To the Moon and back

chapter one

As I opened my eyes and I had to remind myself to breath. I hope like hell today will be a better day. I've been having flashbacks to my old life, the old me that I left behind about a year ago. I never realized how damaged I was until I packed up my 2 baby girl and booked it to another state. It all settled in over me like a raging storm that was out for a vengeance. The nightmares of the abuse haunted my mind dayin and day out. Just like shackles in a dungeon I was trapped in my mind to relive the memories I have suppressed. The screams ,the pain, the heartache, he broke me in the worst of ways. He made me believe that I was never going to be enough for anyone. The demons he planted in my head spoke of such sweet relief from this earth ,such peaceful places I could go to. But I couldn't, my girls are what saved me from such a horrid place to begin with,they are my world and I'd walk to hell and high water to protect them and to keep them from seeing me when I do break. We all break eventually. My name is Ashley and this is my story.

Where too even begin... as I sat there thinking about how to even live my life again. How to pick up the pieces and put them together like a shatter vase that once held the most delicate of flowers. But even flowers start to die eventually, when not taken care of. I always dreamed I would live a very peaceful life, with a husband that loved me to the end of the earth and excepted en for who I am. Yet that wasn't the case, as I laid there in bed listening to my daughter's sleep beside me, their tiny snores of restful sleep. I was questioning how I was going to do this as a single parent. What would I tell them when they got old enough to understand that mommy and daddy are not together anymore.

No one prepares you for any of those questions, nothing ever could. Should I tell them the truth or should I keep the pain hidden until they are old enough to fully understand. I left to protect them of course, they are my life. I n3ver wanted to raise them in a unlovable household. All that my oldest had to see just because I was to afraid to leave. I believe I was never going to beable to get out of the living hell I called home to my girls. I just could help but to keep asking myself the same question, how am I going to do this.

I know I didn't fail them as a mother, I've done everything I could. I had to get them and myself out. Out of respect to myself and the lives of my girls. I had to break the chain of family relationships and abuse. Abuse is not love, it's being silenced when you need to scream. It's being told what to do and forces to do and give thing to the other that was never theirs to take in the first place. And that he did, he took and kept on taking until there was nothing left, I was a black hole that fell for whatever attention he gave me out of good graces. I was a little girl pushed to a blacked out room full of nothing but darkness.