Innocence Lost Part 4

I was now in the fifth grade and my body was changing quickly. My mother on the other hand wanted to see me as a little girl. She still picked out my clothes for me every night and laid them out on a chair for me to wear the next day. I was the only girl in the sixth grade that wore dresses and matching knee socks almost everyday. I hated it! I wanted clothes like everyone else. I already stood out by being a shy quiet overweight girl. In addition, I was in dire need of a bra but only given undershirts. My mother didn’t get me a bra until someone at church mentioned that she needed to. By the time she got me one my I was a size b cup. There were other ways that my mother overcompensated for her lack of mothering in other areas. At least twice a week when I would get home from school, my whole bedroom had been rearranged. My mother was a compulsive cleaner and even when I would beg to help she would never let me because my cleaning skills were never acceptable.

It was at about this time of my life when things just began spiraling out of control. I was starting to have sex education in school and I had to bring home permission slips for my parents to sign. This began the beginning of the end. My step father began behaving a lot differently. He began trying to be a friend or maybe a father? But he was nicer and it was rather peculiar. One day he made me watch a pornographic film claiming that it was “sex education.” My mother found out and was furious but in the end, as always, her anger was impotent. The next few months the arguments between my mother and step father escalated exponentially. I would hear them argue about bizarre things that I didn’t understand the magnitude of at the time. My step father thought it would help my “sex education” if I watched them have sex, and many other sick and delusional ideas. All of this culminated into two huge events.

The first began one school day when my mother was at work. I got up to get ready to go to school and my step father said that if I wanted to stay home from school that I could. I had never, ever, been given that option, and being a kid I jumped on the opportunity. At about mid morning I asked if I could take a bath and my step dad said okay so I went and began running the tub. While the tub was running he told me that he was going to take a bath too. When I realized that he intended to take a bath with me I was sick to my stomach. I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid and I didn’t feel comfortable with taking a bath with my step father. I hadn’t done that since I was four and something didn’t feel right. I was so afraid of my step father I didn’t know what to say or do to get out of the situation. So at least at that point, I felt my fate was sealed. My step dad came into the bathroom and undressed while I was in the bathtub. I wouldn’t look at him and tried to cover myself. When he got into the bathtub, I told him that I was done taking a bath and I was getting out and he could have the bath to himself. I stood up and started to get out. He told me to stay in the bath and due to my fear of him I complied. He washed my back as I felt so sick I just wanted to climb out of by body and not exist. This couldn’t possibly be happening. He shaved my legs and as soon as he was done, I made another attempt to get away by just jumping out of the bathtub snatching a towel and saying that I was done. He replied by telling me I couldn’t leave because he I had to wash his back. So with the towel wrapped tightly around me I kneeled outside the side of the tub to wash his back. He started telling me I had to get back in the tub to wash his back. I couldn’t take it anymore, my fear of what was happening overtook my fear of being beat and I ran to my room as fast as I could, locked my door and dived face first onto my bed bawling. My step father ran after me banging on the door and saying terrible things. He yelled that we would never truly be like father and daughter and many other things that played on all my insecurities. I fell asleep bawling on my bed after he stopped banging and yelling on my door. When I woke up he acted like it never happened and went back to either ignoring me or loathing me whichever suited him at the time. This was just fine with me.

That wasn’t the first time that the lock on my door had saved me. First it had saved me from my little brother trashing my room. But many times it saved me from my step father. My mom and he would be fighting and often times I would hear him hitting her in their bedroom, which was down the hallway from mine. I would run to their room, throw open the door, and yell at him to stop hitting her. For some reason when he was in the middle of beating her, he wouldn’t stop and go after me. When I yelled and then ran back to my room and locked the door, he would stop hitting her and usually leave the house for hours. After I heard him leave I would always go to my mom to comfort her. She would tell me things about their fights that a kid shouldn’t hear and couldn’t begin to understand and in those moments like so many others I became the parent.

The second huge event that ended our dysfunctional family started before I even knew anything about it. Despite the abuse and dysfunction I naively thought that our family was normal that everyone lived like I did because I didn’t know any different. I learned later that my mother was getting increasingly worried about my stepfather’s intentions towards me. My mother had been molested by her own biological father while he was in a drunken stupor on many occasions in her childhood and she was finally worried about what could happen to me. Later she asked me on several occasions whether I had been touched by him and all I could tell her was no. I never told her about the bath incident because I was so ashamed and I didn’t think it would matter anyways. I had told her about being molested in the past and although it was years after it occurred I felt like she never did anything about it, even though there wasn’t much she could do after the fact.

The last day of our family was a normal day. Looking back now my mother probably had already started the process of leaving but I wasn’t aware that anything was occurring at the time. My grandmother was supposed to be arriving in two days for what I thought was a visit. My parents had been arguing for most of the day and into the evening. The tension in the air was electric. My stepdad finally snapped and began hitting her as they made there way throughout the house. It went on for what seemed like hours and escalated to a point where my mother was attempting to call the police. My stepdad yanked the phone cords out of the wall and blocked by mother from escaping the house. My mother began yelling for me to run to the neighbors and call the police but as I began to move from where my two year old brother and I had been sitting paralyzed for most of the night, my step father wrapped his hands around my mothers neck and screamed that it I left the house he would strangle her to death. I knew what he was capable of and I had no doubt in my mind that he would do just as he said. My brother was hysterically crying and screaming and my stepfather told me that I had better keep him quite. Out of my mind with fear I worked to calm my brother down as my step dad dragged by mom into the bedroom. As my brother fell asleep I heard my mothers screams, being smacked, thumped into the wall and finally her being raped by her own husband.

The next day my mother gathered up a few of our things and the next night was spent in a motel room. I don’t know if the man that shared the room with us was someone that my mother had already developed a relationship with or if my mother didn’t have money to get a room and saw this as a way to find us a place to stay but it was another shock to see my mother with another man. We had one room with two full size beds and that night we spent my brother and I in one bed and my mother and some stranger in the next. I was angry and confused. The next day we picked up my grandmother from the airport and went back to our house. The house was completely ransacked. Even my bedroom had not been spared. All of the cards that my mother and stepfather had given to one another over the years were piled up on the coffee table and had been destroyed and maimed just like their marriage. He had cut them up as well as many of our pictures. He was silent and sober and didn’t say anything as we gathered our things. I felt like my world was falling in on top of me. I didn’t know what would come next but no matter how dysfunctional, I felt like I had lost my family. I didn’t have many good memories but he was the only father I ever knew.