Things I Wish I Had Known #2: I Deserved Better

**I found this post difficult to read because abuse is described in detail. If you are the victim of abuse, please consider telling a trusted adult or ally. The woman who wrote this is extraordinary in so many ways, and I'm grateful she is here to tell her story.**

I wish I had known at four years old that I deserved better than what my family gave me. And that nothing about our toxic and volatile household was okay or normal. That I deserved to be free from the jarring recurring dream that has haunted me from my childhood into my present. The dream that had an aerial view of myself fleeing my home, down the slope of my hilly Pittsburgh street, and running so hard and fast that I’d take flight past the powerlines into the refuge of the cerulean sky.

My therapists over the years have advised me to revisit that skinny and frightened little girl to offer her comfort. I often fear that if I heed their suggestions, I will become that preschool-aged girl. The girl whose father whipped her, bound her wrists and ankles with her mother’s nude pantyhose, tied her hands to the tarnished round copper doorknob of her bedroom, and locked her inside while her mother sat complicit in her bedroom across the hall. This was the consequence for coloring on a wall. This unthinkable experience would become one of my first memories.The brutality did not end there. It followed me through early childhood, into my teenage years and to my adolesce

nce. I tried in vain to reach out for help. During one beating when I was in kindergarten, I reached for the red telephone in my bedroom to call my grandmother for help. My father ripped the phone out of the wall. Also during this time, I called my grandmother when I discovered there were no adults home. Nothing came from my cries of distress. Parent-teacher conferences felt like judgment day, even though I was an A student. If I fell short of an A in any class, more violence would follow. By the time I was seven years old, I left a purple and turquoise jump rope next to the crab apple tree in the backyard of our duplex, in case the only way I could escape the abuse was to exit this life into the next one. I don’t know or understand how I knew about suicide in the second grade.

These experiences were, sadly, not unique to just me. My early memories also include watching my mother charge my teenage brother, once when he came home late, and punch him so hard he tumbled down the stairs. I was so frightened, I retreated to my bedroom, but not before seeing his bright red blood splattered across the adjacent kitchen wall. That cold night, my parents forced him to sleep in the backyard with no blanket. My mother, who was a secondary education teacher, warned him that he best not tell the orthodontist the truth about why his teeth were disfigured. When my brother and I went together to family counseling as adults, he shared that he deserved the punishments that he received. I wish I could also go back and tell my brother as a child that he didn’t.

The pain that my father inflicted wasn’t just physical. He called me an idiot so often, the term basically could have been my nickname. If I didn’t learn something fast enough, like how to tell time or do long division, he promised me a beating. All my mother offered me over the years was silence. She participated in the arbitrary abuse too – beating me, for example, when I forgot that I left a lipstick in the pocket of my jeans when I washed them, or for leaving my denim jacket on my school bus though I found it the next day.

My first discovery that things may not have been normal was when I overheard my mother tell someone over the phone that my middle school had concerns that I was being abused at home. This call followed an incident when I cried uncontrollably and banged my head against the girls’ bathroom wall when I got in trouble at school for yelling at a teacher for making my friend cry. Sadly, like the family members who knew of the trouble but looked away, nothing further came from that call.

The recurring dream that had haunted me for so many years prepared me for the day that I believed my life would end at the hands of my father. I was in eighth grade, and I brought home a report card with all As and one B. I lingered in the foyer when I arrived home, mentally planning how I could mitigate the pain as much as possible. My father was at his desk in his makeshift office housed in the dining room. I announced that I was home and had my report card. Predictably, his reaction was for me to select a belt for him to beat me with. I crossed the linoleum kitchen floor, into the wooden hallway and then arrived at the armoire in the bedroom that he shared with my mother. I selected a belt that wasn’t too small, or else he would select one he felt was appropriate and, thus, inflict more pain. I glanced at the belt I feared the most – a thick thrift store cowboy-like belt with branding and turquoise – which evoked an unsteady feeling in the pit of my stomach. When I returned to the foyer, my father was dissatisfied with my selection. He snatched it, went to his bedroom, and returned with the cowboy belt. I knew that he would hold it at one end and strike me with the other end that held the buckle. My mind completely disassociated from my body, just like in my dreams. I tossed my new eyeglasses on the floor, worried that they’d break in the melee. Instinctually and without hesitation, just like in the dream, I booked it for the front door and pounded the concrete, never looking back as if I’d turn into a pillar of salt if I did. I expected my father to chase me and drag me back into the house. I don’t know if he even attempted.

I ran into the sanctuary of the new house that my parents had recently closed on that was located a few blocks away. I was oblivious to the fact that it was winter and that I was not wearing a coat. I scurried to the basement, where my brother was unpacking boxes. As if my father was nearby, I whispered to him what happened. He called my mother. Still wearing my musty cream sweater, I spent the night with my brother at a seedy motel per my mother’s direction. When we returned home, my mother said that my father was not in the house, and that he was sleeping at the unfurnished house that I had previously hid from him in. I felt a short-lived sense of hope when I overheard my mother on the phone announcing that she was going to “divorce” my father (which, technically, I later discovered in my early twenties was impossible, since they never had legally married). My mother shared with me my father’s version of the incident: that I was disrespectful and cursed at him, and that he was hurt. Somehow, his blatant callous lies hurt more than all of the physical pain that he’d inflicted upon me up to that point. Despite his egregious behavior, my mother forced me to speak to him outside of the house the next day. I don’t remember much about the discussion. I just remember that my mother let him back into our home.

I need to tell my four-year-old self that their behavior was wrong. I am the only one who has standing to do so, as my mother died when I was 15, and my father when I was 21. I want to hold them accountable, I resent that they escaped a reckoning, and I wish they could tell me why. I look at my children as they reach the ages I was when I experienced my traumas, and I cry as I wonder how, and why, can two people who are tasked with loving and protecting their children can destroy them in the way that my parents did. I want that little girl to know that she was not obligated to shoulder those secrets into adulthood to protect her parents’ legacies and to shield those who revere them from the truth. Most of all, I want to tell that little girl that, because she was strong enough to hold on and decline wrapping a noose around that tree, she would grow into a woman with the ability to reach back to her to keep her safe.

Submitted by Yasmeen Cowan