Sometimes it's nice that no one knows you and what you are about, other times it's horrid that no one does. The times when you think that somebody should have known that something was going on and been there to help you and they're not. Didn't someone see that the behavior of my sister was not in the norm. She hid things well from us, even tried to protect us on those occasions when my mom let us go see my dad at my grandmothers house. My grandmother had no idea what was going on, she should have, but my mother never said anything to my father's side of the family. Yet, I can't believe that there wasn't another adult out there that didn't see that something was wrong. Back then, as it is today, people mind their own business, but for the sake of a child, I can't understand that nobody noticed anything at all.
This set her, as well as the rest of us on a destruction course of our lives. And when my mother finally did do something about it, she then remarried a man who had no idea how to deal with children period, especially one who had been damaged so severely. At a time in my sisters life when she needed a father figure that could show her the right way to be a dad, he belittled her and mentally abused her. Pushing her further into a deep, dark hole of desperation. Sometimes I think that it's a miracle that she is the person she is today, a loving, giving mother and wife, an asset to society. I see the course that could have been followed and I am so glad that she took a detour. Not that her life as been peaches and cream, not in the least, it has taken her 50 years to be "okay" with herself. But there are others that are not so lucky. They have been spent by their abusers and thrown out like a piece of trash.
I don't remember anything happening to me and I don't want to remember anything. I'm positive that something happened, but I don't see any details. And I know that most of the reason is that the rest of us were younger and my sister tried to protect us. When on occasion we did stay at my grandmothers house, my sister would put us all toward the wall and sleep on the outside so my dad couldn't get to the rest of us. At age 11 to 13 she was already our protector. I can't even imagine the pressure she must have endured and how terrified she must have been everytime we went to go visit my dad. I don't know what my mother was thinking by letting us go, but she perpetuated the pain that my sister was already enduring.
The visits stopped only for my sisters pain to be replaced by a different kind of abuse. At the age of 15 she could take it no more and ran away from home. This was a difficult time for the rest of us, this is the only time I remember my mother ever being absolutely frantic. She loved us, I could tell, but she had endured so much pain as a child that she didn't know how to be there for us. But this hurt her, really bad, I think that she knew that this was her fault, she was not there for my sister the way she should have been, as a mother who would do anything for her children, and she knew it now. It was a few months before they found her and in the mean time my mother had forgotten that she had three other girls to raise. She was there, and cooked and got us to school, but she wasn't really there.
No comments:
Post a Comment