Chapter 6

My mother married Phil when I was three years old.  I lived with fear, hatred and self-loathing until I made my bold escape at age 11.  By now, quite a lot of damage had been done not only externally but internally as well.  Everything was dark and bleak.  This sounds so cliché, but it was dark and bleak.  I saw the world though critical and distrusting eyes.  I still managed to do well in school ~ again, I just wanted to be a good girl.  But I didn’t have lot of friends.  Just one more thing I could blame on my mother.  I had a sparkling personality and was a wicked tetherball player so that couldn’t have been the reason why.  It had to be how I looked.  My Aunt Peg and I always laugh when I talk about this now, but back then, it was horrifying.  In the early 80’s, you had to have Lee jeans and Nikes.  Well, my mother would only buy clothes for me from Kmart, so I had Wranglers jeans and Macgregor’s.  This combination along with my hideous boy haircut and cavities in all my teeth was a friend repellent.  But I did have one good friend, Missy.  I would spend a lot of time at her house where the world was normal.  One night, back in the land of my torture, my mom, Phil and I were watching a TV movie called “Something About Amelia” starring Ted Danson.  The movie was about a young girl being sexually abused by her stepfather.  I watched the movie as if I were in a trance.  I couldn’t believe we were watching this!  Isn’t he going to change the channel?  How could he sit there and watch this?  This movie was very different from my life.  In the end the mother saves Amelia.  That was not going to happen for me.  I knew I was going to have to save myself.  But I didn’t know how.  The next day, in Art class, I told my friend Missy about the movie.  I then told her the same thing was happening to me.  She told me she didn’t believe me.  How could she not believe me?  Wasn’t she my friend?  Then she said she would believe me if I told her mom.  So after school, we went home to Missy’s house.  I told her mom.  I told her every gruesome detail about my life.  She told me I was going to stay at their house that night.  That was not out of the ordinary for me, so I called my mom and told her I was staying at Missy’s.  Little did I know I would never sleep in my mom’s house again.