You Must Remember This........

It is odd how we each remember experiences from our youth. That is a strange word for me to use because I never felt as if I had one. "Youth" is a word associated with purity of home and spirit, and I am certain that those articles never existed in the houses where I grew up.

My memories of my "youth" center on a succession of houses, and apartments, (not homes) steeped in ceaseless turmoil. There was never enough of anything except turmoil and one could only expect more of the same. Hope was something that there was no room for because we were taught that it did not exist. It was fair to say that one could only anticipate doom for it was a sure thing. That being said, someone had to be made responsible for the serious lack that dominated our lives, and that culprit, as I was to hear repeated for my entire "youth", was my father.

In addition to the serious lack, there was a mighty foe that my mother felt that she had to battle against day and night and that was what she believed to be my nymphomaniac tendencies. Even though I was only four the first time I remember her calling me a slut, she was quite diligent in her attempts to beat it out of me. And beat she did. She did it so well and often that she actually elevated it to an art form. By the time I was ten, I knew what to expect so that when I did get my period, I didn't tell her for fear of being beaten. When she did discover it, I was told that I was to get it every month and if I didn't, it meant that I was pregnant, and then she would kill me.

I did have one bright spot in my life, and that was when my mother had safely boarded the bus to New York to gamble at the OTB. I knew that for at least one, two or possibly three weeks, she would be gone. There would be hell to pay when she returned, but the important thing was that she was not there. In her absence, my grandmother, (her mother) took charge. It was her job to hold down the fort until she returned. My grandmother was considered a saint, mainly because the monthly checks she had went to feed us and nothing was ever kept back for her. I didn't know it then, but she was abused by my mother in much the same way I was. Her life was spent doing a chore that I am sure she detested in return for a flimsy roof over her head. When she died, she was very old, and she barely got a hole in the ground.

My mother remembers life differently. She remember putting my brothers and I in the best schools. She remembers working tirelessly to teach us how to be good upright citizens. She remembers sacrificing for us, and even consulting with priests and professors to help get my brother in the right university. She remembers tolerating my father's drunken antics and keeping a home clean and full of plenty. She doesn't remember battering me almost every day of my life until I left her house for good. She does not speak of the years she spent traveling on the bus back and forth to New York, the years she spent gambling; the babysitting money, the paper route money, the Girl Scout cookie money that went missing.

But I remember. My soul remembers the fear, my body the searing pain. And it is because of her absolute denial that I will always remember and never forgive. In honor of my survival, I remember. In honor of my survival, I write. In honor of my survival, I try each day to love my daughter a little bit more. I must remember this.