​I kept trying to recall when the sharp jagged edges of my life turned into an upside-down roller coaster ride.  I never understood that the choices made in life could be ripped to shreds if you went down the wrong dark road.  That everything you take for granted in life, like the struggling relationship between grandparents and a child and the bond of siblings could plummet as far as the eye could see.  That was the dark and ugly truth that led everyone into blindness like scattering bats trying to find its prey in the night. ​Me, I was that blind; even when my father, a man that drank himself into oblivion and was sightless to the people that mattered tried to kill himself in front of me and my siblings when I was merely 8 years old.  He jumped off the roof, broke both of his feet, just shattered them and left us to pick up the pieces of that night.  He wouldn’t allow us to call for help and we had to watch our father dying on a pallet on the floor, barely hanging onto his life.  He made it alive that night but it broke all of us.  Then, he decided to drink and drive.  We were all left badly shaken in a car accident with my father unconscious.  This action caused us to be ripped away from him and placed in my mother’s care.  I remember being a baby sleeping on a twin bed in a dirty room.  I was woken up by something being put in my arms.  I was tired but it seemed like being tired was the norm for me.  My brother was coaxing me awake and all I understood was the word “Christmas.”  He had placed a baby in my arms.  It was a Christmas gift.  He motioned for me to come with him and I did.  I remember my sisters playing amongst some presents in the living room with no one else around.  No mom or dad and it was very dark like it was in the middle of the night.  I sat on the couch with my new baby in my arms and I remember just loving it but I knew it was different from the way I always felt loved.
I remember wanting my mother so badly.  I remember needing her all the time.  It was probably the reason I was with her one weekend when she went home to visit her mother when I was three years old.  I can think of a million reasons that were my fault about why I was there.  But I can’t think of a single reason why she left me there with him.  She should have known about him.  She should have known that her stepfather was a very bad man.  She should have known that one minute I would be sleeping and the next I would be standing on the bed with him next to it, my panties down around my ankles.   She should have known that later in the evening, he would be the one to buckle my car seat just so he could apply a warning I’ll never forget with a simple facial expression. She should have known I would be too frightened to tell her about what my grandfather did to me that weekend.  I told my twin but it came out in a blur of baby words that could hardly be understood. She understood them though and carried them with her to the adults in our living room with me trailing behind to try and make her stop.  My mother took in the information but never took me into an embrace so fierce that could make me feel safer than I’d ever felt in my life.  Instead, she used words like “forgive” and “forget” to try to erase it from my mind and then she left me behind.  My mother joined the military and left us with our broken alcoholic father who separated my brother from his sisters.  I grew up hearing how she pulled up to his parents’ house, let us out of the car all the time and pulled away until she never came back.  My brother and sisters had to live in separate homes for a while until my father could find a home for us all.  What I could never understand was why she came back after my father’s drunken car accident.  Was it because that’s what mother are supposed to do?  Was it to impress her new husband?  The reason really didn’t matter.  What mattered was that even though we were struggling with our father, we were okay.  He got us to keep things clean and made us laugh.  He interacted with us by playing games and having barbecues.  He wasn’t perfect at all and we certainly would have grown up with wounds inflicted from an alcoholic man who always said he wanted to die. I kept trying to remember when I finally figured out that there was something wrong and had been wrong for a very long time.  My friends used to ask me, “What’s wrong with your mom?”  And I always brushed them off but as I grew into an adult the pieces came together like a jig saw puzzle waiting to be solved.  My mother had been completely and utterly emotionally disconnected.  She lacked all the emotions that were tied to intuition and therefore lacked the instincts all mothers possessed which gave them the primal need to protect her children.  As I grew into a child, I began to have questions my mother wouldn’t answer.  She only gave out facts with absolutely no degree of emotion at all. I kept thinking about the way she never brushed my hair or made me brush my teeth.  How I would walk to school with only my fingernail to scrape plaque off my teeth and hair bent in awkward places from sleeping in a dirty room.  I imagine the clothes she dressed me in and I thought about the time she did not spend grooming me with care.  I walked around with holes in my shoes for a long time and my sock kept sliding down and out of it. My mother did sign my sisters and I up for a talent show at the local Boys & Girls Club where we practiced a dance routine for Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me with Your Best Shot.”  We chickened out when the real show began and learned clapping games that came from the girls at school to escape our embarrassment.  