Child Abuse Story From Alex B

by Alex B
(Thousand Oaks, California)

My Experience: 
It all started when I was 3. My first mother committed suicide at home, and left my father and I alone. After 2 years of dating, my dad remarried to a woman he met in Las Vegas. She had stated that she was a school teacher and had degrees in those areas. Without questioning, my father was excited that he had a parent that understood me and knew how to deal with any problems. As the years went by, he realized that there was something wrong, but being a small businessman he was always away and just noticed the small things. My experience during the time he wasn't around is where I start my story.

I guess the first memory of abuse was when I was 5 and was asked if I had brushed my teeth. A common lie among kids. This started the first of three different punishments. The first would be to run 20 laps at the nearby park. A lap consisted of running through dried weeds to my knees, with the thorns and all the fun stuff that you never want to run through to a wall, touching it and coming back. I have gone back and actually measured it now and it is about 7/8 of a mile. So this would be assigned and I would get through about 10 a day, which I would get more tacked on the next day for not finishing. I would get no rest, except for a sip of water when I was dying. I remember intensely these times and the years having to run these laps and the time I had praying my life would end, so I would not have to suffer this way.

There were days where homework came and went, and besides writing my homework out 3 times each, I would then have to write standards to improve my penmanship. These would consist of 2 sentence standards that I would get assigned at least 5,000 a month, along with the laps I would run. To this day, this is the only reason why I am free from the pain, as my father finally saved some and showed the court to prove the type of mindset that I was put through.
Now some may say that neither of these were that bad, as everyone has gone through this at one point or another. But I never stopped. I was able to go out and play maybe a total of 8 days, and watch TV a total of 18 hours during my childhood.

The third punishment was a 5-foot bent plastic tubing from a toy, used as a paddle and was used until I would stop crying. Now as a child and always being wrong and punished, I seldom had a dry eye. So as for the other two punishments, if I didn't stop crying I would get an added 10 minutes of paddling, 1000 standards, or 10 laps, every 30 seconds until I stopped whimpering. Usually I could stop after 3 to 4 minutes, but would continue shortly after. I have been completely purple from the hips to the thighs numerous times.

The fourth would have been soap in the mouth, but I was allergic and it never came about. So my childhood from 5 - 15 was this. And if for some reason I had finished my punishment, I was able to clean the house, from head to toe with let's just say a military style inspection. If anything, and I mean anything, was out of place or had a speck of dust, I was to start all over. I remember for almost ten years wanting to run away, yet I had nowhere to go. I wanted to die, yet it wouldn't happen. So that would be the physical abuse.

For the mental abuse, I never fully realized it until recently and am still uncovering more details, but I was being raised by a pathological liar. Everything she said was to manipulate me against my father, which worked. I hated my father because I was told that all the parents fighting was because she wanted him to spend more time with me. Between that and being the only person I knew, I grew to love her and to believe that these punishments were for my own good. Never did I think that I was being mistreated.

When the divorce finally happened, I was turned over to my father, as my second mother was placed into a mental hospital, and deemed mentally incapable of being a parent. There were many more titles put on her, but I will show restraint. I am currently 24, and finding that the damage done has been much deeper than initially realized. I just hope that my story will help someone and that my case which was used in another similar case will be helpful to others as well.

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