There are two significant events in my life that altered me. The first, I was perhaps I don’t know, 9 or 10 maybe? Anyway, living in Mississippi in a trailer home turned house with unfinished walls out in the country. Stepdad is a truck driver, comes home drunk after a smoky evening at the local bar and my little brother and I are in our bunkbed sleeping. We are woken up by the sounds of him screaming at our mother, my brother is about 6ish (We will call this brother Kaleb, he was born before Charlie to my mother’s second husband). Kaleb crawls into bed with me as the screaming continues and I am holding on to my baby brother when our stepdad throws our door opens and grabs us both and drags us forcefully into the living room and makes us sit on the couch. He takes a big drink of his beer, heads into the bedroom where our mom is, and comes out dragging her by her long blonde hair while she is trying to wriggle free. He slams her head into the ground and her nails break digging into the cheap linoleum floor. He breaks a beer bottle against her face and kicks her and blood from her head goes everywhere. He is screaming, so red in the face I remember and as I stare in horror at my mother laying on the ground bleeding out, he pulls me off the couch and jerks me over to her and pushes me on the ground. He screams into my face that this is all my fault. Everything he does to her is my fault. He grabs my face and slams it into the ground and I remember a mouth full of blood and  my nostrils having my mother’s blood in them from his stepping on my head into the pool of blood. My memory blacks out at that point – I think she was rushed to the ER, who knows how my stepdad got out of that. Or even if he did. I don’t remember. I do remember that the reason for that fight was because my stepdad found my mother’s Wiccan book (she practiced Wiccan her entire life) and he was angry because he forced us to be Christians. Fast forward some time and that house was mysteriously burned to the ground after my mother left my stepdad (albeit temporarily) and both my kitten (PuffPuff) and my dog (a German Shepherd named Marlboro) were both killed in the fire by my stepdad. I suspect that he locked them in the house and burned them with the house and all of my mother and my belonging but…who knows the truth of what he did to them.

This event significantly changed my life in way that I cannot expand upon yet – I am leaving to go clear my head and I’ll be back with a part II.