#the family owns a toy store. work used to be well split until mom died. now molly does basically everything and then some.

[indecisive-v]

ok guys i've never been more tense about a vote than this which says a lot because i am a milgram fan but

please vote molly i am on my knees

Overworked Blorbo Battle Round 3 Poll: 11

[dragonoracle]

Let’s talk about why my Mom did not bond with me and why my Maternal Grandma did.

I think the best thing to do is start at the beginning. I was born one month after my parents first child had died. This sister is my older sister but she was not really a part of our lives. (She will be called from now on DS = Dead Sister in this blog if she is ever brought up.) I think in our entire house there was only one picture of DS and maybe one at my paternal grandmother. I know my mother did have a baby book for DS but she kept it put away out of sight. So was the picture. The picture was shoved to the top of a book shelf in the living room. This death did make it hard if not impossible for my parents to bond with me. Well I should say for my Mom to bond with me. My Dad has made it clear several times that he ever wanted kids and only had me and my siblings because he liked having sex with my Mom. (The next post will go into my details on this point.) But my Mom never let that death go. And this death seemed to have warped my Mom’s mind where my early years are concerned. Whenever I have brought this up to her she always points out that she made me two baby books and will blame my MGM (Maternal Grandmother) for interfering with any bonding we could have done. I want to break down these two excuses one at a time as they both irritate me and upset me. The Baby Books my mother made for me are creepy to tell you all. Not in that way you get when seeing your baby pictures. They seem to document every day of my life until around the time I was two years old. My DS died when she was two years old. As if she was expecting me to die at the same age. My baby book even has a section of my umbilical cord in a little sealed baggy (yes it’s as gross as it sounds). Neither of my sisters’ or brother’s baby books have their cords in it. Also my sisters who are twins only have one shared book and my brother has half a book. It’s almost like once I didn’t die she stopped caring for me. She focused on my sisters and then my brother. She bonded with them but stayed distant with me. Her complaints that my MGM interfered with any bonding we could have had are all lies. My MGM had explained to me (when I was around 18 I think) that my Mom never bounded with me. She took care of me (feeding, changing, and bathing…etc). But once my needs where met that she would set me down or hand me off to another family member. My MGM stepped up and took a major interest in my life as a baby and that carried threw as a kind. She bonded with me and provided me the love and attention that all babies need to grow and thrive. My MGM loved my siblings but our bound was stronger than her bound with them. Partly due to them not needing a mother figure in their lives, partly due to the interference of my Mom, and partly due to how my MGM actually parented when we were in her care.

The distant and lack of bonding with me made my life and relationship with my siblings hard and very abusive. They would bully and beat me up a lot. They would steal my stuff and keep it for themselves. Give my bike to their friends to use so I could not fallow them. Take my diaries and share them with my Mom to get me in trouble for the feelings I had written there. They would break or destroy their stuff and then try and blame me for the breaking of the stuff. Or just try to break my stuff.  My parents did not care nor punish my siblings for doing these things. Or even punish me for defending myself or standing up for myself. Saying the line “You’re the oldest and as such need to set an example for them” or some variation of that. This worked to build their bond between my parents and my siblings.

My MGM on the other hand would punish my siblings for doing them same thin. This would also keep my siblings from wanting to from a relationship with our MGM (cause they where spoiled brats not wanting to get punished). One example of her standing up for me was when we were kids me and my two sisters had been given these lovely cloth merry go round horses. They were kept at my MG house as most of our toys where due to how bad and disgusting our living conditions (to be explained in a latter post.) They each had tails made of color yarn and ribbons. My siblings one day when we were dropped off at my MGM’s house to be watched went back to the room that my Sisters’ merry go round horses were stored. I had joined my MGM in watching TV as we liked to do. Then my siblings came running out and lied that I had cut off the tail of S1’s horse tail. My MGM called them out as she had been in that room and seen the Horse and its tail had been intact before we had arrived and as I had just sat down with my grandmother on my arrival and not moved since. My Mom always blamed my MGM for why I never bonded with my siblings. She also would say that my MG could only bond with the first born grandchildren of each of her children. She always explains it as because my MGM mother died shortly after I think my MGM’s sister was born. My MGM���s father remarried and her stepmother was kind and caring till her stepmother and her father had their own child. Then my MGM and he sister where pushed aside. I have always felt this was just bull shit and excuses. My Mom would take glee in always telling me that had DS lived my MGM would have focused and bonded with DS and I would not have been the favored child. This has gone on ever since my MGM died. My Mom would never have told me that while my MGM was alive cause she figured that I would tell my MGM about what she said. My Mom has since poisoned my siblings with these thoughts and they went with it. It’s made it hard to talk with my sisters about this as they always mimic my Mom’s words back to me.

Saddest part is that my MGM didn’t feel this way at all. She loved all her grandchildren. But did not agree with how my parents (latter just my Mom) where raising us(the continued abuse and bullying I was receiving from my siblings, the lack of punishment and stopping of the behaviors by my parents, and the allowing of my siblings to do dangerous and illegal activities). After my parents divorced and my Mom moved us to a new state my MGM would send $20 a week to be split between the four of us. Then as first my B and S1 started to smoke she had the money to be split between me and S2. Then when S2 started to smoke I was to get the whole amount of the $20. My Mom was upset and angered by this and often said that my siblings were upset by this (and maybe they where I have no idea) but my MGM had hoped and explained this to us and my mother that she would not pay for my siblings to smoke. This didn’t stop my mother from trying by “borrowing” the $20 from me to help with groceries till I found out that she was using the $20 to help pay for my siblings cigarettes  I stopped giving my Mom the $20’s and told her that I would tell my MGM what was she was doing. This stopped my Mom asking me for the $20’s. (Note my mother has never once paid me back for any money borrowed.)

My Mom was not above using the fact I was close to my MGM. She used me almost all the time to ask my MGM for money. Mainly because she felt and knew my MGM would be hard pressed to turn me down. It got so bad that when I would call my MGM I had to make it known to my MGM that no I was not calling for my Mom to ask for money.

She was deeply saddened by the distance that my siblings put between her and them. They stopped calling her on holidays and never wished her a happy birthday. As such she decided to stop sending them gifts. She would still send my siblings cards for holidays and for their birthdays. She just stopped giving them money. She did make it clear to them and my Mom that they just needed to reach out. But it was too late to repair much of the relationship. I do have some memories of my mother half halfheartedly bonding with me in my latter years that where clearly after thoughts and more meant to prove my growing feelings wrong. Or where just either forced on her to deal with my learning disability or cause it made her look bad. These bonding attempts where also always pushed aside quickly either to focus on my siblings or because I was not that receptive to them. These only hurt any relationship we could have had. Now I’m not saying if what my MGM did with her relationship with my siblings was right or wrong but I do understand why she did it. I’m not saying that she did everything right with our relationship. But I will say that without it my already very turmeric childhood would have been truly nightmarish. And I would not be the person I am today. For that I will always be grateful to my MGM and all she did for me. As for my Mom I don’t blame her for not boding with me. It’s impossible and would be monstrous of me to want that. After all her first child had died a month before her second was born. But what I do blame my Mom for is for lying about the fact that we did bond and trying to use the baby books she made for me as proof when they just more seem like they are epitaphs for me for when I was suppose to have died, blaming my MGM for us not bonding, for the issues between me and my sibling, and finally for the continued attacks on the one person who ever cared and stood up for me and protected me. Those are what I blame my mother for. Sorry for the rambling manner of this post. I think I’ve pretty much covered the bonding issue between me and my Mom I think this Friday I’ll post about my bonding issue and relationship with my Dad and his parents (how I did not bond with my PGM(Paternal Grandmother) and how I did bond with my PGF (Paternal Grandfather).

                                                                                                                TL;DR My Mom and I did not bond cause I was born a month after my DS died. And my Mom has two excused for the bonding issue that contradict each other of first we did bond using creepy baby books as proofs and second to blame my MGM for interfering with our bonding. My Mom rather than accept the truth tried to gaslight me. Tear apart my relationship with my now dead MGM and poisoning my siblings to any relationship they could have had and had with our MGM. My mother tried half hardheartedly to bond with me in my latter years but always made it very clear my sisters and brother where her preferred children. I don’t blame my Mom for not bonding with me but more for her lies and her trying to destroy the only happy safe place I ever had during my childhood.

Update I recently talked with my S2 about our childhood. She actually confirmed some of what I said here. My Mom had all through our childhood drilled into the heads of my Siblings head that’s my MG loved me more then them. She would make them jealous of me by telling them my MG would buy stuff for me not them. She also said that my Mom and Dad would all but encourage my parents to beat me up or take my stuff to avoid fights. Now I’m not so foolish to fully believe what she said in this call. But it was interesting to see she backed up my beliefs without me saying what those beliefs where.

[emperorsfoot]

So, in case you missed the two tiny ship posts I made about it, my father died yesterday. 

(Thank you for your sympathy. That’s very kind, but I don’t want your condolences.)

My feelings about my father are complicated. 

He was not a bad father. He never mistreated me or my sister. 

But he was also just sort of... not... there...

Back when my parents were married, my father’s job made him travel a lot. So he was rarely almost ever home. When he did come home, he would bring back all kinds of toys, and clothing, and gifts for my sister and I and at the time that was really cool. (Looking back as an adult, I realize this was him trying to buy our love.)

He also used these business trips to cheat on my mom. (I did not find that out until years later.) 

After he left that job he was home a lot more and one would think that’d be great. But now that he was home, all he did was fight with my mom. Loudly. A lot. He never physically hurt her. Once again, my father never actually mistreated any of us. He was just never there during my formative years, then always argued with my mother -very loudly, and with slurs- and didn’t bother with censoring himself around my sister and I. 

I found out he hadn’t “left” his job, but was “fired”. And had not found a new job to replace it. 

I found this out when cops showed up at our house telling us we no longer lived there. Apparently, my father had stopped paying the mortgage and the bank repossessed our house. (I was the one who answered the door, BTW. It was terrifying for an eleven-year-old.)

Needless to say, after that my parents marital problems got worse. 

My sister moved in with her best friend’s family for the latter half of her senior year, then into the dorms at her collage. She was taken care of in terms of housing. 

My parens and I bounced around a couple different hotel rooms before we found an affordable apartment. (Yes, I was homeless for a couple months between 5th grade and 6th grade.) We were in one apartment for three years. It was not rent controlled and when my parents became unable to afford the increased rent costs we were hard pressed to move again. 

By the time we got to the second apartment, my parents were so done with each other that they weren’t even sleeping in the same room together. My father had his own room, and my mother bunked with me. 

This lasted for a few years until one day when I was seventeen, they were having one of their many, many, many fights in the kitchen and I wanted a snack but their argument was in my way. So I just up and snarled at them to get a divorce already! Why were they even staying together? Not “for the children”. My sister had been living on her own for six years now and didn’t need them. I was certainly getting no benefit from them cohabitation with me. So why were they even bothering?

So, they finally got divorced. 

My mother and I kept the apartment and my father moved out. 

I did not see or hear from him for several years. 

He sent me a birthday card once. He got a date right, but forgot my age. After that, I would get random phone calls asking me about my life, or just my day at odd times (usually while I was at work and coulee not answer). He was trying to form a connection of some kind. He was just going about it badly. 

Finally, he decided to transition from “unemployed” to “retired”, and asked me to help him move. 

He had been living somewhere down near San Diego at the time (it’s cheaper than LA, I have lived in LA my whole life) and wanted to move out of state to some place with a lower cost of living. Before contacting me, he sent out to realtors all over the country for listing packets (or whatever) and there was this one realtor who included her photo on her business card. She was in her late thirties, blond, and showing some shoulder. So my father decided she was gonna be his realtor. 

I don’t know why I agreed to go with him, but I did. We piled into his car and went on a road trip to a place called Hickman Country, Tennessee. 

The trip was four days off cheap motels, bad food, and misadventures that eventually became hilarious stories I brought back to my friends. 

Finally, we get to Hickman Country and meet the realtor he thought was pretty enough to drive 2000 mils to meet. 

Turns out, that picture was 20 years old. The realtor was almost sixty, ...and dying of cancer. Joy.

We were instead helped by another realtor who was splitting her commissions with the first one. 

This was also happening either a year after, or only a couple of months after those huge floods that devastated Nashville and the surrounding area back in 2010. (Hickman County is about an hour [depending on speed limits] south of Nashville, and was hit just as hard by the floods.) Every house we were shown was dirt-cheap and super affordable (the same acreage in LA would have been in the billions, these houses barely broke the hundred-thousands), but was also covered in a layer of fresh damp mold. Sometimes the line on the wall was well above my head indicating that this house was almost completely submerged under water. 

I didn’t want my father to buy any of these. 

But, he drove all this way and already liquified all his assets. He was not going back to LA. He was determined to buy a house here. So, we expanded the search area a little and the realtor showed him a little nothing of a town called “Cable Unincorporated” (if you look it up, you will find it on the map, but back then is was not even on the map). Coble was located within the borders of Hickman County, but not legally considered part of it, hence the use of “Unincorporated” into the name. 

The “two square” consisted of a church on one side, and a restaurant/general store/gas station on the other side. If you were on the road just passing through Coble, you wouldn’t even realize it was a town. You’d think it was an abandoned gas station. But, you wouldn’t be passing it on the road anyway because it was so far out of the way, even if you got lost, you wouldn’t even stumble upon it by accident. You had to be looking for Coble in order to find it. 

But, it was above the flood plane, and so all of the houses were dry. 

My father bought 11 acres of land with a 2-bedroom house on it for 35k. Eleven acres and a livable dwelling for $35,000. Do you understand that!?

I’m now gonna skip over a few years to 2018 when he had his stoke.

Remember how I said Coble was “out of the way”? 

Well, in January of 2018, my father had a stroke. His closest neighbor was the one who found him. We don’t know how long after the stoke it was. She just said she saw him laying on the floor and called 911. 

Even with a helicopter, it took 3 hours to get him to anything resembling a hospital. 

Thing about that for a second. 

Air lift helicopter. 

Three hours to get to a hospital. 

That’s how far out of the way, and in the middle of nowhere he chose to live. 

Anyway, after the stroke he could not go back to living alone. So, my sister and I flew out there to try and figure things out. It was too expensive to bring him back to California with us. Even if we pooled our resources we would not have been able to pay for his care. So, he had to stay in Tennessee. We found a home that was affordable and had an opening and we arranged for him to live there. This one was in a real town with a deal hospital. 

He fought us at every step of the way. 

He wanted to go back to his house in the middle of “in the middle of nowhere”, and die there. 

In retrospect, we should have just let him do that. My sister and I spent the net two years slowly being dragged down in debt paying for his care. 

Yeah, I said Tennessee was “more affordable” but being “more affordable” does not mean that it was actually “affordable”. And, because he owned that absurdly large piece of land, it disqualified him for any kind of state assistance. 

