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I was born in Queens, NY 1982. I don't have many memories of my early years, but I know that for the most part, they were comfortable. I'm the last of six children, yet the only one that my mother had with my biological father. I don't know much about the family's situation before we left New York, so I can't comment on anything firsthand. My mother immigrated here with my grandmother from Kingston, Jamaica, and I know almost nothing about my father.
When I was about seven, my mother absconded with my three youngest siblings and me to a sleepy hamlet in southwest Florida. Not the place you'd raise children if you actually cared about their well being. When I asked, I received multiple conflicting reasons, but I'm assuming that it was drug-related. I don't know for certain, because everyone in my fucking family lies to me, so I don't talk to them (more on that later, I guess) That means that four of us children, plus my mother, my grandmother, and who I think was my maternal grandfather in a two-bedroom house that had a semi-finished carport that we used as a bedroom. Girls slept indoors, the three boys slept in the carport.
I have huge gaps in my memory, and dyscalculia, so I'm not going to worry about ages, I have trouble remembering my own. One by one, my siblings got their own jobs and lives and left, and eventually my grandfather(?) left or died, and my mother moved out (FOR SOME REASON), leaving me with my grandmother. I am assuming that under most situations, this would be fine- I've been led to believe that grandparents love their grandkids and spoil them with glee.
That... didn't happen to me.
Apparently, my grandmother HATED my dad with a furious passion and was not only against my mom marrying him, but her pregnancy with me as well. A reasonable person would think that with him not being in the picture, the problems would end there right?
Fuck no! That twisted monster had the living, walking boy of her dreams in her house. All the anger, the frustration, the hatred that she felt toward my father, she could take out on a small, defenseless, fiercely loyal, and incredibly sensitive child. I would take everything she gave me, and like a kicked puppy, come right back for more. I was a pathetic little shit, and I knew it, too. I knew that I was garbage, and so I let her treat me like garbage.
She used to work in some sort of mental facility as a carer, so she took that as some sort of license to diagnose me as "retarded" because I couldn't memorize the multiplication tables. I have dyscalculia. I'm INCAPABLE memorizing multiplication tables. My math skills stalled in the fourth grade, and I was struggling then. This isn't to say that I was a terrible student. I aced everything else. I struggled in math, and I wasn't given access to a tutor. I didn't get help on my homework at night. I was beaten. Then called stupid and worthless and retarded.
That's pleasant.
I cleaned the entire house, did my own laundry- sometimes hers, as well. I did the dishes, I mowed the lawn, from eight on. I wasn't allowed to have friends over, and I couldn't go to any of my friend's houses except for extremely rare occasions, and when I say rare, I mean once a year. I didn't have any personal freedoms, I didn't have toys, I didn't have any possessions. Whenever someone did give me a gift, she would either force me to give it back (which made me look and feel like the world's biggest asshole), or she'd take it if it was useful to her, or cash. I had paper, so I would draw or write fantastic stories, but I learned that I wouldn't even be allowed that when she let some strange child play in my room when I was at school and came home to being blamed for all of my drawings and stories being torn to shreds and left on piles on the floor.
I wouldn't have to even do anything wrong to get the shit kicked out of me, and my family, I mean ALL of my family would watch like it was perfectly normal to punch an eight-year-old child in the face when they are asking what they did wrong while refusing to tell me. I had to piece together the first of such beatings looking for the actual cause, and I remember that I was outside, we had JUST moved in, and I had a jump rope. I don't know where it came from, but it was the closest thing I had to a toy, I was seven, and I was bored as fuck. I got bored with being bored outside and went inside. The MOMENT I set my foot down, my grandmother practically pushed my siblings aside and grabbed the front of my shirt and started screaming at me.
This would probably be a good time to explain that I do, and have always spoken standard American English, and as a child, I didn't even use slang because my mother forbade it in our household. That being said, my grandmother ONLY spoke in Jamaican patois. To my ears, it was an entire other fucking language, and it still is. Imagine someone twice your size punching you in the face and screaming questions at you in a foreign language. How articulate do you feel your responses are going to be?
WELP.
I didn't realize until I was in my early thirties that I had hit one of her plants with the jump rope. I had no idea. One would think that simply asking the accuser something like "what did I do wrong?" would net a response that contained the fucking answer, but no. Just beaten into the fetal position in the street (because I ran because that's what you do when you are attacked by someone, right?) with zero explanation.
