by Band Back Together | Dec 4, 2010 | Anger, Anxiety, Baby Loss, Coping With Baby Loss, Grief, Guilt, Help For Grief And Grieving, How To Cope With Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Livng Through A Miscarriage, Loss, Love, Miscarriage, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Sadness |
I have never spoken to anyone about this but my husband, my mother, and, of course, my doctors. This may be one of the hardest things I will ever write. It may not all make sense. I don’t remember it all. But yet I remember it like it was yesterday. I will never forget it. This is my PTSD talking. I am in a very bad place right now. And I know what happened to me isn’t as bad as some but to me it’s worse because she was mine.
Anyway, Oh God here goes…
You were due December 25th. I was so excited that both of your sisters were Christmas babies. I love Christmas. And I still do. Your due date was so amazing I couldn’t believe it – three children born on or around Christmas.
The beginning of my pregnancy didn’t seem out of the ordinary. Normal morning all day sickness for me. Around 6 weeks something felt off I called my Doctor who is AMAZING, and she got me right in for an ultrasound. There you were – perfect. And fine. Little heart beating to beat the band with a due date of Dec. 25th. I felt better. Things resumed. We got to our 12th week and we told everyone and even started buying things. Come on – you were my fourth baby. What could go wrong? How could I even think that?? Everything was fine .
Then it happened. July 27th I felt yucky and my back hurt SO bad. I should have called the doctor. You might be here today. I should have known. But I just thought I worked hard that day. It was hotter than hell. And it was just a back ache. I never ever had back labor. At 2:12 on July 28th, I woke up and thought, “shit, I wet the bed.” I hit my husband and said, “I wet the bed. Go get new sheets.” And then I went to turn the lights on. And it felt really off. It was sticky. I turned the light on and there was blood everywhere. I heard a sound like I had never heard before – it was my screams. I told my husband call the doctor and tell her we’re going to the hospital. Something was very very wrong.
My mom came running in and tried to calm me, but it didn’t help. I remember telling her keep the kids out. I didn’t want them to see the blood. And my back – OMG the pain. All the sudden I felt a pop between my legs and there was a “doll” between my legs – it didn’t seem real. I thought WTF is that about my own baby. I saw your little chest heaving up and down. You were breathing!!!!!!!
I screamed for my husband to stop calling the doctor. We had to leave NOW. She’s here. She’s ALIVE. She’s breathing.
You were 18 weeks and 5 days. You were perfect – tiny and waxy, but perfect. You breathed for 5 minutes. I held you in my hand as you took you first and last breaths. I will never forget them. I loved you so much in those 5 minutes. You were my daughter, Ariel Grace.
But the horror didn’t come until we got to the hospital. You WEREN’T a baby. You were nothing. You were – I choke on the words now. You were a miscarriage. But I saw you and I held you. You WERE breathing for 5 minutes. I have a cell video of it. But you were going to be discarded as if it was a miscarriage. I flipped out like my husband has never seen me flip out. I screamed and I wailed. I hit a doctor, I think. Not my doctor. She was AMAZING. She held me while I rocked the baby. She stroked my hair. She couldn’t change the policy.
You would never exist to the world. You would get no birth certificate and no death certificate. But to me and your father, siblings and grandparents you were EVERYTHING!
I made my uncle call his friend at a funeral home. He kind of laughed – not in a mean way but he told my uncle, “She’s not even as big as a cat. I can’t charge. I won’t. It’s a freebie.” I have her ashes. Although that was a HELL of a fight. But I think they knew I was a mad woman and I would not leave that hospital without MY baby.
I have her ashes hidden in my room. I left the hospital the next day with nothing. No baby, no belly, no nothing. I was empty and blank and a Zombie for a LONG time. Hell, I still am. I never mentioned it to anyone. Some people asked questions. I think I probably stared at them blankly. But I never answered. My husband or mother would later. I couldn’t talk about it. It’s over a year later and the pain is still unreal. I have nightmares of waking up to the blood every five minutes. I don’t know that they will ever go away. But what is the worst for me is I can’t talk about her to anyone but my husband, mother and therapists.
