The Blue House

Welcome to the Family

The left side of my face was still stinging from a few hours before when my mom decided that she would come apologize for her husband's angry hands. It's always the same thing, "He doesn't hit you because he's mad, he hit's you because he loves you." or the ever so frequent, "Well, I don't know what to say. He said you were being a bitch, so it sounds to me like you deserve it."

I remember the first time Scott slapped me across my face. I was 12, and had told him that he wasn't my real dad. I guess he couldn't deal with the truth that my words had bared. He wasn't my dad. I had a dad, his name is Russell, he just wasn't in the picture at that point. It was his own doing, of course. He was into drugs, more specifically meth, and for some reason getting high took priority over being around for his family. My mom wasn't exactly a saint either. Her name is Laura, she had me at 17 so I guess her motherly instinct just took a while to kick in... Even though it never quite kicked in when I was involved. She moved from bad relationship to bad relationship for a big part of my childhood, all of them more abusive than the next.

She had another couple kids along the way, the second oldest of which is Noah. He's 13 months younger than I, and has been my best friend for as long as I can remember. Noah is the only one of my brothers, I have 3, that shares both biological mother and father with me. The next oldest is Michael. When Noah and I were toddlers, my mother had followed through with the idea of packing us up and taking us to Oregon. So, the three of us did a little disappearing act one night and didn't look back. My mom ended up getting pregnant when I was 5. Little did I know that the reason she had gotten pregnant was because she was raped. I believe that she was 22 when it happened.

I don't really remember the other people in the house too much. There was an old woman, an old man who was very sick and had oxygen on at all times, and a man who worked with my mom at the fire station. If you can call a person like him a man. Like I said, I don't remember too much from back then but what I do remember is enough to make me hate that man. There was this ping pong table in the house and whenever Noah and I were bad he would pull our pants down, bend us over the table, and hit us repeatedly with one of the ping pong paddles. Whenever he and my mom would argue she would lock us in the bedroom, but we could hear yelling and things breaking in the other room. Sometimes we would be in there for two hours or more, and most of the time when my mom would come in with a newly forming bruise on her face.

This man also had two daughters of his own, though I don't remember their names any more. I do know that they were very close in age with Noah and I. I didn't really know what rape was back then, at least not by name. Every once in a while I would hear from his daughters that their dad would touch them in places where they didn't like it. I can't remember if he had touched Noah or I though. I do remember having to go to the doctor with my Grandma Carol and having the doctor ask me if I had been touched anywhere. They even gave me a doll to show where if I had been. It was all very cliche. I cant remember what I said, but between that and what he was doing to his daughters the man got sent to jail. He's out now though, he sent a letter to my mom about two years ago.

Michael, the third oldest of us kids, is my only half brother from my mom. I love him just as much as I love Noah. Michael was born in the middle of all of this and after my moms maternity leave, she had to go back to work. So Noah, the old lady, the sick old man, and I were left alone with a newborn baby. Needless to say I could change a diaper before I was 6 years old. The old lady never cooked, never cleaned, and never helped with the baby. The house was a mess and we were hungry, I didn't know what to do. One day, I think I had just turned 6, I was hungry and no one was there to make dinner so I had called my Grandma Carol that lived in Montana. Then through the many months, the calls became more frequent and then one day in the middle of a snow storm my Grandma Carol and my Grandma Mary drove to Oregon and took us home. Grandma Carol being my dads mom, and Grandma Mary being my mothers mom.

A few years later my dad had gotten his girlfriend, Sophia, pregnant. They had been together on and off for a while, and she had lived next to us for a long time before that. She had a daughter named Clara who was a few years younger than I was, four years maybe. They didn't stay together for long, but they did get Justin out of it so it wasn't for nothing. Justin is the youngest of us kids, eight years younger than I am. I never really got to see him grow up though, because Noah and I ended up moving back in with my mom, Michael, and her new husband when she remarried.

Which brings us back to Scott. Things weren't so bad at first, actually I genuinely liked the guy.