We tried to sell the property, but -amazingly- no one wants to buy large tracks of land in an area that’s so out of the way it might as well be a mythical fae land only accessible through a mushroom ring. 

Anyway, that was two years ago. It’s April 2020.

He’s finally dead now. 

My sister and I are both in debt so deep we’ll never be able to pull ourselves out of it. 

And there’s a global pandemic going on so I can’t even collect his ashes. 

So, that’s the deal with me and my father. 

[zilannalynn]

Universes

RWBY

Zilanna is the daughter of a newly wealthy family in Atlas. An accomplished huntress, she no longer goes out into the field, but remains as an instructor at one of the prep academies. Her mother was killed when she was 16, leaving her father an emotional mess, which led to her taking control of the family and caring for her 10 year old twin brothers. 

During her time at the Atlas Academy, she dated Tetra, whom she fell deeply in love with. They remained together through their years at school and a couple years after graduation; until it was discovered that Tetra was part of an extremist group. He tried to kill her on a mission, but she retaliated and (accidentally) killed him. This caused her to move from fieldwork to teaching. 

Her weapons consist of two swords that transform into pistols and two daggers. She also generally carries a little bit of dust on her person. 

Semblance:  Teleportation and manipulation of teleported objects. Objects must be teleported to be manipulated. Requires concentration, but not so much that she can’t do other things. Must be within reasonable distance

Final Fantasy XV

Zilanna is the daughter of a wealthy family in Insomnia whose origins lie in Tenebrae. She joins the Crownsguard after befriending Noctis and Ignis via a series of Royal Balls and run ins at the Theater where she would sing and play violin or piano. 

During her time as a teenager, she dated Tetra until it was found that he was a Niflheim sympathizer terrorist who was trying to use his connection to her to gather information from the Citadel. Tetra was then captured, escaped, and his whereabouts unknown for a long while. 

Zilanna travelled with Noctis and the other chocobros to Altissia and back, where it was discovered that Tetra had been working with Ardyn. It was also brought to light that Zilanna was descended from the Oracle line (specifically she’s descended from Aera and Ardyn). She inherits both the title and Trident of the Oracle. She’s able to commune with Lunafreya, who teaches her how to employ her newfound powers. She can also commune with the other Oracles of old, notably Aera, and is told of a way to cleanse the Scourge from Eos without costing the king his life. 

As Noctis sleeps, she waits and trains for the day he might wake... and also so she can warp except that’s not how that works Zil plz

Stormlight Archive (WIP)

Zilanna is a lower ranked lighteyes. Her mother is a renowned an artifabrian, and her father an up and coming weapons merchant. Zilanna herself is a skilled musician, and spends her days generally tucked away studying music and artifabrians. She longs to discover a way to contain music generated in a device, if only so that she can give the her family recordings of their favorite songs. She enjoys nearly every kind of instrument, but, out of all the instruments (which have been few) that have been mentioned in the books, she’d be on the zither. 

Her life largely consists of her simply living and playing her instruments. Her mom is super busy with all her studies, so she ends up taking care of her brothers a lot, and they’re still little troublemakers. They like beating each other up with toy weapons, as good Alethi boys do. They’re around the age of ten, and, while Zilanna knows that the boys will probably spend their near future in an army at war (be it on the Plains or elsewhere) she fears that they’ll be injured and/or killed. She does her best to stop them, but in little ways. 

She comes to The Shattered Plains as a scribe for her father, as her mother is incredibly busy with her fabrials. Her father might be encouraging her to find someone to marry but in the gentle way. You know "isn't that [insert family name here] boy good looking?" "Dad plz. Stahp"

 Final Fantasy X

Zilanna is a summoner of a well to do family in Bevelle. She started her journey with her two childhood friends, Tetra and Yamato. Over the course of the journey, she and Tetra fell for each other and became a couple. 

The trio reached the temple where they were to obtain the final summon, and learned the full truth of the Aeons and Sin, and were stunned. Zilanna was willing: her guardians were not. 

The disagreement between the three caused such a rift in their bond, that the two guardians completely abandoned their summoner in Zanarkand. With a heavy heart, Zilanna made her way home to her twin brothers, where she lives peacefully, healing the injured and supporting new summoners as they pass through the holy city. 

Final Fantasy VII

Zilanna and her mother started as small time researchers for Shinra, interested in the use of materia as aid and relief for the Sectors below the Plate. In the processes of their research, they came across a way to use materia to enhance innate talents, powers, and further enhance materia’s power. When she wasn’t researching, she was learning how to fight with swords from her fiance. As time wore on, and after the death of her mother, Zilanna split from Shinra (fully believing them to be the cause of her mother’s death), taking her family and her research and disappearing below the Plate as best they could, which involves them moving from sector to sector a lot. 

Zil probably vibes a fair bit in Sector 7, though never for too long.

When Zilanna vanished, Tetra, her fiance and SOLDIER 3rd class, spent all his down time searching for her. She would leave little letters and notes scattered through the sectors/slums, but was always careful to never to leave any trace of her whereabouts. She’s only seen him once since her flight from Shinra: the night that he died. Tetra finally tracked her down, but Shinra had followed him. She managed to escape, but at the cost of Tetra’s life. 

Zilanna has since done everything in her power to upset Shinra’s plans, business, etc, though it hasn’t been much. Her individual fight has taken her to Wall Market several times, where she spends her time seeking funding and ways to develop her mother’s materia so that it can be used against Shinra. Rumor has it she has an assassin, though none have ever seen them.  

Fun fact, I loved Aerith as a kid so much that she looks like Aerith, notably with almost the same hairstyle. Which I can never do irl. *cries*

Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows Of Valentia

Zilanna was a Zofian noble near the border between Rigel and Zofia. She was sent away at a young age to the Novis Priory where she met and befriended Celica for a time. Around the time she was sixteen, her parents called her back to their manor so she could aid in dealing with bandits and the ever increasing Terrors as well as aid her father in trying to mend relations between nobles on both sides of the border. 

As Zilanna grew into her own, she met a butler to her house by the name of Tetra. The two fell in love and, after a few years, were engaged to be married. 

Zilanna spent her years away from Novis with her betrothed and their best friend, Yamato. The three would often take on small “missions” for Zil’s father, which often were simple search and destroy style missions. Go, find the group of Terrors or bandits causing problems, and come back. A warrior priestess and her faithful bodyguards often made quick work of the threats. 

Once she turned 20, Zilanna discovered the secret to the Lynn family: they stored not only the location of Princess Celica, but also kept the circlet which confirmed the princess’ identity safe. Additionally, the Lynn’s knew the location of Celica’s half brother, Prince Conrad, who was long thought to be dead. 

Around this time, Tetra showed his true colors as a member of the Duma Faithful sent to spy on the Lynn family, and obtain the location of Celica. As his search proved fruitless, he began to plot to coerce the Lynn family into giving up it’s secrets. He had the perfect leverage: Zilanna. The eventual confrontation almost killed both himself and the noblewoman, but before he could land the killing blow, Tetra was forced to retreat by Yamato, to not be seen for years. 

As the war between Rigel and Zofia, Zilanna found herself on the side of the deliverance, where she fought bravely as a Priestess of the Mother Mila. Their conquest brought them to the Duma Faithful, where she encountered Tetra and could put that piece of her past to rest at long last. 

Under the One Kingdom, Zilanna found herself at the palace quite often, where she would nanny Celica and Alm’s children, or advise the King and Queen on relations between the formerly divided people. 

WILL ADD MORE AS I DISCOVER NEW OBSESSIONS UNIVERSES I WANNA RP IN

[mischiefandspirits]

Twelfth Night

Alicia uses the Euro-Spanish pronunciation (uh-lee-thee-uh)

The twins had always known they were half-alien. It was hard not to. Even their names reflected it. Their first names, Alicia and Calista, came from their father’s heritage while their middle names, Kyzta and Acxa, came from their mother’s.

“Your mother came from the stars, and you both take after her. Alicia, you take after her in spirit; and Calista, you take after her in body,” their father would always say.

They were nine when he died.

Calista had been at home as usual, but Alicia had been in the car with their father since he’d wanted help running errands.

When Alicia woke up, they told him there’d been a crash. He was mostly alright, but their father…

It took Alicia two weeks to sneak away from the family they’d put him with, nearly a month since he’d last seen Calista.

She was terrified when he finally reached her, throwing herself at him the moment he’d shuffled into the hidden panic room in the attic.

“Strangers came to the house,” she told him. “I don’t think they knew I was here or were looking for me. They just checked some stuff and took some clothes and toys from our room and left. But… I heard them mention something about a funeral, and someone coming to clean out and sell the house, and I thought -”

That’s when she broke down crying.

Alicia held her until they both fell asleep. In the morning, they scavenged the house.

Money from their father’s office and the jar on the kitchen counter was added to the stash in the panic room. The food was sorted through like their father had taught them. A good portion of the perishables had been either eaten or gone bad over the month, but most of the food was designed to last. They packed up what remained of their clothes, Alicia’s stuffed hippo toy, Calista’s Lilo doll, and their learning tablets into a suitcase and took it and the first aid kit from the panic room out to the shed. There they strapped the luggage, kit, money stash, and as many bags of food and jugs of water as they could fit onto the secret hoverbike their parents had built.

After that, they waited. They waited for the sun to sink past the horizon. They waited for the lights in the nearby houses to blink out.

Only once the entire street was dark did they sneak down to the shed, GPS in hand. Alicia was the one who knew how to drive the bike, but Calista was the one who could see without needing the headlight. As such, Calista sat in front, directing Alicia through turns and around obstacles while they made their way through rural streets and into open desert. Meanwhile, he kept his eyes glued to the GPS as they grew closer and closer to the coordinates their father had made sure they both memorized.

The sun was rising by the time they reached the shack they had been born in.

They sleepily dragged everything inside before collapsing onto the couch.

The first few weeks -- months, really -- were hard.

They fought. A lot. Both physically and verbally.

Calista yelled that he should just leave, sometimes because she was mad and sometimes because she honestly thought he would be better off without her. He wasn’t the one that was blue and had crests and pointed ears. He could have a normal life without her.

Alicia yelled that maybe he should, sometimes because he was mad and sometimes because he honestly thought she would be better off without him. He got colder more easily than she did, needed more water than her, and his eyes weren’t as good as her own. He couldn’t hunt during the day for as long as her or at all at night.

They pushed through though because neither of them could actually push away what little of their tiny family they had left.

Alicia taught Calista how to drive the hoverbike and Calista taught him how to work the water purifier and food scanner their mother had left behind with their father. Together they learned how to cook, the best ways to hunt, how to care for the vegetable garden in the shed, and how to patch up each other after a fight or on the rare occasion they got hurt hunting by watching videos on their tablets.

There was only so much they could get in the desert though.

Three months after they’d come to the shack, Alicia drove the hoverbike to the nearest town. He’d gotten a little lost, but managed to find his way once he’d spotted the road that led from the neighboring asto-military school to the town. He hid the bike under a tarp just outside of town before creeping in to buy what was needed.

It was the first of many trips, although they were infrequent. The two didn’t need much.

The only exception was the month of October.

Every October twenty-third, they’d leave the shack the moment the sun set and head to town together. Alicia would buy them both ice cream that they’d eat in a hidden part of the park, then the two would sneak into the discount theater to watch whatever old movie was playing.

Two days later, they’d start the night much the same, but with a small cake and a trip to the observatory instead.

Both days Calista would wear a scarf, hood, and sunglasses to hide her face until they were safely tucked away behind tall bushes or at the back of a dark room.

Their next trip, on the other hand…

Halloween was their favorite day. It always had been. It meant Calista could go outside without having to worry about being seen. It was like an extension of their birthdays, and they treated it as such.

They’d spend the afternoon wandering around town, looking at the decorations. Calista would get compliments on her costume, and Alicia would paint his face blue to match. Later, they’d drift from house to house, bags ready to gather as much candy as they could get their hands on.

Time passed and the two grew older.

Alicia was eleven and watching a group of girls giggling from behind a rack of clothes when he realized how different he felt. It wasn’t an alien-different, like how he seemed to always know where everyone around him was without looking or how he was heavier than he was supposed to be given his size.

It was a different sort of different.

When he returned to the shack, he and Calista talked.

And talked.

And looked things up on their tablets.

And talked some more.

On his next birthday, Calista gave him the name Keith. It was both an amalgamation of his two names and the first birthday present either of them had gotten since their father had died.

In return, Keith gave her all his Halloween candy.

Things took a turn for the worst just before their fourteenth birthday.

Keith had always gotten looks when he was in town, but usually a lie about his father being near was enough to turn them away. As he grew older though, the lie worked less and less. To the point where a friendly store clerk tried to “make sure you get back to him safely.”

He barely managed to get away.

“They must not expect little kids to be runaways,” Calista muttered as she worried over a scratch he’d gotten on his hand jumping over a fence. “But teenagers are exactly what they’re expecting.”

“I’ve been going there for years!”

“And they’ve never once seen our father with you.”

It only got worse when their Halloween was cut short by a pair of police officers trying to talk to them. They’d gotten split up while trying to lose their tails. By the time they had been able to meet up at the bike, both were convinced the other had been taken.

They spent the night in each others arms.

“I’m leaving,” Calista announced the next morning.

“What are you talking about?”

“The Boat. I’m going to take it and find mom.”

The Boat was a small craft their mother had left behind. Their father had told them it was in case of emergency, though they weren’t sure exactly what kind of emergency would call for a spaceship.

It wasn’t the first time they had considered using it, really. When their father had died, they’d talked about leaving Earth, had even gone so far as to learn how to fly it using the instructions their mother had given their father. They’d decided against it in the end though. They didn’t know where to go or how to survive in space. Here they had a home and knew how to survive.

When he reminded her of this, she shook her head. “We can’t keep going on like this. You’re not as inconspicuous as before. They’re going to keep coming after you. If they catch you -”

“Then I’ll run away again! I’m not going to leave you alone out here!”

“And what if they put you somewhere you can’t run away from this time?” She yelled, jumping to her feet. “Or what if they don’t catch you, but follow you instead? What if they find us out here? It won’t be foster care then. They’ll run tests on us, and we both know you aren’t as human as you look! They’ll lock us away and-and do who knows what to us!”

“Then I’ll stop going into town!” he yelled back, hopping up as well.

“We’re not that self-sustaining! And what if one of us gets hurt! Really hurt! We’re lucky neither of us has broken a bone or been mauled by a coyote!”

“We know how to set bones and close wounds!”

“First aid!” She shoved him, then grabbed his shoulders and gave him a shake. “We know first aid! We don’t have the tools or knowledge to really fix the problem! And what about infections? And the pain? We can’t get our hands on the medicine we’d need! We can’t even buy cough syrup!”

“I’m not opposed to stealing if I have to!”

