Child Abuse Story From Exanimis

by Exanimis
(North Carolina)

I no longer have a problem telling my story for two reasons.

1. Years of therapy have allowed me to tell it in a time frame that I am most comfortable with.
   
2. All of my abusers are dead.

My story actually starts before I was born. My mother had married young. She married the first man to show an interest in her and he was a drunk. He beat her until she knocked him out with his own liquor bottle. After the birth of my older brother, my father's drinking got worse. Two years later, my mother left my father and moved back home with her parents. My mother found out then that she was pregnant with me. She returned to my father. The year was 1958 and divorce wasn't as popular or as easy as it is today. When I was forty, my mother told me this story and said, "If abortion had been legal in 58, you might not have been here."

Those words haunt me, but not nearly as much as other events in my life. I have been working on my life story, writing it down. For what reason, I don't know. I have titled the story Dog boy. Dog boy is the way I see myself, the way I learned to adapt. To this day I still see myself as less than human; I am more dog than man.

My mother wanted a girl but she got me. She said that if I had been a girl I would have been named Kelly Jean. It's the name she had picked out. When the doctor said she had a boy, she changed it to Kelly Eugene. I've always hated my name. I went to school with girls named Kelly and the one time I decided to go by my middle name, well, by the end of the year everyone, including the teacher, was calling me Gene/ Jean.

My mother never wanted me, she had wanted my older brother, and when I was three she had remarried. My half brother was born when I was six. Both were wanted and they were treated like normal kids. Somewhere around the age of nine, the farmhouse we lived in became too small. There were only three bedrooms. With my parents needing one, that left one for my older brother and one for my younger brother. I wasn't allowed to sleep in the house after that. I slept behind the feed shed where we kept the pig food when the weather was nice. In winter I would climb under the house, I'd take my coat off and put it on backward and sleep with my back against the chimney for heat.

I remember in the fifth grade I had a teacher who I still despise to this day. She would give lectures on hygiene while walking around the room and spraying air freshener. She would always stop at my desk and spray it a little heavier. I remember feeling the drops hitting the back of my neck as I hung my head in shame. The entire class got a laugh out of it. Looking back, I can't remember much more than that and the sixth grade is a complete blank. I don't know what happened that year. That year is just missing from my memory.

At home, I was a slave. I am always angered when people talk about slavery. You see, slavery is not something you can read about or study and understand. It's not something that I or anyone else can communicate in a way that someone can know what it is like. It's not beatings, it's not control or ownership. Slavery is a complete loss of everything that makes you human. Slavery is being asked a question and knowing that any answer you give will be wrong and end with you getting a beating. Slavery is not being allowed to bath or shower, it's having no clothes and wearing the same pair of socks until they rot and stick to your feet. Slavery is finding a beautiful stone and having to hide it because if anyone finds out you have something, they will take it away or destroy it.

I have a lot of memories from when I was a child and even though I have tried to find some good memories, I have none. Not one single good memory. A good memory to me is going out to feed table scraps to the dogs and finding half a roll in the dish. Sitting in the dark dusty dirt under the house with my back against a warm chimney is actually one of my good memories. I don't sleep at night, I sleep during the day. I like the night too much to sleep it away. When I was a child, the night was the only time I was free.


Being a middle child is an all around bad deal anyway. You see, my older brother was old enough to know better and my younger brother was too young to know any better. I always seemed to be at the perfect age where it had to be my fault.

I remember one Saturday morning my older brother got up and went downstairs to watch cartoons. He put some leftover spaghetti on the stove to heat up but got interested in the cartoons and forgot it. By the time he remembered it, it was scalding hot. I was asleep in the chair on the front porch and since the house slave wasn't there to fix his meal, it was most definitely my fault. I woke that morning with scalding hot spaghetti thrown in my face. I was twelve then and I decided to keep track of how many beatings I received that day at the hands of my mother and older brother. Between nine in the morning and twelve noon the count reached ten and I quit counting.

When I was thirteen I was doing my after school chores. I had a lot of them. I basically did everything that a mother and wife would normally do for their family. I was standing in the hall putting clothes into the washing machine when the whole world jumped. That's the best way to describe it. I didn't feel anything. I just say everything around me jumped and then everything was black. I woke to pain. My brother had snuck up behind me and hit me across the head with a broom handle. While I was out cold he decided to rape me and that's what I woke to. Those violent rapes continued until I was seventeen. At seventeen I ran away from home. I hitchhiked from Virginia to New Mexico before the police caught me and locked me in a detention center in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I turned eighteen in a cell with a kid who had murdered his dad. At eighteen, they could no longer hold me as a runaway and they had to release me. I was on my own from that moment forth. I have done almost every drug imaginable. I drank for years and found myself in trouble more times than I can remember.

I am that guy who you see on the street and fear. I'm the guy that your family always told you to stay away from. I've done more harm than good in this world and all I have to look back on are regrets.

On April the first 2009 I will be fifty years old. I am in too bad a shape to keep a job and I am disabled. I only leave my house to cash my check, pay my bills and buy what little groceries I can afford. The only goal I have left, the only thing I look forward to is dying.

My mother accepted the Lord when she was older. She claimed that my older brother excepted the Lord before his death. Even though I wasn't told anything about God or faith as a child, I sought out my own faith and I accepted the Lord in the eighties. Now I fear the hell that I deserve, but I could never be at peace in a heaven that would allow those two in. My hope is that God, being a merciful God, will grant me the mercy of nothingness. I pray that when I die, God will utterly destroy me so that there is no body, no soul, no spirit and no memories left.

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