with, Olivia Hastings, and Linda Pence. They are the first friends I have had in years.
I know I will never have a boyfriend. I have a chipped front tooth, wild unkempt hair which I try to tame and can't, I haven't gotten a hair cut in years. It flops in my eyes and I get teased about it all the time. My Mom will sometimes sit me down and cut it, but she does a terrible job. I have a lack of clothing, nice or otherwise. My clothing comes from my mother's hand-me-downs, my stomach is flat, but my Mom's pooches out from four kids. So do the pants I have. Polyester pants. Looks like I am pregnant. A lot of the teasing and bullying I take is from other teens about my clothing, hair, tooth and weight. I am now overweight. Years of being told I would gain weight have taken their toll, I eat for comfort now and to keep people, especially men, away.
Skiping school is something I love. Being alone hiking in the woods or watching old movies is the highlight of my days No one harassing me, no one teasing, no one beating me. In the fall semester I skipped school 23 times and only got caught once. My Dad caught me, and I thought he would kill me when he caught me trying to sneak out of my window.
Despite skipping, I was still on the dean's list all of last year. I managed to keep my grades up. School is boring. Moving so often has made it so that some years I am ahead, and some so far behind I can't catch up. So far I have attended 8 schools. Or 9, I forget.
Reading is a passion. I love to read. Sometimes as many as 7 books in a day. Everything I can get my hands on. Especially biographies, fantasy, science fiction, westerns and romance. Escaping from my life into another world that I would like to live in. I didn't used to like to read. Really couldn't read well until I was in 5th grade and my social studies teacher read us Shane. Not caring to wait until he finally got to the ending, I went to the library and finished the book during lunch.
Taking care of kids is fun. Babysitting. Little kids are innocent. They don't care how I look, just that I pay attention to them and play with them. So I babysit when I can get the work, and I have for a long time. Now I am making $1.00 an hour. it adds up to being able to go ice skating each week.
My brothers are like brothers everywhere. A bother, a pain in the neck. Love them, a lot, but don't always like them. I love my brothers Mikey who is 3, Bobby who is 9, and my brother Sammy, 12. They are all younger than I am. I am 'in charge' all the time. when my parents aren't home, I am the go to person. Problem is, Bobby and Sammy won't listen to me, ever. Sam and I fight a lot. Knock down fights. Me being in charge aggravates them. They don't help in the house, and I have to get things done before Mom and Dad come home. When Mom and Dad aren't home, I am 'in charge' Cleaning, laundry, starting dinner. It gives Mom and especially Dad, someone to blame if things around the house aren't done, or if something goes wrong.
All that is over. I want it to be over. Not just because of having to help around the house. For the other stuff. The harder stuff. The secret stuff we don't talk about. That I am not allowed to bring up. The skeletons that are me, in the closet that is our family.
****
Three year old brother Mikey comes into the kitchen for a drink. After he gets his drink, I get mine and I send him back outside to play with my other brothers and his friends.
I put my drink on the counter, scoop the pills into one hand, my drink of water in the other, and head to my room. Ignoring the dishes in the sink, laundry in the hall and the boys crap everywhere, I walk slowly up the stairs to my bedroom. My thoughts tumbling around to flashes of my horror of a life. Putting the pills on my dresser, with the water, I start thinking about different times that led me to here. Why do I want to die?.
One of my earliest memories was falling out of a window. I wasn't yet three, probably closer to two. I had climbed onto a table in my room, then looked out the window. I leaned on the screen, not thinking it wouldn't hold my pushing on it. I fell 5 feet to the ground. I wasn't hurt. I just sat there, stunned and not crying at all. Crying gets me in trouble, and spanked. "Shut up unless you want me to give you something to cry about" Is a motto in our home. Even today, at 14, I still get walloped.
When my Dad found me, I was sitting in the grass, in my diaper, with my legs held high to keep them off the grass that made my skin itch and tickled. He swooped me into his arms, and started yelling at me. He turned me over and spanked me for going out the window. Most of the spanks landed on my diaper and but the ones that landed on my back and legs hurt a lot and his yelling hurt my heart. I have always known I was "no good" and a "trouble maker", "stupid" and "worthless". Those words rebound over and over in my head and in my life. I still hear them, over and over, echoing in my brain, because I have heard them over and over all my life.
I was put back into bed, crying, I was told to shut up. It was late afternoon. He got my brother Sammy out of his crib and took him in the living room. They played together until my Mom came home. I had to learn. To be better. To not get in trouble.
I was alone. Seems like I am always alone.
