Over and over viewers on JTV, online friends, or anyone who didn't know my past asked why I wasn't more upset about not being able to walk, or being this ill in general. There are so many events in my life that I carry around silently, hinting at them but never fully explaining them. Jacob may be the first person in my life to know the full scope of everything that has been done to me, as well as things I have done to myself. A few people received hints at this one, but I never really let on the whole story. This is something I tried to publish, but it got rejected for being too outrageous (the story of my life). Everything in here is true to my perspective, and I'm tired of being quiet about it for fear of damaging reputations, or hurting the feelings of people who never cared for mine.
The words hummed around me, shoulder squeezes and sympathetic looks served as maneuvers to infiltrate my cocoon. Their gasoline apologies only strengthened my inflamed loneliness and humiliation. My form I made immobile, hoping to become nothing but a statue on the sofa of this alien household. The perfect straight lines of picture frames and the sheath of fragile glass sheltered the happy family photographs from my anger. I hated them for those smiles, and they smiled at me in reply.
"Come on, lets get you cleaned up."
I heard the words, and inwardly laughed at the suggestion. My hands came into focus. What soaps, brushes, or scrubs did they keep here that could wash away battered skin and bones? Would bleach remove bruises? The memories of what had just transpired had been grafted into my soul. The only thing that could be washed away is a family, and only with a mixture of alcohol and words.
Suddenly I was elevated, two hands grasped me by my arms and I was guided down a dark hall. I wondered as I walked on if this was my death. Perhaps this painful concoction of blue carpeting, eggshell white paint, and Precious Moments dolls was the infamous tunnel to my demise.
From the looks of things, I'm going to interior design hell.
The bathroom door swung open, the light brutally assailed my eyes and in my hand a washcloth appeared. My friend had brushed my hair out of my face and said something soothing that I don't recall. I just wondered where my parachute had gone, and why I hadn't died like I expected.
My friend left, and the door closed me into my solitude. I turned towards the mirror with indifference. The girl in the glass looked like a badly painted porcelain doll. Face red and swollen from sobbing, hair in disarray, shirt with spots of blood. The thin girl touched her scalp carefully as I watched, and winced. It was then I saw her neck, the infantile state of bruising encircled her pale white throat. You could already tell they were marks from fingers; why would she allow herself to be seen in such a state?
I breathed deeply, but instead of inhaling, pain shot through my torso. The end of my shirt I lifted precariously to reveal battered ribs. The image in the mirror sobbing quietly with me, and I appreciated her companionship in misery.
When I had calmed down, I found myself perched on a scale on the bathroom floor, holding my arms tightly to my chest like I did as a child. To my side, the shower door reflected this adult version of the kid I was. Another mirror. Three mirrors in one bathroom. I scoffed at the vanity of it. My imaginative mind attempted to salvage meaning from it, but Clarity had decided instead to bring me back to recollection.
I knew there was going to be trouble this morning. The atmosphere was tense, as though the pilot light had been left on in a pyromaniac's home. I heard my dad pouring himself wine in the family room. From the solid thud of the bottle being set down, I realized someone had bought a full box of matches. I cleaned everything and avoided where he sat at all costs. My little brother and sister I herded into the next room.
It will be me if anyone this time, not them.
Hours passed tensely, afternoon turned to dusk. The passage of time lowered my guard. Now the two youngest children sat a room away from him. I forgot the danger, and instead smiled with pride as I watched them play chess. A six year old and a ten year old playing a game most adults couldn't appreciate. It was a cheap set bought for my father that had been handed down to the children. The phone rang, and as any typical teenage girl I ran to answer it. After several minutes of conversation with my boyfriend, I was jarred back to reality. From the next room I heard a match strike, then the hiss of ignition.
"What did you fucking kids do with my chess piece?"