“I know you’re not, but that could just get us more in trouble! And who knows what kind of dosage we would actually need! We could die!”

Keith opened his mouth to respond, but nothing came out.

The silence felt harsh after the yelling.

She let him go. “Keith -”

“What would we even do?” He snarled, burying his hands in his hair. “Where would we go? We don’t know anything about what’s out there!”

“Actually, I do. I’ve been thinking about this since the last time you got in trouble. I checked the Boat and it’s got navigation. The information is all years out of date, but the more prominent trading hubs are likely still active. They’ll be the best places to look for work and information.”

“So we just pack up and leave? Do you really think we’ll be better off out there?”

Calista reached out and pulled his hands into her own. “Not we, me.”

Keith jerked away from her. “What?”

“I’m going. Alone.”

Keith stared at her for a moment before tackling her. The two rolled around on the floor before Calista managed to pin him.

“No!”

“Keith -”

“We stick together! That’s how we’ve always done this. It’s how we’ve survived this long,” he hissed, getting his foot between them and kicking her off.

“This is different,” she huffed, rolling away before he could grab her. “I can’t stay here any longer, but you can. We both know the only reason you’re out here all alone is because of me.” She grabbed him by the back of his shirt and pulled him into a headlock. “You could have a life here. You could go to school and have friends and live in a real house.”

“I don’t care about any of that stuff.”

“I do. You should be able to live your life without me holding you back. There’s no telling what could happen out th-Ow!”

Keith managed to get a handful of hair and ear and pulled. The pain made her loosen her grip on him enough for him to slip free.

“Which is why we need to stick together!” he yelled, twisting around her to pin her face down.

“Which is why you’re staying here!” she yelled back, trying to pull her arm free from where he was holding it behind her.

“You are not just… just leaving me here!”

“You’ll be safe! You can have an actual life!”

“Our life is fine!”

Calista clawed at Keith’s cheek, giving him four long scratches and making him pull back enough for her to buck him off. She swung herself on top of him, sitting on his chest. She grabbed his wrists and ignored the knees thumping against her back as she leaned close to his face. “Our life sucks.”

“You suck!”

“Keith, be reasonable. I have to leave, but you don’t.”

Keith went limp. “Fine, just leave me then.”

She collapsed on top of him as she saw his eyes growing wet. “You know this isn’t about leaving you. We need to be safe, both of us. You can be safe here, I can’t. And I can’t guarantee you’d be safe out there.”

“We can’t be sure you’d be safe out there either.”

“I have a better chance out there than here though. It’s where Mom’s from, and Dad always said I look like her. If it’s safe out there for her, I shouldn’t be in too much danger. Not like here.”

“We won’t be together though,” Keith muttered, running his fingers along her crests.

Nuzzling into his neck, she grabbed onto his shirt. “I know, but it’s what’s best for both of us.”

“I don’t like it.”

“I know. I don’t either.” She sat up and pulled him into a hug. “I’ll miss you.”

Keith buried his face into her shoulder, tightly wrapping his arms around her.

They held the hug for a few moments before Calista pulled back, her eyes as misty as his.

“Come on, let’s get cleaned up,” she chuckled, gently poking his bleeding cheek.

His nose twisted up and he slapped her hand away. “Why couldn’t I have gotten claws too?”

A month later, the Boat was packed up with Calista’s things and most of the nonperishables.

Keith watched her ready the Boat from behind the pilot seat. “There’s still time to change plans.”

“We’re not having this fight again.”

“I’m not trying to start a fight. I just… are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?”

She sighed and stood up. Tugging him forward, she tucked him under her chin. “I want you to come, but you need to stay here.”

He’d lied. He did want to fight, but he knew it wouldn’t do any good.

She pulled back and leaned down to press their cheeks together.

“Be careful out there.”

“Keep out of trouble here.” They held the position for a moment before she pulled back. “I want you to take this.”

Keith eyes widened as she held out their mother’s blade. “What? No, you should take it! You’re the one heading out there!”

“A little knife isn’t going to do me much good out there.”

“It’s a dagger,” he huffed.

She rolled her eyes and pushed the blade into his hands. “Besides, you’re the one that knows how to use it.”

He tried to push it back, saying, “You should have something to protect yourself with.”

“I’ll figure something out. Mom left it here for us. You should keep it.”

“You’re the one that’s going out there to find her. What if you need it?”

“I know the insignia like the back of my hand.”

“But -”

She grabbed his wrist and forced the blade into his hand. “Take it. It should be yours. You’re the oldest, even if you are as small as a rabbit.”

He punched her arm. “Not my fault I didn’t get Mom’s giant genes.” He glanced down at the blade before strapping it to his belt. He stared down at the ground as they turned to head towards the exit. “Will you ever come back?”

“I don’t know.”

“Try.”

As Keith stepped out, Calista grabbed his shoulder. “Let’s make a deal. I promise to come visit you as soon as I know it’s safe to do so. In return, you promise to at least try to find a life here.” She leaned down until they were nose to nose. “I don’t want you spending the rest of your life missing me.”

“It won’t be the rest of my life if you come back.”

“It will if I don’t.”

“Then come back.”

“I don’t know if I’ll be able to. Like you keep pointing out, we don’t know what it’s like out there. So just try, for me. And if it’s safe to come back, I will. And if you still hate it, you can come with me when I leave again.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

He closed his eyes, then stepped back. “Fine, I’ll try.”

“Good.” She reached out and ruffled his hair.

He hissed and clapped his hands over his head. He glared at her laughter and said, “Aren’t you leaving already?”

“Take care.”

“You too. And hey,” he added, stopping her as she turned. “If you do find Mom, make sure she regrets leaving us.”

She smirked, baring her fangs, then headed inside as the door shut.

Keith left the cave the Boat was hidden in and grabbed his bag. Rubbing his eyes, he turned to watch the Boat fly out the entrance and up into the twilight sky before setting off.

I had more for this, some written and even more planned, but I wanted to get this out before s6 can get the chance to either disprove everything or, God willing, confirm something.

[pixiealtaira]

Dragged Kicking and Screaming  ( 16/ 22)

Title: Dragged Kicking and Screaming  

Or How Burt Hummel Mashed the Hummels and Hudsons Into One Functioning Family.

Characters(s): Kurt, Burt, Carole, Finn, with short appearances by the New Directions guys and various ops who mostly take up space. Rating: PG13 Summary: Somehow the Hummel household and the Hudson household had to come together…

Chapter Nine Chapter Ten

Chapter eleven Chapter twelve  Chapter thirteen  Chapter fourteen

Chapter fifteen

16.

“Mom said this coming year, now that you guys got married, that we’d buy fireworks and I could light off our own….good ones, too.  You know those that have multiple rounds to them and go way high and are loud and everyone in the neighborhood could see.” Finn said.

“No.” Burt said.

“But we can afford them.” Finn said.

“No.” Burt said. “I don’t know if you are aware of this, Finn, but they are illegal within city limits and 9 times out of 10 are banned outside city limits due to the dryness and heat and fire risk.”

“So?” Finn said.

Burt looked at Carole, who shrugged.

“So, we do not to do illegal things in this household. That is one of the reasons we are having a nice long chat about you driving anything soon and your apparent drinking problems.  Now…do you and your mom have any traditions that you do for the Fourth of July?”

Finn shrugged. Burt turned to Carole.

“We’ve been going to Bobby’s but Finn hasn’t been happy with that since he was banned from playing with fireworks there after he set his cousin’s hair on fire a few years ago.  None of the kids are allowed near the fireworks anymore, that was a rough year, but really Bobby over reacted.  Finn didn’t mean to set Mandy’s hair on fire and Molly did not mean to hit Rex with the sparkler and I am certain Jamie didn’t mean to light his mom’s flower bed on fire either. Granted I do think Gabe and Matty did mean to start something on fire but I don’t think they thought the shed would burn like it did and light all the extra fireworks Bobby had stored away for their Christmas Day fireworks. Luckily Daddy was friends with the fire chief and the mayor and so they didn’t end up having to pay for the fire department response. ”

Burt just stared.

“What?” Carole said.  Burt was getting annoyed with the whole ‘don’t you dare think I’ve done something wrong’ face he’d been watching her pull all morning.

“Ok. I think that perhaps we should stay here in Lima and enjoy the festivities here.  We can watch the fireworks display and go see the car show and enjoy whatever is playing on the stage.” Burt said.

“Isn’t that hosted by like…rivals?” Carole asked.

Burt rolled his eyes. “It is a community thing and I like supporting the community, Carole.”

“Well, I still think we should just have a big party here and do our own fireworks. Finn wants to set them off so badly.”

“No.”

“I promised him fireworks, Burt.” Carole said.

“No. Not at my house.  Not driving anywhere in cars that I cover insurance wise. Not attached to my name.”

“Burt…”

“No. Kurt make a page for back to school and labor day and Halloween.”

“What should I put down on the 4th? Kurt asked.

“Nothing right now.”

“Well, what do you do for the 4th?” Carole said.

“Until this last summer, we had a float in Findley’s parade and then booths at the town celebrations of various places around us. Kurt and I would man one, Jake and his wife another, Wade and someone would take one, and Robbie and several friends would do one. Hank is always in Alaska for the fourth of July. Then we would come back into town and go to the car show…sometimes we would bring something we were restoring to it.  Then we would come here and barbecue something for dinner and then go watch the fireworks.  However, this past summer we didn’t get any of it organized and Jake and Robbie couldn’t do anything anyway, so we just didn’t. Kurt and I went to dinner at Wade’s and watched the fireworks.”

“Oh, that doesn’t sound too bad.  I’m sure you made a great deal of money at your booths and that is always good.” Carole said.  “Maybe we should do that next year too.  You and I could do the booth instead.”

“It would be fun, but I didn’t think it would be something you like,” Burt said.

“Why not?  What did you sell? I mean, I will not sell cotton candy or baked goods I have to make, but icy treats would be fine I guess…at least if it was just one day. And I don’t like manning a grill but if I had to I guess I could do hotdogs or something.”

“We didn’t sell things, Carole. We ran a children’s games booth.  We did a duck pond and a fishing booth, usually.”

“You at least made money off it, right?” Carole asked.

Burt looked to Kurt, who shrugged and made a so-so motion with his hands.

“Look, we buy about a thousand bucks worth of little toys…bouncy balls, bracelets, crayon sets, stickers, hats, stuffed animals, hackie sacks, yoyos, hair ribbons…little things and spend about 600 bucks on candies to be used a prizes and thrown at the parade.  We split them between the different booths and games and then we run the booths until it’s time to head out and back here for the car show or we run out.  We charge 25 cents to play both games.  Sometimes we add a soda toss.  We have fun and sometimes we get new customers.”

“Why would you do that?” Carole asked.

“It gives to the communities and we have fun.  It gives more options for families at the different July 4th gatherings. Finally, it is great business.”

“People let Kurt around little kids?” Finn asked.

“And that is the type of comment that Finn will have to pay into the sass jar for making, as well as pure sass.” Burt said.  “And that also might get him grounded.”

“Mom!”

“By my calculations we end up with about six to ten new loyal customers after each Fourth of July Celebration we sent people to.” Kurt said. “We usually do not make money on that day, though.”

Carole shook her head. “I take it back. I don’t think we should do that next 4th of July.  I just don’t understand why you do these things, Burt.”

“What things?”

“Those stupid boxes at the shop, this July 4th thing, that whole charity shopping thing you want us to do…it’s just ridiculous.” Carole said. “I just don’t see the point.”

“To help out those in the community that are less fortunate than we are?” Kurt said.

“But we don’t have the money to do that!” Carole snapped.

Kurt glared at Carole and Burt decided to let Kurt speak.

“Carole, when was the last time you went hungry because you did not have food and had no money to get it?” Kurt asked.

“Umm…” Carole stammered.

“Finn, can you remember a time when you were so poor you did not have food? Not when your mom worked long hours to provide you with it, but where even with that you had none?” Kurt asked.

Finn shook his head.

“Carole, were you ever at any point in time without a job and unable to provide for Finn and yourself?”

“Well, when we first moved here after Finn’s dad died and I hadn’t started my job yet…”

“So, your job moved you here?  You had a job?”

“Yeessss.”

“And at no time were you out of it?” Kurt asked.

“I changed jobs since then.” Carole said.

“But were you without a job or did you have the next one lined up?”

“I had it lined up.” Carole said quietly.

“How many did years did Finn qualify for free or reduced lunch?” Kurt asked.

“None.  I always made too much and it is just Finn and I.” Carole said.

“How many birthdays did Finn not get anything because you could not afford it?”

“None.”

“Christmases?” Kurt asked.

“None.”

“How many times did he start back to school without new clothing?  Or any supplies?”

“Never. Ok! But it was never a lot, it wasn’t what we deserved.  We aren’t rich!” Carole snapped.

“Then you have plenty of money to give some to others every once in a while…I never said you were rich.” Kurt said.  “Sure, you might not have the best of everything but you never went without, so you have enough to spare every once in a while. We aren’t talking about going out and giving to people every single day of the year. We aren’t talking about always covering everything ourselves. We allow others in the community who would like to help out to do so…even if all they can give is a few coins or a few cans of food or a coat their kid outgrew. It allows us to help in our community, to be a part of it.  By the way, we also put together 15 to 20 backpacks worth of school supplies and donate them in August and do Angel Tree gifts as well before Christmas. Dad will call about those on Friday and we’ll go shopping this Saturday.  So…nothing written under July Fourth yet, and we are to Back-To-School.”

“That is not a holiday.” Finn said.

“No, but it might involve traditions.  What do you do to mark the end of summer and start of the school year?” Burt asked.

“Huh?”

“Do you have an end of summer party? Do you do back to school shopping?” Burt asked.

Kurt sighed.  “For example, Finn, my dad buys me one whole new outfit, minus the shoes, which he finds acceptable to be seen in Yearbook photos.  It isn’t part of my clothing money.   That is all the ‘Back to school’ clothes I get because I have such a nice clothing budget. Well…except those purchases he mention earlier, like underwear and socks. We also go and get all the stuff I need school supply wise…doubled.  That way we get it on sale for the next semester as well.  Dad usually takes me someplace the week before school starts…his choice, so that generally means camping or fishing or such. And we go to the state fair and the county fair. Oh…and we do the backpacks.”

“Oh…umm…mom puts a pile of clothes on my bed and I’ve held end of summer parties since I was like 11 or 12.  The first was before Junior High.  It’s just a party party…music, food, whatever…you know. The last few years mom went out so we could have lot of real fun, you know.” Finn said.

“Yeah, again, not happening,” Burt said.

“I usually take him shopping once and we try on stuff…or I get his size from his uniform orders.” Carole explained. “Finn doesn’t like shopping that much.”

“I do…for fun stuff, but clothes are boring.” Finn said. “On the day she makes me try stuff on she also gets me a new game or movie or something like that. This fall I got a new phone, too.”

