Today I am going back to when I was age four. That is the earliest memory I have and, of course, it’s a bad one…..
The year was 1973, school was in session for all of my siblings. My brother is 11 years older than I am. My three sister are 10, 9 and 8 years older than I am. (15,14,13,12). I was always excited to watch my siblings get on the bus every morning. I would stand behind the curtain of the giant picture window and watch them waiting for the bus, then boarding the school bus. I can remember this like it was yesterday. I felt excitement and I just couldn’t wait until I could get on that big bus with them. On this particular day, I waited excitedly as my siblings boarded the school bus and after it drove away, I went back to sit in front of the large TV that was playing Sesame Street. My mother was in the kitchen. I climbed into the laundry basket and played with clothes pins as I watched the show. I clipped each clothes pin to the next until I had a long chain of clothes pins. I remember my mother said something to me, but I just can’t recall what it was or what my response was. Suddenly, she was next to me screaming at me and then she lifted me out of the laundry basket and placed me on the floor. She smacked me a few times and the next thing I knew, her hands were around my neck and squeezing hard. I couldn’t breathe and my body was in a panic. Why was she doing this to me? Everything became dark……. I remember panicking and then I must of passed out. I have no memory of anything that happened after that. Just darkness…… I think she must of panicked herself when I passed out and being a nurse, she probably did what she could to get me breathing again.
I have many memories of my mother loosing is and abusing all of us kids. I was smacked around and thrown into the picture window once, that I recall. My mother would just plain snap into a psychotic person and then the beating would begin. I can also remember my parent fighting in the kitchen and throwing things at each other. One particular time, I was peaking around the corner into the kitchen as they fought and my mother threw the bottle of Sacrin (little pills of sweetener) at my father and it busted and the tiny little pills went everywhere, even near where I was peaking into the kitchen. I started to pick them up and my sister, Sheryll, came up to me and grabbed me and told me not to do that and just come to the bedroom with her. My one sister was always there for me……. I grew up very close to her and I miss her so very much now that I live so far away.
I think I have Never stole a thing in my life, because the day my sister, Sherry, stole a candy bar from a store and they called my parents, that is a day I will never forget. I was 5 years old and my sister was 14 years old. When my parents came home with my sister, my father was yelling at her and he took her upstairs to her room. I was downstairs in the living room and I could hear it all. My father whipped her repeatedly and her screams sent terror through my entire body. I remember yelling out, “make him stop, he is going to kill my sister!” I am the only person I personally know, that has NEVER stole a single thing In their entire life. I guess the possibility of death for that crime was enough to make sure I never did it!
I have absolutely no memory of my brother ever getting a beating and my sisters all said he never did. I guess he was treated differently because he was male. My mother always said she preferred boys over girls. I was a giant accident for my parents. See, my parents and all of my siblings were born in Massachusetts. Religion was against any form of birth control and that explains why my parents had four kids by the time they were 18, but my mothers doctor in Massachusetts found a way to give her birth control pills, by saying it was medically necessary. They moved to New York when my father transferred jobs. The doctor in New York told my mother that she would most likely never become pregnant again since she had been on such a high dose of birth control pills. My mother never had a period after they stopped the birth control pills. Surprise, your pregnant and here comes baby number five! I guess my father immediately went in to get himself fixed after that. They had hoped I would be a boy, but unfortunately, I was another girl. Strangely, there are NO pictures of me from when I was born. The first picture of me was when I was around three months of age. I spent most of my young years believing that I must of been adopted. All of my siblings had the same initials, SBH, but then there was me and my initials were LAH. My mom insists she just did not like any other S name. My mother had the five of us and she kept special needs foster children too. She was so emotionally unstable I have no clue how she did that. She also baked the best tasting cakes ever and sold them. I loved when she would bake cakes, because I would always get the frosting that was left in the icing tube…… To this day, if I eat too much sugar, my tongue gets a tickling feeling in it and I cannot eat anymore.
My childhood, age 0-10, was full of abuse and some cool things as well. I was born in New York and I had many friends. Then we moved away and my life changed so greatly for the negative, I often wonder what my life would of been like if we had never moved away from New York. We moved a couple of times during my tenth year of life, then we settled in Northern, Illinois and the children were horrible to me. But that’s a whole different post for another day…..
CHRONIC 