I had a pretty happy, normal childhood growing up. We went on vacations, we baked cookies with my grandparents, we celebrated every holiday with big parties and decorations-- I want to preface this story this way so you know how my world did a 180*.
I was ten years old and the biggest annoyance of my life at the moment was that I had to go to the dentist that day. My mother told me to brush my teeth before we left, so I did.
Then my father came home. Only it didn't sound like my father. He was angry--angrier than I'd ever imagined he could be.. and I think he was drunk. Only I didn't know words like "drunk" back then. I learned them later on.
He threw a beer bottle at my mother in the kitchen, and I froze in the bathroom. I didn't know what to do. They started arguing and fighting REALLY loudly about how my mother cheated. I didn't understand the word "cheated" either. I didn't understand how my father could get so insanely angry about losing a game.
I stayed in the bathroom, listening to them fighting-- both with words and then with loud crashes in the kitchen while my mother screamed for it to stop-- I must have stayed in the bathroom for over an hour. It felt like forever.
Eventually, I gathered enough courage to race out of the bathroom, back to my room I shared with my sister. She was there too, in tears and on the phone with her friend. She hugged me tightly and asked her friend what to do. She was 14 but we were still way out of our league.
Over the next couple of hours, we listened to them fight and my mother cry. Eventually it ended. They both went to bed.
The next few years were full of them fighting all the time. Sometimes so badly that my other sister (who was 18 at the time and lived most of her days at her boyfriend's house) would bundle us up and bring us to anyone who would take us in for the day because she didn't want us there.
Eventually, my mother became an alcoholic. She promised to change though, to go to counseling, to stop drinking, to not run away with the guy she wanted to leave us all for-- looking back, I wish she had just left. She turned into a horrible nightmare, full of rage and not wanting to stay with our father but still "staying for the kids". I wish my father hadn't begged her to stay. Hell, sometimes (I know this is fucked up) I wish my father had killed her that day.
He was a good guy. She was just a fucking nut.
She lost her mother a few years after that. Started drinking more.
Drank with my aunt. My aunt died of cirrhosis.
Drank with my older sister. My sister died of cirrhosis.
Argued about who was drinking more with my father. He became an alcoholic as well and ended up falling down the stairs and breaking his neck and dying when he was drunk one night.
The middle sister turned to cocaine to escape. She refuses to talk to me these days because she feels fighting over the estate my father left us is more important because she wants the money for drugs. I got kicked out of our house at this point as well because my mother decided the oldest living child of hers should be the executor. I'm living with my fiance (sometimes ex-fiance because we fight so much, but that's another story entirely...) at the moment.
Before my mother died, she did one last thing to screw us all over and left 1/3 of my father's estate to the guy she started fucking after my father died (who was cheating on his wife to screw around with my mother and playing my mom for as much money as he could get).
It's been 21 years of hell since that one night when the world crashed down around me. I never even saw it coming.
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