“So…If you have a party it will be supervised and reasonable,” Burt said. “However it is an option under those conditions. We will buy one school outfit and supplies…no bribes. I think if we are smart Finn won’t need a pile of new clothes set out for him anyway, because we’ll have done that shopping every month so it won’t be a necessity.”

“Yes he will,” Carole answered. “He can’t wear his summer clothes to school. He’ll need new clothing.”

“Kurt always has new school clothes.” Finn said.

“Kurt spends his 100 for August on school clothing and has a job which allows him to buy what he needs.  Kurt also shops for clothing year round and saves stuff.” Kurt answered. “He also doesn’t just buy summer clothes with his summer money.”

“Don’t do that, it is disturbing.” Carole said.

“I generally buy his jacket and gym type shoes right before school.” Burt said. “And I listed other things bought at school time.  I just don’t see why anyone needs to spend hundreds of bucks on clothing at one time when they could spread it out.”

“He has to spend all that money earlier on summer clothes.” Carole said.

“Carole, you are making it sound like Finn has more clothing than Kurt. If he is spending upwards of two hundred bucks on t-shirts and shorts alone, he needs to shop elsewhere.”

“Well, to be fair he probably does own more summer clothing than I do.” Kurt said. “I only buy a few pairs of shorts and a few t-shirts for summer and one nice outfit in case it is needed.  I work so much that I am mostly in uniform.”

“How much does he work, Burt?” Carole asked. “How much goes to paying Kurt?”

Kurt sighed and rolled his eyes.

“Carole, Kurt is an employee, just like the rest.  He gets regular hours which depend on the season and he gets a regular paycheck.  The only thing that is a bit different from his paycheck versus say… Robbie’s…is that his benefits are a bit different because he is a minor and falls under my healthcare stuff. He gets paid different for his hours towards certifications than his non-certification hours as well.”

“He should just work for free.” Carole said.

“The Union does not think so.”

“Well, Finn had better get twice Kurt’s pay when he starts working there. After all he is bigger and so can do more.”

“Finn gets less than half Kurt’s pay until he is certified and joins the union.” Burt said.

“You can’t do that!”

“Carole, I know we went over this when I hired Finn and Puck so they could pay for the replacement of those tires they slashed.  Workers who are not certified are limited in what they can legally do.  IF Finn wants to apprentice and learn all he needs to know for certification…the pay changes while he is doing so.  It changes again when he is certified. Until then…he gets what he gets and gets to do what he can legally do.  Pay is skill level and certification and union based.  Of course, Finn stopped coming by as soon as he’d worked the hours needed to pay those tires off…even though he was offered time to work still.”

“Working was cutting into his free time and the time he could spend with his friends.” Carole replied. “He shouldn’t have to work so much as a kid.”

“He was working two hours a week.” Burt said.

“He had to cancel a date!”

“At 10am?” Burt said.

“No, in the evening, but he had to go hang with the guys instead of go out on his date because he missed going off with the guys earlier.”

“Seriously?” Burt asked. “That is ridiculous.”

[punkpoemprose]

A Brief History of the Farm; Or Why Emily is the Way She Is

As requested, a brief (okay it got really really long) history of life, adventures, and my/ my family member’s fuckups on the farm.

@karis-the-fangirl I hope some of this is helpful/ amusing. Feel free to ask questions at any time if you’d like. If living in the sticks can be helpful to anyone I’m more than happy to share the knowledge I have.

So my dad has like the longest list of insane stories related to farmwork, so a lot of these will be his, and I should say that my family farm is only a hobby farm, so the work is a lot less difficult than my cousin’s dairy farm and the farms around me. We’re more of a subsistence farm/ homestead.

           When my dad was in middle school/ highschool he worked on my cousin’s dairy farm, and nearly died there five times that I know of (there’s probably more).

1.)    In the hayloft and a board broke out from under him sending him to the floor below (about a 10ft drop), which would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that the weak board sent him into a pile of very sharp tools that should have probably impaled him. He walked it off.

2.)    Was switching off equipment because he heard a storm was rolling in. The first strike of lightning in the whole night hits the barn, comes through the outlet, and knocks him flat on his ass, gasping for breath.

3.)    Was digging a trench for waterlines out to the barn. His little cousin was playing with her sisters in the back yard and went running, fell into the trench and straight on top of my father (she wasn’t necessarily small at that age and it was a 12ft trench). She nearly broke my Dad’s back, but it was lucky that she landed on him, because if she hadn’t, she likely would have hit a stone at the bottom of the trench and died.

4.)    Rolled a tractor (you’re not supposed to live through that), and not like a John Deere Mt or a little Ford or something, no, a huge commercial farm tractor with no cab. Again, he went flying, but walked it off.

5.)    Some kid decided to walk up to the back of one of the tractors when a PTO (power take off- basically a thing that spins wicked fast that you can use to power equipment off the back of a tractor, like a mower or what have you… this might explain better https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_take-off) shaft was running. If you so much as touch one of those babies when they’re going it can break your arm/ leg. God forbid you get a scrap of clothing stuck in there, you’re as good as dead. Anyway, kid gets too close, my Dad sees what’s about to happen and shoves the kid out of the way. You can probably guess what happens to Dad’s pants. If it weren’t for the fact that Dad yelled for the kid to move and the kid screamed, which caused my Great Grandfather to come running and shut the tractor off, I probably wouldn’t be here today. Oh, and what happened to him? He walked it off.

Mom wasn’t born on the farm. She was a city gal. Okay so like not a big city, but they had more than one grocery store, so that’s a city for me. My town only has farms, car garages, a post office, a town hall, and the general store an Amish lady opened up about a year ago (the pie is so damn good and her prices are so low it’s a miracle I bake at all anymore tbh, my grandmother has definitely given in all her thanksgiving pies were handmade by Laura Yoder and her three girls).

When she first started seeing Dad she was about my age (I think around 19 or 20?). They met at her summer job (at a plastic plant out towards Utica). My dad was her supervisor, and even though she had never done farm chores before, she started to learn on her visits. My father lived with his grandfather and the house desperately needed a woman’s touch, so Mom often did the dishes and tidied up for them, and she learned to crochet during the winter just to make my Dad a blanket.

By the time they were married Mom felt much more comfortable on the farm, but let me tell you (as she would, she’s a lovely woman and likes others to learn from her mistakes) she made some major mess ups/ had some adventures before and after the wedding.

She ruined about three weeks worth of green beans by weeding the row while they were wet (when you touch green beans while they’re wet they “rust” which is basically a disease/ blight that ruins the beans on the affected plants).

Planted three different plants that are so terribly invasive we’ve done everything we can to kill them since the early 2000’s and they still keep coming back (word to the wise if you ever want to plant spearmint do it in a pot).

Somehow Virginia Creeper ended up in our grape vines, and thankfully Mom only ate one berry (they look a lot like wild grapes). It lit her whole mouth on fire, and luckily she and dad were able to tear it all out before anyone else made the same mistake.

She didn’t fully cook Swiss Chard and had a similar adventure in mouth/ throat burning (The plants have tiny microneedles in their stems that will make you feel pain like no other if you eat it raw/ undercooked).

Once she made a pie with the apples off the back tree, and somehow managed to get several worm filled apples which did not reveal themselves until dinner that night, dead in the pie. In similar bug/ apple tree issues she accidently sent a wasps nest out of the tree and onto my father while picking apples (though Dad got his revenge when I was a kid and sent a chuck of beehive onto her by accident).

She was pulling weeds in the garden, accidently dug up/ pulled out a snake and panicked, not letting go of it, but running so that the poor thing (just a little garter snake mind you) was bouncing up and down the whole time, probably just trying to be free of her. She only dropped it when she ran over to my father (who’s terrified of snakes) and he smacked her hand.

When she was pregnant with me, she and Dad hadn’t accounted for such a cold/ long winter, so in the middle of February (7 months pregnant), she was up in the woods filling up a sled (that didn’t hold much but was heavy when full) with wood to bring back to the house. She had to make this trip 3-5 times in a day, and the woods are a quarter mile from the house in any direction.

When I was a toddler and my brother was a baby she worked in the garden with him in a playpen and I would be playing with my toy garden tools. My cousin, unfortunately, had planted a cornfield in the lot behind my house that he rented from us that year and I toddled off into the corn field. My poor mother ran through the corn field barefoot with my brother in one arm, screaming like a banshee for a good fifteen minutes. By the time she got back to the house, ready to call in a search party, I was being pushed on my swing set by my great grandpa (who was very hard of hearing).

My Gramp was the sweetest/ toughest man you would ever meet and doted on my brother and I terribly. He was half deaf, blind in one eye, his heart barely worked, he had a bad back and barely functioning lungs, but he would go up into the woods on the hottest day of summer to pick wild blackberries, strawberries, and raspberries for me and my brother. When Conner was a baby and I was a toddler he would do it for hours, come back, mash them all up for us with some sugar, let us eat it all, and tell us stories. My dad always said that he wouldn’t have lived as long as he did if it weren’t for me and my brother being around to give him something to live for.

As far as my experiences go I’ve been lucky to avoid anything too possibly life ending. Though we cut our own wood, and when I was a kid my Dad would fall a tree and cut it up and me, my mom, and my brother would load it into the truck or the wagon to take back to the house. Well my favorite thing was when he’d fall a tree on a hill so that we could roll the blocks down the hill to be split/ loaded. One time my shirt got caught on a log I was rolling, and it took me with it. I thankfully got thrown off the block before it could roll on my chest, but it got my leg pretty bad and it knocked all the air out of my lungs. I was pretty young at the time so my parents were worried. They made me and my brother stay in the truck the rest of the time, but we really just wanted to be out rolling more blocks. Also I’ve been hit multiple times by thrown pieces of wood to varying levels of damage to myself. I accidently broke my dad’s glasses when I didn’t see him and tossed a piece at him when I was about 12. But he was mostly fine and my brother broke a window doing the same thing when we were filling a shed, so we’ve all done something.

We use a tractor to plow out the driveway in the winter because we get so much snow. When my brother was a baby he loved riding on the tractor with Dad. (He called it a put-put because that’s the sound the exhaust/ exhaust cap makes when it runs). One time my dad hit a snow bank pretty hard and my little brother (probably about 2 or 3) went flying off the tractor and into the bank. I’m about 4 or 5, so I’m just sort of confused when my dad plucks my brother out of the snow and grabs us both (amazing given how puffy both of our snowsuits were really) and says the one phrase the three of us still share today “Don’t tell mom!”

When my brother and I were up playing on the edge of where the field meets the woods (where my great grandma used to throw the trash because they didn’t have pick up or anything like that) I sliced my finger open on a piece of glass and my brother said I’d have to get stitches so I tried hiding it from my mom for hours. I don’t know how much blood I lost, but my mom (God bless her) found out and managed to butterfly bandage it closed and made me drink a ridiculous amount of water. I probably should have gone to the hospital, but it never scarred and I lived. I have other stories that did leave scars, but I can sum almost all of them up as “young Emily really liked animals but the animals didn’t always like Emily back”. I didn’t learn obviously, I’m a Biologist.

When I started being able to do chores on my own I got my shoe eaten by pigs while bringing them slop, accidently pulled out all the plants and left the weeds in the garden because the leaves were very similar (thankfully we were able to replant them), I accidently broke a ton of eggs, I lost most of the hay out of a bale I was carrying, I ripped open a feed bag because I held it wrong, and I fell into what I will affectionately refer to as “puckey” more times than I’m willing to admit. I also freed all the fish my brother caught (because they were cute), cried over a bird that my brother shot by accident while trying to scare them out of the tomatoes, and with detached emotion named my three pigs breakfast, lunch, and dinner (my brother, who really isn’t a monster I promise, named his bacon, ham, and sausage).

I refuse to hunt, but I’ve gutted deer (the first time was an adventure trust me there), and for the last year I’ve been the closest thing my family had to a farm vet. The vet most people used around here passed recently and evidently a student of biology with a firm understanding of google is good enough for my family when it comes to the chickens and wildlife. I’ve only lost one patient and consulting with my actual vet student friends, she wasn’t going to make it anyway.

Also critters get into the house a lot and because I’m the only one in the family who isn’t afraid of them (mostly mice, bats, moles, and the occasional bird, my mom can handle the frogs/ toads/ salamanders herself), it’s been my job since I was about 12 to shoo them out. I don’t do snakes (because while I respect them I’m afraid of them), but I’ve been known to catch spiders and bring them out to the deck. The only thing I would ever outright refuse to catch is this fucking massive squirrel that used to hang out in the hay loft of my friend’s barn. It was a terror.

Oh and my brother and I had our hair chewed on by a horse when we were kids because we used to have straw blonde hair.

I overfilled a pressure canner once and I nearly died when we opened it prematurely because it blew the pressure gage clear off the top and just past my head.

My dog ran across a wet bridge and sent my cousin into the creek below where he broke his arm. I had to run back to the house (about a half mile) to get my mom to call his mom so we could bring him to the hospital (I was about 13, so he was either 14 or 15).

My brother and I have pulled more stone out of the fields around my house than I can count. Not little ones either. You can run little ones over with the tractor. I’m talking rocks the size of a laptop or larger. Once or twice we’ve found ones so big that we needed my dad to come through with the tractor to get them out.

I’ve been face to face with a bear (which is why I bring my brother, our 4-wheeler and his rifle whenever I go blackberry picking now), and we’ve all had deer, coyote, porcupines, skunks, and snakes cross our paths. Dad tries to shoot all the woodchucks out of the lot (they cause a lot of damage), but I won’t let him kill them if I’m around (same for the moles in the lawn and the field mice in the house).

There’s like a million more things I could say, but this is over 2500 words and I think I should stop now.  

[ralphmorgan-blog1]

Nobody Would Have Been Surprised If I Had Died

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It starts somewhere. It starts in the home. I know what a mass shooter can look like.

First time I saw him, I was 13. The sun wasn’t even up yet and I was wearing my track uniform. I poured myself a bowl of Peanut Butter Captain Crunch, turned and there he was, sitting at the round pale-blue Formica table reading the newspaper and drinking a cup of coffee.

He was a large man. Wavy hair and beard intertwined with strands of black and white. Blue-blue eyes. A department store Santa. He smiled at me. Introduced himself. I was late for practice. So I told him to wash his dishes before he left.

My mother met him the night before. The bowling alley was the place-to-be in our small town, with a crowded bar, nightly bowling leagues, giant trophies and a video game arcade. Normally we went with her, gorging on pizza and Dr. Pepper, but my youngest sister was sick. So my mom went alone, met him and brought him home.

She’d been looking for a man for a while. She was a mother with three little girls. She did not have a job. That was a lot to take on for anyone. Her second marriage had ended a year earlier. He started sleeping in her bedroom every night after they met. A few weeks later, I woke up to find them both gone. It was Christmas Eve morning. She’d left a note. They had gone to Vegas, a four-hour drive. Watch your two younger sisters, please. They’d be back that night.