Am I forgetting her, am I not remembering her, am I cold? I just it hurts so bad. And no one that I personally know can understand that pain. No one I know in real life understands my anger and bitterness of her not being a baby because she was 18 weeks and 5 days and not a viable birth. Isn’t breathing for 5 minutes viable? Had we been at the hospital could we have made it farther my AMAZING doctor thinks that those 5 minutes were pretty darn special. And so do I for a baby with such under developed lungs.
Obviously now everyone knows she was never born and just went away. People have stopped asking questions. And I just can’t talk about it. I feel cold. And I miss her even more now. I don’t know that it will get better. She wasn’t a “real” living baby. But she was mine. I held her. I named her. I talked to her. And on her birthday I buy her a gift. I guess that really does make me crazy. Maybe I’ll stop someday. I don’t know. But I guess tonight on one of my darkest of nights, this needed to come out. Thank you for listening. No one else knows. And it hurt to talk about. A LOT so this was BRAVE. So thank you for reading.
by Band Back Together | Oct 12, 2010 | Anger, Feelings, Grief, Infertility, Loss, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Sadness |
Sometimes you don’t even realize what you have been running from, or for how long.
Until the night (why is it always at night?) it knocks you down, sits on your chest and forces you to stare directly into the eye of the storm. The night when you turned your head too casually and found it, there, staring at you from your peripheral. Angry for being ignored, pained for not being nurtured.
It is on this night that you pay for the days, months, (years in my case) of composure, the relief you have culled from choosing to ignore your demons.
And oh, I paid dearly.
Six years ago, I woke up from anesthesia an altered woman.
I have never allowed myself to mourn what I lost that day and how much of my soul has been scraped away since. I have been too busy ‘looking forward’ and ‘moving on’ and ‘being thankful’. I have kept a smile on my face and I have continued to placate myself with thoughts of ‘it could be so much worse’ (it could) and ‘I still have more than others’ (I do). But last night night, I was not thinking of how much worse it could be, but how bad it is, not caring that I don’t have it as bad as others because my situation is looking worse by the day.
And it all fell down. My feelings of frustration and inadequacy. My overwhelming pain over never being able to do what I always thought I would and could do.
It honestly became exhausting to hold down my feelings about losing part of my body, of being let down for the past four years by other parts of it. My arms and my heart gave out from the weight of it all. I have been holding my hand over that little girl’s mouth for too long but last night she was allowed to wail and cry and stomp her feet for what she has lost. For the life she felt promised, but was never and may never be fulfilled. For being the exception to the rule and for being held at arms length from almost every goal she ever set for herself.
Today, yes, I will try to get back to my zen, a place of acceptance and a place where I can build from.
Last night though, was about how much has been lost and destroyed.
by Band Back Together | Oct 10, 2010 | Anger, Anxiety, Birth Defects, Birth Trauma, Encephalocele, Fear, Feelings, Generalized Anxiety Disorder Resources, Hope, How To Cope With Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Loneliness, Medical Mystery Tour, Neural Tube Defects, NICU, PICU, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Sadness, Stress, Trauma |
Hear my prayer, hear my prayer, hear my prayer, please God, hear my prayer.
I instinctively checked the monitors as I approached my daughter who was sprawled out, getting a sunbath underneath the warmer. Her stats were picture perfect, I noticed, breathing a little more easily, and I made my way slowly to her bedside where she was sleeping peacefully.
I slogged my soggy bottom from the wheelchair onto the rocker that had been shoved into her tiny NICU room; barely even a room, more like a broom closet. She was sandwiched in between two misbehaving (“misbehaving” means that their alarms were constantly blaring) babies who I could hear misbehaving.
Most of the NICU, I noted as I was wheeled past, was full of Feeders and Growers. That’s NICU slang for babies that were, for whatever reason, finishing their gestation outside of the womb. It”s always evoked a pleasant picture of a garden of freshly hatched babies. A Baby Garden.
Of the other babies that I could see cooking away merrily in their incubators, Amelia was the biggest, fattest, and likely the only full- term baby there.
According to her room placement, though, she was the most ill.
Hear my prayer, hear my prayer, hear my prayer, please God, hear my prayer.
