my voice

Chapter one: The Beginning

       My name is Kirsten, I'm 26 years old and I'm here to tell you my life story. My parents believed in physical punishments from time to time however my father was one to take it too far. Before my parents had divorced my brother and I had bedrooms upstairs across from each other separated by a doorway. We are two years and 4 months apart. 

      To get a feel for what this story is going to be about, when my brother was about the age of 2, he was crying in the middle of the night. My mom had been upstairs with him offering endless amounts of love and comfort to get him to calm down. My dad worked a day shift job and needed to be getting up for work in the hours of the early morning so he should have been sleeping during this time. His footsteps approached the bottom of the staircase and every step he took after that got closer to the top. He came in went right past me in my bedroom directly to my younger brother and my mother. It was then in those very moments our first feelings of fear and pain were truly discovered. My father proceeded and took off his diaper and began to smack him on his bare bottom. once, twice, a third time but the screaming cry had already begun. 

     What was thought to be a one-time mishap would soon turn into the everyday norm. See the thing of it is, is apparently from what I'm told my father wasn't always the ignorant prick I got to know him as. At one point in time, I guess you could say he might have been like your average everyday person, went to work, paid bills, tested the limits as a teenager just like everyone else. After that night things settled down a little bit at least to my own eyes, that was only because everything was happening behind closed doors. I got a little bit older, and the issues became more frequent more aggressive and harder to come back from. 

    Ever since I can remember I painted this picture in my head of what my father would be, the things we would do together, all the things that he could teach me and all the fun we would share together but I was so incredibly wrong. There would be times while on the bus ride home from school I would notice my dad's truck behind us, and I would get so excited. I just thought he was the coolest person the go to one I had if I ever needed someone to be on my side. He's 6'2 with a bulky build, I thought he would always be the one to protect me when I needed it, but he was the very one to beat me down literally and hypothetically. 

    There was an incident that I don't remember but my brother does. Something was going on in the kitchen a disagreement of some sort my dad pushed my mom back onto our metal shoe rack that also was a microwave stand on the top part. She fell down to the floor and apparently that hadn't been the only time he had been aggressive towards my mother. The fighting became more frequent between them and gradually more aggressive than they ever needed to be. 

    Unfortunately for us the abuse didn't end, but it did continue grow and with each day the hate my father expressed and showed grew deeper and darker inside of him. He was never present for school events. 

    I do remember this one time I had to study the states and capitals in like 4th grade, and he traced me the entire U.S map and helped me study. I was never so excited for a test in my life because I knew I was about to pass this with flying colors. It was one of the only few times I can remember him actually attempting to participate in parenting. It was one of the only times that i actually felt like he loved and cared about me.