written by Ornella Lewis ©
Hello, and thank you for reading my article. Here’s the story of my own life, initially from the perspective of my young toddler self as I watched my mother being abused by firstly, my father, and in the next few articles, by other men that she got involved with after leaving him. So here’s my story.
My mother’s name is Angie Morris and I consider her to be a very strong woman, she has with abusers not once but four times in her life she have survive and gotten pass it all and in this first story I will share with you what she went through in her first abuse.
My father is not really a lovable guy one would say but he have always been a drinker, he was a smoker at one time too, but I am happy be gave that up before I came into this world. Drinking was his thing ever since the day I was born and am pretty sure long before I came along too. He met my mother when she was in early twenties at a bar where she worked; you see, he loved the bartenders (ladies, of course). So he decides to take her home and they lived together for a while. During that time she became pregnant with me. She didn’t know although it was her second child but my father who has been in the field many times before knew the symptoms and knew that she was pregnant. They were happy for a time – she was naive like that.
He drinks a lot so when he would come home drunk he would hit her now and then with me in the womb still. So she left and moved in with a friend before the bulge in her belly was showing, but after a few months apart he convinced her to come back to him for my sake. He didn’t hit her again until after my sister and I were born. My mother had twins, two beautiful little girls identical and both Mom and Dad loved us. But my sister was a very sickly child and so when we were a month old, one night very late, my mother was tired after having to feed both of us, so she burped me and she must have thought she had done the same with my sister, but instead she fell asleep.
The next morning when my mother woke and checked on us, she notice my sister was not breathing. She was so traumatize that she left me in the house by myself and took my sister who was dead and started headed up the road. She just held her in her arms like she was still alive when an old lady saw her with the dead child she told her to go back home. When she got home she called my father and told him that was his fault why she died and that she wasn’t burp and my father was livid when he heard the news from her. When he came home he called his good friends and they held a small burial ceremony at the back of our house near to where my grandparents were also buried, putting her in a shoe box (that’s how small she was). They held a small wake afterwards and there was music and liquor for everyone. When everyone was gone that night and I was asleep in bed my father was drunk so he took out his anger on my mother hitting her until he wasn’t able to anymore. She stayed with him for a while taking his abuse until one day she couldn’t take it anymore.
He had come home from the bar drunk as usual, and instead of using the toilet, when he wanted to pee he did it in the house. Then he got the belt ready to beat her. She did take some of it but when she couldn’t take it anymore she grabbed a knife from the kitchen and cut him on his arm saying that he should never touch her again. That’s happened when I was one year old but during that time I started to walk and soon after the bashing I started to crawl again (I don’t know why this occurred – it must have been that I was so frightened and traumatized by seeing my Mom being hit with the belt by my Dad that I regressed in my behavior) and so then she decided to leave my father and take me away to safety.
When we left my father’s house I started to walk again, which made her very happy. We didn’t have any place to stay so sometimes she would stay with any friends who were willing to help us. My mother had a lot of friends back then and some were very nice and others tried to hurt me very badly. Not all of her friends were kind to me because sometimes she had to leave me alone with them…… but that story is for another article.
To this day my father still drinks and although he has an enlarged prostate and other illnesses, they don’t stop him from drinking at every opportunity. He can never let go of his drinking and he still picks up ladies at the bar sometimes. He dated other women too after my mother but never laid a finger on them and I was happy about that. He is not an easy man to understand and I still can’t figure him out but sometimes I wonder why she let it happen to her. Why does she always pick the guys that want to beat her up? Is something written on her forehead that says she wants men that are abusive in her life? That is something I will never understand. She still loves him although he is a conniving old man. My mother is very strong to have stood up to my father who was over six feet tall, and she fought her way out of that first abuse relationship. At the time I wondered how she would manage when she found another relationship – would it be abusive too? My next story will come out soon.
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