My ass firmly planted now onto the chair (I’d had a traumatic vaginal birth mere hours before), I held Amelia’s lone sock as a talisman, hoping it would ward off the Bad News. I was preparing to nurse my daughter again, just waiting for our nurse to come and help me sort through the tangle of wires my daughter was attached to.
It was hard to believe only thirty or so minutes had passed since we’d heard “there’s something sinister on your daughter’s CT scan.”
Our–Amelia’s–nurse walked in and introduced herself to The Daver and I. I was openly weeping, holding onto Mimi’s sock and my iPhone – where the Pranksters live!- as a life preserver. The Daver was pale(r) and stalwart.
I handed off the box of Kleenex that had been pressed onto my lap as we left Mother/Baby and my daughter was brought back to me, hooked up to so many wires that she looked like an electrical outlet. The nurse stood there, kindly talking to us, but not revealing anything.
We still had no idea what was wrong with our daughter. A diagnosis would take weeks. Her life, as far as we knew, hung in the balance.
I begged the nurse to have the house neonatologist visit my daughter as the pediatric neurosurgeon was busily operating on someone’s head somewhere other than the NICU. It’s probably good I didn’t know where he was or I’d have stalked him down and dragged him to my daughter for a diagnosis.
The neonatologist – the one I’d met a lifetime ago in the delivery room, the guy who was always drinking a bottle of something – he came over to Amelia’s “room” and he told us that there was a “bright spot” on Amelia’s CT Scan. He didn’t mean diamonds.
I had no fucking clue what that meant and he didn’t follow it up with much, although I did see his lips move, I couldn’t understand his words.
Guess that’s panic for you.
After the doctor left, the nurse came back in to ask if we’d wanted to see the chaplain; rather to have Amelia meet the chaplain. A thousand times yes.
She was amazing. Just. Incredible. For the next year, it was her words, her warmth and compassion that I kept coming back to. She blessed my daughter. My daughter was blessed.
And she is so, so blessed.
We sat there in the NICU; just the three of us. I couldn’t tell you how long we just sat. Time in the ICU is timeless. 4 AM and 4PM are the same.
Soon enough, I had to go upstairs to change my undergarments and ready myself to see my boys. My sister-in-law was bringing my sons to visit, and I had to put on my Poker Face. Given the raw, chapped and bleeding state of my cheeks, was going to be damn near impossible.
Back in my room, I saw that I’d gotten some flowers and a basket from two of my Pranksters and it made me cry. Then again, I think the package of Saltines that had been ruthlessly thrown on the floor the night before might have made me cry. I wasn’t in a Good Place.
Alex and Ben came in a bit after I’d gotten cleaned up. I held Alex very, very close as Ben showed me some pictures he’d colored of Amelia. Ben knew his sister was sick but Alex (only 22 months old) had no idea what a “sister” was, let alone what being “sick” meant. I held them and faked normal until I got the call from the NICU. Time to nurse the baby.
Talk about being torn.
I cried as I said goodbye to my youngest son–my eldest just wanted to get home and I couldn’t find fault with that–and he cried and yowled “Mooommmmyyy” as he was led away to the elevators that would dump him back into the outside world.
By myself for the first time, I tearfully found my way back to the Secret Place, The Land of Tears. Never have I felt so sick to my stomach in my life. People stared sympathetically as I wept in the elevator, leaning against the walls for support.
I begged God to let her live, even if she was retarded and her IQ was 43 and had to live at home for the rest of her life, just please let my baby girl live. I didn’t care what was wrong with her so long as she made it out alive. I begged God to take me instead. I’d had 28 wonderful years on the planet already, and she was less than 24 hours old. Certainly, I’d give my life to save her in a moment.
Hear my prayer, hear my prayer, hear my prayer. Please God, hear my prayer.
After scrubbing the top 50 layers of skin from my arm and signing a reasonable facsimile of my name, I wobbled to her bedside. There she was, my girl. Perfect stats, thrashing about her isolette, pissed as hell and looking for something to eat.
In the brief time I’d been gone we’d gotten a new nurse.
When she came in to assess my daughter and saw me crying as I nursed my girl, for the first time in a day, someone asked me what was wrong. I explained that I didn’t know if my daughter would live or die. I told her that no one had told us what could be wrong with her, what that bump COULD be, why she was in the NICU, nothing.
