As a fourteen year old eighth grade girl, all I should be worrying about are boys and grades, mostly boys. But there's more to my life than just that. I'm Emily, the youngest of four children, two of which now attend Nottingham University all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. I live together with my sixteen year old sister, Rachel, and my father. My mother, I never talk to. As a little girl, she abused sister and me. I still fear her up to this day. I tend to wake up in the middle of the night crying from the nightmares I have from her. I'm scared she'll come back for me. This is the untold story of my mother.
When I was four years old, I remembered my mom always yelling at my dad. "You piece of shit," she cried, "Why can't you just stop fucking up our family's lives." Little did I know she was the one tearing our family apart. My dad did everything around the house. He cooked, cleaned, taken care of us, and at the same time had two jobs to keep a roof over our heads. My brothers, Alexander and Elijah each had a part time job when they were twelve and fourteen, respectively. My mother stayed at home. She was a drug addict, but I didn't know that at the time. She used all of the money my dad earned on buying illegal drugs. She stayed in her room doing meth while my sister had to take care of me. My dad tried to keep us out of our house as much as we could. After school every day, we went with my second-oldest brother to the library until my dad could pick us up. Sometimes, we had to wait outside of the library when it was dark out because my dad tried to work over time a lot. Luckily, a library associate stayed with us after it closed, sometimes hours until my dad finally arrived.
It took my dad seventeen years to get away from my mom. I was only six. At first, my mother was sane. For the first nine years my dad had known her, my mom had been a great person. My dad and brothers told me she had been perfectly fine until she had my sister. After that, she kept getting worse and worse. After I was born, she started doing drugs. After my parents were divorced, I decided to live with my dad, my the court decided my sister and I had to visit her at least one weekend every month until we become thirteen years old. My brothers were old enough to have the option to not visit.
Our visits were hell. During my first visit, she was living in her first boyfriend's apartment. We had nothing to eat. All she would ever tell us to do was look in the fridge where there was only beer and raw poultry. The only thing actually edible was stale bread. It only had one room to sleep in, so my sister let me sleep on the couch and she slept on the hard floor. Neither of us could sleep though. I remember I could hear them making loud noises and knocking things over while they were having sex. At that time, I didn't know what was happening, and I was too scared to do anything about it. My sister kept trying to make me feel better though. "Please don't cry. Everything's gonna be okay, Emily, " she'd always tell me as she hug me tightly when I couldn't sleep.
When our dad picked us up, we were a mess. We started crying and ran into his arms. He held us tightly as we told him what happened. When he attempted to confront our mom, her boyfriend stepped in and threatened my dad to stop. After my dad denied what her boyfriend said, he punched my dad in the face. It scared the shit out of me. Her boyfriend locked the door immediately and we didn't know what to do. My dad told us to go to the car. We ran there as he was trailing closely behind. Blood was running down his nose. He dropped us off where my oldest brother had his internship at as he went to the hospital. My brother drove us home that night after he picked up my other brother from his part time job as a cashier at City Market.
My dad hadn't come home that night. The morning after, my aunt came over and told my brothers that the bone in the nose broke, and punctured deep into his head. Over the next week, we had to stay home alone until my dad could recover with the doctor watching over him closely. When he made a full recovery and came home, he told us the man who hit him was arrested and charged for battery.
Our first visit to our mom's place was at the beginning of the month, so we figured we didn't need to go for seven more weeks. We went to a new place than before. This time, she lived with a different boyfriend. I have to admit, he was a pretty cool guy. He let us play on his Gameboy Color he owned. He fed us and took care of us. And our mom was also being nice to us and I thought she really had changed. That is, until my sister dropped and broke the Gameboy Color while he was working. My mom was home alone that night with us and she started hitting her until she became red all over. I ran away to lock myself in the bathroom. I could hear her yelling at my sister. "You better not ruin this for me, you little bitch. You and your sister were the worst things that have ever happened to me. I've tricked this man to fall in love with me and now he lets me use money, so you better not fuck up or else I'll kill you."
My dad, brothers (who came just in case something bad happens), and her boyfriend came in at the same time that night and I was still locked up in the bathroom. I came out when I heard their voices and I saw my sister was still sitting lying on the carpet bleeding and too scared to even move. Then my mom came down, and tried to lie her way out of it. I told them what really happened and my mom slapped me across the face. Her boyfriend demanded for her to leave and so she did. He offered us dinner at his house as an apology for what happened that night. My dad and the man became great friends.
As we thought our lives were finally falling back into place, I had to go see my mom again. She had a new boyfriend (again) who was just as much of a dick as the first one. This time we actually had our own room. My sister and I stayed in our room and hid from them most of the time. My mom got her boyfriend to drag us out of our room and then she started yelling at us about how we were terrible daughters. After she was finished yelling at us, we ran out of the house to the park in the neighborhood. And sobbed. And sobbed. At sundown, we finally decided to go back. When we went in, she grabbed my sister. I was too scare to even watch what she would do to her. I immediately ran upstairs to the room and put everything i could to block the door from being opened. I saw he had a phone in that room. My first response was to called the police, but it was hard for them to hear because of my crying. The few minutes I waited for them to get here were the longest of my life.
By the time the police arrived, it was almost too late. They broke right through the door and I opened the door just enough to see what had happened. One of the policeman had grabbed my mom and put her in handcuffs. But when the other cop tried to grab her boyfriend, he kept resisting and fought back.The two cops couldn't contain him. He broke loose of their grasp and ran out through the door. One of cops chased after him, and the other one called for me. "Is anyone here?" He shouted, "Everything's okay; you can come out now." When I came out, I saw my mom in handcuffs lying on the floor. On the other side of the room was the cop at my sister's aid. He called for an ambulance. I could see why. My own sister was lying half dead on the carpet. She had huge cuts piercing into her back. Her face was completely swollen. Blood was flowing all over. Suddenly, the crack of a gunshot broke the silence. Then the ambulance finally arrived. My sister was put on a stretcher and taken to the hospital. The police officer called my dad to come pick me up and sort out this mess. Several officers arrived momentarily, followed by my dad and oldest brother, each in their own car. I had to go home with my brother that night, but my dad didn't come home.
I found out he was staying at the hospital all night with my sister. I asked if I could go, but my dad didn't let me because he thought I would've been emotionally scarred seeing someone in that condition when I was only seven. The morning after, the news was on. The police officer chasing down her boyfriend had shot and killed him when he grabbed a steel pipe and attempted to attack him. My mother was currently kept at the county jail. My sister was in critical condition with a damaged spinal cord.
Weeks later, my sister came out of the hospital. She came home in a wheelchair. She was completely paralyzed from the waist down. Just a few days later, we had to go to our mom's hearing in court. She pleaded guilty for multiple charges including possession of illiegal drugs. She was sentenced to twenty-two years in prison and four years of parole afterwards. She was out of our lives forever.
No one outside of my family has ever heard this story until now.
