I lived with my mother and grandparents when I was very young, about 3 or 4 years old I’d say. My sister and I stayed in what we called the middle room. That’s the horror room. That’s supposedly where the “demons” were. It’s also where a lot of abuse in that family took place. So we (my mother, my sister and I) moved back and forth between living with the grandparents and living with my Aunty S until about the 1st grade.
In the second grade we moved to our own apartment on the West side of X where we stayed only two years. That second grade apartment (which I often refer to as “the second grade house”) is the subject of many nightmares. That’s when she picked up using the dowel rods on my sister and myself and didn’t stop until the end of high school. That second grade house is where my sister started touching me sexually and didn’t stop until about the 4th grade. In that house in the second grade I walked in on her and a red headed girl named X having sex. I remember hiding in the closet and thinking, “better her than me.” They called me out of the closet to come join them but as I did my mother walked in the house and I never ended up participating because of the interruption. The red headed chick scooted out shortly after my mother got home. I doubt my mother even knew she was there. I was going to X Elementary School and hung around with a girl named X that I called my girlfriend. It wasn’t until later that I found out her uncle was messing with her.
We had a lot of contact with the mother’s family still. The grandmother lived about 30 minutes away but we went there quite a bit. Going there was horrible because the entire drive there all she talked about was sex in graphic detail. As you can see sex seemed to be all that family did. The fact that I came out of the closet without any real kind of struggle lets you know just how common place such acts were, even among the children. My sister was a child herself, only three years older than me.
The second grade is when the mother introduced the idea that she had papers in a gray metal box in her bedroom that all she had to do was sign and people from Knightstown would come and take us away from her. She told us that we’d visit that place often so we could get use to our new home because eventually she would get tired of us and send us there. She also talked about tough love and how she would send us to Girls School so and we’d never see her again or we’d only see her when our liaison (her exact phrase) set up a meeting. She said the meetings would be set up when we learned to behave ourselves. Every year on September 20th thru the 22nd we visited Knightstown with the grandparents. Little did I know we visited not to learn about our new home but because my grandfather was an Alumnus. The woman lied about why we visited and I didn’t figure that out for years.
The second grade is where all her declarations of my failing health started. That’s when she put me on a serious regimen of vitamins to keep my “multiple sclerosis” at bay. We all but lived at X Health Food Store so that she could purchase those nasty, huge, so-called cherry flavored, dirty looking vitamins for us. I remember crying as I took them on one of our many trips to Florida via trailer. She asked me why I was crying and I told her because I didn’t want to die. She handed me another vitamin. I fell asleep on the bed in the back.
I did well in school. I started taking Latin as early as the 2nd grade but quickly got attached to German. My great-grandmother spoke German. She was the only family member who spoke that language and I wanted to be able to speak to her in her language. My mother wasn’t interested in learning it and my grandmother refused to speak it. She didn’t grow up with my great-grandmother. She grew up with the people from X State University so she never learned that language from her mother. I wanted to speak a language that my mother didn’t know and so I jumped at the chance at learning German. I took it early and stopped my second year in college. To my knowledge my mother never learned German.
I learned German at school (still the second grade) but at home we spoke mostly Spanish and used American Sign Language as well. It was odd to have her yell out the front door in Spanish to my sister and myself to come in. My sister and I use to tell her we weren’t Spanish we’re black. She didn’t care. Spanish was what we spoke at home and that was that. I think I purposely block that language out of my mind. Despite speaking it as a child I hardly understand a word of it anymore. I could kick myself in the butt for forgetting it because now I wish I spoke it. We took classes at the local Deaf School but after a few years we stopped. I didn’t pick it up again until later in life when my mother had long forgotten all of hers. I was still looking for a language she didn’t use in order to express myself safely.
The second grade is also the time when I first tried to kill myself. I remember telling the teacher that what I wanted to be when I grew up was dead. That and other odd behaviors had my teacher somewhat alarmed about my social development. She told my mother that my grades were good but that she wanted to hold me back because of being behind socially. She had to have my mother’s permission to hold me back because my grades were honor roll level. My mother agreed so I did the second grade over again. I think it was my mother that had the real social issues, not me.
That’s all for today,
Austin
Where I lived and Where I Went To School and Second Grade Memories
Time Line – Therapy Assignment
Monday, May 14, 2007-8:55PM EST
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