She looked pretty aghast that we’d been told nothing, and for the first time, someone tried to reassure us. I remember leaving the NICU several hours later slightly less burdened.
That night, we ordered a pizza and tried to relax in my somber room. We tried to let go of some of The Fear. I didn’t feel much like celebrating anything, so no balloons, no stuffed animals, no signs that I had just given birth decorated my room. I could have been on any floor, in any room in the hospital.
The nurse brought me my Ambien and the NICU called to tell me that they would bring my daughter up to nurse every 2 hours (the NICU runs like clockwork. It’s no wonder that new parents struggle to care for their NICU graduate when they get home). I turned on the sound machine to blast white noise over The Daver’s snores, and waited, trying to fall asleep.
Unsurprisingly to no one, I couldn’t get anywhere close to sleep that night. This made the tally of nights without sleep 3.
I was about to lose it.
Somewhere around 4 AM, after someone had barged into my room to empty the wastebasket, waking me from the lightest of light sleep, I panicked. I’d sent Dave down to the NICU to sit with our daughter in the vain hope that having him at her side would set my mind free.
I was alone. The panic that had been a constant dull buzzing had morphed into something much more sinister and I knew what was about to happen.
Frantically, I paged the nurses station because I knew I needed help. I explained as carefully as I could that I was about to have a panic attack and that I needed my nurse NOW. My nurse came in, I don’t remember what she did, but she didn’t want to call my doctors because they would be rounding in a couple of hours and I could ask for something for my anxiety then.
Fucking bitch.
She told me to “relax” and then left.
I tried to “relax” which was as useful as punching myself in the face with a hammer. It didn’t work. I put a call back into the nurses station, begging; pleading with them to call my doctor. I begged for help.
My last rational thought was to quickly inventory anything in the room with any sort of calming properties. The best I could come up with was a bottle of Scope.
I didn’t end up drinking it, but I did call the NICU and beg Dave to come back up. A nurse passing by my room took pity on me and called my doctor, who prescribed me an Ativan. A swarm of people all happened to come into my room at the same time: a partner in my OB practice who looked terrified by me but discharged me anyway, a nurse with that beautiful pill, a tech to get my vitals, and my husband.
It sounds, in retelling this, that they were all there to help, but it wasn’t really like that. Dave and the nurse were trying to calm me down, but the tech, the doctor and whomever was washing the floor were doing their jobs. With spectacularly bad timing.
Ativan on board now, I was trying to gulp some calming breaths and stave off the panic. They’d turned off the lights, and covered my still-swollen body with fresh sheets, cleaned off the bedside table and turned on the white noise machine.
Finally, I began to relax and beat the panic away, if only slightly. Dave held my hand and told me over and over and over again that my daughter was just fine, she was perfect, she was wonderful, she’d done great overnight, she was beautiful, she was going to be just fine. It was soothing to hear, but what would have been MORE soothing? Having her bassinet next to my bed where it belonged instead of three floors below.
Then (dun, dun, DUN), the absolute worst person to show up did.
Lactation services.
Lactation Services showed up, because they say they’ll come by every day you’re in the hospital with a new baby, and they do. It’s awesome for people who need help because breastfeeding is nowhere NEAR as easy as it looks on those weird Lamaze videos.
(also: why are people in the Lamaze videos always naked?)
But I didn’t need help. And when she showed up and saw me shaking in bed, being held by my husband while the nurse clucked around me like a mother hen, lights off, white noise blaring, she should have excused herself. This is not a debate about breast and bottle feeding, this is about decency. But no, she didn’t get the hint.
No.
She introduced herself perkily and asked me how breastfeeding was going, and through clenched teeth, I answered that it was fine. Kinder than the situation warranted.
I expected this to be enough for her, but no, she followed that up with, “Do you have any concerns about breastfeeding?” Wrong question, dipshit. Time, place, all that.
“You know what?” I snarled, “I’m MUCH MORE concerned that my baby is going to die than if I have proper latch, okay?”
Again, she could have gracefully bid be farewell. But no. She kept on keeping on.
“Well, what about your concerns with BREASTFEEDING?” She asked, just not getting it.
