Child Abuse Story From Anonymous

by Anonymous
(Ontario, Canada)

A Life of Abuse: 
I was abused for as many years as I can remember. And the worst part about it was, I didn't even know it was abuse! When we (my twin brother and I) were as young as two or three, my mother used to shut us up in our room and lock us in while she went off to have one of her 'breakdowns'. Though I can't remember it, I've been told by my grandparents she used to lock herself in the bathroom and leave us unattended in the house when we were as young as one year old.

My mother became increasingly more neglectful and emotionally abusive as we got older. Though she denies it to this day, she used unreasonable physical force against my brother and me on more then one occasion. Once, for bickering, we were told to kneel with our heads against the back of the couch so that she could beat us with a belt.

When I was thirteen, my brother and I moved in with our dad. Soon after, our mother abandoned us to go live in Detroit with her latest boyfriend (then husband, then ex-husband). While I lived with my father, he placed exceedingly unreasonable demands on me, screamed at me so much and so loudly it made me cry on many occasions. He hit and beat me whenever he became enraged, and perhaps the most hurtful part of my childhood was that he never seemed to want to show his own children any affection.

For as long as I can remember, my parents had been divorced and my father had been with an awful woman, my stepmother. For many years, I lived in fear of her. When I was a child, she used to yell at me and frighten me so badly I often wet myself-which of course made her scream more.

After ten years, the relationship between my father and stepmother began to rapidly decline-and my stepmother placed all the blame for that on me. Once, my brother and I got into a gigantic screaming match with her one day near the end of the school year. She used to get very close to me while she yelled as a means of intimidating me. Somehow, I always resisted my urge to hit her.

The last straw with my stepmother came one day when I was sixteen. My stepmother, while thin, was surprisingly strong. Or perhaps her trump card was the fact that I was always incredibly weak and timid, and she could easily dominate me. That night, I asked her a simple question, asking nicely if she could refrain from using my things. She lost it completely, yelling and screaming about how she paid the mortgage in the house (which by that point, she actually didn't). She threw me to the floor, dragging me down the stairs by my hair, screaming, "I'll show you what I f**king pay for!"

Immediately after this, I gathered my purse, shoes, my little dog, and fled to a neighbour's house. They let me use their phone to call my grandparents, who brought me to their house. They told my father he had to protect me, but he didn't care. In fact, he believed it was all my fault. Instead of sacrificing his own plans, he brought me out on a date with him as I had no other place to go that night.

He began bringing his new girlfriend over. To her credit, this new woman was extremely kind and loving towards me and my brother. Though by this point, my brother would not speak to anyone. He hates me. Any time he sees me now, he flips me off. He was the one who, in his anger, threw me into furniture and nearly strangled me to death on two separate occasions.

At the beginning of grade eleven, with nowhere else to turn, I went to one of my teachers with everything my father and everyone else had been doing. I had gone to a teacher in grade nine as well, but she had reported the incidents. Child Services called my parents, and I was worse off for it. But this new teacher (let's say, Mrs. X) in grade eleven seemed different somehow, and indeed she was. She never told anyone the things I told her; and what she did say was carefully controlled so that it wouldn't make the counselors at my school suspect anything was amiss.

In November of that year, she took me to a women's shelter in my city. I became scared however, and returned to my father's house. For another month I lived in fear of him, until finally, on Christmas day no less, he threatened me by telling me how he had killed a man many years before in a fit of rage. I wanted to leave that night, but he physically restrained me and made me stay in the house.

My next opportunity to leave did not come until that April. With the willing support of Mrs. X, I returned to the women's shelter for good, packing my things in the middle of the night and fleeing the next afternoon. My brother screamed and tried to restrain me, but luckily I got away amidst the screaming match that ensued in our driveway. Luckily, my father was at work two hours away and could not stop me. By this time, my mother was absent completely, having been put in jail months before. And even later when she got out, I was not permitted to live with her.

I spent two and a half months in the women's shelter, learning a lot about myself and why I felt the way I did about things. Eventually, I was able to get an apartment and obtain government assistance, and now live across town from my father. While my family denies abuse and all refuse to talk to me, Mrs. X is still by my side, and I know now that she will never abandon me or abuse me like my parents did.

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