I knew there was going to be trouble this morning. Every two weeks something set him off. I came around the corner, and peered into the room I had left the children in. They hid, as of yet undiscovered, behind the couch as my father yelled furiously over a missing piece of plastic. The world was in slow motion. My mind was besieged with memories. The broken nose I earned when I was 12 for reading a kids book. My then 2 year old brother lifted by his leg and thrown across the room for crying. I recalled praying silently, my pregnant mother begging for mercy as he held a knife to her throat against my bedroom door. I wondered if my baby sister could remember that, the first time her father almost killed her.
Mother always worked, father never interested, oldest daughter left to raise the younger children. Its a frequent situation. The women's movement only applies in special cases, I had conjectured. Though I was just a teenager, only a child myself, those two frightened children were mine. I loved them, I knew their failures and fears, their skills and sentiments. I had always there for them, because they were all I had.
But at this moment, fear had made me a frozen observer. I couldn't intervene. Countless times I had watched as my older brother looked on when our dad came after me. Fear and mild hints of remorse I read in their faces as the old man's fists took flight. Now I understood their predicament as I stood there in my shameful trance, self preservation advertising my cowardice. My eyes slid from father to hidden children in slow motion. My little brother clasped his hand on our sister's mouth too late to prevent a whimper's escape.
(Oh god, he's going to kill them.
Awakened suddenly, I could not pitifully tremble from uselessness any longer. I shouted, I swore, and I waved for them to run to me. As though avoiding a blood thirty giant, they skirted around his feet and hid behind me.
"Into my room, don't lock the door!" I whispered as I pushed them on, and turned back to my father. Before long it was time for me to run too, down the one way hall to my locked bedroom door. Locked.
I knew there was going to be trouble this morning; a massive understatement.
In slow motion I turned to face him. I sobbed in terror and blabbered an excuse, no nobility left in my appearance. The tattered shouts and cries from behind the door were muffled as my father bashed my head against it, his hands around my throat, squeezing the life from my veins. It was all too easy for him. Enraged with alcohol or not, his two hundred pound frame stood six inches taller than me. I've always been the smallest in my family. Teachers at school tended to ask if I was adopted.
The ice cold tile struck my face hard. I wondered how the tile got on my door, or if he had tiles in his hands. I began to fade into unconsciousness as I realized I had fallen to the ground. Something mysteriously hit me in the stomach, chest, neck over and over. With weary eyes I saw his foot collide with my face in slow motion.
He's kicking me when I'm down. That is so cheap.
As I was lulled into blackness, I realized my mother had been yelling. I had barely noticed she was there.
"Jesus, you are killing her! God, please stop! You are killing her!"
I laughed at my mother's words within my agony. This man is no god.
Little hands were dragging me backward along the ground, into my bedroom. Arms and hands I had forgotten I had pulled me inside and closed the door. Though my consciousness had slipped, my panic and tolerance had not. Frantic phone calls to whoever would answer, confused looks from my siblings, and declarations of independence ensued. Then a growl came at the door from an unexpected monster.
"Open the door, Norah. NOW."
Mom? I saved the kids, didn't you see?
I opened the door, and raced back to my bed, holding the two terrified children in my arms tightly. Brutally, with finality, she took them away. My body shivered from the cold vacancy. The emptiness was my only comfort as I faced her anger. The confused synapses and neural connections in my recently battered brain could not process what was happening. An obvious line divided this situation from tolerable, but my Mom was the perfect voice of reason. What logical reasoning had I failed to identify?
"Mom, I'm not going to take this." I declared in a voice too small to express my determination.
While I was a child, my family moved so frequently, so hastily, that friendships were hard to justify. The importance of family was a lesson told over and over by my perfect mother, a lesson she never had to teach to me. All of my favorite memories were of her, or of my brothers and sisters. I never cared if society scorned me; my family was my world. It was us against the man, the man who was now pouring himself another glass of wine in the kitchen. With her high paying job, masters degree, blonde hair and blue eyes, she was a six foot tall Nordic goddess to me. All seven children had blue eyes, all were tall, except for one. My swollen face and reddened eyes accentuated our disconnect with my impure green eyes.
