Enough

I've spent my whole life being collateral damage for a family who measures my worth by how quietly I can bleed and what they can get from me.

Being the youngest meant watching everyone vanish. Dad left and mom chose her freedom over us. My sisters chose drugs and boys, which left me as the unpaid babysitter. I was taken out of school and treated like a prisoner, forced to raise kids that weren't mine. I was bullied by my own family for, well... everything. Asking to be heard was dramatic and speaking up was problematic. So, I began cutting and starving myself in an attempt to have some form of control over my own body.

The day my mom's husband punched me in the face, nobody defended me. I ran off with a 20-year-old man I met online at the age of 14, which led to seven years of horrific abuse. It came to a head when he fractured my arm in the door and then took me out the next day to 'apologize'. That's where he came clean about all the cheating I already knew about and then pretended to throw my engagement ring into the lake.

He abandoned me on that mountain, mocking me and laughing as he pretended he would run me over in his Bronco. He sent his sister to pick me up and bring me to his parents' house where I spent the next two weeks living under their stairs like freakin' Harry Potter, listening while his mommy and him decided what to do with me.

I escaped... and I went to my moms, landing right back where I was before. The babysitter. The helper. Nothing I wanted for myself mattered because everyone else needed me to help them and anytime I asked for help, I "needed to figure it out for myself" because I was an adult.

I met someone online who lived in Texas and it was perfect. We moved in together and we built up a beautiful home, got married, started a family. But I still couldn't stop trying to help people who wouldn't ever help me. I let my sister and her 9 kids move in, and she ran through everything we had. We lost our house.

That loss drove me straight into my dad's house this time. I'd known life with Mom, I didn't want to do it again. So, I tried my dad's this time. Instead of protection, he demolished me. My half-sister, who wasn't his child WAS awful, but my drug addict sister turned homewrecker was what I should be. He branded me "just like my mom" his ultimate insult as she's the person he hates most in the world. He told me I was a horrible mother who needed to leave my husband for a truck driver. Whatever the worst thing was in his eyes, I was worse than that.

Crying in my dad's moldy basement, watching brown recluse spiders crawl all over my kids' things, it hit me.

My whole life, I'd been begging on my knees for the actual bare minimum. While I'd burned for everyone, not a single soul had been there for me. And now I had kids, and I was dragging them through the fire too.

No one was coming to save me. No one cared. I burned one last time, and whatever came out of those ashes that day took the wheel. I handed her the pen, and she said fuck it all. No one fixed the break. I stopped biting my tongue and I refused to be their doormat.

Click on the link above to read all the details for Shirley's challenge!