Mind you, there were at least two of my siblings within arm's reach, and I'm almost certain my mother was in attendance as well. Why didn't anyone speak up and say something to the tune of: "hey, I don't think it's a great idea to beat a small child like he's a nazi, especially if he doesn't even know what he did wrong"? Well, they kept watching television, because they didn't want to jeopardize the free rent.
I'm worth less than rent.
Here's the thing. I love Jamaican food. I love food period, but I could eat Jamaican cuisine every day. Here's the problem- my grandmother? Incredible cook. Everything she made sang to my tastebuds, which makes it a little odd to complain when I was fed every day. Yes, the milk was spoiled, and she didn't tell me. Yes, there were weevils in the food that she served me, but at least two hots and a cot, right?
If I finished everything I was served, I was a fat greedy pig. If I didn't finish everything that I was served as well as everything that my siblings didn't eat, I was a selfish, and wasteful retard. I never knew what the right thing to do was, and every day was a fresh set of rules that I had to live by with no indication of what they could be.
Eventually, my siblings all moved out. Once my youngest sister moved out of the house, I got myself ready to move from the carport, which is practically a shed- into the other room indoors. Gone would be the uncomfortably cold nights for which I didn't have a blanket to shelter myself from or the blisteringly hot days that no amount of hand-fanning could alleviate. No more getting eaten alive by ants and mosquitos. No more flooding in my room every time it rained.
Nope!
For those of you who don't know what a carport is, it's covered parking attached to your house. Now add drywall and linoleum over the concrete, and you have my bedroom from ages 7-14. I stayed there for my entire childhood. I asked her- one time, sheepishly, if I could move into the bedroom, and she slapped me in the face.
Now, I find the concept of racism to be stupid, wasteful, and morally repugnant. That being said, my grandmother was fairer skinned. She could have passed for Greek or Sicilian were it not for her speech, and she loved it. My five siblings and I have potentially all different fathers (fucking yay), and of us all, my second-oldest sister has the lightest skin. She's in her 40s, and still gets mistaken for white. The two darkest in my family? Myself and my oldest sister. She treated us both like slaves.
Why was that horrific shit important to say? I'm glad you asked. She was INSULTED that I could fucking insinuate that she wouldn't keep that bedroom free for my fair-skinned sister in case she wanted to visit. Bear in mind that at the time, she was living in England, and later enlisted in the Army, and was stationed in Korea. She had ZERO interest or need to use the room because she was on the other side of the planet. I lived in a glorified outhouse like a slave so she could maintain a guest room for a total of four days of use.
I don't know where my mother was at this point. Every other time I would see her, she would be in a different car, and wouldn't share any details about anything in her life. I could never get a straight answer from her about anything. Ever.
What else we got? Ah! So I had an embarrassing accident in my pants when I was nine, I think. I hid them in my laundry so I could get to them as soon as no one was looking, and the second I turn away, I see my grandmother rifling through my hamper. I didn't pay it any mind because it's not like she's going to do my laundry, that would be doing something for me, and I had no reason to expect. it.
Lo, and behold, she found them. Great. Now, this is when someone would probably expect an awkward talk about thorough cleaning of one's self and other habits that while unnecessary (I have been obsessively fastidious my entire life), would actually feel weirdly supportive. Neato. Nope. She chased me down with the soiled underpants and smeared them into my face like you would a hated dog while- you fucking guessed it- punching me in the goddamn face.
Fuck, I live a charmed life.
I distinctly remember being in the sixth grade and realizing that it's been years YEARS since I heard a nice thing said about me at home. Like, anything. I don't know how long I had to go without hearing "I love you", but if that phrase was uttered in my direction while I lived in that house, it wasn't said while I was in the room.
I remember the first time I intentionally lied, and it harkened back to the jump-rope thing. I recall screaming that I had no clue why she was mad at me, and it blew my mind. You're supposed to tell the truth. Everyone knows that. If you tell the truth, you'll be okay. Except I was telling the truth, and it didn't fucking matter. I learned that the truth wasn't the primary concern for some people, and they just want to ruin your day.
By now, you're probably wondering why I didn't you say anything, and you'd be right to do so! I did! I told CPS, a police officer, and my FUCKING principal. As you can guess, a little Black boy complaining about getting the fuck stomped out of him by his legal guardian was a pretty low priority. I learned to bottle it up. There was no chance of getting any outside help, so I just shoved it all down, and hoped to either get lucky and she manages to kill me, or I last long enough to move out and never see her again. There's a part of me that was glad that it never came to anything because could you imagine what she'd do to me if CPS came around and did nothing? What fresh horror she'd visit upon me to deal with the shame? Oh, she'd flay me alive, and not a jury in the world would convict her.