I always knew I didn't belong.
"Norah, you have to accept that this is the way it is. Nothing is going to change."
The destruction of my admiration of her was not a slow process, but rather it was a severing as quick as a flick of her tongue. I staggered back from the release, watching the parachute that was my family travel forever away from me. With that killing blow dealt, she closed the door.
I recalled all the feminist style lectures, the rants about equal pay for equal work, the preparation she gave me for a world that would discriminate against me because I was born a woman. One day, I would understand that those words were not intended to be a description of her pathway through life, but rather a warning to avoid her result. At the time though, I only cared that I was a child, and had been betrayed by my mother.
A boyfriend too scared to get me, brothers too far away to call, the police always out of the question to my trained little mind.
Mom says rapists adopt children. Think of the children, Norah, think of the children.
A vague friendship is recalled, and without question or hesitation she comes. I wait at the window, still hyperventilating as I wait. I wait for a sign of her arrival, the sight of her car, as I wait for salvation from this insanity. Time drags for an eternity, and all I can think of is escape. Attachment, admiration, affection for my mother is pushed from my mind like a splinter.
Mother values her marriage vows above her children's lives. God would be proud.
The red Mazda comes around the corner, and I walk quickly out of the house, internally celebrating in the belief I had escaped notice. Anger repelled me from here, and I would now be homeless, sleeping on couches and even outside till I graduated, given hand outs of cash from school counselors and teachers, for a time, even a welcome dependent on my boyfriends mother, but I would recover. I thought of the future and I applauded my escape until I saw him. My father outside, walking towards me from the driveway.
"If he comes here again, I'll kill him."
Confusion twisted my face, but instinct nodded my head as I ran. He must have thought it was my boyfriend, I pondered. The one too terrified to save me.
Sorry to contradict you, dad, but mom isn't the only person who abandoned me today.
Into the car I went, and we drove till I had left my childhood far behind. Seven years later I still cannot be touched on the neck without it inducing terror. Visions and recollections are ushered into the forefront of my consciousness continually. These problems have evolved into mere companions now, compliments to my already bizarre set of idiosyncrasies. The tears over my mother's words dried up over time, though my soul bears the open wound from them for eternity. She and I are still friends, though throughout this illness, I have wondered if her lack of desire to visit me was some form of punishment. She is a great woman, who raised 4 children on a $23k/year salary while my father was out of work. I don't think I am capable of forgiveness, but if I am, I forgave her for what happened long ago. She is human, and made mistakes, just as I have made mine.
Her marriage to my father remains intact, though my relationship with him does not. His last words to me shall always be that misdirected death threat. Old age has calmed him, my mother says, though from time to time I receive reports to the contrary. I don't hate him anymore, but I consider myself to have no connection to him.
The people who helped me, especially the girl whom I was friends with up until my illness, I will be forever grateful for. One day I hope to send an "Ed McMahon" style check to them. Hopefully Justin.tv sells for a gazillion dollars and Jacob and I will have some money spend on giant checks :)
The ache that pains me to tears in my solitude, even to this day, is the time lost with my brother and sister. Birthdays, holidays, and achievements have all been experienced after the festivities are over, and almost always by phone. Fears, disasters, and heartbreaks have been left for others to attend to.
The children do not understand why I left them. The subsequent abandonment is the only event they recall vividly. The little sister, the child that called me mommy for years, is now a teenager. The little brother, who's glasses I would wipe tears from during sad movies, is now the age I was when I left him. His childhood has evolved into one much more different than I had experienced. Instead of his siblings, he turns to friends for advice and support. Suspicions of drinking and drug use now linger in the air between us as I try to recall the sweet, painfully gullible baby brother I once knew. The small children my mother pulled from my arms are gone now, replaced with young adults I will never really know.
I float on in the world, watching the parachute that was my family drift elsewhere, hoping I will find someone who will welcome me home.
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