I responded with, “Look, if she’s dead, I’m not going to give a FUCK about colostrum, okay? Please!”
I began to sob heavily again. It was the very real truth that my daughter could die. We all knew it. Nursing her wasn’t going to help an encephalocele.
Dave told her to get the fuck out of our room.
Finally, with a DO NOT DISTURB sign on my door, I slept for a few hours.
I awoke when The Daver bounded in and announced, “the neurosurgeon ordered an MRI! And he’s really nice! And not concerned! He thinks it’s an encephalocele! It’s a piece of brain or something that’s herniated out! We can go home after the MRI! And follow up with the results next week! Oh, I wish you’d met him. He was so, so nice.”
And just like that, we went from critical to discharged in less than 36 hours.
by Band Back Together | Sep 20, 2010 | NICU, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Special Needs Parenting |
The first time I saw a brain, a real brain, suspended in some greenish liquid at the front of my gross anatomy lab, I stood there, staring at it for a good long while. I was long past being disgusted by the organs of the human body, and seeing the folds of the creamy white tissue struck me only with a sense of wonder. This was it, right there: all that you were, all that you thought, all that made you you was right there in that innocuous looking organ.
Really, it could have been a football for as glamorous as it looked.
But to know how it worked, studying the nuances of neurology, that is poetry. All of the mysteries that we still do not know about how the synapses fire to make one person want to maim and dismember and one person want to paint the Sistine Chapel, that is beauty. The smooth folds folding seamlessly into each other made up separate and distinct parts of the brain and instinctively I rattled them off in my head as I examined the brain in the jar: the cerebral cortex, responsible for how we are feeling, our emotions. Those that make someone laugh or weep, smile or scream, right there.
The parietal lobe, which is how we use all of our senses at once to make decisions, the back of the head responsible for sight, the very sense I was using to examine the brain I was so enthralled by. Without it, I wouldn’t be able to drive a car, see the deep brown of my son’s eyes, the bright red of the fall leaves outside of the classroom. One by one, I observed all of these structures on that brain, carefully preserved in formalin in a jar labeled ABBY NORMAL.
How could something that looked like a Nerf ball be so mystifying and so shockingly resplendent in it’s simplicity at the same time? Something that made each of us who we are should have looked unique, special, like a jewel and somehow, the more brains I saw, the more I realized that they all looked pretty much the same.
Maybe it’s what we do with those hunks of white matter that contains the beauty, because with the exception of the cerebellum (which is surprisingly beautiful), it’s a highly understated organ, especially when compared to something flashy like the kidneys.
When my daughter was born with part of her brain hanging jauntily out of the back of her head, the doctors pretty much shrugged their shoulders when we asked what that meant about her future. While she showed no signs of neurological damage, she could be profoundly normal or profoundly retarded, it simply wasn’t something that could be determined by a blood test or an MRI.
Up until she was a year old, Amelia was followed by Early Intervention, who came every couple of months, tested her, declared her normal and left. When she turned a year, I figured it was probably time to let them close the case on her for now and promise to make a call back if something changed. I know the drill with special needs kids well enough, and her medical diagnosis is an immediate qualifier for assistance.
It’s taken me until now to realize that there is actually something wrong with her beautiful brain.
Amelia has no words.
She has no words.
No glorious words, the very thing that I make my (pathetic) living from, she has none. I’ve always derived so much happiness in putting together combination of words to titillate, horrify, or move people, and she has not one word.
She’s had words before, they’ve slipped out of her mouth for a couple of days until it appears that she forgets them and goes back to shrieking and grunting to get her point across. In many ways, this terrifies me more than seeing my mute autistic son did, because it seems as though she has words, then loses them again.
It’s time to call the specialists back in and help my daughter find her words.
For good, this time.