I wasn’t mad. I was hopeful. She was lonely, she was drinking more and the laundry was piling up in the garage. He lifted her up, easily, and swung her around the room, happily, and he bought all three of us brand new bicycles. I wanted it to work out for her this time. We all did.

I woke up before dawn on Christmas morning and they still hadn’t come home. The Christmas tree was decorated and the red and green lights were blinking expectantly, but the cookies and milk were untouched. I ate the cookies, drank the milk, and then stole her money from the cigar box.

I rode my new banana seat bike that he bought me in the dark to the 7-Eleven on Grand Avenue, where I bought presents on behalf of Santa. I bought records for my two sisters. The 45’s of I Think I Love You by The Partridge Family and I Don’t Like Spiders and Snakes by Jim Stafford. The three of us had a band called “Wonder.” I played the drums on the back of a set of silver pots, while they played the tambourine and maracas. Our mother was best and only audience. At the store, I bought as much candy, soapy bubbles and plastic toys as I could afford. Then, I bought one more thing. A gift for my mother. The .45 record of You and Me Against the World by Helen Reddy.

“When all the others turn their backs and walk away

You can count on me to stay…”

I wanted her to know I would stay.

“And when one of us is gone

And one of us is left to carry on

Remembering will have to do…”

I wanted her to know I would remember her.

I rode my bike home as the sun rose. I wrapped the Christmas presents and put them under the tree. I quickly made pancakes, which my mother had always done for us on Christmas morning. My sisters woke up shortly after and opened their gifts. If they were disappointed in the small bounty, they didn’t say. We got out the silver pots, played the records and sang the songs. It was a happy Christmas morning. The only thing missing was our audience.

My mother called hours later. They were driving back from Vegas. Would I find a restaurant open for Christmas dinner? Scouring the Yellow Pages, I made a reservation at a Chinese restaurant in the next town, and it was there my mother showed us her diamond ring and told us they were getting married. From that day forward, he lived with us. The changes happened rather fast.

I never liked meat. Even as a very small child, my mother told me I would spit out beef. For dinner, my mother made meatloaf, his favorite. She gave me the side dishes: mashed potatoes, green beans, macaroni and cheese. He insisted I eat the meatloaf. I wouldn’t. My mother defended me. But he was the man of the house now. I could not leave the kitchen table until I ate the meatloaf. My mother shook me awake the next morning. I had fallen asleep. She had a black eye. I never saw him hit her. But I didn’t have to eat the meatloaf.

He bought her a red Lotus, an expensive sports car with a stick shift. Then, they took another trip to Vegas and left us alone. I stole my mother’s car keys and drove my sisters to school in the brand new Lotus. I taught myself how to drive her stick shift, but not very well, because I hit a tree in the school parking lot. Students stared. Teachers stared. The car was towed.

I was 14 and didn’t have a driver’s license. They called my mother in Vegas. She returned with a black eye, a split lip and a badly bruised arm hanging limply by her side. He walked right past me into the house without saying a word. She looked right at me and said, quietly, “I took it for you.”

It was my fault I wrecked the car. It was my fault he beat her.

My mother started drinking more. He started drinking more. The fights happened more. A passion play and we were the audience. Parenting became an afterthought. When the food in the house ran out, my sisters and I would take a taxi and my mother’s checkbook to the grocery store. We’d load up the shopping cart and not with very good choices. In front of the cashier, I’d carefully fill out the dollar amount on the check, and then forge my mother’s signature. It was a small town.

Everybody knew why. But nobody said a thing.

What we allow will continue. What continues will escalate.

Life became a routine. When the fighting started downstairs, my younger sisters left their bedrooms and showed up in mine. The record player went on. The record collection grew. I learned which chair to wedge under the doorknob to keep my bedroom door shut. I learned which concealer worked best to hide her bruises the next morning. Sometimes, the ambulance would come. Sometimes, she’d wear dark sunglasses, a loose sweatshirt and a big floppy hat when she walked the dogs.

Everybody knew. But nobody said a thing.

What we allow will continue. What continues will escalate.

There were moments of hope. Because nobody is angry and violent all day, every day. They just have to be angry and violent one day. My mother would wake us up in the middle of the night, and tell us to pack a suitcase. We’d hole up in a hotel. We were underworld spies, prisoners from a jailbreak. We’d order food, watch Charlie’s Angels, hope to never to be found. But we were never really lost, because a day or two later, he’d knock on the hotel door, carrying flowers. And it was over. Because who doesn’t want to go to Disneyland? Who doesn’t want to be the first house on the block to have a swimming pool?

My mother hated guns, so there were no guns in our house. I slept with a butcher knife under my pillow. I used it once. I was 16. The fighting downstairs stopped, abruptly, in the middle of my mother’s scream. I called 911 and then I crept downstairs. He was hunched over her body. She was on the floor in a pool of her own blood. I put the knife to the back of his neck to stop him from killing my mother. The ambulance came and took her away. The police came and took him away. We snuck into a next door neighbor’s backyard and slept on their lawn furniture. We woke up with blankets. Of course, they knew.

Everybody knew. But nobody said a thing.

What we allow will continue. What continues will escalate.

Weeks later, I was called out of my high school English class. My mother was at the school and wanted to talk to me. It was Halloween. I was a vampire, my long black cape flapping in the wind. She, newly released from the hospital, looked like a mummy, with her hollow eyes, her head shaved and her 32 stitches wrapped in white bandages. School was in session, so we were alone. She’d paid his bail. He was sorry. He was waiting at the house. Would I give him another chance, please?

My mother came to my school, begging me not to break up with her.

“When all the others turn their backs and walk away

You can count on me to stay…”

I broke my own heart when I did not come home from school that day. My mother could “take it” for me, but I couldn’t “take it” anymore. My middle sister, 13, ran away. Our father, remarried with two new small children, put her into a boarding school. My youngest sister, who had a different father from my mother’s second marriage, was only 6, so she cried herself to sleep at night. Our family was torn apart. So they moved to a new house on the outskirts of our small town on a secluded dirt road.

Last time I saw him, I was 16. When I pulled up to the new house to get my things, he stepped outside to meet me. The beard was gone. He’d lost weight. He was calm. He held a shotgun in his hand. It was pointed down, non-threatening. There was finality in the moment. I was leaving home for good. There was finality in the presence of a weapon. If I was willing to use a knife, he was willing to use a gun.

My sister was still in that house. My mother was still in that house.

Everybody knew.

Neighbors, coaches, grocery store cashiers, elementary, junior and high school teachers, school principals, classmates. Her parents knew, my father knew.

Everybody knew. Nobody said a thing.

What we allow will continue. What continues will escalate.

I never saw my stepfather again. There is no big turning point moment here, where I confronted him about the abuse. Where I asked him, point blank, why did you beat my mother? Where I told him, point blank, the pain he caused my sisters and me could be forgiven, but it could never be undone. My mother left him a few years later. She died a few years after that.

My stepfather did not murder my mother. My stepfather did not murder me.

But had my stepfather picked up a gun and killed us all, nobody would have been surprised. He was a violent guy, they’d tell the news cameras. Everybody knew that.

But nobody got involved. Because we somehow believe that we are safe from a guy who “only” beats his wife. We’re not a member of that family, so it doesn’t really affect us.

Had my stepfather picked up a semi-automatic weapon and killed scores of strangers in a public place, nobody would have been surprised by that either. He was a violent guy, they’d tell the news cameras. Everybody knew that.

But now everybody’s involved. Because innocent people have been killed in a church, in a nightclub, at a concert or a cafe, and in an elementary school.

Domestic violence no longer lives inside that one house on the block. Domestic violence lives in the public now.

According to Everytown for Gun Safety, the majority of all mass shooters in the United States killed an intimate partner or family member during the massacre or had a history of domestic violence.

Somebody out there, right now, knows the next big mass shooter. Somebody out there is getting blamed, screamed at, beaten up.

Somebody out there wants to believe that he’s sorry, that he’s changed and that love means giving him a second chance. Even if that second chance means giving him another bullet because he missed the first time.

Somebody out there, right now, needs our help.

Once, you could feel sorry for the three little girls from the violent home forging a check at the grocery store. Once, you could smile softly, avert your eyes and do nothing. Not anymore.

The facts show that domestic violence is a very clear warning sign that people outside of the family might also be hurt in the future.

Violent men don’t just drop out of the sky with guns and start shooting up people in public places. There are warning signs.

Abused women and children are the canary in the coal mine.

It starts somewhere. It starts in the home.

Nobody would have been surprised if I had died.

“And when one of us is gone

And one of us is left to carry on

Then remembering will have to do

Our memories alone will get us through

Think about the days of me and you

Of you and me against the world  

I love you, Mommy

I love you, baby…”

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Nobody Would Have Been Surprised If I Had Died was originally posted by A 18 MOA Top News from around

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Woman Reveals How Everyone Turned A Blind Eye To What Her Stepfather Was Doing

In the wake of the horrific mass shooting that left 26 people dead in Sutherland Springs, Texas recently, writer Katherine Fugate decided to share her own story.

“It starts somewhere. It starts in the home. I know what a mass shooter can look like.

First time I saw him, I was 13. The sun wasn’t even up yet and I was wearing my track uniform. I poured myself a bowl of Peanut Butter Captain Crunch, turned and there he was, sitting at the round pale-blue Formica table reading the newspaper and drinking a cup of coffee.

He was a large man. Wavy hair and beard intertwined with strands of black and white. Blue-blue eyes. A department store Santa. He smiled at me. Introduced himself. I was late for practice. So I told him to wash his dishes before he left.

My mother met him the night before. The bowling alley was the place-to-be in our small town, with a crowded bar, nightly bowling leagues, giant trophies and a video game arcade. Normally we went with her, gorging on pizza and Dr. Pepper, but my youngest sister was sick. So my mom went alone, met him and brought him home.

She’d been looking for a man for a while. She was a mother with three little girls. She did not have a job. That was a lot to take on for anyone. Her second marriage had ended a year earlier. He started sleeping in her bedroom every night after they met. A few weeks later, I woke up to find them both gone. It was Christmas Eve morning. She’d left a note. They had gone to Vegas, a four hour drive. Watch your two younger sisters, please. They’d be back that night.

I wasn’t mad. I was hopeful. She was lonely, she was drinking more and the laundry was piling up in the garage. He lifted her up, easily, and swung her around the room, happily, and he bought all three of us brand new bicycles. I wanted it to work out for her this time. We all did.

I woke up before dawn on Christmas morning and they still hadn’t come home. The Christmas tree was decorated and the red and green lights were blinking expectantly, but the cookies and milk were untouched. I ate the cookies, drank the milk, and then stole her money from the cigar box.

I rode my new banana seat bike that he bought me in the dark to the 7-Eleven on Grand Avenue, where I bought presents on behalf of Santa. I bought records for my two sisters. The 45’s of I Think I Love You by The Partridge Family and I Don’t Like Spiders and Snakes by Jim Stafford. The three of us had a band called “Wonder.” I played the drums on the back of a set of silver pots, while they played the tambourine and maracas. Our mother was best and only audience. At the store, I bought as much candy, soapy bubbles and plastic toys as I could afford. Then, I bought one more thing. A gift for my mother. The .45 record of You and Me Against the World by Helen Reddy.

“When all the others turn their backs and walk away

You can count on me to stay…”

I wanted her to know I would stay.

“And when one of us is gone

And one of us is left to carry on

Remembering will have to do…”

I wanted her to know I would remember her.

I rode my bike home as the sun rose. I wrapped the Christmas presents and put them under the tree. I quickly made pancakes, which my mother had always done for us on Christmas morning. My sisters woke up shortly after and opened their gifts. If they were disappointed in the small bounty, they didn’t say. We got out the silver pots, played the records and sang the songs. It was a happy Christmas morning. The only thing missing was our audience.

My mother called hours later. They were driving back from Vegas. Would I find a restaurant open for Christmas dinner? Scouring the Yellow Pages, I made a reservation at a Chinese restaurant in the next town, and it was there my mother showed us her diamond ring and told us they were getting married. From that day forward, he lived with us. The changes happened rather fast.

I never liked meat. Even as a very small child, my mother told me I would spit out beef. For dinner, my mother made meatloaf, his favorite. She gave me the side dishes: mashed potatoes, green beans, macaroni and cheese. He insisted I eat the meatloaf. I wouldn’t. My mother defended me. But he was the man of the house now. I could not leave the kitchen table until I ate the meatloaf. My mother shook me awake the next morning. I had fallen asleep. She had a black eye. I never saw him hit her. But I didn’t have to eat the meatloaf.

He bought her a red Lotus, an expensive sports car with a stick shift. Then, they took another trip to Vegas and left us alone. I stole my mother’s car keys and drove my sisters to school in the brand new Lotus. I taught myself how to drive her stick shift, but not very well, because I hit a tree in the school parking lot. Students stared. Teachers stared. The car was towed.

I was 14 and didn’t have a driver’s license. They called my mother in Vegas. She returned with a black eye, a split lip and a badly bruised arm hanging limply by her side. He walked right past me into the house without saying a word. She looked right at me and said, quietly, “I took it for you.”

It was my fault I wrecked the car. It was my fault he beat her.

My mother started drinking more. He started drinking more. The fights happened more. A passion play and we were the audience. Parenting became an afterthought. When the food in the house ran out, my sisters and I would take a taxi and my mother’s check book to the grocery store. We’d load up the shopping cart and not with very good choices. In front of the cashier, I’d carefully fill out the dollar amount on the check, and then forge my mother’s signature. It was a small town.

Everybody knew why. But nobody said a thing.

What we allow will continue. What continues will escalate.

Life became a routine. When the fighting started downstairs, my younger sisters left their bedrooms and showed up in mine. The record player went on. The record collection grew. I learned which chair to wedge under the doorknob to keep my bedroom door shut. I learned which concealer worked best to hide her bruises the next morning. Sometimes, the ambulance would come. Sometimes, she’d wear dark sunglasses, a loose sweatshirt and a big floppy hat when she walked the dogs.

Everybody knew. But nobody said a thing.

What we allow will continue. What continues will escalate.

There were moments of hope. Because nobody is angry and violent all day, every day. They just have to be angry and violent one day. My mother would wake us up in the middle of the night, and tell us to pack a suitcase. We’d hole up in a hotel. We were underworld spies, prisoners from a jailbreak. We’d order food, watch Charlie’s Angels, hope to never to be found. But we were never really lost, because a day or two later, he’d knock on the hotel door, carrying flowers. And it was over. Because who doesn’t want to go to Disneyland? Who doesn’t want to be the first house on the block to have a swimming pool?

