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Is He Proud of Me
The first appointment. Everything up to this point has been history. This one happened this week. My anxiety was high going in. Not about the appointment itself — about the delivery. I have done this a lot of times now. New office, new person, and the whole thing has to come out again from the…
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Rule Number Three
Fourteen onward. At fourteen, I got what I had been trying to get since I was thirteen. My mother was found unfit and my dad was given full custody. I want to write the next sentence carefully, because for twenty-five years I have not let myself write it at all. I went from being the…
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One Eighth
Thirteen to fourteen. The year I paid for it. Last post ended with me packing my dad’s truck at thirteen and saying I wasn’t coming back. I want to be honest about what I thought that meant at the time. I thought it was over. It wasn’t. The order said every other weekend, so for…
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I’m Not Coming Back
Thirteen By thirteen I was getting migraines. Constant ones. I didn’t connect it to anything at the time. Nobody did. I was just a kid who got bad headaches, and it went in the same drawer as everything else about me — something to work around, not something to ask about. Four years of not…
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We Don’t Cry
My dad. The hardest post so far. I need to say the most important thing first, before anything else in this post, because everything after it will be read wrong otherwise. I am a daddy’s girl. I always have been. There is nothing in here that changes that, and if you finish this post thinking I’ve…
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The Job Nobody Hired Me For
What I was doing in the daytime Last post was the night shift. This one is the day shift. I want to be clear that these were happening at the same time, in the same house, to the same kid. My mother had started on pills before she and my dad split. After, it got…
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The Night Shift
Nine to thirteen. Where the panic attacks were built. Last time I ended by telling you that you’re off shift. This is the post about where the shift came from. The first time He hit her. She went down. Then he went to put an elbow into her back while she was on the floor.…
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What I Actually Stopped
Age ten. A parking lot. A baseball bat. About a year after the morning I wrote about last time, my parents started talking about getting back together. I need you to understand what that meant to a ten-year-old who had spent a year in a house with a man she was afraid of. It meant…
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Where the Tape Starts
My first memory, and what’s in front of it Most people’s earliest memory is a birthday, or a beach, or a dog. Something warm and half-blurry that their parents had to help them fill in. Mine has a room, a time of day, and a body count. And in front of it there is nothing…
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Fifteen Years of Doggy Love
The one grief I can feel all the way through I can tell you the worst things that ever happened to me in a calm, steady voice, in order, with dates. I’ve been doing it in offices since I was thirteen. I cannot get through a three-minute country song about a dog. Billy Currington. Like My…
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