I remember the first suicidal thoughts around ten years old if memory serves. Nothing terribly invasive, just the knowledge that I could pull the pin on the whole thing whenever I wanted to. This later became a sick fascination with fantasizing different horrific ways to kill myself to make everyone else feel the pain I felt every day. To make such a visceral mess that anyone that stumbled across my remains would be scarred forever.
Then I thought about the people who may not have anything to do with my life being peripherally affected just by seeing my body splayed and bloody on my roof or whatever, or just some innocent stranger keeping the trauma of seeing my death for the rest of their lives, and I felt guilty for not caring about their feelings. Then I would feel abject terror at the concept of losing my immortal soul by committing suicide. Then I would feel like the world's biggest pussy for coming up with excuses for not jumping off of a bridge (fuck, any bridge. My ass can't swim). The feelings would cycle without end until I was fetal and sobbing uncontrollably.
There's a school of thought that waking up and surviving is your biggest victory. I woke up every day disappointed that I made it through the night. I walked around every day feeling like an absolute fucking fake because I couldn't go through with it. I had dozens, if not hundreds of methods. I could just pick one, and be on my way. Wouldn't take more than a couple of seconds. I just had to stop being a little bitch.
I was fucking ten.
I don't recall what happened before it, but once, my grandmother asked me if I loved her. I wanted to tell her the truth; I wanted to love her. I had no reason to not- save for the relentless, needless abuse. I remember that I hesitated, and then I watch her ball her fists so tightly they went white. She was going to maim me if I didn't lie. So I lied. "Of course, I love you, Mumma."
If I didn't feel like a worthless pile of shit before, OH BOY, did I feel like it after. I had the chance to tell her once and for all that she disgusted me. We were family, and all I wanted to do was love my grandmother, and I couldn't because she didn't' even see me as a human.
One of the few times I was allowed outside aside from school was church. I loved church. I love God. I always have. I have boundless love and faith in my heart, and I loved the community that our church had. Also- once or twice a week, a nice person will wrap their arms around me and remind me that Christ loves and cares for me, then tell me that they loved me too. I could count on one hand the times my mother said "I love you" since I was ten years old. I'm fucking 37.
Oh, and it was extra special to have my grandmother tell me just how hilarious it was that my own mother abandoned me on her doorstep. That was a shocking realization. I wasn't being mauled by a mad dog that was attacking me in some mindless fugue state. This was a systematic and intentional attack on a vulnerable and defenseless child for the better part of a decade.
I spend a lot of time deflecting and saying that it wasn't so bad- there are kids living homeless, or getting raped and molested. I was getting food and shelter. I didn't have that much to complain about. So I never complained. Reporting it yielded zero results, and I break the sacred Black tenets of letting white people know your business, AND I'm snitching, so I just kept it to myself. I had one friend that I trusted with much of it, but even then, I was reluctant to share any more if it because of how dehumanizing it was to admit to another person just how worthless I felt I was.
I knew I was a castoff, and I was so unaccustomed to any positive praise of any sort would cause me to burst into tears from the confusion. I never really learned to take a compliment. I am so afraid of abandonment that I'll stay in an abusive relationship far longer than I should or simply vanish if I think that I'm going to be abandoned again.
I start every interaction with people with one foot already out in case I need an Irish goodbye. I hate who and what I am, and I always have.
One of the best things about forced manual labor is that it strengthens and toughens the tissues. So let's fast forward to age 13 or 14, and it's time for another beating. Normally, I'd just cover my face and crotch to keep it somewhat sporting, but I didn't see it coming, and she just started hitting me in the back. Oddly, I didn't realize until she stopped because it didn't hurt. Wait. It didn't hurt! She pounded on me like a drum, and it was like a percussive back massage!
This is the part of the story where the victim grabs the abusers arms and physically dominates them to let them know that they will never be a victim again. Cue the music, everyone chants "RUDY, RUDY, RUDY!!"
I didn't. I turned, tears filling my eyes because this woman who had every opportunity to show me, her youngest grandchild love was distraught because she couldn't victimize me anymore. Not that she couldn't hit me. But that she couldn't harm me. I hit a GIGANTIC growth spurt was over 200 pounds of beefy muscle. Adult men gave me a wide berth at this point. I didn't want to hurt her. I wanted to hug her and not hate her. I wanted her to show me just goddamn once that she could love me.
No dice.