When my Mom needs to go somewhere, I am taken into the base day care. I am very little, still in a diaper. The daycare is dark and shadowy. I am afraid. Each day I am taken in there and each day I cry. One time, a big dark skinned woman there becomes impatient and throws me to the floor. She puts a bin in front of me. I sit in front of a bin of wooden animals with paper bodies plastered to the wood. I sit alone, crying silently, not trying to interact or play with anyone.
When you are left by yourself, with strangers, you are alone.
It is the late 60's at some point. I am little -- two or three. My Dad is overseas. In a war. I know it is a war because someone told me, while I was watching television of people shooting each other, that my Daddy was there. I start having nightmares. I can't sleep.
At night when I cry from fear, my Mom gets angry and sometimes spanks me. She takes me to the doctor and they give her medicine to give me. I can't tell her in words what I am scared of. What the nightmares are about. Mom is grumpy all the time, and I am by myself dealing with the fear of the unknown.
I was still two, maybe almost three. I was walking with my Grandpa G. Grandpa lives in Virginia. That is where we live when this happens. Grandpa is my Dad's father. He is old and smells disgusting. Dirty and I realize now that it was the Whiskey or booze on his breath that smelled, and his mouth was just rancid.
On the sidewalk outside of his house, there was a rusty brown brillo pad on the ground and I started to pick it up. Grandpa yelled at me to not touch it. Told me it would eat my fingers. His loud yelling scared me, and I didn't touch it. I walked a long way around it, and have never touched a brillo pad again. I can't stand the feel of them. They scare me. In a weird way, what I feel about brillo pads is all tangled up with what happened next.
We walked back into the house. We were alone. He is drinking alcohol from a big brown bottle. He walked me into the bedroom, and began undressing me, touching me in between my legs and making it hurt. Then he took off his pants..
He laid on top of me, and I started crying and fighting to get him off. I couldn't breathe. He put his penis in between my legs and started moving up and down. Suddenly there was wet all over me. Then, I wet myself and he started hitting me, I think because now, the bed was all wet too.
Laying on the bed crying, I felt bruised and couldn't catch my breath. Returning with a cloth, he roughly wiped me down, changed the sheets and my diaper, dressed me and told me to take a nap. He yelled at me to shut up and be quiet. I wouldn't stop crying so he hit me over and over. Then he left. I laid there smelling the urine odors and the smell of him, and cried quietly.
I was alone. Sometimes it is safer to be alone.
My Mom used to go to my Grandma's (her Mom's) apartment complex. A huge place called Concord Village. When I was at my Granma's house, I really wanted to go to the park. I was 3. No one would take me. I didn't know the way and the apartment complex was huge. I started out, and got lost. Very lost. I was found by some people who knew that a little three year old shouldn't be alone. A tiny lady who seemed like she was older than anyone I knew in my lifel gave me some vanilla ice cream, in a blue bowl, not a cone and someone else went to find who I belonged to. My Mom finally came and she was furious. Mom grabbed the ice cream bowl from me and spanked me. The people there tried to get my Mom to realize she didn't need to be angry. It didn't work. I couldn't finish my ice cream, and then when we went to the apartment, Granma was angry with me. I wasn't allowed to go to the park again until the summer I was 9 and stayed with my Granma for the summer.
At some point when I was 5 and 6 we were living in North Carolina, close enough so that I could see my Granma a lot. I remember Mr. Constantine being my first 'dentist' and pulling a front tooth with a string. He was a neighbor of my Granma's and good friends. When I was 5 I was dared by Mr. Constantine to spit on his car window. So I did. So did my 4 year old brother Sammy. Suddenly Mr. Constantine was no longer joking around and having fun, he was furious and went to tell my Granma.
We ran. Sammy hid and so did I. In one corner of the apartment complex there was an area we would one day use as a fort. Blocked by bushes, if you pushed your way through, it was built on a hill, surrounded by bricks, with a balcony area overlooking the hill. It smelled of the berries and holly that grew in a line by it and dry dust. For hours we hid, with my Granma calling for us. When we finally went home, she washed our mouths out with soap, and then used a wooden spoon to spank us.
Running away just delays problems and punishments
Before I was 6 we had already moved more times than I could remember. We had by then moved more than seven times, between four different states. We were back in Texas, in an apartment complex. My Dad is overseas, in Korea or Vietnam? It is 1971. My brother Bobby is just a year old. My brother Sam is 5. I am 6.
Each day I walk alone to and from school. I am in first grade. On the way home from school each day I walk along the side of the apartment complex, next to a closed-down carnival. I had never been taken to the carnival, but it was a dream for me to go to ride the rides. Mom never took me, though she took my brothers a couple times in the afternoons while I was in school.
One day a man approaches me and asks me if I want a Bunny. He asks me my name and tells me he can catch me a bunny if I come with him. Unconvinced, I ask where his carrots are. I tell him to wait and run home to get carrots. When I come back, he is gone.
