Please Stop

When I was seven, my beautiful little sister came into this world. Shortly after I held her in my arms while my parents screamed awful things at each other in the next room. It got so bad I had to take her to a neighbor's house to calm her down.

The next day I came home from school to find a note from my father saying he had to go.

My mother only got worse from there.

My father couldn't handle it, so from the minute he left until I was almost 13 years old, I may have saw him a total of ten times. I suppose I can't blame him for wanting to run away, but I can't help but blame him for who he left me with.

I was so young when everything went wrong that it is almost hard for me to remember a mother who actually treated me with love. What I got after that day was a mother who used every chance she could to tell me I was stupid, worthless, ugly and wouldn't amount to much of anything. I got a mother who could somehow find a way to love me one day and the next just never come home and leave her children to find a way to feed themselves on their own. I got a mother who would get tired of looking at us and kick us out of the house in the Texas heat with no food or water and a toddler to take care of.

Myself and my older brother tried to stay strong through it all. Through every awful thing she said, through every water hose she beat us with when we made her mad, through every night she never came home and every day we wished she would just leave.

Things somehow got worse when she met a new man. Why this one was the one she decided to move into our home with her three children, I will never understand. All the other men had come and gone, but this one stuck around. This one who had prior convictions for sexually assaulting children. Of course that didn't matter to her.

I was about ten years old when he took me to a Radio Shack and told me I couldn't have the toy I wanted unless I showed him my boobs. Unfortunately, I had developed early.

It was soon after that he took me to a movie and told me I needed to get in the back seat and take off my pants before we could go inside. (If I refused we would go home with no movie.)

I was a child. A child who had no idea what was happening to me or what to do about it. I let him assault me that night, and then I went in to see that 13 going on 30 movie and spent the entire movie completely afraid he might touch me again. I had no idea what had happened, but I knew it wasn't right.

I caught a lucky break when he got put away for the sexual assault of another child. I thought I was free. I thought the woman who was supposed to love me and take care of me wouldn't stand for being with a man like that. I thought I'd be safe. I thought wrong.

She forced me to go see him in jail every week. She didn't believe me when I told her how uncomfortable he made me feel. She didn't believe me when I told her that he touched me. She didn't believe in me.

When he got out he came right back home with us.

I will never understand how we ended up in the custody of a woman like that after everything she did. I remember multiple CPS visits at school and home. I remember a small hope in my heart that these people could save me, but I never told them about what he did to me. After all, he did it to someone else and he was out already. What would happen if I told someone who was supposed to care? Would they believe me when my own mother didn't? After all, I wasn't even sure that what happened was wrong. Just that it certainly didn't feel right.

About a month before my sixth grade year ended in 2006, I got called out of band practice and was told my mother was there to pick me up. She pulled my brother and I out of school and we took off that day in a travel trailer that she had purchased. We weren't allowed to call our father. We weren't allowed to finish the last month of school. We weren't allowed to know if we were ever coming back. They don't call it kidnapping, but it sure felt like it to me.

It took months, but one night my brother and I were fighting over who was going to be able to sleep on the couch when a SWAT team showed up at our front door with giant guns, arrested my mother and her terrible boyfriend, and took us to a foster facility not far from the city of Kanab, Utah where we were staying.

I remember the kindness of a few of the officers that day. My brother and I were older and had been through so much that this didn't really faze us, but my little sister was only five years old. They sat and talked to her. They kept her calm.

I honestly don't think that either one of them served any time after being arrested that day.

We were in the facility for a few days before my father was able to fly out to get us, but they wouldn't let him take my brother. You see, James isn't biologically our father's child. He was raised by him from the time he was a baby and has never had any contact with his real father who last I checked is in prison for murder.

It took months before the courts could figure out their crap and allow my brother to come home.

I could probably write a novel about every gory detail and everything that has ever happened to me, but the truth is I am a better person now because of it.

I am kind to others because I know how important it can be to build someone up when you never know who may be tearing them down in their lives.

I care. (Sometimes too deeply)

I don't give up easily. (Which isn't always a good thing)

I have found a way to still strive to see the good in people after seeing so much bad.

So please stop asking why sometimes I can't get out of bed in the morning. Please stop ask why I need everything on my bedside table to be just perfect. Please stop asking what is so scary about driving a car. Please stop asking why I have to pause my favorite TV show sometimes because I am so distracted by the way my clothes are laying on the bed next to me. Please stop asking why I have to remove myself from situations that are too loud. Please stop asking why I sometimes spend ten minutes moving something back and forth less than an inch even though my logical brain knows that I am actually not moving anything at all. Please stop asking why I have to take deep breaths sometimes and can't focus on anything other than that. Please stop asking why I am so afraid. Please stop asking why I sometimes have trouble mustering up a smile. Please stop asking. I wish I knew.

There is something wrong with my brain, and I can't apologize for that. I am a miracle. I am standing tall. I have a job, a home, a wonderful man who loves me, friends who have become family, spectacular in-laws, a beautiful troubled little sister, a brother who loves me, and a father who loves me very much and does his best. I am leaps and bounds from where I should be after everything I have been through.

So could you please stop questioning why I am the way I am. I didn't ask for mental illness. I do everything in my power to cope with mental illness. I know it's not logical, but sometimes your logical brain loses to your broken one.

I am flawed, but I am beautiful. Please stop trying to make sense of my problems and just help me cope with them or leave me alone.

Please.