Nelson Change

What innocent-seeming picture is actually heartbreaking?

This cute little boy ended up being rejected by my mother. Decades later I asked my mom what that was about and she said: “I don’t know, when he got to be three, he got ugly to me.” The other four of us didn’t know that or understand what it was about. He became the family scapegoat, taking mental and physical abuse from the brother three years older and mental abuse from the rest of us. Then my father died when he was eight and my mother moved us 2000 miles away across the country. The family went under stress, but the one brother picked on him.