Content Warning: Abuse, Neglect, Suicidal Ideation, Depression
I paced frantically back and forth across my bedroom, on high alert, my breathing shallow and fast.
I had to get out of there. I’d hit my limit. Plus, there was this calm and clear voice inside telling me that it was time to leave.
I removed the screen from my second-floor bedroom window and stepped onto the overhang above the garage. I walked to the side of the house and looked at the drop. Images of me lying on the ground with a broken ankle trapping me in that house forever ran through my head.
I climbed back into my bedroom. My sister was next door in her bedroom practicing her violin, unaware of the scene unfolding in the backyard and the rest of the house.
I’d come home from school that Friday afternoon in late October, made myself a snack, and then, as my mother had instructed me to do that morning, went out back to clean the above-ground pool our stepfather had installed once he’d moved in. I was in a hurry as I had to return to school in three hours with my band uniform and instrument to march during the football pregame and halftime shows. I was sixteen and a junior in high school.
The weather had been nice that week but had turned cold that day, too cold to get into the water. I stood on the deck of the pool instead, vacuuming the floor of it, and then walked around the narrow ledge along the back, vacuum in hand, thinking about everything I still had to do to get myself ready to get back to school and daydreaming about boys and theater and anything else that made me happy.
“Get your lazy fat ass in the pool and clean it correctly!” my stepfather shouted at me through the kitchen window breaking my reverie. He’d come home while I was finishing up cleaning it. I tried to ignore him as I started to panic, hoping he’d move on.
One minute later and louder, “I said, get your fat, lazy ass in the pool and clean it correctly!”
I saw my next-door neighbor watching out of their window, the father of my childhood best friend, someone else prone to violent outbursts of rage.
I told him, “It’s cold out and I am not feeling great. I am not going to get in the water. I vacuumed it fine from the ledge. It’s perfectly clean now.”
He stormed out of the house toward me. My memory is a little fuzzy regarding the details of what happened next. There was more yelling and swearing. I returned fire. He shoved me a few times and I backed up pretty sure he was going to knock me down on the ground as he had done before or even hit me, yet I continued to refuse to do what he was demanding me to do.
I had it. I was done. Fuck him and all of his abuse and misery. I was not going to do a single thing he told me to do. Nothing worked. I’d spent six years trying to make him like me by doing everything he told me to while he continued to degrade me, torture me, and abuse me.
Fuck him
“NO!” I finally screamed at him and pushed him back. Terrified, I then jumped farther back away from him.
“Get in your fucking room! We’ll deal with you when your mother gets home!”
My mother was still at work. She was supposed to come home soon, drop her car off for me to take to school, take his car, and then leave again to pick up her stepmother at the airport, the woman who had abused her as a child and teenager. “Granny” had a long layover and the plan had been to pick her up and bring her back to our house for dinner. To this day, the karmic confluence of my mother’s abuser being involved in this moment continues to astound me.
I headed upstairs, terrified that he would follow.
I’ve mentioned before that when it comes to the fight or flight response, my immediate go-to is fight. However once in my room, all the fight drained out of me. It was time to run.
“If you stay here, he’s going to kill you,” said the voice in my head, the calm one telling me to leave.
I left the screen leaning against the wall, grabbed my purse, and crept down the flight of stairs past the Papasan chair that he’d pushed me into and then hit me in the face until my mother and sister pulled him off of me over a year before. I passed the couch upon which my mother had lain, still drunk, her lip bloodied after he’d punched her in the face nine months earlier, and tiptoed into the vestibule to the front door.
Thank God, I was going to make it! My hand was on the doorknob.
“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?!” he was suddenly right behind me, looming over me.
I turned around, looked him in the eye, finding a bit of my fight, and said, “Don’t worry, I am not coming back.”
“Good! That’s what I always wanted,” he creepily smiled as I opened the door and left.
I started walking. I did not know where I was going. All I had with me was my purse. I would not go next door to my best friend’s house. It would be way too easy for my mother to come over there and convince me to return as she had cried at me not to leave when I had tried to move in with my father who did not want me either over one year earlier.
