Lesley F

This is my story, starting with the beginning when I was about 10 or 11 years old.

What created me to be a beautiful disaster is my mom‘s ex-husband. Now he wasn’t physically abusive but he was very verbally and emotionally abusive man. And unfortunately my mom was one of the women that was kind of stuck (in her mind) in the relationship. Now I am the oldest of three. And he was the same to all three of us. This man pretty much took away our childhood never really had a normal childhood and this went on for 13 years, the divorce was finalized in January 2020.

So growing up it was pretty much all about him, he would call us names and make fun of our weight. And on top of that he was bipolar and when he was younger he did a lot of drugs so there would be some times where he would “hear things” my mom and I would supposedly say sexual things towards him, which I’ve never told anybody but the things he heard weren’t true. I think I was only 13 at the time. He was a man that never loved us and was constantly bash on my dad in front of us while talking to my mom. And my mom could careless if it hurt us. His excuses of not loving us was that he didn’t know how to love a child which was complete bull. Because every time his daughter came to visit on the weekends he knew exactly how to be a dad and how to love her. And he was actually that way with the neighborhood kids. 

I hated the fact that the kids really liked him. The only time he wanted to be a “parent “ was when it came to discipline. He pretty much broke apart my family we weren’t able to see my aunts and uncles because of him. My grandma would never come over because he would constantly disrespect her, he’s even kicked her out of the house before for telling my mom she deserves better. Whenever we would go to places we were not allowed to talk in the car or laugh or play any kind of car games families tend to play. And not being allowed to talk that pretty much took away my identity because as a child growing up I was very expressive and very talkative and outgoing and it’s taking me a long time to go back to who I was. It’s really sad I was a very quiet child and I never really put two in two together until I took grief classes at my church.

I remember this one time, I was going out with this boy and he had asked me why I don’t talk a lot and I told him I don’t know maybe because at home I couldn’t talk and he laughed at that and said that’s dumb so I thought it was wrong so I never really thought about that afterwords. There was a couple of times where me and my sister would try to run away but when we would call our dad on a payphone he would tell us to go back because it was always around midnight, we lived in San Bernardino at the time and he lived about 4 hrs away but that happened only twice. I ran away during the day before and I left my phone behind and I was gone for a couple of hours because I couldn’t deal with my mom‘s ex-husband and her constantly fighting. And by the way they would always say it was because of “us”.

I’ve had to deal with my mom saying how she didn’t want to live whenever they would break up and how she wishes she can just hide under a rock where nobody could ever find her and she could never leave (I was just a teen then). There was even times as a child where I would sleep with a knife under my pillow because I didn’t feel safe with him being in the house. It was a very short period in my life where I thought about suicide but just thinking about my family that did love me I could never do it and that was a very short phase that quickly went away, he wasn’t worth my life. 

It has been 13 years of going in a circle. And because of it I am very cautious but I’m a very strong woman now today I don’t tolerate shit for men and I refused to be like my mom and give a “man” a thousands tries, I’m very fast to pick up patterns in men and I am quick to end things. I don’t want to say I have a man mentality when it comes to relationships but if it ain’t rocking my boat I kick em to the curb, and I don’t really dwell on things. Is that so bad? But I can’t really say I would change anything from the past because I am who I am today a 23 year old Beautiful disaster that loves herself and that’s pretty bad ass and knows how to handle hers.