A Broken Home

Everyone saw a happy, healthy family. But what I saw, was a broken home. If only walls could talk it have stories to tell you wouldn't believe. Stories even I didn't believe, till I lived them. I was always told the home you grow up in builds the person you become, it's true. This home built me...

A story only the walls could tell for years, the daughter silenced from what she saw and felt. The pain, the tears, and the fear. Because of you, I am ashamed of my life because it's empty. I could say my heart was broken by some guy but the truth is, you broke my heart long before any guy ever could. The happy, healthy family you saw was just an image. The home that built me was a lie.

The place you are suppose to feel safe, I watched my mother verbally and physically abuse everyone around her. From the suicide attempts, the verbal words she will kill herself if we leave her, the clubbing and partying, the abuse of prescription drugs, etc. it was all there and saw by an innocent little girl who grew up silent, hiding in her bedroom, letting everyone see the happy home that built her into the strong independent woman she is now that fears love and getting close to people. The woman who loves being alone in her room now because it's her safe place.

I remember coming home with a report card, A's and one B. The school was so proud, I walked in handed the report card to my mother who slapped me saying that B needs to be an A. You'll never be the daughter I wanted. All the pageants I was forced into, all the friends I couldn't have because they wasn't popular enough, all the imperfect moments pointed out because I wasn't the daughter my mother wanted. I can't remember a time my mother ever said she was proud of me, she told people she was but I had never heard it personally. The constant yelling, the fighting, the constant fear when I walked through that front door of not knowing who would be behind that door.

I never knew one day, the preparing I got from my father I would one day walk in and find my mother dead, would come true. Years later, it came true. The pain, the fears, and the memories seemed to fade in that moment and a sign of relief rushed over me. I never shed a tear, not because I didn't love the mother I was given but because for the first time in my entire life, I felt free and like I could become the woman I would become not what someone wanted me to be.

The show she put on for years made her look like this picture perfect mother, wife, and friend. She tried no doubt, coming from the home life she did I never blamed her for her actions. I just wish I had the mother that everyone saw, the picture perfect mother who was proud of her daughter. The one who loved and accepted her daughter for the tomboy, fun loving woman she really was and eventually would become when she got away from the toxic home life. The house that built me: it gave me bad dreams, bad memories, a fear of yelling or hand raising, and a fear of people. It made me independent to the point, I don't even know how to let anyone in and how to ask for help when I need it. The house that built me, made me the woman I am proud to be today.