My family and past

I don't always like to talk about my past but I feel that by letting people know about the things that I have gone through in my life I become a stronger person for learning from it and who knows, perhaps it will help someone else as well.

My childhood was good at best. My father is an alcoholic, and it is something that I have been dealing with for years. You will hear people say that alcoholism affects not just the person who is an alcoholic, but their family and friends as well, and I have to say that this is 100% truth. When I think about what I went through as a child I always cry. I can still close my eyes and see my father strangling my brother against the wall because he took my teacup while I was playing. I can also see my father pushing my mother up against the fridge ripping her clothes off and throwing glasses at her head. It is not something easy to deal with by any means, and it still haunts me to his day the things my father has done to people in my family when he has been drinking. I am reminded of these things constantly.

The most vivid of these, was my freshman year of high school. I had just made the freshman cheer leading team, and was going to camp in a week. We were going out to a family dinner, and my nephew was crying in his car seat. My dad turned around and was yelling at him to to shut up. I am very very protective over my nephews, I only want the best for them. I told my dad that yelling at him would only make him cry more. My dad did not approve of me talking back to him and he grabbed my arm and I screamed for him to let go. He kept yelling at me, and finally he punched me in the face. I kicked at his seat, and kicked towards his face, but he was so much stronger then me, and his nails dug into my arm. What hurt me the most, was that my mother took his side. I wasn't in the wrong. I didn't deserve to be hit, hell I was just a kid myself. It hurts me that a father would punch his own child, his flesh and blood, and to this day I cannot understand how he could do that to his child. I never wanted people to know what I was going through at home, I didn't want to feel like a charity case. I hid it from all of my friends, and I told people at camp that my cat attacked me. I still have the scars on my arm where his nails dug into my skin as I kicked to try to get away and I'm reminded of it every time I look down.

My father now is much more mild. I can see that he knows that he has made mistakes in his past. I hated him so much for what he did to our family and especially to me. Now, we are closer then ever. I have not forgiven him for what he did to me, and the hell he put me through, but I know that he is not going to live forever. The drinking has gotten worse. He is going senile and cannot remember simple things. My mom is such a strong person for sticking by his side. She is and will always be my hero. We think that he has five maybe seven years at best left. We have decided as a family that is drinking is what makes him happy in his last years then we will just deal with it.

Something else that i have hidden from most everybody in my life is that I was so stressed out from my home life, that I started cutting myself in junior high. It was a way to release all of the things that I was feeling because I could not deal with the emotional hurt. I kept it from everyone. A friend of mine named Andy was the only person I told, he was a boy that sat behind me in Math class. he saved my life. I still remember what he told me that made me stop cutting. He told me one day, that if I wanted to kill myself so much, that he would kill me himself. I knew right then that I needed to stop. I had told a few other friends about it too, and it disturbs me to this day that no one else said a fucking thing about it. No one else cared enough about me to try to help me. I started cutting to relieve the hurt I was feeling from my home life, and I became addicted to the pain. I cut for for at least four years. I still remember telling my mom about it. It was right after I had stopped. I wrote a long journal about it. One night as my mom and me were staying up talking, I told her I wanted to share something with her. So I gave her my journal and I let her read what I wrote, and when she was done, she started crying and and we hugged, and we both said our sorrys to each other, and my mother and I have been close ever since.