My mother hated guns, so there were no guns in our house. I slept with a butcher knife under my pillow. I used it once. I was 16. The fighting downstairs stopped, abruptly, in the middle of my mother’s scream. I called 911 and then I crept downstairs. He was hunched over her body. She was on the floor in a pool of her own blood. I put the knife to the back of his neck to stop him from killing my mother. The ambulance came and took her away. The police came and took him away. We snuck into a next door neighbor’s backyard and slept on their lawn furniture. We woke up with blankets. Of course, they knew.

Everybody knew. But nobody said a thing.

What we allow will continue. What continues will escalate.

Weeks later, I was called out of my high school English class. My mother was at the school and wanted to talk to me. It was Halloween. I was a vampire, my long black cape flapping in the wind. She, newly released from the hospital, looked like a mummy, with her hollow eyes, her head shaved and her 32 stitches wrapped in white bandages. School was in session, so we were alone. She’d paid his bail. He was sorry. He was waiting at the house. Would I give him another chance, please?

My mother came to my school, begging me not to break up with her.

“When all the others turn their backs and walk away

You can count on me to stay…”

I broke my own heart when I did not come home from school that day. My mother could “take it” for me, but I couldn’t “take it” anymore. My middle sister, 13, ran away. Our father, remarried with two new small children, put her into a boarding school. My youngest sister, who had a different father from my mother’s second marriage, was only 6, so she cried herself to sleep at night. Our family was torn apart. So they moved to a new house on the outskirts of our small town on a secluded dirt road.

Last time I saw him, I was 16. When I pulled up to the new house to get my things, he stepped outside to meet me. The beard was gone. He’d lost weight. He was calm. He held a shotgun in his hand. It was pointed down, non-threatening. There was finality in the moment. I was leaving home for good. There was finality in the presence of a weapon. If I was willing to use a knife, he was willing to use a gun.

My sister was still in that house. My mother was still in that house.

Everybody knew.

Neighbors, coaches, grocery store cashiers, elementary, junior and high school teachers, school principals, classmates. Her parents knew, my father knew.

Everybody knew. Nobody said a thing.

What we allow will continue. What continues will escalate.

I never saw my stepfather again. There is no big turning point moment here, where I confronted him about the abuse. Where I asked him, point blank, why did you beat my mother? Where I told him, point blank, the pain he caused my sisters and me could be forgiven, but it could never be undone. My mother left him a few years later. She died a few years after that.

My stepfather did not murder my mother. My stepfather did not murder me.

But had my stepfather picked up a gun and killed us all, nobody would have been surprised. He was a violent guy, they’d tell the news cameras. Everybody knew that.

But nobody got involved. Because we somehow believe that we are safe from a guy who “only” beats his wife. We’re not a member of that family, so it doesn’t really affect us.

Had my stepfather picked up a semi-automatic weapon and killed scores of strangers in a public place, nobody would have been surprised by that either. He was a violent guy, they’d tell the news cameras. Everybody knew that.

But now everybody’s involved. Because innocent people have been killed in a church, in a nightclub, at a concert or a cafe, and in an elementary school.

Domestic violence no longer lives inside that one house on the block. Domestic violence lives in the public now.

According to Everytown for Gun Safety, the majority of all mass shooters in the United States killed an intimate partner or family member during the massacre or had a history of domestic violence.

Somebody out there, right now, knows the next big mass shooter. Somebody out there is getting blamed, screamed at, beaten up.

Somebody out there wants to believe that he’s sorry, that he’s changed and that love means giving him a second chance. Even if that second chance means giving him another bullet because he missed the first time.

Somebody out there, right now, needs our help.

Once, you could feel sorry for the three little girls from the violent home forging a check at the grocery store. Once, you could smile softly, avert your eyes and do nothing. Not anymore.

The facts show that domestic violence is a very clear warning sign that people outside of the family might also be hurt in the future.

Violent men don’t just drop out of the sky with guns and start shooting up people in public places. There are warning signs.

Abused women and children are the canary in the coal mine.

It starts somewhere. It starts in the home.

Nobody would have been surprised if I had died.

“And when one of us is gone

And one of us is left to carry on

Then remembering will have to do

Our memories alone will get us through

Think about the days of me and you

Of you and me against the world

I love you, Mommy

I love you, baby…””

Source: Medium.com

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Woman Reveals How Everyone Turned A Blind Eye To What Her Stepfather Was Doing

In the wake of the horrific mass shooting that left 26 people dead in Sutherland Springs, Texas recently, writer Katherine Fugate decided to share her own story.

“It starts somewhere. It starts in the home. I know what a mass shooter can look like.

First time I saw him, I was 13. The sun wasn’t even up yet and I was wearing my track uniform. I poured myself a bowl of Peanut Butter Captain Crunch, turned and there he was, sitting at the round pale-blue Formica table reading the newspaper and drinking a cup of coffee.

He was a large man. Wavy hair and beard intertwined with strands of black and white. Blue-blue eyes. A department store Santa. He smiled at me. Introduced himself. I was late for practice. So I told him to wash his dishes before he left.

My mother met him the night before. The bowling alley was the place-to-be in our small town, with a crowded bar, nightly bowling leagues, giant trophies and a video game arcade. Normally we went with her, gorging on pizza and Dr. Pepper, but my youngest sister was sick. So my mom went alone, met him and brought him home.

She’d been looking for a man for a while. She was a mother with three little girls. She did not have a job. That was a lot to take on for anyone. Her second marriage had ended a year earlier. He started sleeping in her bedroom every night after they met. A few weeks later, I woke up to find them both gone. It was Christmas Eve morning. She’d left a note. They had gone to Vegas, a four hour drive. Watch your two younger sisters, please. They’d be back that night.

I wasn’t mad. I was hopeful. She was lonely, she was drinking more and the laundry was piling up in the garage. He lifted her up, easily, and swung her around the room, happily, and he bought all three of us brand new bicycles. I wanted it to work out for her this time. We all did.

I woke up before dawn on Christmas morning and they still hadn’t come home. The Christmas tree was decorated and the red and green lights were blinking expectantly, but the cookies and milk were untouched. I ate the cookies, drank the milk, and then stole her money from the cigar box.

I rode my new banana seat bike that he bought me in the dark to the 7-Eleven on Grand Avenue, where I bought presents on behalf of Santa. I bought records for my two sisters. The 45’s of I Think I Love You by The Partridge Family and I Don’t Like Spiders and Snakes by Jim Stafford. The three of us had a band called “Wonder.” I played the drums on the back of a set of silver pots, while they played the tambourine and maracas. Our mother was best and only audience. At the store, I bought as much candy, soapy bubbles and plastic toys as I could afford. Then, I bought one more thing. A gift for my mother. The .45 record of You and Me Against the World by Helen Reddy.

“When all the others turn their backs and walk away

You can count on me to stay…”

I wanted her to know I would stay.

“And when one of us is gone

And one of us is left to carry on

Remembering will have to do…”

I wanted her to know I would remember her.

I rode my bike home as the sun rose. I wrapped the Christmas presents and put them under the tree. I quickly made pancakes, which my mother had always done for us on Christmas morning. My sisters woke up shortly after and opened their gifts. If they were disappointed in the small bounty, they didn’t say. We got out the silver pots, played the records and sang the songs. It was a happy Christmas morning. The only thing missing was our audience.

My mother called hours later. They were driving back from Vegas. Would I find a restaurant open for Christmas dinner? Scouring the Yellow Pages, I made a reservation at a Chinese restaurant in the next town, and it was there my mother showed us her diamond ring and told us they were getting married. From that day forward, he lived with us. The changes happened rather fast.

I never liked meat. Even as a very small child, my mother told me I would spit out beef. For dinner, my mother made meatloaf, his favorite. She gave me the side dishes: mashed potatoes, green beans, macaroni and cheese. He insisted I eat the meatloaf. I wouldn’t. My mother defended me. But he was the man of the house now. I could not leave the kitchen table until I ate the meatloaf. My mother shook me awake the next morning. I had fallen asleep. She had a black eye. I never saw him hit her. But I didn’t have to eat the meatloaf.

He bought her a red Lotus, an expensive sports car with a stick shift. Then, they took another trip to Vegas and left us alone. I stole my mother’s car keys and drove my sisters to school in the brand new Lotus. I taught myself how to drive her stick shift, but not very well, because I hit a tree in the school parking lot. Students stared. Teachers stared. The car was towed.

I was 14 and didn’t have a driver’s license. They called my mother in Vegas. She returned with a black eye, a split lip and a badly bruised arm hanging limply by her side. He walked right past me into the house without saying a word. She looked right at me and said, quietly, “I took it for you.”

It was my fault I wrecked the car. It was my fault he beat her.

My mother started drinking more. He started drinking more. The fights happened more. A passion play and we were the audience. Parenting became an afterthought. When the food in the house ran out, my sisters and I would take a taxi and my mother’s check book to the grocery store. We’d load up the shopping cart and not with very good choices. In front of the cashier, I’d carefully fill out the dollar amount on the check, and then forge my mother’s signature. It was a small town.

Everybody knew why. But nobody said a thing.

What we allow will continue. What continues will escalate.

Life became a routine. When the fighting started downstairs, my younger sisters left their bedrooms and showed up in mine. The record player went on. The record collection grew. I learned which chair to wedge under the doorknob to keep my bedroom door shut. I learned which concealer worked best to hide her bruises the next morning. Sometimes, the ambulance would come. Sometimes, she’d wear dark sunglasses, a loose sweatshirt and a big floppy hat when she walked the dogs.

Everybody knew. But nobody said a thing.

What we allow will continue. What continues will escalate.

There were moments of hope. Because nobody is angry and violent all day, every day. They just have to be angry and violent one day. My mother would wake us up in the middle of the night, and tell us to pack a suitcase. We’d hole up in a hotel. We were underworld spies, prisoners from a jailbreak. We’d order food, watch Charlie’s Angels, hope to never to be found. But we were never really lost, because a day or two later, he’d knock on the hotel door, carrying flowers. And it was over. Because who doesn’t want to go to Disneyland? Who doesn’t want to be the first house on the block to have a swimming pool?

My mother hated guns, so there were no guns in our house. I slept with a butcher knife under my pillow. I used it once. I was 16. The fighting downstairs stopped, abruptly, in the middle of my mother’s scream. I called 911 and then I crept downstairs. He was hunched over her body. She was on the floor in a pool of her own blood. I put the knife to the back of his neck to stop him from killing my mother. The ambulance came and took her away. The police came and took him away. We snuck into a next door neighbor’s backyard and slept on their lawn furniture. We woke up with blankets. Of course, they knew.

Everybody knew. But nobody said a thing.

What we allow will continue. What continues will escalate.

Weeks later, I was called out of my high school English class. My mother was at the school and wanted to talk to me. It was Halloween. I was a vampire, my long black cape flapping in the wind. She, newly released from the hospital, looked like a mummy, with her hollow eyes, her head shaved and her 32 stitches wrapped in white bandages. School was in session, so we were alone. She’d paid his bail. He was sorry. He was waiting at the house. Would I give him another chance, please?

My mother came to my school, begging me not to break up with her.

“When all the others turn their backs and walk away

You can count on me to stay…”

I broke my own heart when I did not come home from school that day. My mother could “take it” for me, but I couldn’t “take it” anymore. My middle sister, 13, ran away. Our father, remarried with two new small children, put her into a boarding school. My youngest sister, who had a different father from my mother’s second marriage, was only 6, so she cried herself to sleep at night. Our family was torn apart. So they moved to a new house on the outskirts of our small town on a secluded dirt road.

Last time I saw him, I was 16. When I pulled up to the new house to get my things, he stepped outside to meet me. The beard was gone. He’d lost weight. He was calm. He held a shotgun in his hand. It was pointed down, non-threatening. There was finality in the moment. I was leaving home for good. There was finality in the presence of a weapon. If I was willing to use a knife, he was willing to use a gun.

My sister was still in that house. My mother was still in that house.

Everybody knew.

Neighbors, coaches, grocery store cashiers, elementary, junior and high school teachers, school principals, classmates. Her parents knew, my father knew.

Everybody knew. Nobody said a thing.

What we allow will continue. What continues will escalate.

I never saw my stepfather again. There is no big turning point moment here, where I confronted him about the abuse. Where I asked him, point blank, why did you beat my mother? Where I told him, point blank, the pain he caused my sisters and me could be forgiven, but it could never be undone. My mother left him a few years later. She died a few years after that.

My stepfather did not murder my mother. My stepfather did not murder me.

But had my stepfather picked up a gun and killed us all, nobody would have been surprised. He was a violent guy, they’d tell the news cameras. Everybody knew that.

But nobody got involved. Because we somehow believe that we are safe from a guy who “only” beats his wife. We’re not a member of that family, so it doesn’t really affect us.

Had my stepfather picked up a semi-automatic weapon and killed scores of strangers in a public place, nobody would have been surprised by that either. He was a violent guy, they’d tell the news cameras. Everybody knew that.

But now everybody’s involved. Because innocent people have been killed in a church, in a nightclub, at a concert or a cafe, and in an elementary school.

Domestic violence no longer lives inside that one house on the block. Domestic violence lives in the public now.

According to Everytown for Gun Safety, the majority of all mass shooters in the United States killed an intimate partner or family member during the massacre or had a history of domestic violence.

Somebody out there, right now, knows the next big mass shooter. Somebody out there is getting blamed, screamed at, beaten up.

Somebody out there wants to believe that he’s sorry, that he’s changed and that love means giving him a second chance. Even if that second chance means giving him another bullet because he missed the first time.

Somebody out there, right now, needs our help.

Once, you could feel sorry for the three little girls from the violent home forging a check at the grocery store. Once, you could smile softly, avert your eyes and do nothing. Not anymore.

The facts show that domestic violence is a very clear warning sign that people outside of the family might also be hurt in the future.

Violent men don’t just drop out of the sky with guns and start shooting up people in public places. There are warning signs.

Abused women and children are the canary in the coal mine.

It starts somewhere. It starts in the home.

Nobody would have been surprised if I had died.

“And when one of us is gone

And one of us is left to carry on

Then remembering will have to do

Our memories alone will get us through

Think about the days of me and you

Of you and me against the world

I love you, Mommy

I love you, baby…””

Source: Medium.com

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Woman Reveals How Everyone Turned A Blind Eye To What Her Stepfather Was Doing

In the wake of the horrific mass shooting that left 26 people dead in Sutherland Springs, Texas recently, writer Katherine Fugate decided to share her own story.

“It starts somewhere. It starts in the home. I know what a mass shooter can look like.

First time I saw him, I was 13. The sun wasn’t even up yet and I was wearing my track uniform. I poured myself a bowl of Peanut Butter Captain Crunch, turned and there he was, sitting at the round pale-blue Formica table reading the newspaper and drinking a cup of coffee.

He was a large man. Wavy hair and beard intertwined with strands of black and white. Blue-blue eyes. A department store Santa. He smiled at me. Introduced himself. I was late for practice. So I told him to wash his dishes before he left.

