Let me be very clear with you, dear readers, had I not had children I wouldn't be alive today and if I were it would be because I had run far far away from this life. I had tried suicide as a teenager and failed. I wouldn't have failed again. But you don't get that out when you are a mother. You don't get to choose that door and if you do, if you give up, then you are not a person I respect. You do what you have to do, you make things work somehow, but you never abandon your children. You just don't.
I don't know how long I sat there, I don't know how many things ran around my mind. I don't even know if I was awake still when the pounding on my door started. I remember it scared me, like when someone sneaks up on you in the dark and you feel your heart almost stop. I jolted and then went to the door of my room and opened it. There she was, the same as when I had left her. Still angry, still mean and still drunk. I told her I was sleeping and I would speak with her in the morning and closed the door and relocked it. She then started pounding on it again. I opened it and told her to stop, she would wake the girls. She gave me that look, that I-don't give-a-flying-fuck look and I knew I had to get out of that room or she would wake the girls. So I walked into the living room and closed the door to my room. Then it started, the same way it always started. She screamed at me and belittled me and told me basically how much I sucked, how horrid my children were. That was my hot button back then, maybe it still is, and it made me cry. Which I think is what she wanted. When you tell me that my kids are anything that they are not, I get angry. The older I get, the better hold I have on my temper, but back then... well, again, I wasn't very stable. I just sat there on the couch and took it all and waited for her to finish. For the inevitable finale.
When I tuned back in, she was bitching about the dishes. The dishes weren't done. This, in her eyes, meant the kitchen was a mess. So at 3:30 am, I went to do the dishes hoping she would pass out and I could go to bed. Because, I was tired. Tired physically, emotionally, of my life, every kind of tired you can imagine. But it didn't stop, she got louder. Soon Noah and Ruthie were awake and involved and I was just glazed over, top to bottom. Imagine me thinking this isn't my life, this isn't my life, this isn't my life over and over again while washing the plates from a dinner I wasn't even home for. But she started on Ruthie. And Ruthie had school the next day and it was late and I was all tapped out on patience.
I lashed out, I yelled enough or something equally ineffective and then she turned on me. I am nineteen and she grabs my hair, I am an adult and she grabs my hair, I have two children sleeping in the other room and she grabs my hair. There were some other physical actions there. She hit me a few times and slammed me into the wall where I just slid down to the floor, but I couldn't get over the fact that she had grabbed my hair. My hair. It was long then, nearly to my butt. It was long for only a few moments longer because when she got off of me, when I got up and walked out, I went into the other room and grabbed the scissors and cut it all off, to my ears. I can hear that sound that it made. The scissors trying to cut through all of my hair as I opened and closed them, opened and closed them on my hair. I can hear it blurred together with the screaming and crying, my sister yelling stop, please stop at my mother and my brother yelling threats. Over all the noise and I could hear so clearly the sound the scissors made sawing through my hair.
When it separated from my head, I threw it at her. I was so lost. I was just numb standing there. It flurried off into different piles, some here, some stuck to my hand, some stuck to her shirt, some stuck to the bed. My hair was everywhere. Then that was it. She couldn't pull it anymore.
The finale.
I could go to bed. She was done, I was done. And I left my hair laying on the floor and walked away, my back to her apologies. My mind thinking they always apologize.
fourth...
Labels: History Lesson
