My Ugly Normal

Everything I lived through, I thought, was normal. My memory of these events began when I was eight years old. Hurricane Floyd hit Virginia and, my family was forever changed. Not because of Hurricane, but the storm my father brought against us.

I will be using the term father throughout this piece, but I never called this man dad or any other name for a father figure. He never allowed me to call him dad. It was always his first name, which I will not use here.

During the storm, my parents continued working their factory jobs while I spent the night at our neighbors. The following day, my heart sank to the ground like the trees in our neighborhood. It was like my body knew something was different. Leaving my neighbor’s house to go home, I see my parents arguing. Leaning against the wall, I carefully listened to the conversation. My father was trying to have mom hospitalized for her mental health. He wanted to leave her there to rot and never come home again. I never understood why he wanted to place her in a mental health hospital and never had the chance to ask my mom before her death. This is where the hell my father put us through for many years started.

Mom plotted to leave him. The first glimpse of this memory was a blur, as is I never wanted to remember. The first moments of the memory had mom stabbing a letter into the railing with a knife. Written in giant blue letters, it said, “DO NOT COME FIND US.” Mom drops me off at my grandmother’s as if I was going to work, and she runs away. The following day, I accompany my grandmother to get her done, which for a black woman, takes hours. About an hour pass, and I can hear my father’s truck blazing down the road. It turns out my uncle told him where we were. No one was supposed to know.

My father bangs on the door and then allows himself in. He first asked my grandmother about the whereabouts of my mother, be she kept it to herself. Then he grabs me, and I fall like a rag doll attempting to escape his grasp. Grandma and the ladies of the shop start shouting at my father, asking him to let me go. Dragging me up the hill through the grass and mud, he slings me into the car and races off to our house.

“Where is your mom?” he asked in a booming tone.

Scared to even think I told him I didn’t know. He didn’t believe me.

He walks into the house calling mom on her cell phone; no answer. I stayed outside, pacing across the scare yard, trying to think of what to do. Could I do anything? Should I run away to another house? Why didn’t mom take me with her?

Yelling at me to come into the house, I obey. Finally, reaching mom on the phone, he walks into the kitchen. He asks over and over where you are and to come home while I pace through the living room. I hear him slide a knife out of the knife block, and he boldly says, “I will kill our son if you do not come home.” Hearing that, I began to scream and run out of the house as he walked after me. Through all of the noise, I could still hear my mom scream, “don’t hurt my son.”

The next thing I knew, the cops were there. Who called them? Was someone watching from another house and saw my father walking toward me with a knife?