My mother met him the night before. The bowling alley was the place-to-be in our small town, with a crowded bar, nightly bowling leagues, giant trophies and a video game arcade. Normally we went with her, gorging on pizza and Dr. Pepper, but my youngest sister was sick. So my mom went alone, met him and brought him home.

She’d been looking for a man for a while. She was a mother with three little girls. She did not have a job. That was a lot to take on for anyone. Her second marriage had ended a year earlier. He started sleeping in her bedroom every night after they met. A few weeks later, I woke up to find them both gone. It was Christmas Eve morning. She’d left a note. They had gone to Vegas, a four hour drive. Watch your two younger sisters, please. They’d be back that night.

I wasn’t mad. I was hopeful. She was lonely, she was drinking more and the laundry was piling up in the garage. He lifted her up, easily, and swung her around the room, happily, and he bought all three of us brand new bicycles. I wanted it to work out for her this time. We all did.

I woke up before dawn on Christmas morning and they still hadn’t come home. The Christmas tree was decorated and the red and green lights were blinking expectantly, but the cookies and milk were untouched. I ate the cookies, drank the milk, and then stole her money from the cigar box.

I rode my new banana seat bike that he bought me in the dark to the 7-Eleven on Grand Avenue, where I bought presents on behalf of Santa. I bought records for my two sisters. The 45’s of I Think I Love You by The Partridge Family and I Don’t Like Spiders and Snakes by Jim Stafford. The three of us had a band called “Wonder.” I played the drums on the back of a set of silver pots, while they played the tambourine and maracas. Our mother was best and only audience. At the store, I bought as much candy, soapy bubbles and plastic toys as I could afford. Then, I bought one more thing. A gift for my mother. The .45 record of You and Me Against the World by Helen Reddy.

“When all the others turn their backs and walk away

You can count on me to stay…”

I wanted her to know I would stay.

“And when one of us is gone

And one of us is left to carry on

Remembering will have to do…”

I wanted her to know I would remember her.

I rode my bike home as the sun rose. I wrapped the Christmas presents and put them under the tree. I quickly made pancakes, which my mother had always done for us on Christmas morning. My sisters woke up shortly after and opened their gifts. If they were disappointed in the small bounty, they didn’t say. We got out the silver pots, played the records and sang the songs. It was a happy Christmas morning. The only thing missing was our audience.

My mother called hours later. They were driving back from Vegas. Would I find a restaurant open for Christmas dinner? Scouring the Yellow Pages, I made a reservation at a Chinese restaurant in the next town, and it was there my mother showed us her diamond ring and told us they were getting married. From that day forward, he lived with us. The changes happened rather fast.

I never liked meat. Even as a very small child, my mother told me I would spit out beef. For dinner, my mother made meatloaf, his favorite. She gave me the side dishes: mashed potatoes, green beans, macaroni and cheese. He insisted I eat the meatloaf. I wouldn’t. My mother defended me. But he was the man of the house now. I could not leave the kitchen table until I ate the meatloaf. My mother shook me awake the next morning. I had fallen asleep. She had a black eye. I never saw him hit her. But I didn’t have to eat the meatloaf.

He bought her a red Lotus, an expensive sports car with a stick shift. Then, they took another trip to Vegas and left us alone. I stole my mother’s car keys and drove my sisters to school in the brand new Lotus. I taught myself how to drive her stick shift, but not very well, because I hit a tree in the school parking lot. Students stared. Teachers stared. The car was towed.

I was 14 and didn’t have a driver’s license. They called my mother in Vegas. She returned with a black eye, a split lip and a badly bruised arm hanging limply by her side. He walked right past me into the house without saying a word. She looked right at me and said, quietly, “I took it for you.”

It was my fault I wrecked the car. It was my fault he beat her.

My mother started drinking more. He started drinking more. The fights happened more. A passion play and we were the audience. Parenting became an afterthought. When the food in the house ran out, my sisters and I would take a taxi and my mother’s check book to the grocery store. We’d load up the shopping cart and not with very good choices. In front of the cashier, I’d carefully fill out the dollar amount on the check, and then forge my mother’s signature. It was a small town.

Everybody knew why. But nobody said a thing.

What we allow will continue. What continues will escalate.

Life became a routine. When the fighting started downstairs, my younger sisters left their bedrooms and showed up in mine. The record player went on. The record collection grew. I learned which chair to wedge under the doorknob to keep my bedroom door shut. I learned which concealer worked best to hide her bruises the next morning. Sometimes, the ambulance would come. Sometimes, she’d wear dark sunglasses, a loose sweatshirt and a big floppy hat when she walked the dogs.

Everybody knew. But nobody said a thing.

What we allow will continue. What continues will escalate.

There were moments of hope. Because nobody is angry and violent all day, every day. They just have to be angry and violent one day. My mother would wake us up in the middle of the night, and tell us to pack a suitcase. We’d hole up in a hotel. We were underworld spies, prisoners from a jailbreak. We’d order food, watch Charlie’s Angels, hope to never to be found. But we were never really lost, because a day or two later, he’d knock on the hotel door, carrying flowers. And it was over. Because who doesn’t want to go to Disneyland? Who doesn’t want to be the first house on the block to have a swimming pool?

My mother hated guns, so there were no guns in our house. I slept with a butcher knife under my pillow. I used it once. I was 16. The fighting downstairs stopped, abruptly, in the middle of my mother’s scream. I called 911 and then I crept downstairs. He was hunched over her body. She was on the floor in a pool of her own blood. I put the knife to the back of his neck to stop him from killing my mother. The ambulance came and took her away. The police came and took him away. We snuck into a next door neighbor’s backyard and slept on their lawn furniture. We woke up with blankets. Of course, they knew.

Everybody knew. But nobody said a thing.

What we allow will continue. What continues will escalate.

Weeks later, I was called out of my high school English class. My mother was at the school and wanted to talk to me. It was Halloween. I was a vampire, my long black cape flapping in the wind. She, newly released from the hospital, looked like a mummy, with her hollow eyes, her head shaved and her 32 stitches wrapped in white bandages. School was in session, so we were alone. She’d paid his bail. He was sorry. He was waiting at the house. Would I give him another chance, please?

My mother came to my school, begging me not to break up with her.

“When all the others turn their backs and walk away

You can count on me to stay…”

I broke my own heart when I did not come home from school that day. My mother could “take it” for me, but I couldn’t “take it” anymore. My middle sister, 13, ran away. Our father, remarried with two new small children, put her into a boarding school. My youngest sister, who had a different father from my mother’s second marriage, was only 6, so she cried herself to sleep at night. Our family was torn apart. So they moved to a new house on the outskirts of our small town on a secluded dirt road.

Last time I saw him, I was 16. When I pulled up to the new house to get my things, he stepped outside to meet me. The beard was gone. He’d lost weight. He was calm. He held a shotgun in his hand. It was pointed down, non-threatening. There was finality in the moment. I was leaving home for good. There was finality in the presence of a weapon. If I was willing to use a knife, he was willing to use a gun.

My sister was still in that house. My mother was still in that house.

Everybody knew.

Neighbors, coaches, grocery store cashiers, elementary, junior and high school teachers, school principals, classmates. Her parents knew, my father knew.

Everybody knew. Nobody said a thing.

What we allow will continue. What continues will escalate.

I never saw my stepfather again. There is no big turning point moment here, where I confronted him about the abuse. Where I asked him, point blank, why did you beat my mother? Where I told him, point blank, the pain he caused my sisters and me could be forgiven, but it could never be undone. My mother left him a few years later. She died a few years after that.

My stepfather did not murder my mother. My stepfather did not murder me.

But had my stepfather picked up a gun and killed us all, nobody would have been surprised. He was a violent guy, they’d tell the news cameras. Everybody knew that.

But nobody got involved. Because we somehow believe that we are safe from a guy who “only” beats his wife. We’re not a member of that family, so it doesn’t really affect us.

Had my stepfather picked up a semi-automatic weapon and killed scores of strangers in a public place, nobody would have been surprised by that either. He was a violent guy, they’d tell the news cameras. Everybody knew that.

But now everybody’s involved. Because innocent people have been killed in a church, in a nightclub, at a concert or a cafe, and in an elementary school.

Domestic violence no longer lives inside that one house on the block. Domestic violence lives in the public now.

According to Everytown for Gun Safety, the majority of all mass shooters in the United States killed an intimate partner or family member during the massacre or had a history of domestic violence.

Somebody out there, right now, knows the next big mass shooter. Somebody out there is getting blamed, screamed at, beaten up.

Somebody out there wants to believe that he’s sorry, that he’s changed and that love means giving him a second chance. Even if that second chance means giving him another bullet because he missed the first time.

Somebody out there, right now, needs our help.

Once, you could feel sorry for the three little girls from the violent home forging a check at the grocery store. Once, you could smile softly, avert your eyes and do nothing. Not anymore.

The facts show that domestic violence is a very clear warning sign that people outside of the family might also be hurt in the future.

Violent men don’t just drop out of the sky with guns and start shooting up people in public places. There are warning signs.

Abused women and children are the canary in the coal mine.

It starts somewhere. It starts in the home.

Nobody would have been surprised if I had died.

“And when one of us is gone

And one of us is left to carry on

Then remembering will have to do

Our memories alone will get us through

Think about the days of me and you

Of you and me against the world

I love you, Mommy

I love you, baby…””

Source: Medium.com

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Woman Reveals How Everyone Turned A Blind Eye To What Her Stepfather Was Doing

In the wake of the horrific mass shooting that left 26 people dead in Sutherland Springs, Texas recently, writer Katherine Fugate decided to share her own story.

“It starts somewhere. It starts in the home. I know what a mass shooter can look like.

First time I saw him, I was 13. The sun wasn’t even up yet and I was wearing my track uniform. I poured myself a bowl of Peanut Butter Captain Crunch, turned and there he was, sitting at the round pale-blue Formica table reading the newspaper and drinking a cup of coffee.

He was a large man. Wavy hair and beard intertwined with strands of black and white. Blue-blue eyes. A department store Santa. He smiled at me. Introduced himself. I was late for practice. So I told him to wash his dishes before he left.

My mother met him the night before. The bowling alley was the place-to-be in our small town, with a crowded bar, nightly bowling leagues, giant trophies and a video game arcade. Normally we went with her, gorging on pizza and Dr. Pepper, but my youngest sister was sick. So my mom went alone, met him and brought him home.

She’d been looking for a man for a while. She was a mother with three little girls. She did not have a job. That was a lot to take on for anyone. Her second marriage had ended a year earlier. He started sleeping in her bedroom every night after they met. A few weeks later, I woke up to find them both gone. It was Christmas Eve morning. She’d left a note. They had gone to Vegas, a four hour drive. Watch your two younger sisters, please. They’d be back that night.

I wasn’t mad. I was hopeful. She was lonely, she was drinking more and the laundry was piling up in the garage. He lifted her up, easily, and swung her around the room, happily, and he bought all three of us brand new bicycles. I wanted it to work out for her this time. We all did.

I woke up before dawn on Christmas morning and they still hadn’t come home. The Christmas tree was decorated and the red and green lights were blinking expectantly, but the cookies and milk were untouched. I ate the cookies, drank the milk, and then stole her money from the cigar box.

I rode my new banana seat bike that he bought me in the dark to the 7-Eleven on Grand Avenue, where I bought presents on behalf of Santa. I bought records for my two sisters. The 45’s of I Think I Love You by The Partridge Family and I Don’t Like Spiders and Snakes by Jim Stafford. The three of us had a band called “Wonder.” I played the drums on the back of a set of silver pots, while they played the tambourine and maracas. Our mother was best and only audience. At the store, I bought as much candy, soapy bubbles and plastic toys as I could afford. Then, I bought one more thing. A gift for my mother. The .45 record of You and Me Against the World by Helen Reddy.

“When all the others turn their backs and walk away

You can count on me to stay…”

I wanted her to know I would stay.

“And when one of us is gone

And one of us is left to carry on

Remembering will have to do…”

I wanted her to know I would remember her.

I rode my bike home as the sun rose. I wrapped the Christmas presents and put them under the tree. I quickly made pancakes, which my mother had always done for us on Christmas morning. My sisters woke up shortly after and opened their gifts. If they were disappointed in the small bounty, they didn’t say. We got out the silver pots, played the records and sang the songs. It was a happy Christmas morning. The only thing missing was our audience.

My mother called hours later. They were driving back from Vegas. Would I find a restaurant open for Christmas dinner? Scouring the Yellow Pages, I made a reservation at a Chinese restaurant in the next town, and it was there my mother showed us her diamond ring and told us they were getting married. From that day forward, he lived with us. The changes happened rather fast.

I never liked meat. Even as a very small child, my mother told me I would spit out beef. For dinner, my mother made meatloaf, his favorite. She gave me the side dishes: mashed potatoes, green beans, macaroni and cheese. He insisted I eat the meatloaf. I wouldn’t. My mother defended me. But he was the man of the house now. I could not leave the kitchen table until I ate the meatloaf. My mother shook me awake the next morning. I had fallen asleep. She had a black eye. I never saw him hit her. But I didn’t have to eat the meatloaf.

He bought her a red Lotus, an expensive sports car with a stick shift. Then, they took another trip to Vegas and left us alone. I stole my mother’s car keys and drove my sisters to school in the brand new Lotus. I taught myself how to drive her stick shift, but not very well, because I hit a tree in the school parking lot. Students stared. Teachers stared. The car was towed.

I was 14 and didn’t have a driver’s license. They called my mother in Vegas. She returned with a black eye, a split lip and a badly bruised arm hanging limply by her side. He walked right past me into the house without saying a word. She looked right at me and said, quietly, “I took it for you.”

It was my fault I wrecked the car. It was my fault he beat her.

My mother started drinking more. He started drinking more. The fights happened more. A passion play and we were the audience. Parenting became an afterthought. When the food in the house ran out, my sisters and I would take a taxi and my mother’s check book to the grocery store. We’d load up the shopping cart and not with very good choices. In front of the cashier, I’d carefully fill out the dollar amount on the check, and then forge my mother’s signature. It was a small town.

Everybody knew why. But nobody said a thing.

What we allow will continue. What continues will escalate.

Life became a routine. When the fighting started downstairs, my younger sisters left their bedrooms and showed up in mine. The record player went on. The record collection grew. I learned which chair to wedge under the doorknob to keep my bedroom door shut. I learned which concealer worked best to hide her bruises the next morning. Sometimes, the ambulance would come. Sometimes, she’d wear dark sunglasses, a loose sweatshirt and a big floppy hat when she walked the dogs.

Everybody knew. But nobody said a thing.

What we allow will continue. What continues will escalate.

