Replies to '12/23 Real Life: Heart Shattered'

My father was an alcoholic.  He drank every Friday, Sat., and Sunday. On Friday night I remember we would ride around to the bars so my mother could get at least some of the money because if not he would drink it up and no bills would be paid.  This kept on all my life.  I never spent one single weekend in my own home because my father would come home and try to get the money from my mother and violence would result.  I was the DA.  I was in charge of getting the other children out of the house and into the car.  We had emergency bags packed, i had to make sure they were in the car also.  I had my own key to the car and could back the car out of the driveway and in front of the front door, so my mom could run and get in and off we would go to a relative or a friend's house to spend the night or the weekend.  This went on until I was sixteen.  I got a job at General Telephone part time and was making good money for someone so young.  I bought my own car which my father stole and wrecked.  I fixed it.  But when he burned our house down, that was it.  My clothes that were store bought for the first time in my life were burned and melted to nothing.  I remember telling my mom, we were sleeping in the same bed at my grandma's house, that something wasn't right, I could feel it in my bones.  She just told me to relax and go to sleep, fifteen minutes later the phone rang and it was my Uncle Jake (my father's brother) telling us our house was on fire.  We drove up and I remember the fireman were pulling the carpet out of the living room and the piano that I loved so much was half in and half out the window.  The firemen were trying to save the piano but it was no use.  The house was a total loss and we had lost everything.  Let me back up and say that before I started working, I had to make all of my clothes.  Which now is a great skill, but I wanted to look like all the other girls.  I remember getting my first very own sewing machine which had melted in the fire.  But my clothes...I was sixteen....and my clothes were ruined.  My grandma (father's) lived three doors down from us and I ran down there with murder on my mind.  I was going to kill the SOB even if he was my father, some father.  Anyway, it took four police officers to pull me off of him because I was wailing him for all I was worth.  He was drunk so it was easy.  My father also molested me at 10 years old and nobody believed me.  He would taunt me about that - telling me nobody will believe you  - so I'm going to do this with you and you are going to cooperate.  It was horrible.  I am still not over it.  My own daughter was molested at 10 years old by her stepfather.  If only I had known what he was.  But I have learned we are doomed to repeat the past unless we recognize it and chart a new course for ourselves.  If only I knew that then.  Amanda, my daughter, will not even acknowledge that I am alive.  She will not let me be in my granddaughter's lives - she says it is their decision, but how can children make that kind of decision.  I kept those children when they were young for no money and I was driving from a town away.  But it didn't matter because I loved them so much.  I sit here all alone night  and day and try to think of a way to make amends with Amanda.  She is my only child.  But I wasn't the one who did it to her.  I own that I brought that man into our lives but you can see I was ill attempted to a full and useful life, I was broken.  I didn't know the right thing to do.  I got her our of that house the next day and we didn't go back.  He was found guilty and served his five years for taking indecent liberties with a child and given a bus ticket out of North Carolina because he was from St. Joseph, MO.  And told never to come back here.  He did though.  I was terrified to see him sitting at the end of our street one day.  And the hell of it is he has not registered as a sex offender in Missouri.  And I can't get the police to do anything about it.  Alcohol has destroyed my life (even though I don't drink), and my daughter's life (I don't know if she drinks or not).  I heard she got remarried and had a baby, I don't know the sex  of the baby, and has taken advantage of the housing problem going on and bought a house.  She has a secure job and he probably has too or she wouldn't have married him...she is all about the money.  There is no solution for this.  I will be dead in my grave and she will not even care a flip.  I would love to make up with her and maybe work on our relationship.  But she will not do it.  She doesn't care.  It is so awful.  I feel useless and unworthy and why should I feel that way.  But I do.  And nothing is going to change it.  I do see a counselor every six months...but that is just to renew my drugs.  There is no therapy going on there.

So I will just go on with my life and hope that someday she needs me.  I would love to make a baby quilt for the baby but she would probably just throw it away.  She hates me.  It's all my fault.

The End.

Barbwire1970 from North Carolina