Two days later, my mother and her new husband appeared and told me to pack. No explanation. Just get your shit. I. Was. Ecstatic. I don't remember having joy like that before or since. I was getting out of this hell FOUR YEARS EARLY. It wasn't until later that I pieced together that I wasn't enrolled into high school until my parents got me. I wasn't going to be enrolled in school. She was planning to keep me in the fucking closet like some sort of failed experiment.
My parents weren't much better. They had raised (in my mother's regard, I'm just going to say that she 'had' children. There was minimal rearing involved) seven children to adulthood, and before moving me in, were content with not raising an eighth. Which I understood. I got that when you get close to retirement age, it would probably do to not have to raise another kid.
But that's the thing. No one had to raise me. I was done. Just keep food in the fridge and pay the bills, I didn't need parents, and I didn't get any. I had like, resentful roommates. All relevant life skills I either learned from trial and error, seeking mentors, or by looking up on my own. They still resented my presence, which baffled me considering that I was the most low-maintenance child imaginable.
When I was a senior, they were fed up with my messy room. To be fair, I made my bed, but I had adopted a gross teenage habit of making piles of laundry and not keeping it in the hamper. I was just hella lazy about it. However, that alone was enough for them to try to dump me on my biological father.
Wait, what?
Apparently, they had much of my father's information on hand (I was previously told that it was all lost) and employed a private eye so they could force him to take me for the rest of my senior year. Because I made messy piles of laundry. Oh, did I forget to mention that I still cleaned the entire house myself? The only part of the house that wasn't their bedroom that I didn't clean to white-glove inspection was my bedroom.
What this also meant was that they could have found my father when I was a child and saved me years of trauma. Instead, because I was an afterthought, they didn't even consider it until I became a mild irritant.
This may be a good time to mention that in four years, they never once asked me about my post-high school plans. I knew that college was a wash. I was autodidactic, but with my math skills, I wasn't going to make it. So I did the only thing I could do, and I joined the Army. Fast forward two years, and I'm back home with a spinal injury.
Fast forward another few years, and I go back to my hometown and see my parents. My grandmother had developed dementia, and was living with them. I only got to see my mother because her husband took my grandmother away for an hour because they didn't want my presence to upset her.
Let that soak in.
Fast forward another couple of years, and I find out that she had died, and was being buried through a fucking Facebook message. They didn't want me to do make a scene at the funeral.
Oh, I wanted to. I wanted to spit on her face at the viewing and void my bladder as they lowered her casket. I thought about what my siblings would say. I thought about what my mother would say. Then I realized that I didn't have a clue how they would react. I didn't know them. The only member of my family that I have an understanding of is in a fucking box.
I dare you to not scream yourself hoarse at that realization.
I don't speak to my family; they are a gaggle of strangers, liars, and cowards. I don't know what that makes me.
I know that I have a rather dubious sackful of unfavorable mental health diagnoses.
I know that I have more hope for dying a violent death than anything else.
I know that I'm an absolute fucking mess, and I'm not likely to pull up out of this lifelong tailspin.
And that's about it.
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I’m so sorry all of this happened to you. Do you have a therapist you go to? Anyone you can talk to? Or is that why you’re sharing your story on here. Either way, I hope you’re ok. You said in your story that you have a close relationship to God. I know you might hear this an awful lot but God has a plan. You’re part of God’s plan. God loves you. He loves you. When your grandmother was being awful to you, God loved you and he’s so proud of you. He is so proud of you for staying strong. I really recommend talking to a therapist. They could really help you. I had extreme anxiety and I went to a therapist for about a year and I’m so much better. Please find one. 💕
ReplyThis absolutely. Breaks my heart. I can't even imagine treating an innocent child that way, no matter the color.
However, what so touches me is your own deep sense of compassion for others. Despite the medical issues you have an utterly BRILLIANT mind. You are clearly intelligent, eloquent, and well spoken.
Your grandmother took so much from you. While it seems the rest of your family stood by and did nothing to stop her. Co-conspirators in cruelty. Yet despite all that, here you are. Courageously releasing your story. I hope this has some element of healing for you. I really do.
Difficulties of this nature would only be undertaken by a very advanced soul. You've survived this (and I'm sure much more) without yielding to that final crack. That tempting option of death. I salute you for that.
I'm proud of you. It seems you are a quality person. I sincerely wish the rest of your days are as good as they ever were bad. I pray God continues to bless and keep you and give you strength. And I surely wish I could give you a hug.
Monumental job on the writing.
I am honored you shared this.
❤
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