My first memory is shivering from the cold, even though we were covered in quilts. It was me and my three sisters in a full-sized bed.
I could always hear the slow breathing of my sisters at the top of the bed and my four brothers a couple of feet away in another bed.
The wind whistled through the gray boards of our four-room shack. Even the single bulb hanging from the kitchen ceiling swayed back and forth, casting eerie shadows around the room.
And If you dared to look in the kitchen, you could see and hear the rats that came in through the holes.
One thing I could count on was that as soon as daylight came, my Mom would be in the room to start a fire in the old coal stove in the corner. She tried to warm up the room before we got up.
If my Dad were gone again, my Mom would cry silent tears that rolled down her face.
I was so afraid that he wouldn’t return and even more afraid that he would.
When he did come back, he would pull my mom out of bed and start beating her, and soon, kids would be flying all over the room as we tried to help her.
My childhood was a cycle of violence, abuse, and hunger that would’ve been a lot worse for me and my other sister.
My older brother was abused horribly. Our father beat him for the slightest infraction.
There was physical, sexual, and emotional abuse in our family. No one dared to speak of it, and if someone tried they were not believed.
We often had group beatings where we would be required to lean over the sofa in a row and take our whipping. I’ll never forget the sound of my father’s big leather belt being pulled from his pants.
I won’t go into the details for now, but the sexual abuse started early on around four or five I believe.
I was terrified of him until the day he died.
We often had group beatings where we would have to lean over the sofa and take our punishment.
He would always say “It hurts me more than it does you.”
This continued until I was a teenager. Two of my sisters got married at fifteen and left home. Then my other sister married and that left me and three boys. I had pretty much learned to stay away from him and to try not to upset him.
I just knew that when I got married I would have the life I wanted. But that will be another story.