Child Abuse Story From Jessica5 Part 2

by Jessica
(Pennsylvania, USA)

See Part 1 of Jessica's story on this site.

Eventually my mom got two minimum wage jobs, and we got a disgusting house. It was bare minimum and we were just squeaking by. This is the first time in my life I realized we were poor. We only lived there about 6 months before my mom and dad got back together. We moved back in with my dad.

Soon after that my dad hurt his back at work. He got addicted to pain killers. That's when he started to get abusive with us. I don't remember much of it. I was about 12-13.

One time, a friend from school called my house. I don't even know why, but this made my dad mad at me. He answered the phone, said, "Yeah, hang on a minute," and then he hit me in the face with it and hung it up. I remember I just ran upstairs, crying.

I remember another time. We had this sliding glass door in the back of our house that went out to the porch. There was something wrong with the track that the screen door was on, and it fell off almost every time it was opened. I was too short to fix it myself, so I just set it against the house and I laid out on the porch and listened to the radio. I was facing away from the door. I never saw him coming. He kicked me when he saw I had knocked the screen off. He also got a running start before he kicked me. This is the worst pain I have ever been in. He got me right in the side. I didn't even get up. I just laid there and cried.

I also remember him hitting my brothers all the time. One time, my littlest brother Jorden was trying to hide from him, I think he was about 4 or 5. He hid up in his bunk bed, which was at the top. My dad reached up and grabbed him down. There was a post at the top that was part of the ladder to get up there. He pulled my little brother the whole way across it. He ended up with a huge cut from the top of his chest all the way passed his belly button. My dad slammed him on the floor, and then left.

I remember another time that was pretty severe, where I was getting a spanking for something, I don't remember what it was. I remember that I made it to the window and I was yelling for help. My dad picked up a wooden kid's chair and hit me with it across my back a couple times. I fell down in between my bed and the wall and cried. I woke up there the next day.

Then my mom and dad would fight again. Always about money or drugs. Then they would break almost everything in the house. And then my mom would leave and get her own pathetic house. I don't know why I always went with my mom. I just did.

This time, the house was horrible. It didn't have enough bedrooms for me my three brothers and my mom. At this point my mom had acquired a lot of dogs. We had 4 pit bulls and 3 mutts in a tiny house that didn't even have enough room for us. She also had three rabbits. She took better care of her pets than she did of her kids.

I was in ninth grade at this time.

I did not have my own bedroom. I slept in a recliner in the living room. My mom used to work at a dentist's office from 8 till 5, and then at a grocery store from 6 pm till 1 am. She didn't drive, so she walked home and it would be about 2 am by the time she got home. I admit she was trying hard, but since the door to the house was in the living room, I never got any sleep. She didn't seem to understand this, when I started skipping school and sleeping at friend's house. I did everything I could to not be at that house. The screen door fell off, and the door knob to the front door fell apart. There were no locks on the door at all. Not that there was anything in the house to steal, but I was always afraid, even though I was 14.

I stopped using the bathroom downstairs, because huge rats would swim up into the toilet. She kept her rabbits down there too, but never cleaned up after them. It smelled horrible. There were also bugs that I've never seen anywhere else. They were huge. I eventually went to the bathroom in a bucket I was hiding in one of my brothers' room. I was 14.

Then my dad started coming around again, trying to win my mom back. It was a Saturday or Sunday in the summer. My dad was outside, but my mom had put a bunch of stuff in front of the door so he couldn't get in. There was an air conditioner in a window. I was laying under that window so I could get some sleep in a somewhat comfortable position. My dad pushed the air conditioner in through the window. A corner of it hit my face and cracked two of my teeth. My mom was barely concerned.

Darlene's comments to this "Child Abuse Story From Jessica5 Part 2" can be found below. If you do not see the comments I've written, please be patient, as there continues to be a system glitch—in spite of being posted and approved, some comments are not appearing live on my site. Jessica, I replied to your story June 10, 2008, comments titled "Wounds that don't heal..." Keep checking back to this page if you don't see those comments yet. I thank you Jessica and my other visitors for your understanding while I work diligently at getting this malfunction resolved.

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