I have a lot of delicious combinations to teach her.
by Band Back Together | Sep 18, 2010 | Abuse, Addiction, Adult Children of Addicts, Blended Families, Bone Cancer, Child Abuse, Emotional Abuse, Homelessness, Hospice, How To Cope With Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, How To Help A Loved One Who Self-Injures, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Psychological Manipulation, Self Injury, Self-Destructive Behavior, Suicide |
every time i try to start a post for this new community, i erase it and start over. i literally do not know where to begin.
i am an addict. i am a cutter. i am clinically depressed. i have ptsd. i have anxiety disorders. i am the child of an alcoholic. i was physically and emotionally abused. i couldn’t stop my friend from being raped. i went to my first funeral at the age of 5. my parents are divorced. i have had 16 suicide attempts. i have a younger brother and he is my best friend. i have an awesome husband, and he is my other best friend. i have sold drugs. i have had sex for payment. i was on welfare. i have had sex in a church parking lot. i have done cocaine off the back of a public toilet. i have cheated, lied, stolen, broken, taken, left a path of destruction around me.
but i am here. i don’t know what to make of that most days. am i a survivor? a survivor of what? of life?
life should be lived, not survived. you survive a disease. you survive in battle. you survive an accident. you don’t ‘survive’ life.
i guess this is as good of a place as any to start: i’m fucking crazy. batshit crazy. yes, you read that right. i own my craziness. but i don’t know what to do about it. i take my pills, i blog (which is my new free therapy), i exercise, i try to be a productive adult. and i fool most people. the pills help, they do. but it’s like lying under the surface, there’s always this blackness waiting to grab me and pull me under again.
i’m always treading water: surviving.
i don’t know why i’m crazy. i know that outside factors have not always helped. my dad was a highly functioning, non-abusive alcoholic. we left when i was 6. i got a new step mom when i was 7. and my mom found a new boyfriend when i was 9. we moved in with him when i was 10.
that first summer, he was home sometimes during the day. mom was at work, brother was at daycamp or some shit. i don’t remember why it happened, but i do remember the first time he hit me. it was kind of like a spanking. i was a bit old for that at ten, and had something to say about it. he told me that my mother had said he could discipline us, and she knew that he was hitting me.
so i didn’t say anything.
when i was 11, he flung a heavy piece of thick plexiglass at me while i was sitting on the stairs. i jumped down, and the plexiglass broke the banister. he would call me names – tell me i was fat, i was a whore, i was stupid, i was ugly. he would hit me. my mother finally noticed something was wrong, that i was acting out. she did the right thing and called a child psychologist.
i went to the psychologist three times. back then, i didn’t know what she told my mom or why i stopped going. now i know: she told my mom that i was a pathological liar. i was not being hit or abused by my stepfather – i was making it all up for attention. my mother was told to continue disciplining me, but not to give me that attention that i supposed was acting out for. i had no idea.
then he started getting me high. he first offered me pot when i was 12. he supplied me until i was 18. i was high for six years. and it didn’t help.
he was a functioning alcoholic. he almost never seemed drunk, and i didn’t even always register it. we’d smoke a joint in the basement, then each grab a beer while he cooked dinner. we’d be friends for that time. but it never lasted. i stopped respecting him because of the way he treated me. so i started mouthing off to him. he threw a pot of cooked rice at me at the dinner table one night. my mom saw it, but what she saw was me goading him into doing it. in reality, i just didn’t care anymore. i ran away about once a week. he would follow me outside to the gate, tell me he loved me like i was his own daughter, please come back inside.
i would.
one time, i walked out to clear my head after a confrontation. i must have been 14 or 15. when i came back in, he said, ‘i thought you were running away’. i told him i just went for a walk, but i’d leave if he wanted me to. he got mouthy with me, i got mouthy with him, and he threw a butcher knife at me. in front of my mother. i left then, and stayed at a friend’s that night. i called home five times, hanging up every time he answered. finally, my mom picked up and i told her where i was.
his defense to my mom was that if he wanted to hit me with the knife, he wouldn’t have missed.
one time, i told him i’d call the cops on him. he got in my face, and told me he’d already been in jail, it didn’t scare him. they’d never believe me anyway – i was crazy. i told him if he ever touched my mother or my brother, i would kill him or die trying.
he never did lay a hand on them. only me.
