My Story: The Little Kid Who Never Looked Up

When I was a child, at first, I had a mother, a father, two brothers, and two sisters. There were seven of us in all. We all lived in the same house together. By any reasonable understanding of the definition of family, we should have been a close-knit group of people. A strange thing about my family, however, or perhaps just about myself, was that my brothers and sisters never played with me or spent any time at all with me. I never had a conversation with any of them. They were all away from home every day or in their rooms.

I was not allowed to leave the one-acre property we lived on, and for a time, I didnt have a bedroom, but instead, my bed was in a narrow hallway, even though there were enough bedrooms in the house for each of us children and my parents to have our own individual bedrooms. My mother forbid me to play with children in the neighborhood and at school. She did not want me to speak aloud ever, to anyone, period. So I didnt. I was mute at home, mute on the school bus, and mute in school. I was terrified of the beating and screaming that would happen if I spoke to the teachers or other children. My mother had one other rule: I was never to go near a telephone or be left alone in a room with a telephone, under any circumstances. My father never spoke to me, and like my mother, he also had the rule that I was never to speak. When he was in a room, I had to be in another room or outside hiding somewhere. Usually I would hide by lying down on the ground in some weeds in the field behind the barn, for entire days. I would lay in the weeds, playing with little pieces of sticks to pass the time, and eating the weeds because food was not regularly available. I would sneak back into the house after dark and hope he didnt see me. Sometimes at night I would sneak down to the kitchen to get a spoonful of flour or a really small raw potato that I hoped no one would notice went missing, because I hadnt eaten that day, and probably hadnt eaten the day before either. I discovered very early in life that if my father was within arms length of me, he would hit me, just to let me know I wasnt supposed to be anywhere near him. Though he never spoke to me, I can clearly remember him yelling once, Get that thing out of here! That thing was me. I will never know if it is true or not, but my mother told me in one of her screaming tirades when I was young that my father tried to kill me as a baby by holding a pillow over my face to suffocate me.

I dont know if my brothers and sisters ever played with each other or spent time together during their childhoods. I know that my sisters were in a 4-H club for rural children, had after-school band practice, horse shows where they took their ponies and horses, and they had other animals such as chickens, sheep, pigeons, and rabbits, some of which they may have entered in state fair animal judging contests. My sisters had friends and were allowed to leave the property. My oldest brother had his own vehicle, a large delivery van, and went out driving in it. He wasnt around home much. Im pretty sure he had friends, though I never saw them. My other brother, a little younger than me, was allowed to have friends, go play with them, talk out loud, and be a child.

I thought my siblings stayed away from me because there was something horribly wrong with me. My mother told me that I was evil, filled with demons, and the cause of all evil in the world, and she had to physically beat me and go into hours-long screaming tyrades to get the demons to come out of my evil body. If she could just beat me enough, planes would stop crashing, the neighbors would stop ostracizing her for the crazy things she was constantly doing, my father would agree with her on everything and not try to have her committed to a mental hospital, and the world would somehow be a magical place with her as its center. It is no exaggeration that it felt like everyone hated me when I was a child, and that I was this offensive subhuman thing that was not supposed to exist. In hindsight, I was a normal child who didnt look weird or act weird or say weird things, but for whatever reason, I was treated as if I was guilty of all of these things. I would describe myself at the time as being shy, timid, having strawberry-blonde hair, and slightly stunted growth from starvation, but otherwise a fairly typical child with a normal I.Q.

When I was twelve years old, everything changed. My two oldest siblings disappeared. I later learned they ran away from home, and I guess they stayed at the homes of friends or something like that until they reached adulthood, but I dont really know for sure. My mother had me and my remaining brother and sister barricade ourselves in one of the bedrooms for a night. The next day, when we came home from school, there was a taxi waiting for us, and my mother abducted us. Abducted is the right word, because I think that my father was quite possibly going to have my mother legally declared an unfit parent and sent to a state mental hospital, so my mother got us into the cab and thus began the journey from one part of hell into another. My mother had a huge handbag-style purse with her, and concealed in it were quite a few bottles of prescription drugs and a big kitchen knife. When she had me away from my brother and sister for a brief moment, she told me that I was always the troublemaker, and that I would go with her in the cab or my father would kill me or she would use the knife, which she showed to me, to kill me. Had I any clue about what was about to begin in my life, that very moment I would have run and run and run until I reached a neighbors house or I found a hiding place.

Oddly, I cannot remember what the taxi driver looked like. I guess I must have kept my eyes pointed at the floor where I was in the back seat of the vehicle, as I was accustomed to doing. I didnt look up at things or people because whenever I did that, I would be hit in the head by my mothers big purple fist. Everywhere I went, I kept my eyes pointed down. I was the little kid who never looked up.


The above is a small part of my experiences during the formative childhood years of life. I would like to know your story, too, if you are someone who was abused as a child -

Announcing a new group on the Daily Strength Website:

A Child Abuse Survivors Group

If you were abused as a child, and are now are separated from the circumstances of your abuse, but continue to suffer from unpleasant memories, flashbacks, nightmares, post-traumatic stress disorder, have difficulty functioning in society, feel alone and friendless, feel 'different' from everyone else and have trouble fitting in, are living in poverty, sometimes wonder if you are human at all, or are experiencing other difficulties stemming from abuse, neglect, abandonment, torture, verbal abuse, physical abuse, etc., that occurred during your childhood or teenage years, you are invited to join this group.

To visit the group homepage now, please click on the link here:
www.dailystrength.org/groups/achildabusesurvivorsgroup