My mother was emotionally and mentally abusive my entire life. She even didn't want a child. I've never met my biological father - he walked away while she was pregnant.
The only reason I was even born was because when my mother called to ask her mom for money to have an abortion her mom said no - told her she had already lost too many potential grandchildren (this would have been - at least - my mother's 6th or 7th abortion by the time she was 23, starting when she was 15. I'm not bashing abortion here, just women who use it as their primary form of birth control.) Her mom then offered to support her and the baby (who would end up being me) for the entirety of the pregnancy and the first two years of the baby's life.
My mother met my father when I was three, almost four. Their first meeting did not go well (she was the daytime bartender at a hole-in-wall kind of place; he serviced jukeboxes and the like by day, was a bookie by night). He accused her of stealing a $50 tip he left for the night bartender, but as it turns out the owner of the bar took it because the other girl owed her money. My mother took great pleasure in telling him leave and to go (blank) himself and to tell none of his friends to ever (blank-ing) come back while she was there, either. So, of course, my father's reaction of hearing this from her was to begin about a two-month long odyssey of asking her out and getting turned down over and over again. For some reason that I was never able to ask, one night she changed her mind. Nine weeks later they got married.
When he proposed the first thing he said was that he wanted to be my father, if she would let him. When they got married I even got my own gold ring with a tiny purple gemstone. That ring is across the room in my jewelry box right now and has been since I was ten.
Their marriage was rocky from the beginning. My mother had a long history of mental issues and my father drank a lot in the beginning. They went through a series of miscarriages while trying to have another child, the first after over five months of gestation. None of the next pregnancies would go near as far as that one did. My father was my father, though, and I was a complete and total Daddies' Girl. His mother, my Gram, came to my forth birthday party a month later and the first words she said to me were, "I guess I'm your grandmother now, huh?" She's the sweetest woman in the world and I adore her. We still talk on the phone at least once a week, most of the time more, and neither of us particularly enjoys talking on the phone.
When I was eight, my mother escalated into physical abuse. Unbeknownst to her, at the same time a cousin whose mother was living with us at the time began to sexually assault me. No place was safe, not even school. I was always the kid who won the spelling bees and came in first place in the science fair every year. Add to that an odd name, looking almost completely different from anyone else, and the fact that I was a working actress and often got to leave school early or miss it entirely because of auditions/jobs? All the kids hated me. And because of her extremely abrasive personality and manner most the adult personnel there hated my mother. Because of this, many of the school officials ranged anywhere from blatantly obvious about their dislike of me too or completely indifferent and thus payed me no mind, so they did little or nothing to the kids who made it their mission in life to torture me.
On May 24th, 1990 (also a Monday) my life changed forever, in both bad and good ways.
My mother picked me and two of my friends who lived in the same apartment complex up, as she did every day after school. She dropped them off and then went right back out of the complex's gate. She then proceeded to play one of her favorite "games": she'd drive to the local police station parking lot (slapping/hitting/punching me the entire way) and yell at me to get out. I never had any idea of what to do when she did this. Yes, I wanted to get out of the car, but I was also terrified of the thought. My mother had always told me that I was a horrible child and that bad things would happen to a kid like me out there. Also, I was nine and she was my mommy. All I ever wanted was for her to love me. I did well in school - for her; I tried my hardest to make friends, for her; I got paid acting gigs, for her. The list goes on and on. Needless to say, I never succeeded in my quest for her love.
So, we're still in the middle of the above mentioned "game," but this time I break the script. See, up until now it always went like this: she'd hit and yell at me, I'd cry, she'd hit and yell at me some more, I'd beg her to stop, she'd hit and yell at me yet again, I'd promise to be good, she'd tell me that if I wanted to come back home with her then I'd have to understand that I couldn't say anything about what was happening and I'd also have to accept that it wasn't going to stop. Every time she did this, that's how it would go. I don't even remember the amount of times, just that it was often. I think back now and always remark to myself how brazen of her it was to abuse her kid in the parking lot of a POLICE STATION.
This time, though, I improvised: I started to get out of the car.
This set her off even more because this was unexpected. She'd didn't want to be caught - she had always counted on the fear she had drummed into me. She didn't know what to do now that it wasn't working. So she pulled me back into the car before I even got a single foot on the concrete.
