The Airing of Greiviances, part 1

* Please be advised that some of the information in this post are graphic and disturbing and if you are squeamish, you may not want to read them.  But know that they are all true.  This will be one of several posts where I discuss the nature of abuse.  I write this with the hope that someone who had a similar experience or worse, realizes that there are good people in the world and help is given to those who ask.  You are not alone.  Don't stay silent.  Speak to someone who you trust and get help.  If nothing happens, tell someone else.  Tell as many people as it takes until you find the help you need.

    Some things just need to be resolved and if we don't get things out in the open, they eat away at you and ruin the precious things you hold most dear.  I have been holding a lot of resentment for someone and I need certain things to be brought out into the open.  If I hold on to these hateful feelings any longer, they are going to eventually destroy my marriage to my beautiful wife and to my children.  If my brothers and sisters ever read this, please know that I have no ill-will towards you and love you dearly.  

    I was abused as a child from the moment my new step-mom's 1st son was born, when I was seven, until the day I stood up to her and threatened to disappear off the face of the planet at age seventeen.  When my first brother was born, I was so excited.  I finally had a living relative that was my brother.  Even if by blood he was only a half-brother, in my eyes back then (and still to this day), I saw all of my siblings as my true brothers and sister.  But something happened after Brother #1 was born.  My step-mom seemed to have lost her mind and see me as a threat now that her "new" son was part of the family.  Immediately, she became more aggressive and assertive and time consumed everything I did.  

     Every task began to with a timer and if the task was not completed on time, punishments were doled out.  Now, I can understand a parent trying to motivate their child to complete their chores, but for a 7 year old to clean the entire house from top to bottom is a bit excessive.

    When my step-mom decided that new chores wasn't motivating me enough, she turned to her abusive behavior.  At first, she started using wooden spoons and swatting me with them.  When that didn't work, she coaxed me to hold my hands out in front of me by beating me over the head with a metal lined ruler.  I was terrified!  The thought of being hit over my hands brought tears to my eyes and I began crying before I was even hit, because I new the type of pain these wooden instruments brought to me before, but I had no idea just how badly they would hurt on my sensitive hands.

     WHAAAAACK!!!  The pain shot up from my fingers and registered in my brain almost instantly and as a natural reaction, my hands withdrew to clutch the afflicted fingers to my chest to nurse the pain away.  I cried out in pain and shirked away, hoping making my self smaller would make myself less of a target.

    "Put your hands back in front of you right now," she said as she hit my ear with the wooden tormentor.  This was followed by another yelp from my mouth.

    I put my hands out again, the pain filling my body with adrenaline.  I flinched when I saw the spoon come hurling to my hands and watched it as it struck the table, snapping the evil instrument in half.  I watched, unable to move, as my step-mom went to the counter and grabbed another wooden spoon from the mug on the counter where kitchen ladles and stirring devices were kept.

     She rushed back and towered over my tiny frame, glaring at me in a spiteful manner.  "Put your hands out again, you retard," she yelled, waiting impatiently for my hands to slowly inch forward and then whacked them again, even harder.

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    This became our new routine.  A task given with an unreasonable time frame for completion.  Abuse, taunts and slander pronounced at how slow I was.  At how stupid I was.  At how retarded I was.  I'm such an idiot.  I was never going to amount to anything and if she had any say in it, she hoped I would rot in Hell.
    I dreaded teachers who gave homework because that meant the timer and more abuse, so I began to hide it.  In the third grade, my blue coat with the fuzzy liner had a hole in the pocket that became wide enough for me to stuff all of my homework assignments into the coat itself.  My grades began slipping because of it and I knew I'd be beaten some more, but I didn't care.  That was a far off date and if it kept me from being beaten today, that was all that mattered.
    My already skinny body looked emaciated because I was unable to eat the food on my plate before the timer went off.  No one else in the family had a timer, why should I?  I shouldn't worry about that, because I'm retarded.
    At night, I would go to bed, hungry and in pain.  I would pray to God and my deceased mother and demand to know why I was being hurt so much.  Why did I have to have these pains in my stomach all the time?  Almost every night for ten long years, I prayed that God would end my life and let me be with my mother again, so I would be safe and free from the pain.  I shouted and told him I hated him for allowing these abuses to continue.

To be continued....

Married without Children.

     As someone who lives in Utah, I would say that I am not your typical, normal Utahn.  As of November 2010, the average age of males, who married for the first time, was twenty-three.  The large majority of these members of the male Utah population have propagated the species and have created substantial families of their own, in those eleven years. When the newly married men from 1999 reached their eleventh anniversary, they then had an average of 3.1 children.  You know what?  Let's just round up to four, because unless individuals are giving birth to baby heads with no bodies that are still alive, no one is having 10% of a child.
      That is the average newly married man in Utah.  Then there is me.  I married at age thirty-two.  My beautiful wife is 11 years younger than me and is somehow more mature than I am (For those of you keeping score, when I graduated high school, my wife finished the 1st grade.  A special thanks goes out to my friend Brent for making me feel creepy about my marriage).  While the rest of my brethren of the species are at home have their established families and their careers, I'm eking out a meager existence and am approaching my second wedding anniversary.
     While it may seem that I may be jealous of these men of modern days, this is not the case.  I just have difficulty speaking to them since their children and spouse are their very existence and I have no common ground to compare with them.  The discussions of poop size and consistency are not necessarily topics I want to discuss while I'm eating a peanut butter shake.  The little child wandering around carrying out random cup checks is also something I could go without.
     My wife and I went to a couple's home tonight for a 'game-night' with 3 other couples and their 3+ kids each.  That's a lot of kids for any gathering I'm included in.  One of the boys wandered around the house for a good 15 minutes coughing with his mouth open.  He would walk up to each person and then move on to the next in line.  I imagine that this is actually what caused the black plague to be spread instead of the 'rats' that we are told in history. Some little boy wandering around coughing on people, smiling, and then moving on.
     The one thing that these married couples were truly envious of, was my ability to look at their crying children and have them immediately stop crying.  My friends jokingly call me the Baby Whisperer after Caesar Milan's TV show.  They are of the belief that I should start my own TV show and that millions of babies nation wide would be captivated by me doing the most mundane daily tasks.  I would imagine it would be similar to watching Mr. Bean, without any thought to content or educational value (think Blue's Clues dumbed down).
    When the time comes (if it ever does), I'll accept my role as a father and do the best job I can with the tools I've been given, as long as I don't have to be the disciplinarian.   I'll let my wife be the 'mean mom'.