Painful Memories

My childhood was very chaotic. I only remember bits and pieces of it. My father was a hard-core alcoholic, and mean as a rattle snake when drinking. My mother and father would go out drinking and it never ended very well. I remember one night they came home, and they were fighting. It was so bad that my mother crawled in bed with my sister and I. She was trying to get away from my father. That wasn’t a good choice, because he threw a beer bottle at her, and it went whizzing past my head. I was only five or six at the time. I really didn’t understand what was going on. These incidents would go on for years, before my mother said she’d had enough.

I remember another time when my mother gathered all of us up in the middle of the night, and all we had on was white t-shirts and underwear. I’m not sure what my mother was thinking. We ran across a golf course, and ended up in some abandoned house. We stayed there for a week. My mother didn’t have any money, and we had no food.  My mother finally went back. These events would go on for a couple years until my mother FINALLY left for good. There were many more incidents, but I won’t go into those. 

We stayed with my aunt for a while. I remember my father showed up, and my mother had a loaded shotgun. She was going to shoot him,  but the gun jammed. My mother stuck to her promise, she wasn’t going back. Needless to say, these events damaged my psyche. I was a daddy’s girl and even though he was a total asshole, I still loved him. My father never came to visit us, and the one time he called he told my mother if she had sex with him he’d come and see us. That was my mother’s story. Not sure if she was telling the truth. We never saw my father again. He just disappeared off the face of the earth. We found out years later, when I was about 22 years old cancer got him, and he died all alone. It was during this time I decide to sacrife my autobiography, and tell how the earlier incidents affected my life. I will be brutally honest and I won't sugar coat my words. 

            We stayed with my aunt for three or four months, and then we moved to grandpa’s house. We lived there for about a year, with my Aunt Rosie and her three boys. It was a chaotic house full of love. Grandpa’s house was haunted and we all hated it. I was grandpa’s favorite and when he died, I cried and cried. I didn’t understand death, but I knew he wasn’t coming back. Grandpa bought mom a trailer down the hill from his house shortly before he died. It was in that trailer that my mental health problems really started. My mother and my Aunt Rosie liked to visit the local watering holes. This was an everyday thing, and we were often left alone. 

            Well mom decided she needed a man. He wasn’t any man, he was a married man. My sister who was about seven decided to bite his leg. I just got a creepy feeling about him, and I tried to avoid him. Well one night I'm not sure how I ended up alone with this man. That night he decided molesting me would be a good idea. This event sent me on a path to a long journey of mental health issues. I told good ole mom, she didn’t believe me. At some point they broke up, and my mother blamed me. I didn’t have a real good relationship with her for the rest of her life. My mother till the day she died never believed me.

       I had no support for this incident and it just ate at my insides. Great support mom, thanks. So, at the tender age of ten I learned to take care of myself. I am a middle child and being such, I was the odd man out. I have an older sister, who was mom’s favorite.  Then along came my older brother, and because he was the only boy, he got everything. Then I came along and then my baby sister.  She was the baby she got away with everything. I felt lonely a lot of times. I didn’t have any friends, because I was shy. I had my sister to hang out with, but she wasn’t always home.

            We moved to Watertown when I was 14 and I made some friends with the girls down the street. I think they had self-esteem issues themselves. We were all pretty chunky. I think for me it was a defense mechanism to keep away unwanted advances. It was during this time I met one of my brothers’ friends and we started dating. I had sex one time and got pregnant.  My mother forced me to go to some hack of a doctor to have an abortion. I was naïve and didn’t know I had a choice. Between the molestation and the abortion I was a mental case.  I had no support system and had to learn to deal with all these emotions. I cried a lot and got through it the best I could. It would affect me for the rest of my life.

          The piece of shit that got me pregnant was an abusive asshole. He would call me names, cheated on me, and physically abused me. One night he came home and I had a loaded shotgun pointed at the door. I was going to shoot him. I chose not to. I guess the apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree. Daughter like mother. So, like mommy I continued dealing with him for four years. It was during this time mommy. dearest had several mental breakdowns ,and blamed it on me and my sister. Really mom, but anytime something happened it was our fault. 

Another incident of control was when I was in nursing school, and dropped out with six months to go. The abusive asshole was jealous of the guy who would pick me up for school. It was easier to quit than continue the fighting. It was after a weekend with my older sister that my piece of shit boyfriend accused me of cheating on him. It was at this point I told him to go fuck himself. He kept hounding me and stalking me and he wouldn’t stop. One day I had enough and told my mother I wanted to join the military. We walked in the recruiting offices and the only recruiter there was the Navy. So, in August 1981 I joined the  delayed entry program. I reported for boot camp in January 1982.

Oh my Navy days were wild. The odds were in my favor, and I had my pick of all those gorgeous men. Next four or five years I slept my way around. I don’t know if it was because I could, or I was looking for someone to love me. I think it was the latter, but none of them worked out. Most were one-night stands. Alcohol was involved. I never drank before I joined the Navy, and let me tell you at one point I could have drank some of the best under the table. I’m sure I had a drinking problem, but just didn’t admit it.

I spent 16 ½ years in the Navy and I finally settled down. I drank only occasionally, but I was still single. I met my husband on line in a military chat room , during the haydays of AOL. It wasn’t love at first sight. He looked like he had anorexia, and that turned me off somewhat. I sent him packing, but we eventually got back together. We married in May 1997 and within the first month of being married I questioned my sanity. We both liked to drink, but he liked it a little more. It's when we were drinking that the fights would start. He was jealous of pictures of old boyfriends and all sorts of shit. We got out the military in 1998 when our son was born. The drinking just escalated on his side. I wasn’t drinking, because I had a child to take care off.

The first 10 years of my marriage was a nightmare. His drinking had escalated to the point he did it first thing in the morning, and all day long. His drink of choice was vodka, because you can’t smell it. I finally had enough of the drinking and verbal abuse, I was getting ready to take my kids and leave. He had some kind of ah-ha moment and decided to go to rehab. What a joy, or so I thought. Unknown to me he found another drunk in the rehab program that he had feelings for. So, when he got out of rehab he left us and started a relationship with this bitch.

Just like my mother before me, I’m an idiot and stayed married. He had a car accident where he was T-boned and broke several bones in his body. It was at this time he came back home for good ole me to nurse him back to health. During this time he admitted to having an affair. I went numb, like what the fuck? He found Jesus and it turned his whole life around. I forgave him, but I will never forget. Oft times we get into a fight and I throw that in his face. I never stepped outside the marriage. When I said I do I meant it.

Fast forward 27 years later we are doing great, but in the back of my mind I think about what he did. He isn’t abusive anymore, since he hasn’t touched a drink in over 15 years.

I sit and reflect on my life. My parents had a big influence on my life, whether I like it or not. The pattern I see is; I drank like a fish like my father,  and I had abusive relationships like my mother. I suffer from depression like my mother, but unlike mother I take medication to help the chemical imbalance in my brain.

Happily, for me my life has turned around. When my husband and I found God, it was an answer to prayer. With God anything is possible. We now live happily ever after. I am a warrior and will succeed.