After that my next memory is of waking up in the hospital next door with my grandfather's face leaning over me, yelling for the nurse.
I had been in a coma for eight days, I later learned. My mother had me beaten so severely - all within the confines of a car, no less - that I'd lost consciousness. Immediately aware of what she'd just done, she dumped my body in the parking lot of the hospital in between a couple of random cars and left me for dead.
I had a fractured right shoulder, a broken left wrist (from trying to defend my face, apparently), a broken nose, a broken jar, two teeth knocked out, three broken ribs, a punctured lung and kidney, a cracked skull which led to bleeding on my brain which is what ultimately caused my coma, and many more horrible things.
It turned out that after leaving me laying prone in the hospital parking lot, my mother went straight home and proceeded to take the most spectacular overdose in history, all washed down with vodka. Her note consisted mainly of trying to lay the blame at all the medication her doctor's had recently put her on, despite the abuse stemming far back from that rather recent event. She went on to say that she knew she was going to get in trouble for what she had done and that she "wasn't going to let the system take it's pound of flesh from her."
I was found where she left me rather quickly and rushed straight into the emergency room, who in turn rushed me straight upstairs to the OR. I underwent four surgeries (one in which my heart stopped momentarily and another after I developed an embolism). There was always a family member by my side.
Just four days after the attack, the abuse was out in the open (my mother's abuse, at least), my mother was dead after she succeeded in her most recent bid for suicide, and after not leaving the hospital except for the one time to cross to the police station and give a statement, my father stepped out of my room after telling my uncle that he "needed to get some air," and that he'd "be back in just a minute." He was wrong.
The fact that his only child was in a coma in the hospital was ground-shaking enough for a man who just a year before was in the hospital himself, having suffered two heart attacks. But add to the fact that no one could find his wife when such a thing had happened? Well, that was insane.
Cut to my grandfather, who had just gotten home from work to a ringing phone. He lived in the same complex as we did, so he went down to our apartment to see if she was asleep, as the medication she was on had a tendency to make her groggy, before he came rushing to the hospital himself, figuring that one delirious person behind the wheel was better than two. When no one answered, he used his key. She was already dead.
My father made it to his car, but didn't quite manage to get the door open. He collapsed onto the pavement, much in the same way I'm told I was found, dead at thirty-nine, the victim of a sudden stroke.
I didn't get to go to his funeral. My mother didn't have one. No one wanted to, I've been told by my brother, "waste the money," considering my now - rather large - medical bills. She was cremated, as per her previously stated wishes. I have no idea what happened to the ashes, but my father's are on my mantle.
When I was finally released from the hospital, more than a month later, my grandparents (who, at this time, had been divorced for near on a decade) had rented a house clear on the other side of town and set up my room with all of my things. My dog even had a brand new bed, right next to mine.
When I say Mom and Dad, unless I preface the Dad one, I mean them. Even with all the bad blood between them because of the divorce they always worked at putting me ahead of their feelings towards the other and this was the ultimate showing of it. They took me to therapy, family therapy, physical therapy, the works. They took a broken little girl and slowly, but surely, glued her back together again, perhaps even stronger than before. I now knew that it wasn't okay to hit someone, even if you say you'll never do it again. I eventually felt safe enough to tell them about my cousin's abuse. As it turns out, I was not his only victim.
They hired a personal tutor for me when I went back to school that fall because it quickly became apparent that I was not ready. With her help, I jumped grades like crazy and when I finally went back three years later it was as a thirteen-year-old junior in high school.
I graduated high school as valedictorian at fourteen, summa cum laude from college (just blocks from our house) at eighteen. I finally left home then, to cross the ocean in search of my doctorate in Economics, which I got at rapid speed, yet again, at twenty-one on a Marshall Scholarship. Finally, I received my law degree at twenty-four.
I'm twenty-nine. I turn thirty this August. That same month I'm getting married. In January, I will welcome my first child. My life is amazing. I never in a million years would have thought that a story as seemingly tragic as mine could end in such a stereotypical manner.
My life is amazing, yes. There's just one thing: I didn't cry yesterday, but I will this Friday.
I miss you, Daddy.