I was sitting on the bed clapping and singing with my older sister one evening when she stopped and got really quiet. “I have to tell you something,” she whispered in such a disturbing tone that took my breath away.  He’s been touching me at night…” she continued in a slur of words I couldn’t seem to understand.  “I wake up…” and “he’s there.”   I couldn’t wrap my mind around those words that brought my own memories to the surface of my mind.  Those old memories were screaming at me like a silent but painful alarm bell ringing in my ears and I told her to stop.  I didn’t want to hear.  I didn’t want to believe that our own stepfather was hurting my sister.  I pulled away and never let her bring it up again.  After that I tried to ignore my sister’s disappearances from her bed in the middle of the night.  I told myself there were other reasons we found her in different places trying to escape the horror she was enduring until I just couldn’t ignore it anymore.  It was worse that our mother never knew half the things we did because she never paid attention.  She never knew that as soon as she left for work at the crack of dawn that we would wait for the right moment to run across a four-laned busy as hell highway at the corner of our apartment.  She never knew that my twin burned my face with a match.  When our brother finally joined our home after spending several years trying to console our father over his losing battle in court, he would put us on our bicycles and have us follow him through the dangerous highways of Coronado.  We never told our mother about those scary rendezvouses to the park next to the library because it seemed forbidden somehow.  She never knew that we were terrified of our stepfather and that we kept track of the days he would be out on deployment and when he would spend nights working on his navy ship so we could let our guard down.   She also never knew that men who favored children groomed them for what he wanted and that my sister’s disappearing act didn’t help her.  He just presented himself to her for the days when my mother was out at work or at the store. The truth was that she married a perverted old man and paid little attention to our cries for help when his wicked thoughts swayed him to my older sister’s bedroom in the middle of the night.  After three years his attention to my older sister dulled and the persuasion of our budding youth led him to my other sister and me.   When Social Services heard they snatched us from our mother just as quickly as my mother had done with our father.  They put us in a foster home and monitored our every word, every friend, and every move. ​After that my sisters and I clung to each other providing ourselves with a sense of support that at times the other didn’t know how to give.  Our foster family tried to be there for us in their own way but at the same time didn’t know what do or say to make us feel any better.  We were constantly being held liable for every broken object and every argument between their children and us.  We definitely felt like outsiders to their tight nit family they had created before us.  However, it was the first time I felt like a normal child and it was in this home with someone else’s family.  The first really pretty dress I had ever owned was bought to testify against my step father in court.  I remember preparing to testify by doing twirls in my new dress and fantasizing that someone would save me from having to look my mother in the eyes with the truth.  ​Our visitations with our mother held tense conversations.  Every word that was passed between us had been silently aimed at accusations.  We had to testify against our stepfather with our mother’s disbelieving eyes gazing up at us.  I look back at those broken moments in time and remember how much worse it was to dissect the most disgraceful events with my stepfather in court than what he did to my sisters and I.  I tried to block out the conversations by answering the bare minimum.  I’d look at my mother sitting in the chair staring at me, those dark eyes attempting to guilt me into silence and wonder how she could let her daughter’s get taken away.  She didn’t even bother to clean our rooms.  She just let her baby girls climb over mounds of rubble to collect their things to live with strangers.  She let us break in silence while she didn’t believe and I couldn’t have any feelings about it.  I didn’t want to talk about the fact that I didn’t believe my sister when she told me what had started between our stepfather and her and how she couldn’t stop it.  I didn’t want to talk about my sister’s vanishing acts in the middle of the night. I didn’t want to think about how the court proceedings had resulted in a mistrial because my sisters and I had different stories.  Most of all, my sisters and I didn’t want to talk about it.  We weren’t trying to get our story straight.  However, through it all we obtained a bond of siblings stronger than we had ever known before. ​The parting of our relationship didn’t come until a while after we moved to our grandparents in Arrowhead Resort and hadn’t completely demolished.  We still stuck up for each other when our grandparents couldn’t understand us.  There were days when nothing would keep my sisters and I from expressing our feelings about the changes in our lives or the nasty past that we had endured together.  It wasn’t until we approached the fork in the road and set off in separate paths to view the stormy seas of life that we couldn’t seem to connect anymore.

“If you want grow with me, you can’t go with me!”