A few days later, he is back. Again I run to get carrots or lettuce, and again he is gone when I get back.
The next time I see the man, he has carrots, and I am with my little brother Sammy. He tells Sammy to leave that he is going to catch me a bunny rabbit, but Sammy tags along he wants a bunny rabbit too. He leads us into the wooded area next to the side of the apartments. Deeper and deeper we go, until we are out of sight of the apartments. I am worried because we aren't supposed to leave the playground area. The man stops and pulls out his pockets and he begins to laugh. He says the rabbit is in his pants.
At the time, I don't understand, and I don't see what is funny.
I start getting worried and scared. He tells us to take our clothing off. Sammy is wearing a one piece khaki outfit, and he takes it off quickly. Sammy is naked, and I refuse. The man forces me to touch him. With my mouth and hands. I do it, then self preservation kicks in and I get up, and start to run, fast, towards home. I get home and all my Mom wants to know is where is Sammy. Fear keeps me quiet about the man. Sammy walks in a little bit after me, and he doesn't talk either. We know we would be in big trouble. I get the belt because I left my brother alone, and because we were supposed to be on the playground.
I start having nightmares again, they continue to this day. About bad men hurting me making me do things I don't want to do. About being naked in school. About being alone, with no one to protect me.
Running and being alone. The keys to safety.
My brother and I go to the playground to play. There is a girl there, about 11 years old. She is a mean person. I play alone and stay away from her and her friends. Not trying to make friends, or be with others. She comes over and tells me to get off the swing. She and her friends want to swing. I tell her no. She starts hitting me, and pulls me off the swing and I attack her. She grabs me by my hair and pulls me away from the swings. She keeps pulling me, across the grass, across the parking lot, past my building. I am kicking, screaming, my body is twisting on the ground ruining my clothing. There are holes all over my pants. She suddenly stops and kicks me. She tells me to never come back to the playground. She leaves me laying on the ground.
After I caught my breath. My Mom comes over to me. Sammy had gone to get her. Mom makes me march over to the girls apartment, and a man with no legs and in a wheel chair answers the door. She tells him what the girl has done to me. Then he yells at my Mom. Asks her what can he do about her? "Nothing" he says. She is wild. Stay away from her.
My Mom doesn't let me go to the playground after that. She doesn't want to have to be there to watch me, so she doesn't let ME go. Sammy can. I can't. I am to 'stay away' from that girl. Suddenly, somehow, it is my fault that I got dragged by that girl. For the next few weeks I am made to stay inside. Play alone in my room. Mom is busy, she can't be bothered. She reads, does crafts. I play. Alone.
My 7th birthday, my Mom throws me a surprise birthday party. Mom makes me a strawberry cake with pink frosting and plastic pink flowers on top. Kids I don't know are invited to the party I don't want. They aren't my friends. I don't know their names or who they are. They are kids my Mom knows through her friends. They are strangers. I get angry during the party because I don't want to be around all these people. I want to be alone. My wish was granted. I had to go to my room. No cake and ice cream. No presents. Just my room.
Alone.
When the party is over. The belt comes out. I didn't act nicely. I wasn't polite. I misbehaved. I was bad. I got a spanking. With the belt. The belt is a thick leather, There are cut outs of circles on the belt with grommets every other hole. They leave circles, big and little on my legs, back and butt. it is summer time, so no one sees.
Each time, after the belt, there are bruises in a few days. It hurts to sit, and when the fall comes, teachers see, because I wear dresses all the time and can't sit. They never ask me about it, they just shake their heads.
Even in a crowd of people, I am alone.
[shop lifting by Sammy, getting caught]
My Dad is almost always gone. He works long hours, and he has served two overseas tours, while we stayed behind. He plays softball all the time. He smells like Grandpa a lot after softball games. When he is home, he plays with the boys, watches television and doesn't want me near him. He never hugs me. Never picks me up and swirls me around like he does the boys. Any time he is wrestling with the boys, I have to leave. I can't play too. One thing I dread is when my Mom says "You wait until your father comes home" Then I know I will be getting beat with the belt.
I am almost 8, and Dad is home from Vietnam. We are living outside of Randolph AFB. on Straight Lane. Dad and Mom bought a house. There are boys down the street that want to play with me. They are from Mexico and speak Spanish. They are 11 and 12. They take me to a drainage pipe in the park and we play hide and seek. It is the first friends I have tried to have since I was 6. One of the boys catch me, and pulls me into the drainage pipe. He wants me to show my privates. He lays on top of me with his penis out, and humps me.
I start crying and try to leave then the other boy does the same things.
I spend the summer trying to avoid them. I stay in the house, or the backyard, alone. Every time I see them I get scared again
TBC