The only reason I was even born was because when my mother called to ask her mom for money to have an abortion her mom said no - told her she had already lost too many potential grandchildren (this would have been - at least - my mother's 6th or 7th abortion by the time she was 23, starting when she was 15. I'm not bashing abortion here, just women who use it as their primary form of birth control.) Her mom then offered to support her and the baby (who would end up being me) for the entirety of the pregnancy and the first two years of the baby's life.
My mother met my father when I was three, almost four. Their first meeting did not go well (she was the daytime bartender at a hole-in-wall kind of place; he serviced jukeboxes and the like by day, was a bookie by night). He accused her of stealing a $50 tip he left for the night bartender, but as it turns out the owner of the bar took it because the other girl owed her money. My mother took great pleasure in telling him leave and to go (blank) himself and to tell none of his friends to ever (blank-ing) come back while she was there, either. So, of course, my father's reaction of hearing this from her was to begin about a two-month long odyssey of asking her out and getting turned down over and over again. For some reason that I was never able to ask, one night she changed her mind. Nine weeks later they got married.
When he proposed the first thing he said was that he wanted to be my father, if she would let him. When they got married I even got my own gold ring with a tiny purple gemstone. That ring is across the room in my jewelry box right now and has been since I was ten.
Their marriage was rocky from the beginning. My mother had a long history of mental issues and my father drank a lot in the beginning. They went through a series of miscarriages while trying to have another child, the first after over five months of gestation. None of the next pregnancies would go near as far as that one did. My father was my father, though, and I was a complete and total Daddies' Girl. His mother, my Gram, came to my forth birthday party a month later and the first words she said to me were, "I guess I'm your grandmother now, huh?" She's the sweetest woman in the world and I adore her. We still talk on the phone at least once a week, most of the time more, and neither of us particularly enjoys talking on the phone.
When I was eight, my mother escalated into physical abuse. Unbeknownst to her, at the same time a cousin whose mother was living with us at the time began to sexually assault me. No place was safe, not even school. I was always the kid who won the spelling bees and came in first place in the science fair every year. Add to that an odd name, looking almost completely different from anyone else, and the fact that I was a working actress and often got to leave school early or miss it entirely because of auditions/jobs? All the kids hated me. And because of her extremely abrasive personality and manner most the adult personnel there hated my mother. Because of this, many of the school officials ranged anywhere from blatantly obvious about their dislike of me too or completely indifferent and thus payed me no mind, so they did little or nothing to the kids who made it their mission in life to torture me.
On May 24th, 1990 (also a Monday) my life changed forever, in both bad and good ways.
My mother picked me and two of my friends who lived in the same apartment complex up, as she did every day after school. She dropped them off and then went right back out of the complex's gate. She then proceeded to play one of her favorite "games": she'd drive to the local police station parking lot (slapping/hitting/punching me the entire way) and yell at me to get out. I never had any idea of what to do when she did this. Yes, I wanted to get out of the car, but I was also terrified of the thought. My mother had always told me that I was a horrible child and that bad things would happen to a kid like me out there. Also, I was nine and she was my mommy. All I ever wanted was for her to love me. I did well in school - for her; I tried my hardest to make friends, for her; I got paid acting gigs, for her. The list goes on and on. Needless to say, I never succeeded in my quest for her love.
So, we're still in the middle of the above mentioned "game," but this time I break the script. See, up until now it always went like this: she'd hit and yell at me, I'd cry, she'd hit and yell at me some more, I'd beg her to stop, she'd hit and yell at me yet again, I'd promise to be good, she'd tell me that if I wanted to come back home with her then I'd have to understand that I couldn't say anything about what was happening and I'd also have to accept that it wasn't going to stop. Every time she did this, that's how it would go. I don't even remember the amount of times, just that it was often. I think back now and always remark to myself how brazen of her it was to abuse her kid in the parking lot of a POLICE STATION.
This time, though, I improvised: I started to get out of the car.
This set her off even more because this was unexpected. She'd didn't want to be caught - she had always counted on the fear she had drummed into me. She didn't know what to do now that it wasn't working. So she pulled me back into the car before I even got a single foot on the concrete.
After that my next memory is of waking up in the hospital next door with my grandfather's face leaning over me, yelling for the nurse.
I had been in a coma for eight days, I later learned. My mother had me beaten so severely - all within the confines of a car, no less - that I'd lost consciousness. Immediately aware of what she'd just done, she dumped my body in the parking lot of the hospital in between a couple of random cars and left me for dead.
