Child Abuse Story From Mary3
by Mary
(LaFayette, Georgia, USA)
I am 41 years now and have raised five wonderful children. I learned from being abused while growing up that I would be good and loving to my children. I turned the tide and turned out to be a good mom.
It all started when I was three years old. My father started molesting me. I didn't know what was going on but in my heart I knew that it was wrong. Later my mother went to work when I was five and I had to take care of my two sisters and baby brother. I became the woman of the house. My father was a drunk and he would come home and while Mom was at work he would sexually abuse me. I had the job of changing my siblings' diapers, keeping their bottles full and potty training them. We moved to another town and the abuse got worse.
My father beat my mother daily. My mother took her anger out on us. The first thing my father did when we moved was to tear off the bathroom and take out the hot water tank. We had a shed out back that we went to the bathroom in. We lived in subdivision. We didn't have a way to take a bath or to use the bathroom. Later that year he had the electricity turned off. My father was a block-and-brick mason, working for his own company. However, his money did not come to take care of us.
My parents started leaving us at home for weeks at a time and with no food. I was the oldest and had to cook whatever had been given to us as canned food. We had a Coleman cook stove and we had one can of Coleman fuel. We used it to cook with until the fuel ran out, then we just ate out of the jars cold. When my parents did show up they would fight and us kids would get in the middle of it. I would try to break them up and my parents would turn on me.
My father started abusing my little sister. I would lie in bed next to her bed and listen to her beg and cry and plead with him to stop. I was devastated. I didn't know what to do. The sexual abuse continued. During this time I did as I was told. I got up and got my siblings ready for school. I instructed them to eat every bite of their lunch because we didn't know if we would get any more food. I found out that they served breakfast at school and we started going to breakfast. So school food was very important to us.
I did great in school, however my siblings did not. I didn't realize until I was grown that I should have helped them with their school work and helped them in school. My sister that my father started abusing started doing drugs at the age of 8 years. I knew she was doing them but I thought it was her only way of coping, so I didn't say anything. My sister turned out to have a learning disability and needed special education classes. My parents refused to go to the school and sign the papers and allow her to get help. She to this day has never learned to read. My little sister and brother didn't get passed 7th grade in school. They can read a little but not very well.
My parents never bought us clothes. We wore whatever was given to us no matter what it looked like or how big it was.
My parents continued to fight. They separated several times. One time during their many separations, we tried to tell our mother that our father was abusing us. She didn't believe us. She said that why would he want you ugly slut when he has me. My mother would yell at us and throw things at us. She never hugged us or showed us any tenderness. She would bring any man she could find into our house and sleep with them in front of us.
During our childhood we did without the basic things in life, and survived. We had never been to a grocery store until I was eleven years old. My mother got food stamps and welfare. When the food stamps would come, my mother's parents would come and take us to the store. My mother and grandmother would go into the store and come out with a large bag of pinto beans, coffee, cream, sugar, 20 lbs of flour, 20 lbs of cornmeal, fifty pounds of potatoes, and four boxes of macaroni and cheese. The rest of the food stamps were given to my grandparents. We did not get any more food for the month. The next month would roll around and the same thing would happen.
Then one day we went down to pick up the food stamps at the welfare office. On our way back home, I told Momma to pull into the WinnDixie. We got out and went into our very first grocery store. We didn't know that you could buy the foods that we got at school at the grocery store. We were amazed at the foods that you could buy and eat at home. We spent all of Momma's food stamps on food. From then on I made sure that the food stamps were spent in one day on food for us. My mother drew welfare on us kids since we were born. We never saw a dime of it. That all went toward my parents' partying and living the good life away from us. My siblings and I didn't know that how we were being raised was wrong. Back when we were growing up nobody talked about child abuse, and that it was wrong to starve your children.
I remember when we moved to the new house, and we started a new school. I made a new friend on the bus. Her name was Jana. We were friends on the bus. At school she didn't talk to me or have anything to do with me. I was okay with that. I understood why the other children didn't like me. I didn't dress like them or have the stuff that they had. Finally, in fourth grade I made a school friend in this overweight girl named Linda. She was nice to me, and later another overweight girl named Connie joined our group. We all were good friends. In the sixth grade, the popular girls that were in Jana's group turned on her. I took up for my friend and she joined our group.
That year we went to visit my aunt who lived outside of Atlanta. She lived about two miles from the county dump. She said we could go to the dump after it closed and see what we could find. So after the dump closed, her husband took us to the dump site and let us out. We all climbed down into these huge trenches and started going through the garbage, one bag at a time. Luckily, I hit pay dirt. I found a lot of clothes and shoes. I gathered them all up, and after two hours of going through all that garbage, my uncle came back and picked us up. I had found enough clothes and shoes for me and my siblings for the next school term. We went to school the next year proud as peacocks with our garbage school clothes on. My friend Jana told me one day she said, "Your clothes are better this year." I felt bad because my friends had never mentioned how bad my clothes had looked over the years.
One my thirteenth birthday my parents had been separated, and on the weekend before my birthday my dad came back home. I was very upset. I did not want him back in our lives. As long as he was gone, me and my sister could sleep in peace. However, that Monday I got up and got ready for school. I had not spoken to my parents all weekend and they knew that I was not happy with him coming home. I started out the door to go to the bus stop and my mother walked over to me and said, "If you don't like it here at home you can leave". I thought about it all the way to school. When I got to school I confided in my friend Tammy. She said if you leave I am going with you. I left school. Me and Tammy hid out at her grandparents' house and made our way back to her house that afternoon. By then the school had contacted my parents and the police. Me and Tammy were walking up toward her house. My parents came up the road. My dad stopped the truck beside us and my mother got out. She grabbed a stick off the back the truck and came around the truck and grabbed me by the hair and started hitting me with the stick. She busted my head open. She grabbed my arms and started slapping me in the face. Out of desperation I broke free and started to run in the woods. The sheriffs department was pulled up behind my parents and did nothing.
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