Innocence Lost Part3

My mother was pregnant! I was going to have a baby sister or brother. I was so excited! Imagine, I wasn’t going to be alone and a baby to play with, how fun! The months went quickly by as we lived with my aunt and I was in kindergarten. Every day that my mother’s stomach grew, I imagined having a baby help take care of. My mother went to have the baby and I was told that I had a sister! I was so excited the day that my mother was coming home from the hospital because that meant the baby would be coming home too. It was so hard to sit still that day at school and each second, minute, and hour felt like a million. I skipped quickly all the way to home from school. I ran into the house and asked my aunt where my mom and the baby were. She told me to go upstairs. Only at then I didn’t notice the expression on her face because I was exhilarated. The moment I had waited for, for so long had finally arrived and I was oblivious to anything else around me. I ran up the stairs as fast as I could, threw open the door, to the room and started searching for the baby. I saw my mother and step-dad sitting in bed and I ran to the crib and looked inside, the whole time asking, “Where is the baby? Where is the baby?” My mother started bawling and my step-father looked at me and bluntly said, “the baby is dead.” Once again my life was shaken to the very core. How much pain and tragedy could a five-year-old handle? No one could have prepared me? I wasn’t important enough? They knew the baby was sick. My sister Cecilia was born with so many birth defects that the doctors had told my mother she had two choices. One choice was to keep her alive on machines for as long as they could and she would inevitably die or to take her off the machines now and let her go without prolonging her pain. Now I realize that I was only five, but my sister lived for two days. Why was it so hard to consider my feelings and to prepare me for the loss? I saw my beautiful sister for the first and last time at the ripe old age of five years old when I was brought to her funeral. As a grown woman and now a mother I can’t begin to imagine the depth of the grief that my mother has experienced due to my sisters death. I only wished that there was an adult or family member that could have exercised the foresight to prepare me for the grief the five year old me experienced.





We moved from my aunts in Iowa. Away from the pain and the memories, and now we were in Texas. The first time I ever saw him hit her shook me to my core. I had been left at a friends house while my mom and step-dad were gone for most of the day. When they returned they were yelling and arguing so loudly that they decided to take it outside. I sat in the living room of the house trying to ignore the yelling but my heart was racing and if I wasn’t so afraid, I would have raced out of the house to make sure my mother was okay. Suddenly, the front door flew open as my mother struggled to get in the house and my step-dad grabbed her by the back of the neck and dragged her back out while her hands were reaching out and then slammed the door. My fragile security was crashing right before me, was this it? Was it over? Was he going to hurt her? Was she okay? That day she was okay. And guess what? He was so nice after that a least for a little while but isn’t that how they cycle works?

Punishments were the worst. Usually I would get whipped with the belt. I still believe that sometimes this is necessary but not to the extent that I experienced. But there were many times when being whipped would turn into being beat and worse. I remember one particularly traumatic instance when I was being punished for some infraction but now I can’t remember what it was. I hadn’t had a lot of toys and someone had given my mother a garbage bag full of used toys and in this bag was one of my favorite dolls in the whole world. Its’ body was made of hard plastic and its’ hair was tangled, matted, and blonde it was beautiful to me. The day I was punished I had been whipped with the belt until angry red raised welts appeared across my buttocks and upper thighs and then told to sit on the couch in the front room. While I sat muffling my cries in order to keep from being spanked again, I watched as my stepfather brought out my beautiful blonde nappy head doll. To my horror he placed the doll on the kitchen counter, took out a large knife, and made me watch as he cut my doll into pieces. Now at that age my imagination was great and that doll was my only companion in my solitude and misery. And as I watched him sawing at my doll it was as if he was cutting up my only friend.


We were on the move again. This time we were headed to California. This was the state that my step-dad was born and raised in and we were going to move there. We were filled with excitement at the prospect of starting brand new. My step-dad never mentioned family or parents but we were going to meet someone he considered his mother and father. He had met them as an adult and they kind of adopted one another. I hadn’t seen my grandma for a long time and I spent a lot of time crying for her and wishing I could be with her so I was so happy to have a new grandma and grandpa. I was told that they were german and that I could call them oma and opa. Oma and Opa owned a high performance auto shop and were thrilled to see my step-dad. They gave him a job right away and we stayed at there house until we got an apartment. Their house was beautiful and I loved it! Oma had some many beautiful collections. I would spend hours looking at all of her beautiful glass figurines. There were curio stands full of glass figurines shaped like every animal you could imagine. There were picture boxes full of silver spoons with the names of the states they came from on the handle. A lot of them were from Canada, which at that age, seemed like a very far away place. My oma kept a lot of toys at her house for her granddaughters, so it seemed like heaven with all the barbies and dolls there were to play with. Along with a new grandma and grandpa I acquired an aunt, uncle, and two cousins. I was insanely jealous of my cousins, Sarah and Rachel. It seemed like they had every toy a girl could want. They both had their own rooms, something I had never had. They had a father that they could climb in his lap and spent time with them. I never had that either. They were pretty and I felt like the ugly duckling. I wanted everything they had, I wanted their dad, and their grandma and grandpa, I wanted their life.