Bad Girl House 11.5

My first teaching experiences are tainted with the horrifying memories of escalating physical violence and emotional abuse. I can clearly picture each of my classrooms. The faces of a few charismatic students stay with me. I still know the simple songs that I taught them by heart. It is astounding to me that I was able to focus on teaching as my situation at home got steadily worse. The short time I spent in Virginia began years of survival that I didn’t see ending.

I vividly remember John’s violent outbursts and abusive behaviors. Each one caught me by surprise, only adding to the changing patterns of my own behavior. It was perfectly clear that what John presented outwardly was not an indicator of his internal plotting. There was no way to predict how he was going to react to anything. My only defense was to do everything possible to keep him appeased. I soon found that to be an impossibility. The only thing I could do was to wait for the violence to stop. Several of these memories stand out to me when I think back about my time in Virginia. All of them were his way to continue punishing me for lying to him.

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While working on lesson plans, my teacher manual was suddenly ripped from my hands. John walked towards the back door. I jumped up from where I was sitting, already realizing what he was about to do. I grabbed his arm and begged him to give it back to me.

“Your school work needs to do done at school. Not while I’m here.”

I watched helplessly as the book was flung off of the back deck. It sailed high into the air. The force of the throw made the pages tear away from their ringed binding. A cloud of white paper floated to the ground, some being caught by with wind, traveling even further away. I stared into the distance in disbelief. John went back in the house. There was no retrieving the book. It had flown over a fence where the ground made a very steep drop.

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I sat in a rocking chair in the dark living room after being berated. I closed my eyes to take in the silence. There was a sudden sound in the bedroom. I barely had time to open my eyes before my chair was pushed over but he force of John’s hand on my neck.

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I was rarely allowed to shower by myself when was in Virginia. He always set the water so that it was almost too hot to stand in, and made sure that I was under it.

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John held my forearm firmly with both of his hands, threatening to twist my skin as hard as he could. He was again pushing me for more information. I yelled out as he began twisting, not being able to pull my arm from his grip.

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I woke up to John walking into the bedroom holding a pair of scissors. He took a pair of my shoes out of the closet, holding the open scissors to them.

“Tell me the truth, or I am going to destroy everything that’s yours in this closet.”

He didn’t give me time to say a word before pieces of my shoes were cut in half. John went back to the closet. The next thing to be cut to pieces was a scarf I had crocheted for him as a gift on our second Christmas together. Small pieces of dark green yarn rained down on the carpet. My guitar was taken from its case. The sound of John’s foot stomping on the wood made a sickening crunch. Finally, there was a box of photographs sitting on the closet floor. An envelope held all of my elementary class pictures. An album had pictures from a forth grade class trip, pictures I took of high school concerts, and senior pictures of close friends. I had looked at those pictures so many times that I can still see the young faces. Once John shredded the photos, my mind was the only place they existed.

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