one night at dinner, he shoved our wrought iron table into my ribs multiple times, bruising two of them. we just kept eating. he told me he wanted to get some mushrooms (not the cooking kind). i could get them, but my source wanted my stepdad to roll blunts for him. he agreed, and my source gave me cigars to be rolled. my step dad showed them to my mom, said he’d found them in my room (he had – in my underwear drawer. he routinely went through my things) and that i needed to be punished. he made me eat the cigar. and when i wasn’t eating it fast enough, he lit it and exhaled the smoke into a plastic bag. he then made me hold the bag over my nose and mouth for what seemed like three or four minutes.
i spent the night vomiting in my room. i never got him the ‘shrooms.
i tried to put the iced tea back in the fridge one night. he got within arms length of me. by this time, i was 16 and had a panic attack when he got that close to me. i started yelling at him to get away from me. he trapped me behind the fridge door and shouted at me. i started screaming obscenities at him. he hocked a loogie in my eye. when i ran screaming to the bathroom to take out my contacts, he followed me and threw me across the bathroom. i bruised my lower and mid back on the side of the tub when i fell in.
he threw me out when i stole $1000 from him. i thought it was his, but it was actually the rent money for our house. he took everything i owned – all my artwork, paintings, sculptures, and threw them out. he got rid of my bed. he dumped all my clothes into plastic garbage bags, and emptied an ash tray into each bag. i ended up with two laundry baskets full of clothing, my senior year english notebook, two sketchbooks, and some cd’s. i lived in my car for a few weeks, sleeping over friend’s houses when i could – but most were away at college. my boyfriend’s mom took pity on me, and let me move in. until his grandma found out a few weeks later why i was thrown out of my home – then she threw me out too.
i was 17 and going to be put in a girl’s home. when they called my mom to tell her, HE insisted that i could not go to a place like that and let me come home. my room had my old dresser and desk, a lamp, and my bookcase in it. my boyfriend took a mattress off a cot his family had so i didn’t have to sleep on the hard floor in my own home. i lived like this from october 1997 until august 1998.
i’m focusing on my step dad here, so there are lots of things missing – me doing drugs, me stealing, me raising a bit of hell. but i’ve never laid this all out before. i’ve never actually gone through it all like this.
i was kicked out again in 1998. i lived out of my car for weeks this time. i slept on the road near my boyfriend’s house. i’d call friends to sleep over and shower at their house. i wasn’t allowed in his home at all – not even to pee. his grandmother wouldn’t allow it. we’d drive to a local taco bell so i could use the bathroom. every night, his mom would send him out with two dinner plates, and we’d eat dinner in my car. i finally went on welfare for housing in september 1998 and was in the system until june 1999. i was hospitalized for a suicide attempt. the only person who came to visit me in the hospital was my boyfriend. i didn’t see my stepdad much during this time.
in 1999, i moved within a few miles of my mom’s new home. i was invited over occasionally for dinner or something like that. i’d pick up my brother to hang out with me and my boyfriend. little by little, i was allowed in the house more. i would come over to do laundry. my step father would make passes at me, comments about us being alone together. i made sure that wouldn’t happen.
i was telling my mom one day that it had been so long since i cut, i was feeling better. we were having a dialogue, and that hadn’t happened in so long. my step dad put a knife on the table in front of me, and walked away. he’d come up behind me when i was in the family room alone, using the computer, and put his hands on my shoulders and whisper nasty things in my ear. we’d go to a family dinner for thanksgiving at my aunt’s house, and he’d hand me $100. it was a confusing relationship.
after the last time i was kicked out of my house, he never struck me again. but he was as emotionally and verbally abusive as he could be. my mother never really saw it again when i was an adult, but he was inappropriate with me up until he was diagnosed with bone cancer in june of 2003. he died december 28, 2003. i was at the house helping my mom that day. things did not look good, our hospice nurse was concerned. i usually did not go into their bedroom, ever. i hadn’t since i was 10. i went up to say good bye to him before i left. when i poked my head in the door, he waved me to the bed. i walked in, and he reached his hand out to me. i held it for a moment, and he said, ‘good bye’.
i said ‘good bye’. i drove home. he died about five hours later. my boyfriend – the same one all this time – drove me over there at 2am. (i ended up marrying him.) for my mom and my brother, it was a release – he’d been so sick. it was sad, but it was good. it was over.
i was the one who broke down.
i will never know why he chose me.
