How It Got To Be Like This {Part 1}

I wasn't always someone who was willing to ask for help, or even accept it. Now, I am in a place where not only do I need to ask for help, but I need to ask for lots of help - from strangers, or else risk losing even the most basic of things that we take for granted every day.

I understand that everyone has a story. I don't begin to think that my story deserves more sympathy than anyone else's. I just finally believe that I should tell mine...that I should give you the opportunity to hear it, and possibly decide for yourself whether or not you would be willing to reach in and, from the goodness of your heart, help me make it another month.

I used to be the girl who, even though I came from nothing, seemed to have it all. I was born in a small town in a small state to parents who were young and didn't have much at all. Eventually, after tons of abuse and it being obvious to everyone but them that the situation wasn't working, my father came in the middle of the night and packed one paper grocery bag of my belongings. He drove through the night until we reached my grandmother's house in a different state. He brought me onto her porch and waited there with me as he rang and rang her bell and woke her from sleep. When she came to the door, he showed her the bag, pointed at me and said to her, "If you don't take her, I'm giving her to the state for foster care. We're not doing right by her. We keep hurting her and hurting each other in front of her. Do you want her? Will you take her?"

And so, she did. Eventually, she took my two younger sisters as well, and we made it by the skin of our teeth, as she would say. Money was always tight. Sometimes my father would come by when he said that he would with money for her, but more often he would not. My youngest sister was 4 years my junior, so my grandma wasn't able to work and care for us. Especially since she was of the old-school train of thought that you stayed home and reared children, but more than that because she knew that we had been through trauma already...that I had been abused and seen abuse. She wanted to baby us, she wanted to make me forget. She often would talk when I got older of how, when my sister cried, I would get up in the night to fix her bottle and how this broke her heart. She couldn't imagine how bad life had been for me with my parents, knowing that no one was caring for us, and that it was on me to make sure that my sisters were cared for...so this meant that no one was caring for me.

My Grandma did the best she could, she wanted the best for us. She found religion, and she found a church. She believed she had found what would be our saving grace, the thing that would offer her redemption, that would offer *us* redemption. A different life. A way out of the way that life had always been. She had grown up poor and married the first man who had asked. He had turned out to be an abusive alcoholic. He kept a mistress that everyone, including her, knew about. He had children with the mistress. When my Grandma was six months pregnant with children 5 & 6, twins, he came home drunk and angry and kicked her in the stomach sending her toppling backwards down the stairs, telling her that he didn't want any more of her children.

When each of her children turned sixteen, my Grandmother signed their Marriage Certificates so that they could leave their abusive home. Each of her daughters, in turn, married men who turned out to be alcoholic and abusive. My mom turned sixteen on Christmas day. The day after, she married my dad. He was much older than her and from a family that didn't have a good reputation. They were basically the small town Gotti's...a small time crime family with visions of a much larger profit which would mean a willingness for harder crime. My dad, and his eleven brothers and sisters, didn't have an issue with doing one to get to the other. By the time that I was a young girl, stories ran rampant of them...girls as well as the men, showing up to run men out of their own businesses with chains and knives in hand. They were 'That Family'.

And because my Grandma didn't know what else to do, because she feared the damage that her own father would do to her if she stayed in her home, my Grandma signed my mom over to this man...my dad. Soon, it was obvious that the marriage wouldn't be a happy one. It was apparent that the Marriage Certificate that my Grandma signed with a heavy heart thinking that she was making a sacrifice that would benefit her seed in the end, would not hold him. It became clear to my mom that like her father before him, her husband would have his cake and eat it too. He would have a mistress on the side...her own humiliation with a name that everyone would utter as she walked into the bar.

At the age of sixteen, she would become hardened, bitter, cynical...averse to the pain that this so-called love and its trappings would offer her. And so she curled up her nose and snarled at the crowd. She fought and she fought hard and she fought anyone. She drank and she drank heavy and she drank anything. She drank to make the pain go away and she drank to wash the pills down and she drank to forget the pain of already waking up beside him and she drank to forget the pain of the bruises that he left when she questioned him.