Sad Character

1

I could never remember a time when my parents loved each other. The household I entered was filled with toxicity and violence. I was born as a last ditch effort from my parents to salvage what was once a warm and inviting home.

It didn't work.

As my parent's marriage crumbled, so did my sisters' kindness. I grew up being hated and outcast by my siblings for the sole fact of holding the last bit of my mothers affection.

Even my father hated me.

This lead me through a lonely and depressing start in life.

From what I remember from my earliest days, though my parents were beginning to hate each other, it hadn't yet descended into the hell it would grow to be.

Hate breeds more hate, and more hate breeds violence. What started out as hurtful words and icy silences, turned into screaming matches and upturned tables. What had started between my parents, and what had continued to grow between them, the hateful toxicity, soon spread throughout the household.

My sisters turned from watching TV to hiding in their room. And their countenance turned from sweet and innocent to bitter and fearful. The change in their personalities led to harsher treatments of me. Before, I was ignored and an outcast, but now I was a target for their inner anger and pain. What feelings they could not take out on our mother and father, they turned and took out on me. They would yell at me, and taunt me, and make sure I understood that I was not wanted.

This part of my life was the loneliest.

I had no one to turn to and no one on my side. My parents were locked in a fierce bitter battle of wills, and my sisters were clouded and controlled by their pain and fear.

My only solace at this time were the brief moments of affection my mother would show me between her fights with my father.

Looking back, I can see that these moments of affection were a main contributor for the bullying I received from my sisters. I was the only child my mother seemed to love anymore. In my sisters' moment of need, she abandoned them to my father's wrath.

As the years passed, the violence grew and our house, which was once a home, turned into a prison ruled under the vicious fist of my father and the sharp tongue of my mother.

My older sisters' wills began to be break and their mental stability began to crack. My eldest sister took it the hardest. She was the one who carried the brunt of the abuse dealt out by our parents, and as a result, she was the one who fell the hardest and furthest down.

I remember the night like it was yesterday. It was early evening and our family had just finished up taking portraits. Smiling for the camera and putting on a fake visage of a happy family. Me, my sisters, and my father were waiting in the car when my mother ran out of the door with my eldest sister in tow. She pushed her into the backseat and jumped into the front yelling at my father to rush to the hospital.

My eldest sister had swallowed 47 pills of TylenolPM.

At the time, I was too young to fully understand what that meant. Suicide was a concept I had yet to learn about.

The most vivid memory I have of the whole thing was my sister sitting in the backseat next to me, slurring her words and drooping her eyes, as my father drove to a Walgreens to get her Ipecac syrup instead of taking her to the emergency room.

He would rather gamble with her life than lose face to those around us by admitting my sister for a suicide attempt.

In the end, my mother's screeches and threats forced him to take her to the hospital.

When they wheeled her in, her liver was almost at the point of shutting down.

If we had been any later, she would have died.

Even knowing this, my father was still upset he had been forced to take her in.

My parents didn't even stay at the hospital with her that night, instead opting to driving me and my sitters home to sleep. Before they went to bed, I remember them sitting us down and telling us that if anybody were to ask about my sisters suicide attempt, we were to lie and tell them that our household was normal and happy.

I've always wondered if this meant that my parents knew the whole time that what they were doing was wrong. If they didn't believe they were abusing us, why would they have told us to lie about their actions.