I kept walking west and then north on the street that ran through our subdivision into the next one. I crossed the busy street towards my grade school and church and suddenly knew where my body was taking me. I was going to my friend Barbie’s house. I turned left and headed west again walking the long block that would take me to her street.
The late bus pulled up at the end of the block I was walking and I saw her get out, her beautiful blonde hair visible to me from where I was. “Barbie!” I screamed as I finally started sobbing. She was too far away and did not hear me.
When she answered the door, munching on her after-school snack, her smile immediately turned to concern as she opened it and let me in.
“Can I stay here?” I managed to get out through my tears.
“Of course!” she replied as she hugged me.
She did not need me to tell her why. At that point, all of my friends knew to some level or another the ongoing nightmare of my life at home.
“Hi, Nora,” her dad said warmly when he arrived home just a few minutes later, “How are you?”
His smile also faded as my tears came to the surface again. I saw Barb shake her head at him, cutting him off from asking me what happened. Instead, he just said, “Oh," and enveloped me in a giant hug, letting me cry on his shoulder.
“Nora is going to stay with us this weekend,” Barb said.
“Of course you are!” he responded.
I called my house after that, praying that my sister would answer. She did. “I am at Barb’s. I am not coming home until he’s gone.” I said. I told her briefly what had happened. She looked outside and told me that he was in the pool, “cleaning it”. I asked her to please go into my room and put the screen back in my window.
Ridiculous, all of it, that I was worried about leaving the screen where it was and that he was in the pool acting as if I had not done what my mother had told me to do earlier that morning. Apparently, he planned to tell my mother that I had refused to do my chores and when he tried to discipline me I’d left, and then he had to clean the pool which he was still in when she arrived home with her stepmother.
She called me at Barb’s. Her tone was sharp, “He said you were very disrespectful to him.”
“You know that’s not what happened,” I said. “I need to come back and get my band things. Barb will drive me, and then I am leaving. I will not come home again until he is gone.”
“I have to go pick up Granny,” she mumbled as I hung up.
By the time I got back to my house to get my uniform and instrument and pack some clothes for myself, she was gone, off to the airport.
“I knew you’d be back,” he sneered at me from my bedroom door while I was shoving my spats into my uniform bag.
“I’m not back,” I replied and left, getting into Barb’s car as she took me to school and dropped me off. Not for one second did I think that I should not march. They were counting on me, it did not even occur to me that I could opt out.
While sitting in the band room in my uniform, warming up, the strap on my hat broke. I had not told any of my other friends there what had happened as I was completely dissociated by then and buried in survival mode. With my broken hat in hand, I approached the band director, a person I genuinely liked who returned the feeling and told him I’d need a new hat.
“Come on!” he grinned as he walked me to the giant walk-in closet that stored the extra uniforms and other band equipment. I stepped into the cocoon of that space behind him, feeling the stillness and his kindness, and again I started to cry.
“It’s just a hat,” he said, laughing.
I then recounted in a monotone a brief yet detailed rundown of what I had just lived through. He stood there, silent, his mouth open. Even though all of my friends knew about my home life, none of my teachers did.
“Okay,” he said, pulling me in and hugging me, “You won’t be marching tonight. Why don’t you get out of uniform and sit in the stands with the band.”
I nodded at him as we walked out of the closet together back into the din of the many students practicing and horsing around.
“Nora!” he suddenly stopped, “do you have somewhere to sleep tonight?”
I nodded at him again, startled by his question as it drove home the seriousness of my situation. I left the band room to change out of my uniform in the girls’ locker room across the hall. By then some of my friends there were catching on that something was wrong and followed me in.
I sat in the stands with them all in uniform and me in my street clothes, and watched them alone from above as they performed the halftime show. I wandered down the stands and walked around a bit. Suddenly my mother and her stepmother were in front of me.
“I’m divorcing him,” she said.
“Yeah, sure you are,” I replied. “I am still not coming home until he is gone.” I no longer trusted her. My trust in her had ended long ago.
I spent the next three nights at Barb’s house. I was not the first teen they had taken in and housed that was not their own. My feet had taken me that day to exactly the right place. Monday at school was weird as fuck. I was exhausted and disoriented, sleeping in a bed that was not mine, in a home that was not mine, unsure that I even had a home any longer to call my own. Focusing was a challenge and I was lost.
