I have always had trouble remembering the times before I was young. Whether it be the amazing trips I got to go on or even what I wore and the fashion trends I never remembered or I never realized I wasn’t noticing. My life growing up wasn’t about the materialistic thing sit was more about the embarrassment I would go through whether it be about my family, or me in general. I would hate how I would come home after school and unlike everyone else. I always knew I was less than other people, I didn’t look like them, act like them, nor did I try to be like the people who we looked up to in life. I didn’t have the opposite sex coming after me and when the first one did he destroyed me. It all started with that one guy who finally gives you attention and you look back and you realize how much of an idiot you were. But I have realized at the age of 15, everything happens for a reason.
When I was just under two years old my own mother was beaten, for mistakes I had apparently made. My father never wanted a child after my brother, and sometimes you have to think maybe he was right. Maybe if my mom did believe in abortion like my father then I wouldn’t be here and people then wouldn’t have to deal with my issues or how I feel. After I was born my mother’s life drastically went downhill somehow worse than before her life before my father. One day my father beat my mother so hard she just passed out. Nothing to her and there was just me and my brother unable to know, or understand anything. My grandmother stepped in and of course took us into her St. Augustine home. Where we lived the next year or so with my nana, my mom, my brother, my two aunts, and one of their boyfriend’s now my uncle. After working awhile my mother met my stepfather, from that point . it changed. I should explain my mother is somewhat like the young me, believes in love and falls easily to the things that give her the attention. Little did she know she opened the door to a 17 year long abusive relationships. If you ask her she will always say “the first ten was never bad, it was the point that I messed up that he felt he had all the control.”
My mother back in the early 2000’s would book us trips to Hawaii, Vegas, and New York. my step father never caring for where the money came from, he had his mind too deep in the bottle to know anything. She built up thousands of dollars in debt, where it ruined her credit score. From there on he cheated on, never went to anything my brother and I did, and became worse and worse of an alcoholic. In and out of rehab multiple times, at one point flew him all the way to Arizona to a specialized treatment where he didn’t stay sober when he got back and soon after is when my mother started to realize something was wrong. When he got back, he was fired, kicked my 18 year old brother out of the house even though he was the one attempting to hit my brother. What 18 year old young man has a place to live, none. My brother went to live with my grandma and has been with her since. I love my brother so much, and my mom knew it would make me mad about hearing this so she hid it from me. While I was at college I never went home, I loved being in Jacksonville. One weekend I went home and she told me and I was so bad. This 60 something year old drunk just ran my brother off. It was a long weekend and I didn’t go back until I had to that next summer. My mom was on the last verge of leaving my stepfather. I was basically babysitting this man while my mom was out of town for a week. By day 3 I had called the ambulance twice because he was falling over drunk. I don’t have the capabilities of lifting 250 pounds by myself, and at that point one day he was asleep and I took a car and I left. I had nothing with me so what did I do, I went to my nana’s where she wasn’t home. My aunt was there and she looked at me and just knew I wasn’t sleeping. She looked at me and pulled me to the back and asked me what was wrong where I broke into tears. Explaining how bad it was and how I was at the hospital all day before. I didn’t sleep at night and when I did eventually I would get woken up by screams of a man saying “help.” I understand I wasn’t a child, but its traumatizing. So later that afternoon we had figured he would be asleep they drove me to my house and they came in with me and watched me grab enough clothes for 2 weeks or at least until my mom got back. I called my mom and explained and at this point she was not ready to loose both children for the act of this one man. She returned days later and I picked her up from the airport where I drove her back home and she then grabbed things for her just what she needed until she could think about what to do next. She spent all summer thinking about what to do. I was begging for her to leave him. I couldn’t spend one more night in that home. She did decide to leave him around September, of course I was back in school at this point and she didn’t talk to me much. My family said very often to me ” we worry about you” and at tat point I don’t think they needed to be concerned. At least not as much as they should be for what was soon to come. It was a Monday Morning, and my mom called me which is weird because she should have been at work and it startled me and I thought something was wrong. I answered and she asked me what my plans were, I had said had night class but nothing else really too concerning. She asked if she could take me to lunch and I started to question her why she wasn’t at work. She just kept saying she took a personal day. She pulled up to my dorm where I climbed in and I looked at her and she started crying. She told me that night before the police had gone out to the same home I had begged to not be returned to, where they found my step dad in his bed no longer alive.
This man who I hated and loved so much was dead. It was my first death to someone close to me. I threw up as soon as she told me and bawled my eyes out, I couldn’t breath, think or speak. I wanted to run far away and not look back. Two months later I found a voicemail from his phone where he called me one night in September and he just had to apologize for how he was when I was growing up. He told me he would always love me no matter what happened in life, and I hope he knew I always loved him too. He was my father, the man who taught me things, he was the father I had always wanted even though he did so many bad things. So this life lesson I have had to learn since a year after his passing is you always take the chance. You always buy that ticket to a new place, you buy that thing you’ve always wanted because you never know when that/ if that chance will come again.
Life Blog 