Welcome to Gaia! ::

After a rather terrible sequence of events tonight, I sat alone in the dark, bawling my eyes out for a good few minutes. Not long afterward, I reclaimed my laptop, waited until everyone else in the house had either gone to bed or plugged into the internet, and wrote this status on my Facebook timeline, taking care to apply custom security settings so that my parents and their family and friends wouldn't see it.

It's not right for me to protect them, though, especially after everything that happened tonight: after being tackled by a nearly-300lb man, hit and cursed at and threatened with further intentional violence ("You want me to pop your nose open? I'll do it!" "Don't curse at me; I'll beat that filthy mouth of yours!") as he attempted to pry from my hands the laptop I bought with my own hard-earned dollars, all because my sister was mad at me and, knowing that our parents would believe a likely lie over an honest truth, knowing that our father in particular had caused harm to me before and would do it again if I bucked him at all, knowing that our parents would leap to her side because she gives them money, told my father a pack of lies in the hopes that she could get me thrown out of my warm bed so she could have the bedroom to herself for the night. "Fine," she said, "If you won't do what I say and follow my rules, then I'm getting Dad to deal with you and I'm not going to be responsible for what happens."

My mother didn't help, of course. In fact, she took the angle that it was my fault, that I started the fight, that my efforts at calm, quiet talk being run over by my father's belligerent yelling and repetition somehow equated to an incitement to riot. I asked if we could talk in private, person to person, and she continued to interrupt me, telling me to "calm down", that I was "being immature" and that I was "making up a fantasy". Then she literally shut the door on me, leaving me alone in the dark to "calm down" and "think about what you're saying".

The worst part of it all is that this kind of thing has been happening repeatedly for over sixteen years of my life, and I have covered it up, I have remained silent and I have pushed the pain, the hurt, and the betrayal to the back of my mind because my parents have always told me that what they do isn't abuse because it could be worse. I could be in the hospital. I could be raped and beaten every night. I could carry lasting physical damage -- scars, disfigured features, brain damage -- from the attacks, rather than just a bruise here and there, shattered feelings and a broken possession or two.

This is the status I posted to Facebook, and it describes well my feelings on everything about this. I'm stepping up my travel plans. I'm packing my things and taking off to Indiana as soon as finals are over. I cannot stay in a house like this anymore.

I hope you are able to get out of there soon.

Thank you so much, everybody. Fortunately, I have been contacted by in-person friends who have offered to help with storage, packing and temporary living space. I count myself really lucky; not a lot of people get this much help on such short notice.



Jean, I completely agree. The stupidest part is that my family and I know people who have gone through worse (My mother's friend, for example, was hospitalized by her father when she was a child and didn't receive proper medical care for the many other times he attacked her; my best friend and future roommate's father emotionally tore her down, beat her, and even threatened her with his gun, all because he had wanted a boy and viewed her as a huge disappointment). These friends' misfortunes were basically turned into excuses to make the s**t that I've been putting up with seem okay by comparison, and it worked for so long. It still sort of works, because after I posted on Facebook and made this thread, I started having second thoughts: "Maybe I was over-reacting." "At least it's not every day." "Maybe it was just an accident and my parents feel horrible about it right now."

I just have to keep reminding myself that, even though the particularly violent s**t happens only every few months or so now, the yelling, the verbal smackdowns, the chew-outs and so on happen almost daily, and there was a time when the violent s**t was more frequent. More importantly, I'm not the only one in my family that this has happened to. My oldest sister was kicked out at the age of sixteen because she didn't agree with my parents' religion at the time and was also yelled at, hit and threatened by my father while she was under his roof. The elder of my two little brothers was struck down to the floor less than a year ago at the ripe old age of fourteen because he and our dad had a disagreement, which included the line, "I could take you on any day, little man; you want to fight me?"

Some of this s**t wasn't even because of an argument. One of the weirder occasions I remember from back when I was fourteen or fifteen happened while I was washing the dishes late at night. Dad was teasing me and I playfully whacked him on the back of his arm with a spoon. Everything was fine until five minutes later when he came charging back into the kitchen, all pissed off, cornered me and backhanded me yelling, "You knew there was peanut butter on that spoon!" (I'm dead serious. I still don't get it and I'm twenty-one now. Maybe he got it on a pillow or an armchair or something... =.=)

Sorry for the unnecessary second tirade... I don't ever talk about it with people usually, which is why this is such a literal rant thread. There's a lot of memories in my head that I've been keeping quiet because I didn't want to get my parents into more trouble than they deserved, or because I didn't want people to freak out and panic over an occasional backhand or loss of temper. Most of all, I didn't want to make my family look bad or get CPS involved.

Now, I don't give a ********, and the internet is a beautiful, beautiful place.