Hiding

I used to be afraid. So afraid. Not of things that most teenagers are afraid of. Not of things like spiders or scary movies. I was afraid of the one person who was always supposed to protect me.

I was afraid of my mother.
(pause)
When I was little, she was just a normal mom. She played with me and took care of me. I didn’t have a dad, so she was my only friend. When I was six, she gave me a locket necklace, and on the inside it said “I will love you forever”. I loved it. I loved her.

As I got older, I noticed that my mom would sit in the kitchen, quiet and alone. She looked so sad, and I knew it was because my father wasn’t there. She loved him so much. She used to tell me about him, how he was tall and handsome and funny.

But he left. She told me it because he was afraid of being a dad. I didn’t really understand what she meant, but I would hug her and tell her that everything would be alright.

We were fine on our own for a while, I would go to school and she would go to work and then we would come home and watch movies and talk and laugh. Everything was fine until she lost her job. I was ten. I came home from school and she was sitting in the kitchen drinking (?) My mother never drank until that day. There were a lot of empty bottles. I asked her what was wrong, and she looked at me in a way that I can’t describe.

Then she hit me.
She told me that it was all my fault. I was the reason that my dad left, I was the reason they fired her at work. She had asked for a raise because she couldn’t pay our bills. They fired her on the spot for being ungrateful. She told me that I was useless and stupid.

I ran to my room crying, and didn’t come out until it was time for school the next day. I had a big bruise on my cheek where she hit me. When I came down the stairs, she was in the living room waiting. She told me that she was sorry for hitting me and that it would never happen again. I believed her.

But the same thing happened almost every day after school, I would come home to a mean, drunk mother who hit me and blamed me for everything.

I was so confused. What happened? What had I done to deserve this? I tried so hard to be perfect for her. I got good grades, stayed out of trouble, helped her whenever I could. She didn’t care. I was the only one she could blame for her problems even if I hadn’t caused them.
(step to side, “shift” in emotion)
I started to avoid her. I hid wherever I could. She drank all day and I couldn’t stop her or her beatings, so I hid. I didn’t have any friends that I could tell and the teachers would just call the police. I didn’t want her in jail, I wanted her to get help. I didn’t know how to help her on my own, so I hid away from it. I pretended that it never happened.

I hid until I was sick of hiding. It took 5 years, but I decided that I was done. I was done being her punching bag. I was done being blamed for problems that weren’t my own.

So I confronted her. I told her that none of this was my fault. I screamed at her until my throat was raw. And when I was done, she just looked at me. She looked at me with such a mix of emotions that even I was confused. She looked surprised at first, which then turned to anger. I waited for the slap, for a punch or a scream or anything. Nothing came. In the end, she just looked….sad. Guilty. She looked like she regretted was she had done to me.

She asked me to take a walk with her. She said we could talk about all of this.

I thought my tirade had broken her. Changed something in her, made her regret the wrong she had done me. So I did.

We walked on the familiar trail that we used to go on when I was little. She taught me to ride a bike on this trail. We walked to the bean field where I used to play. I knew where we were going. We had our own little spot under a tree in the middle of the field. I knew she wouldn’t hurt me here, it was our place.

Well, that’s what I thought.

As we walked, my mom started to slow down and trail behind me. Suddenly, I felt something big and hard hit me on the back of my head. I started to fall, and tried to cry out. Blackness took over.

My mother went home and reported me as a runaway. The police thought that maybe I would have gone to a shelter, but didn’t find my anywhere. They didn’t know where I was until the farmer that owned the bean field found me, three weeks later. The cops said it looked like an animal attack, a bad one. My mother acted distraught and upset.

They identified me by the locket around my neck. The one that said “I will love you forever,”.

I thought that my tantrum had changed my mom.
Instead, it got me in a wooden box, eight feet underground, with nobody to miss me.
I should have kept hiding.