Anonymous

I've been at work. Long ..

I've been at work. Long hours. Too busy to really type anything. I've been so exhausted mentally and physically. Stress is like a whole other animal. The holidays are coming up. Took me back to when I was young. Holidays were always terrible. Halloween was a fight about my costume. Granted I wasn't dressed slutty or anything. It was simply one piece outfits. Like the onesies from the 90s type thing. We would go door to door and trunk or treating and after all of that we would be lucky to get one piece of candy. My mom's boyfriend would take all of our candy and lock it up in his room. From early on he had major control issues. He controlled everything all the way down to how long my hair was and how I wore it. Thanksgiving was awful too. Every year I would be grounded and made to write endless amounts of sentences. Stand in the corner with my arms above my head and balancing on one foot. My foot had to be above the knee I was standing on. If my foot went below my other knee I would be hit with the belt. I couldn't use the wall for balance or to lean against it either. The dishes were a nightmare at Thanksgiving. He made sure to dirty pretty much every dish we had. I would have the punishment of washing them all which would take hours. I specifically hated it because of the dishes and the fact that some of the family or neighbors would come over and witness me being under punishment and I wasn't allowed to talk to them or interact with them. At Christmas the tree would always get kicked down and the presents would get kicked and stomped or we would have several police calls to our house for violence. Sometimes both. Christmas was always the worst of the worst though. We would open presents and it was like they expected a certain reaction. If we didn't seem surprised we would get accused of being in their room snooping. If we were surprised it was an instant target on the object to be taken from us. We didn't have like a rich household. More on the poor end but not like government housing type. Well one year my mom's boyfriend got me a horse for my birthday. I love horses. I know that sounds awesome right? Most would've considered me lucky. Horses are expensive animals and we didn't really have a farm more like 2 acres in a small house that we rented. Everyday from the day I got the horse it was used as leverage. If I didn't do what he wanted he said he would get rid of it. If I spoke out of turn or pretty much did anything he didn't like he said he would get rid of it. One day I was fed up. I said just get rid of the horse because I'm tired of it being used against me for every little thing that I do or don't do. He went outside in the middle of the night and gutted my favorite goat and hung it in the middle of the barn. He woke me up at 4 am and told me he thought he heard something and wanted me to go check..I took a flashlight outside and walked to the barn. There was my favorite goat. Dead. Gutted. And hanging there. I cried so hard. Just to find him behind me laughing and said you got what you deserved. Now yes I am aware that that was just a goat. Not really an animal people attach to. But animals were my world. I loved and obsessed over my animals. I would talk to my animals and spend a lot of time with them. I had chores that felt endless. So I would take my time doing them to spend more time with the animals and less time in the house with my mom and her boyfriend. I had rabbits. One in particular I was just all out obsessed with. My mom talked her sister into getting a rabbit. So we had two rabbits and her sister had one. Well her sister decided after a few months that she didn't want the one she purchased and gave it to us. The rabbit looked a bit wild and not like the ones we had. One day I was taking the rabbits outside and my mom's boyfriend came outside and was mad as hell. He jerked the rabbit we had just got from my mom's sister out of my arms and held it by it's back legs and began beating the rabbit against the house. I started screaming and crying. He threw the rabbit down and started calling me names and cussing me. I picked up the rabbit and took it inside and told my mom what he had done. My mom said you are fucking stupid he would've never done that. The rabbit was obviously injured. And died later that afternoon. Each day I would go outside and find a dead animal or satanic symbols drawn on my horse. I could only assume he was trying to scare me but I couldn't figure out why he would kill my animals. It was just cruel. We didn't eat our animals. We had them as pets. My birthday was also terrible. A fight about the cake. A fight about where we would have it. It was just so exhausted to do anything. I remember one Christmas I had begged all year for an ipod. I got an ipod for Christmas and I opened it and I had a brief moment of excitement and I put the iPod back in the box and I handed it back to my mom. She said it is the one you wanted right? I said yeah. She said well why are you handing it back. I said you are just going to take it anyway just like everything else I get from you or him so may as well hand my stuff over now. My mom stopped and looked at me like I had just shot her or something and handed back the iPod and said don't act like that. I told her everytime they get me something for Christmas or my birthday you both just find a way to take it back and ground me from it. That ipod was the one thing I never got grounded from or took from me. I still have that ipod. I hate that it took me to have that interaction with her to be able to keep something as simple as an ipod