When all else fails

Chapter 1

     The Dr comes rushing in with a very large syringe as the nurse switches to the second syringe to put me under. As the surgical type room starts to fade I look over at mommy and daddy, smile, and whisper around my paci "I love you"

     Just as another world, another life, comes into focus. I'm 6 standing in front of my mom and dad. Mom is 5'5" fiery red hair that she has to keep permed in a tight spiral. Dad is 5'10" dark brown hair and eyes that can bore through you with just a glance. They are both yelling at me for something I did. I hear the words, they are just not making sense. I'm told I'm going to bed without dinner.

     Six months pass I'm over my dad's knee. Getting my behind tanned as he says. The words ringing in my ears "you will learn one way or another you need to keep your hands to yourself."

     Three months later my dad is yelling for me to get down to my room. I turn and run fearing the outcome if I'm not fast enough. I find my mattress and box springs on their side still on the frame. My dad is behind me "they will stay that way until I decide to put them down. Do you know why they are that way?" I shake my head I really had no clue, I followed all the rules I know I did. "You didn't clean your room like your mother told you to." they stayed there for two weeks me sleeping on a concrete basement floor.

     Three months after my eighth birthday I find myself over my dad's knee again. They got me a boxing toy, one of those inflatable ones you hit and they come back up. I was curious as to how it was made, so I found a plastic knife and went to cutting. Boy was that a mistake. I should have hidden it better..

     It was four months after my tenth birthday, I come in the house after school to both my parents sitting at the dining room table. I can tell right away my dad has been crying. Mom looks over at me and says "Sean we need you to sit down for a minute we have something to tell you." I sat at the kitchen table across from them, as if I'm sitting on egg shells, waiting for whatever bombshell they plan on dropping now. "There is no easy way to say this....... Your grandfather Fredrickson died this morning."

     I sit trying to wrap my head around what was just said. It can't be, he's 6'3" fit as a fiddle, he's my rock, my shining light in the shit hole I call a life. All the good memories turn to ash in my mind as my world crumbles around me. I don't even have the emotions to cry, I'm numb from the inside out. I stare blankly at her as she finishes what she was saying, I blanked out I don't recall if there was anything after.

     It takes two months and we are now living in grandpa's house. There is no room for me, the only boy, so I sleep on the floor of my sisters' room. I sleep there for six months as my parents slowly clear a room out just enough for my dresser and bed. Once I'm there I start thinking and dreaming of simpler and better times. Times when I was just a baby and was loved and cared for.

     Image after image fly past, this little boy... wait that's me sitting alone under the play structure at my new school in as small of a hole I could find. Not really fitting in anywhere. Being locked out of the house for not collecting firewood for the house. Getting slapped and belittled for cutting some logs wrong. Joining wrestling in high school every match hoping just one of my parents would show but never being there. Yet always attending anything thing that my two sisters were involved in.

     Throughout this time my dad draws further and further away, pulling so far back he might as well not even been there. However, his insistence that boys don't do this, or don't walk this way, or don't do that with their hands sticks in my head and won't let go. Mom on the other hand gets more and more violent, more and more verbal. Never going past the line into abuse but toeing it enough times it left the scars nonetheless.

     I decided the only way I could escape this life is to join the military. On my eighteenth birthday I signed up as a Navy corpsman. I shipped out in four months for bootcamp. As graduation time neared I sent the date and invitation to my parents, thinking there is no way they would fly halfway across the country for this, not for me. Yet there they where, they showed. That was the first time, since that day many years ago, I saw some life in my dad's eyes. "I'm proud of you Sean." was all he said, but in those few words he spoke the world.