I had a fractured right shoulder, a broken left wrist (from trying to defend my face, apparently), a broken nose, a broken jar, two teeth knocked out, three broken ribs, a punctured lung and kidney, a cracked skull which led to bleeding on my brain which is what ultimately caused my coma, and many more horrible things.
It turned out that after leaving me laying prone in the hospital parking lot, my mother went straight home and proceeded to take the most spectacular overdose in history, all washed down with vodka. Her note consisted mainly of trying to lay the blame at all the medication her doctor's had recently put her on, despite the abuse stemming far back from that rather recent event. She went on to say that she knew she was going to get in trouble for what she had done and that she "wasn't going to let the system take it's pound of flesh from her."
I was found where she left me rather quickly and rushed straight into the emergency room, who in turn rushed me straight upstairs to the OR. I underwent four surgeries (one in which my heart stopped momentarily and another after I developed an embolism). There was always a family member by my side.
Just four days after the attack, the abuse was out in the open (my mother's abuse, at least), my mother was dead after she succeeded in her most recent bid for suicide, and after not leaving the hospital except for the one time to cross to the police station and give a statement, my father stepped out of my room after telling my uncle that he "needed to get some air," and that he'd "be back in just a minute." He was wrong.
The fact that his only child was in a coma in the hospital was ground-shaking enough for a man who just a year before was in the hospital himself, having suffered two heart attacks. But add to the fact that no one could find his wife when such a thing had happened? Well, that was insane.
Cut to my grandfather, who had just gotten home from work to a ringing phone. He lived in the same complex as we did, so he went down to our apartment to see if she was asleep, as the medication she was on had a tendency to make her groggy, before he came rushing to the hospital himself, figuring that one delirious person behind the wheel was better than two. When no one answered, he used his key. She was already dead.
My father made it to his car, but didn't quite manage to get the door open. He collapsed onto the pavement, much in the same way I'm told I was found, dead at thirty-nine, the victim of a sudden stroke.
I didn't get to go to his funeral. My mother didn't have one. No one wanted to, I've been told by my brother, "waste the money," considering my now - rather large - medical bills. She was cremated, as per her previously stated wishes. I have no idea what happened to the ashes, but my father's are on my mantle.
When I was finally released from the hospital, more than a month later, my grandparents (who, at this time, had been divorced for near on a decade) had rented a house clear on the other side of town and set up my room with all of my things. My dog even had a brand new bed, right next to mine.
When I say Mom and Dad, unless I preface the Dad one, I mean them. Even with all the bad blood between them because of the divorce they always worked at putting me ahead of their feelings towards the other and this was the ultimate showing of it. They took me to therapy, family therapy, physical therapy, the works. They took a broken little girl and slowly, but surely, glued her back together again, perhaps even stronger than before. I now knew that it wasn't okay to hit someone, even if you say you'll never do it again. I eventually felt safe enough to tell them about my cousin's abuse. As it turns out, I was not his only victim.
They hired a personal tutor for me when I went back to school that fall because it quickly became apparent that I was not ready. With her help, I jumped grades like crazy and when I finally went back three years later it was as a thirteen-year-old junior in high school.
I graduated high school as valedictorian at fourteen, summa cum laude from college (just blocks from our house) at eighteen. I finally left home then, to cross the ocean in search of my doctorate in Economics, which I got at rapid speed, yet again, at twenty-one on a Marshall Scholarship. Finally, I received my law degree at twenty-four.
I'm twenty-nine. I turn thirty this August. That same month I'm getting married. In January, I will welcome my first child. My life is amazing. I never in a million years would have thought that a story as seemingly tragic as mine could end in such a stereotypical manner.
My life is amazing, yes. There's just one thing: I didn't cry yesterday, but I will this Friday.
I miss you, Daddy.
I am glad you are happy now. Your story having a wonderful part is uplifting. Congratulations on your wedding and baby! You sound like a strong person. Not sure if you want questions, but I was curious- Was it your mom's parents or your stepfather's parents that gave you a home? That was surely what 'saved' you. Having someone to depend on is important to us, especially as a child.
I'm glad things worked out for you in the end! Congratulations on your expected baby!
for all of the good things in your life right now, instead of giving you sad smilies for the bad things of the past.
