CORNERED FOR THE LAST TIME

I remember it like it was yesterday, the sun coming in the front kitchen window as my mother cornered me in the kitchen to hit me again. I was 17 years old and had been beaten since I could form my earliest memory at four. The belt was my mothers favorite weapon and using the end with the buckle seemed to give her great pleasure but she was not hesitant to use her fists or any item nearby either. I had grown up accustomed to welts on my legs, arms, back and occasionally my head. I was used to being beat daily but on this day I realized that I had also become tired of it. I hurt all the time from the beatings and I just wanted it to stop. I had learned that there was nothing I could do or say to escape the abuse! I had tried everything possible. I never let my mom see emotion on me because she did not like that, no cry babies. I learned to shrink myself in every way possible. I developed an eating disorder and stayed well below the weight of others my age and bone structure. I never asked for anything. I tried to be perfect because I believed that if I was, she would love me and stop beating me. Nothing stopped it. Nothing. But this day; this time in the corner of the kitchen with the sun shining through, I would stop it! It would be the last time that my mother would hit me but it would be the beginning of abuse far worse than anything I had ever experienced before!

I closed my eyes and hit her back, then I ran. I ran out of the house and didn’t look back. Once far enough from the house, I got in touch with an acquaintance and told her I was never going back home and needed a place to stay. She hooked me up with a “friend” of hers who was sharing an apartment with her boyfriend and I moved in with them in early summer before my senior year of high school. I would sneak into my moms house during the week while my mother was at work to get clothes and the few things that were actually mine. I was 17 and this couple I moved in with was in their early thirties so looking back now I see the danger in that but at the time thought I had finally found people who would love me. It started off with them feeding me drugs. I was happy to take them because of how they made me feel! I loved feeling numb and having all my emotions dulled by the euphoria I felt. I didn’t eat much ever but I was high all the time. I witnessed my first drug overdose at seventeen when the girl in the apartment next to ours overdosed on heroin. I swore I would never touch that stuff and stick to the pot, pills and cocaine that I had believed to be safe and had also grown very fond of. It would be almost 30 years of narrowly escaping heroin before giving in and getting addicted to it myself. That’s a story for later.

Once this couple succeeded in getting me hooked on drugs things took a dark turn and my life began to not only change but change who I was on the inside. Pieces of me would slowly begin to fade away. To be able to continue to get my drugs it became necessary for me to sleep with “B” and “M” so I entered into a sexual relationship with the both of them. At times I think I liked it because I thought that meant they loved me but other times I felt so dirty. I wasn’t comfortable having sex with one person at seventeen let alone two. The solution to how I felt about this was in doing more drugs and staying as numb as possible. That worked for a while until they decided that the way for them to get more drugs was for them to “loan” me to their dealer.