My stepfather worked himself into such a state that he gave himself an asthma attack and had to be hospitalized. Our mother picked us up from school and then forced us to go visit him at the hospital. Feeling defeated and alone I stood there in his room, looking at him, repulsed by everything about him and wondering if he’d faked the attack for sympathy, certain that he had.
I slept in my bed that night, my mother assuring me that when he got out of the hospital he’d not be returning to our home. I was relieved to be back in my room with my things.
He did return, on Wednesday. I came home from school and he was there. After dinner, he and my mother locked themselves into “his room”, the room that used to be our family room, that he’d walled up and taken for himself when he moved in. They were in there for hours. I was sure he was going to win and my desperation, loneliness, and hopelessness reached the point where I began searching the medicine cabinets of the house for pills. I wanted out and physically leaving and staying elsewhere was not going to cut it this time. My fight was gone. I was leaving.
The only thing in the cabinets were bottles of Tylenol and Advil. I knew even a whole bottle of those would not kill me and would just make me sick. That calm and clear voice returned and suggested that I go to bed and that perhaps things would be different in the morning.
I got up the next day and went to school. I don’t remember interacting with anyone in the house. I made it to third period, Trigonometry, before my breakdown began. The fact that I had seriously wanted to kill myself the night before came crashing down on me.
I stood up, walked up to my teacher, and told him I was not feeling well and needed to go to the nurse. I walked out with my things, down the hallways, past the nurse’s office, and headed to the section of the school that housed the theatre, band, and choir rooms. I thought I was going to sit for a while in the stairwell behind the backstage door to the theater but noticed that the band director’s door was open and he was inside and alone.
“Hi Nora, how are you?” he asked as he pulled the chair across from his desk out for me. I sat, took a breath, and told him that I had contemplated suicide the night before. I knew I needed help and did not trust myself or my mother to return to my home again without it.
“Okay,” he said when I was done. “Please pick up your things.”
He walked me down to the counselor’s office. I am sure this was textbook policy for what to do when a student tells you they are suicidal and yet this was not at all what I was looking for. I did not particularly like my counselor. I had tried with my counselor once before and she had not taken me seriously.
He left me there with her and she called my mother at work. I had to sit there with her while I waited for my mother to pick me up. She was embarrassed and enraged when she arrived. I could feel it all bubbling beneath the calm exterior she showed everyone there. She barely spoke to me during the car ride home other than to accuse me of being dramatic.
My stepfather, however, was not home when we arrived.
“He’s gone,” she said, “I am divorcing him.”
The relief I could have felt at this news was nowhere to be found as depression had taken over.
A couple of nights later while standing at the kitchen counter, my mother got my sister’s attention while she and I were at the table. She then mimed holding a bottle of pills in her hand, opening it, and pouring them down her throat, laughing maniacally. My sister looked horrified, and my depression and loneliness intensified.
He tried to come back the next week. He showed up with gifts for us all, apologizing profusely, and begging us to take him back. It did not work. I felt bad for him. This is my Achilles heel. I often, feel the pain of the person in front of me and make their needs more important than mine.
It’s taken me decades to recognize this in myself and be able to feel their pain now without it canceling out my own needs. Back then and all through my twenties, I was a field day for narcissists, sociopaths, and pathological liars.
“Did you feel powerful that you were the one that got him to leave?” my therapist asked the twenty-five-year-old me when finally, after more than one breakdown, I got some actual help.
“No, I felt terrible,” I replied, shocked that anyone could have interpreted anything I did back then as coming from a place of power. All I felt was powerlessness and desperation as Nora.
But there was that voice, that clear and calm voice that guided me that day, guided my actions, that was with me as I walked the streets of my neighborhood alone looking for a place to land, that told me to go to sleep that night instead of looking for another way out of my body, that told me to seek help. That voice has saved me many times in many other ways.
As I have healed and matured and listened more often and intently there is less and less distance between me and that voice.
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This is very difficult to read, it goes directly home.
I love you, big hugs!
Oh Nora, I am so sorry you went through that nightmare! I send you love!