There were moments of hope. Because nobody is angry and violent all day, every day. They just have to be angry and violent one day. My mother would wake us up in the middle of the night, and tell us to pack a suitcase. We’d hole up in a hotel. We were underworld spies, prisoners from a jailbreak. We’d order food, watch Charlie’s Angels, hope to never to be found. But we were never really lost, because a day or two later, he’d knock on the hotel door, carrying flowers. And it was over. Because who doesn’t want to go to Disneyland? Who doesn’t want to be the first house on the block to have a swimming pool?

My mother hated guns, so there were no guns in our house. I slept with a butcher knife under my pillow. I used it once. I was 16. The fighting downstairs stopped, abruptly, in the middle of my mother’s scream. I called 911 and then I crept downstairs. He was hunched over her body. She was on the floor in a pool of her own blood. I put the knife to the back of his neck to stop him from killing my mother. The ambulance came and took her away. The police came and took him away. We snuck into a next door neighbor’s backyard and slept on their lawn furniture. We woke up with blankets. Of course, they knew.

Everybody knew. But nobody said a thing.

What we allow will continue. What continues will escalate.

Weeks later, I was called out of my high school English class. My mother was at the school and wanted to talk to me. It was Halloween. I was a vampire, my long black cape flapping in the wind. She, newly released from the hospital, looked like a mummy, with her hollow eyes, her head shaved and her 32 stitches wrapped in white bandages. School was in session, so we were alone. She’d paid his bail. He was sorry. He was waiting at the house. Would I give him another chance, please?

My mother came to my school, begging me not to break up with her.

“When all the others turn their backs and walk away

You can count on me to stay…”

I broke my own heart when I did not come home from school that day. My mother could “take it” for me, but I couldn’t “take it” anymore. My middle sister, 13, ran away. Our father, remarried with two new small children, put her into a boarding school. My youngest sister, who had a different father from my mother’s second marriage, was only 6, so she cried herself to sleep at night. Our family was torn apart. So they moved to a new house on the outskirts of our small town on a secluded dirt road.

Last time I saw him, I was 16. When I pulled up to the new house to get my things, he stepped outside to meet me. The beard was gone. He’d lost weight. He was calm. He held a shotgun in his hand. It was pointed down, non-threatening. There was finality in the moment. I was leaving home for good. There was finality in the presence of a weapon. If I was willing to use a knife, he was willing to use a gun.

My sister was still in that house. My mother was still in that house.

Everybody knew.

Neighbors, coaches, grocery store cashiers, elementary, junior and high school teachers, school principals, classmates. Her parents knew, my father knew.

Everybody knew. Nobody said a thing.

What we allow will continue. What continues will escalate.

I never saw my stepfather again. There is no big turning point moment here, where I confronted him about the abuse. Where I asked him, point blank, why did you beat my mother? Where I told him, point blank, the pain he caused my sisters and me could be forgiven, but it could never be undone. My mother left him a few years later. She died a few years after that.

My stepfather did not murder my mother. My stepfather did not murder me.

But had my stepfather picked up a gun and killed us all, nobody would have been surprised. He was a violent guy, they’d tell the news cameras. Everybody knew that.

But nobody got involved. Because we somehow believe that we are safe from a guy who “only” beats his wife. We’re not a member of that family, so it doesn’t really affect us.

Had my stepfather picked up a semi-automatic weapon and killed scores of strangers in a public place, nobody would have been surprised by that either. He was a violent guy, they’d tell the news cameras. Everybody knew that.

But now everybody’s involved. Because innocent people have been killed in a church, in a nightclub, at a concert or a cafe, and in an elementary school.

Domestic violence no longer lives inside that one house on the block. Domestic violence lives in the public now.

According to Everytown for Gun Safety, the majority of all mass shooters in the United States killed an intimate partner or family member during the massacre or had a history of domestic violence.

Somebody out there, right now, knows the next big mass shooter. Somebody out there is getting blamed, screamed at, beaten up.

Somebody out there wants to believe that he’s sorry, that he’s changed and that love means giving him a second chance. Even if that second chance means giving him another bullet because he missed the first time.

Somebody out there, right now, needs our help.

Once, you could feel sorry for the three little girls from the violent home forging a check at the grocery store. Once, you could smile softly, avert your eyes and do nothing. Not anymore.

The facts show that domestic violence is a very clear warning sign that people outside of the family might also be hurt in the future.

Violent men don’t just drop out of the sky with guns and start shooting up people in public places. There are warning signs.

Abused women and children are the canary in the coal mine.

It starts somewhere. It starts in the home.

Nobody would have been surprised if I had died.

“And when one of us is gone

And one of us is left to carry on

Then remembering will have to do

Our memories alone will get us through

Think about the days of me and you

Of you and me against the world

I love you, Mommy

I love you, baby…””

Source: Medium.com

from Viral News HQ http://ift.tt/2mPdYcD via Viral News HQ

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Woman Reveals How Everyone Turned A Blind Eye To What Her Stepfather Was Doing

In the wake of the horrific mass shooting that left 26 people dead in Sutherland Springs, Texas recently, writer Katherine Fugate decided to share her own story.

“It starts somewhere. It starts in the home. I know what a mass shooter can look like.

First time I saw him, I was 13. The sun wasn’t even up yet and I was wearing my track uniform. I poured myself a bowl of Peanut Butter Captain Crunch, turned and there he was, sitting at the round pale-blue Formica table reading the newspaper and drinking a cup of coffee.

He was a large man. Wavy hair and beard intertwined with strands of black and white. Blue-blue eyes. A department store Santa. He smiled at me. Introduced himself. I was late for practice. So I told him to wash his dishes before he left.

My mother met him the night before. The bowling alley was the place-to-be in our small town, with a crowded bar, nightly bowling leagues, giant trophies and a video game arcade. Normally we went with her, gorging on pizza and Dr. Pepper, but my youngest sister was sick. So my mom went alone, met him and brought him home.

She’d been looking for a man for a while. She was a mother with three little girls. She did not have a job. That was a lot to take on for anyone. Her second marriage had ended a year earlier. He started sleeping in her bedroom every night after they met. A few weeks later, I woke up to find them both gone. It was Christmas Eve morning. She’d left a note. They had gone to Vegas, a four hour drive. Watch your two younger sisters, please. They’d be back that night.

I wasn’t mad. I was hopeful. She was lonely, she was drinking more and the laundry was piling up in the garage. He lifted her up, easily, and swung her around the room, happily, and he bought all three of us brand new bicycles. I wanted it to work out for her this time. We all did.

I woke up before dawn on Christmas morning and they still hadn’t come home. The Christmas tree was decorated and the red and green lights were blinking expectantly, but the cookies and milk were untouched. I ate the cookies, drank the milk, and then stole her money from the cigar box.

I rode my new banana seat bike that he bought me in the dark to the 7-Eleven on Grand Avenue, where I bought presents on behalf of Santa. I bought records for my two sisters. The 45’s of I Think I Love You by The Partridge Family and I Don’t Like Spiders and Snakes by Jim Stafford. The three of us had a band called “Wonder.” I played the drums on the back of a set of silver pots, while they played the tambourine and maracas. Our mother was best and only audience. At the store, I bought as much candy, soapy bubbles and plastic toys as I could afford. Then, I bought one more thing. A gift for my mother. The .45 record of You and Me Against the World by Helen Reddy.

“When all the others turn their backs and walk away

You can count on me to stay…”

I wanted her to know I would stay.

“And when one of us is gone

And one of us is left to carry on

Remembering will have to do…”

I wanted her to know I would remember her.

I rode my bike home as the sun rose. I wrapped the Christmas presents and put them under the tree. I quickly made pancakes, which my mother had always done for us on Christmas morning. My sisters woke up shortly after and opened their gifts. If they were disappointed in the small bounty, they didn’t say. We got out the silver pots, played the records and sang the songs. It was a happy Christmas morning. The only thing missing was our audience.

My mother called hours later. They were driving back from Vegas. Would I find a restaurant open for Christmas dinner? Scouring the Yellow Pages, I made a reservation at a Chinese restaurant in the next town, and it was there my mother showed us her diamond ring and told us they were getting married. From that day forward, he lived with us. The changes happened rather fast.

I never liked meat. Even as a very small child, my mother told me I would spit out beef. For dinner, my mother made meatloaf, his favorite. She gave me the side dishes: mashed potatoes, green beans, macaroni and cheese. He insisted I eat the meatloaf. I wouldn’t. My mother defended me. But he was the man of the house now. I could not leave the kitchen table until I ate the meatloaf. My mother shook me awake the next morning. I had fallen asleep. She had a black eye. I never saw him hit her. But I didn’t have to eat the meatloaf.

He bought her a red Lotus, an expensive sports car with a stick shift. Then, they took another trip to Vegas and left us alone. I stole my mother’s car keys and drove my sisters to school in the brand new Lotus. I taught myself how to drive her stick shift, but not very well, because I hit a tree in the school parking lot. Students stared. Teachers stared. The car was towed.

I was 14 and didn’t have a driver’s license. They called my mother in Vegas. She returned with a black eye, a split lip and a badly bruised arm hanging limply by her side. He walked right past me into the house without saying a word. She looked right at me and said, quietly, “I took it for you.”

It was my fault I wrecked the car. It was my fault he beat her.

My mother started drinking more. He started drinking more. The fights happened more. A passion play and we were the audience. Parenting became an afterthought. When the food in the house ran out, my sisters and I would take a taxi and my mother’s check book to the grocery store. We’d load up the shopping cart and not with very good choices. In front of the cashier, I’d carefully fill out the dollar amount on the check, and then forge my mother’s signature. It was a small town.

Everybody knew why. But nobody said a thing.

What we allow will continue. What continues will escalate.

Life became a routine. When the fighting started downstairs, my younger sisters left their bedrooms and showed up in mine. The record player went on. The record collection grew. I learned which chair to wedge under the doorknob to keep my bedroom door shut. I learned which concealer worked best to hide her bruises the next morning. Sometimes, the ambulance would come. Sometimes, she’d wear dark sunglasses, a loose sweatshirt and a big floppy hat when she walked the dogs.

Everybody knew. But nobody said a thing.

What we allow will continue. What continues will escalate.

There were moments of hope. Because nobody is angry and violent all day, every day. They just have to be angry and violent one day. My mother would wake us up in the middle of the night, and tell us to pack a suitcase. We’d hole up in a hotel. We were underworld spies, prisoners from a jailbreak. We’d order food, watch Charlie’s Angels, hope to never to be found. But we were never really lost, because a day or two later, he’d knock on the hotel door, carrying flowers. And it was over. Because who doesn’t want to go to Disneyland? Who doesn’t want to be the first house on the block to have a swimming pool?

My mother hated guns, so there were no guns in our house. I slept with a butcher knife under my pillow. I used it once. I was 16. The fighting downstairs stopped, abruptly, in the middle of my mother’s scream. I called 911 and then I crept downstairs. He was hunched over her body. She was on the floor in a pool of her own blood. I put the knife to the back of his neck to stop him from killing my mother. The ambulance came and took her away. The police came and took him away. We snuck into a next door neighbor’s backyard and slept on their lawn furniture. We woke up with blankets. Of course, they knew.

Everybody knew. But nobody said a thing.

What we allow will continue. What continues will escalate.

Weeks later, I was called out of my high school English class. My mother was at the school and wanted to talk to me. It was Halloween. I was a vampire, my long black cape flapping in the wind. She, newly released from the hospital, looked like a mummy, with her hollow eyes, her head shaved and her 32 stitches wrapped in white bandages. School was in session, so we were alone. She’d paid his bail. He was sorry. He was waiting at the house. Would I give him another chance, please?

My mother came to my school, begging me not to break up with her.

“When all the others turn their backs and walk away

You can count on me to stay…”

I broke my own heart when I did not come home from school that day. My mother could “take it” for me, but I couldn’t “take it” anymore. My middle sister, 13, ran away. Our father, remarried with two new small children, put her into a boarding school. My youngest sister, who had a different father from my mother’s second marriage, was only 6, so she cried herself to sleep at night. Our family was torn apart. So they moved to a new house on the outskirts of our small town on a secluded dirt road.

Last time I saw him, I was 16. When I pulled up to the new house to get my things, he stepped outside to meet me. The beard was gone. He’d lost weight. He was calm. He held a shotgun in his hand. It was pointed down, non-threatening. There was finality in the moment. I was leaving home for good. There was finality in the presence of a weapon. If I was willing to use a knife, he was willing to use a gun.

My sister was still in that house. My mother was still in that house.

Everybody knew.

Neighbors, coaches, grocery store cashiers, elementary, junior and high school teachers, school principals, classmates. Her parents knew, my father knew.

Everybody knew. Nobody said a thing.

What we allow will continue. What continues will escalate.

I never saw my stepfather again. There is no big turning point moment here, where I confronted him about the abuse. Where I asked him, point blank, why did you beat my mother? Where I told him, point blank, the pain he caused my sisters and me could be forgiven, but it could never be undone. My mother left him a few years later. She died a few years after that.

My stepfather did not murder my mother. My stepfather did not murder me.

But had my stepfather picked up a gun and killed us all, nobody would have been surprised. He was a violent guy, they’d tell the news cameras. Everybody knew that.

But nobody got involved. Because we somehow believe that we are safe from a guy who “only” beats his wife. We’re not a member of that family, so it doesn’t really affect us.

Had my stepfather picked up a semi-automatic weapon and killed scores of strangers in a public place, nobody would have been surprised by that either. He was a violent guy, they’d tell the news cameras. Everybody knew that.

But now everybody’s involved. Because innocent people have been killed in a church, in a nightclub, at a concert or a cafe, and in an elementary school.

Domestic violence no longer lives inside that one house on the block. Domestic violence lives in the public now.

According to Everytown for Gun Safety, the majority of all mass shooters in the United States killed an intimate partner or family member during the massacre or had a history of domestic violence.

Somebody out there, right now, knows the next big mass shooter. Somebody out there is getting blamed, screamed at, beaten up.

Somebody out there wants to believe that he’s sorry, that he’s changed and that love means giving him a second chance. Even if that second chance means giving him another bullet because he missed the first time.

Somebody out there, right now, needs our help.

Once, you could feel sorry for the three little girls from the violent home forging a check at the grocery store. Once, you could smile softly, avert your eyes and do nothing. Not anymore.

The facts show that domestic violence is a very clear warning sign that people outside of the family might also be hurt in the future.

Violent men don’t just drop out of the sky with guns and start shooting up people in public places. There are warning signs.

Abused women and children are the canary in the coal mine.

It starts somewhere. It starts in the home.

Nobody would have been surprised if I had died.

“And when one of us is gone

And one of us is left to carry on

Then remembering will have to do

Our memories alone will get us through

Think about the days of me and you

Of you and me against the world

I love you, Mommy

I love you, baby…””

Source: Medium.com

from Viral News HQ http://ift.tt/2mPdYcD via Viral News HQ