Growing up ... (continued)

 “There is an ache in my heart for the imagined beauty of a life I haven't had, from which I had been locked out, and it never goes away.”
― Robert Goolrick, The End of the World as We Know It: Scenes from a Life

... After that awful, and traumatic event of that night, my mom got us together the following day, we packed a bag and went back to Spokane for a couple of days to be with family, and people who cares.  Before we went, we had to go to school and get our homework for the week and when I showed up to some my classes, my teacher's were very concerned because of what my face looked like especially my health teacher.  Some of the student's saw me as I was at the front door of the classroom and were shocked to see my face all scratched and swollen.

We drove up to Spokane and the whole two hour drive up there, we did nothing but talk about the incident and how mom was going to have to make some tough choices in the coming days.  Whether she was going to leave him and move us back to Spokane or stay with him.  It was leaning more towards leaving and we were so excited to be finally getting out of his grip on us and most of all my mom.  Once we got to my grandparents house, my grandfather was so mad that he threatened to kill him! I guess deep down I wanted him to so bad!  He was going to get my uncle's, my mom's brother's, and go down to Clarkston and beat the living shit out of him, then hill him.  I have never seen them so mad like this before.  And I also have never seen my mom so upset, sad and just feeling lost and like she had let us children down.  I was so sad for her.

I started talking to my grandparents about possibly staying up in Spokane with them and my cousin's.  But in the end, mom decided that it was best that we go back to Clarkston and work it out.  Once my step dad got out of jail, he started calling my mom and pleading with her to come home and that he promised something like that will ever happen again and that he will stop drinking and that the drinking was the reason why things got out of control.  BULL SHIT! was my thought!, but mom fell into the trap and we ended up going back to that.  He had her so convinced that she didn't even turn in the police report from us children detailing the events of that horrific evening.  I was devastated and felt completely betrayed by her and so did my sisters.  We could not figure out how this event would be able to be forgotten like it was being and that he was being given another chance.

So we went back to the nightmare.  Sure the drinking stopped for awhile, until the both of them started back up again.  How we knew is we would always hear the bottle being opened and ice hitting the bottom of a glass as we were downstairs like we always were.  He used to hide the bottles in a corner cabinet we used to have, a lazy Susan is what it was called, so was easy to hide the bottles back in the corner of it.  As time went on, things just got worse and my years in High School were very hard to deal with, not only was I not popular at school or had many friends, and the majority of my friends were those of my sisters that it made me become more depressed and lonely.  I did everything I could to fit in at that school, but nothing helped.  Since my parents were always drinking, I started to drink myself, and I think it was more to fit in than anything else.  I didn't really start drinking until my Junior year of school, in the summer time.  My drinking progressed from there, always getting drunk and always on a mission to do so.  I was able to buy alcohol way out at the edge of town at this tiny gas station.  So I would buy for anyone, as long as I was included, I didn't care.

Anyway, life after that horrific night during the holidays went on and like I said, did not get any better, just continued to get worse.  My mom's family lost all respect for the man after that incident and never trusted him again.  I remember mom would make me go hunting with this ass hole and fishing with him to try to rebuild a relationship with him, but I NEVER had one to begin with, but my mom was so blindly in love with this man, that she could not see the pain I was in or any of my sisters as well.  I think toward the end, she just could not leave him because she was afraid to be alone.  He had kicked her self esteem down so low that she didn't have the nerve to leave him.  But after fifteen years, and all of her children moving miles away, she finally left him and saw him for the prick he was.

Before all of that, we would continue to go up to see our family and we had a place on the Ponderay river and we would spend weekends up there.  I had a motorcycle up there, so it kept me busy, and by that I mean, out of the place so I did not have to be around all the bull shit.  One winter we had invited all of our family up for the weekend, and my grandparent's brought out their snowmobiles and everything.  All my uncle's came etc.  Well, I believe it was Saturday night, they all decided to go into town and have dinner and have a little fun.  I was left with my sisters and cousins to babysit.  Us kids were all sitting around watching TV when all of a sudden we heard that cars pull in and all of a sudden we heard screaming and yelling, so we all went to the door and opened it to find my step dad punching on my grandfather and uncle's.  It was huge mess.  What brought all this on, they all were drunk, my step dad was driving with my mom in the big four wheel drive we had at the time and he was wasted and speeding down the road and unfortunately the road was icy, with an abundance of black ice because we had between three to four feet of snow on the ground and it had begun to snow again.  He had lost control of the vehicle and went down into a ditch about twenty feet below.  They were all right, thank God, but when everyone else came driving around the corner and had seen what had happened and that they had gone off the road.  This set off the chain of events that followed soon after at the cabin.  They had to be pulled out by a passing semi truck because of the snow was so deep and was so cold.  When they came up on the vehicle, everyone thought that they were dead!  So I do not blame my grandfather and my uncle's for charging after my step dad once they all got back to the cabin especially since he literally beat the shit out of me not too long before all of this had even occurred. 

... another night that was filled with horror and bad memories ...... nothing with this man was ever calm, I was always on edge around him.  My grandparent's were so afraid after that incident that they remember a news report about a young boy who was always physically abused and one night he just could not take it anymore and shot his dad with a shotgun and killed him in his sleep right next to his mother.  They were so afraid that I might crack and do the same, because we always had six or seven very powerful rifles in the house and they were always loaded, something my step dad said that needed to be.  Looking back, and knowing now what I know, would I have done such a thing ...... I really could not say.