My Past: Part I

Present day 2021:

This has been an on and off again project I have been toying around with for over a decade since I began to understand blogging and social media platforms.
I'm also aware that most children of parents who has abused them don't ever step forward.

I started this in hopes of one day being strong enough to send this out into the world and come what may.

This year is the year.
I have a voice.

Last year I came to learn that I had been lied too, for years, by my mother. So things that are written in the past, I'll later explain at the end in a Present update.

The Past, written in 2016:

  I'm not going to say my whole past sucked, because there were a lot of fun and memorable times, but life could have been better.

  My childhood started me off with the divorce of my parents and the feelings that I was the one who failed them. It wasn't that at all and later learned that my father would religiously beat on my mother and at one point pushed her down the stairs while pregnant with my sister. Still, as a child, you harbor the thought of guilt. Years later both remarried different people, my step-dad showed me the fathers love I had been missing out on and when my 'father' remarried he married a woman I loathed for many years to come.

  Step mother was bipolar, emotionally and physically abusive and my father was physically abusive to her. To justify herself, step-mother would boarder line pick on me, emotionally belittle and talk down to me as well and on several occasions she would hit me. I was used as a 'weapon' for both my father and mom. Father would do the same to my youngest step sister and also my step brother, the physical stuff was better to handle, I think opposed to the verbal and mental lashing I took, I thought the same way when I was married to my ex. I wont bore you with all the stories, maybe one day, but I realized that my step-mother was the controller, the female narcissist, when I was going through my divorce.
I went a whole car ride, driving to work, thinking, about two people combined into one. My step-mother from long ago combined with my then mother-in-law, and I thought of them as one person and when I told myself that they were two different people I had to stop and recollect my thoughts. Those two women were very similar and I found my way back into that situation, but in a different context.

  Fast forward to my ex-husband, he was a charmer, he was good looking, had a car, a job, talked well of his family and even his accomplishments. He had a stunning pair of blue eyes that really drew you in and a deep southern draw that melted butter.
He was as a man ought to be, as Jane Austen would put.
 He stayed that way until I moved to Alabama. My gut had been screaming at me for months asking when it was going to end, when will he change, because there was something warning me, even though he said all the right things; there was doubt. 

A few months later things did change, it was slight, so slight I'm not sure when things really started changing but it stayed that way for two years and slowly declined from there. One of those moments was sitting at his brothers graduation, I was talking to an older lady next to me, he was quiet but all of a sudden he was putting me down.
Saying how he sent me to culinary school and I still couldn't cook worth a crap. I was fuming, I even defended myself but he kept going until I was so put out I knew if I said one more word I would cry my eyes out. The dinner that followed I sat in silence, being made fun of by him and his family and the ride home was the same. Most nights I laid awake in bed, hating him. The times I lay there hating him, he would roll over, start touching me and asking me for a blow job or sex. Most times I cried silently when we had sex because he talked me into it.
I did not feel sexy, I did not feel good about myself, and I sure as hell didn't feel the need to have intercourse.
  He also compared me to my sister, asking why I didn't wear the sexy clothing she did, or would point at other women and ask why I didn't look like them. I asked him once if a dress looked good on me and he proceeded to say, 'You're mom's right, you have gained a lot of weight, you might want to stop.'

  On top of that I had his mother grilling me on a daily basis about how I cooked, cleaned, did laundry and how I even existed. My family would be made fun of,  I would be made to look like an idiot almost daily and my words meant nothing.

  The breakdown took exactly two years and started with a series of pondering as to why he wouldn't talk to me and spend more time over at his parents than at home. I quit my great paying job to go to a job I worked mornings so I could be home, like he insisted and he wasn't even there.

It went on to a rather irritating Thanksgiving which left me stomping out in anger to the car because the day became a disaster. His mother harped me all day, I brought over homemade donuts and all she had to say was, 'you're a little too late', complained the whole dinner through and then once at her families house interrupted a conversation I was having with a cousin by pushing my arm saying, 'No one cares what you think anyways.' To which my scathing reply was a very heated, 'No one asked YOU to be a BITCH either.'
  I also walked away, slammed out of the house and went and sat in the car and sent a single text message of, 'I'm leaving, bring me the keys.'

  I was OVER the pain, the humiliation and their high and mighty attitudes because my mom never raised me to act like that. I was even raised having money and I never treated people low like she did, if I wanted to I could have told her trailer trashed self to take a flying leap off her single wide and suck a tiny one, but I'm just enough of a southerner to fan myself and say bless your heart.

  That was the first moment I found my balls because she confronted me about calling her a bitch and I said, 'Well, then don't act like one.' It's not that hard to be a nice person and sometimes it is OKAY for you to not say what's on your mind.

  My inevitable breakdown followed with him being deployed and me feeling a tiny sense of freedom and excitement to be away from them all for 9 months. For a solid year they told me to get pregnant, have a baby to occupy my time and give me something to do.

I refused to bring a child into an unhappy home and it still gives me a panic attack thinking what-if I had. I would have never left.

  On the other hand I had a nagging irritant in the back of my mind that I would get screwed over. His mom was on the banking's account and was famous for taking all his money, so I told him before he left she needed to be off that account. I got all the paperwork together, set up times and a date and when I asked her to go do that she said there was no way in hell she was getting off the account. I left and went straight outside and let him know what time it was and proceeded to my house thinking I was safe, but she came in and cornered me in the bathroom and told me she would not be getting off, and that I better just deal with it, and that I shouldn't be putting her baby boy through all this and that I was crazy.

  Bad feeling aside her being on a married couples banking's account was crazy. The JAG thought it was messed up, the military wives I talked too said the same, and anyone I talked too said I needed to fix it when he left. She had her Netflix subscription of $30 coming out monthly, every two months she would go get her hair done at $100 a pop, they ate out three to four times a week and have him pay $50 each time. I didn't trust her.

  And it gets better...

Present 2021:

I came to learn, in 2020 during the pandemic, that lies had permeated my child brain about my biological father. That he wasn't as abusive as my mother had been saying. That he had sought therapy and had become a better person.
She over played things and played the victim.