Well, I started receiving counseling this week. Counseling that I should have had years ago. The counselor told me one thing that I knew all along. I have some messed up parents. You would think I'm a teenager. Far from it. I have teenage children. I'm amazed at how well they have turned out considering that I am their mom. Not that I am a horrible mother. I just did not have the best examples to pull from. That's a laugh. I am amazed that I am still alive considering how many times I have considered suicide. Sorry to be so blunt. This being the main reason I am now in counseling. Well, I guess a back story is in order. Understand, this will not be able to be covered in one entry. My damage was done over years. (lovely at it was)

     I was born the youngest of four girls. My mother was a nurse and my father was an optometrist. He was all about image and how people perceived his family(remember this). My parents got divorced when I was around seven. My mother was interested in MUCH younger men. My father claims that she had an affair, but she makes claims against him also. Who do you believe? She married a man nineteen years younger than her. He was twenty-one and she was forty. Things went okay for them about six months. After about six months, this young man can't handle the married life raising three kids (my older sister was only a year younger than him). He starts getting violent. He starts in on my mom with the physical violence. Screaming at us in the middle on the night. It progresses to being belted until we have welts that are bleeding. My second oldest sister runs off to my dad's to live when she turns fourteen. Understand that she tells my dad what is going on. He leaves us there. As things progress with the violence towards our mom, my other sister and I can no longer stand by and listen to our mom taking this. We try to step in. Wrong thing to do. This brings on a new kind of violence towards us.

     I guess my mom decided we lived to close to my dad and decided to move us a little further away. I'm figuring she sensed that we would not be able to take the violence much longer and we would follow our sister's lead. Well, my next sister did. When she left and I did not tell on her and kept it a secret so that she could get away, guess who nearly got beaten? I was very, very lucky that there was someone there at the house that was man enough to stand in between and stop him. I was so scared that night. If you are asking why didn't I leave, I will give you that answer. I still loved my mom. I loved her very much. I was afraid for her. I was afraid that if I left and there was no one there, he may go too far. he may go too far because there would be no one to call 911. Whenever he started in on her, he made sure she could not get to the phone. She would have to yell for me to call 911. That was the only way to get him to stop. Did she ever file charges on him? Of course not. Well, when my last sister left, my mother tried to fight my father to get her back. What a joke? It went to court and my sister told them of my step-father hitting her. They would not dare let me in the court room. If they had, they would have lost custody of me. But again, my dad knew what was going on and left me there.

     My mom decided she was not far enough away from my dad. So she moved us two states away to Savannah, Ga. We moved into an apartment complex. I was feeling so lonely at this time because my sister that left last was my best friend. We were thirteen months apart in age. I had always been with her. We shared rooms most of ours lives. Here I was in a new place without her, no friends, and dealing with our violent step-father all by myself now. It's not like I could turn to our mother. She couldn't even help herself.