"Stop it, stop hurting me, I fucking hate you!" I screamed
repeatedly. Nothing happened though, just more yelling and more punches,
which is what I expected. I could scream for hours non-stop and still
nothing would happen. I wish I could stop being so naïve. I wish I could
realize and accept that this is my life, my horrible life. Nothing ever
goes well for me, so why should anything good happen now? Ever since I was
thirteen my life has been pure hell, everyday is a nightmare.
When I was a kid everything was perfect. I lived in a huge house, my family was very loving, we were rich, everything was great. When I was thirteen and my family was living in Connecticut I met a guy who changed my life forever. We started dating and all of a sudden things went seriously wrong, I became pregnant. When I first found out I thought it was no big deal. I mean my mom had me when she was seventeen, so I figured my life would turn out as great as her's, I couldn't have been more wrong. From the moment my parents found out they were upset, they told me how terrible I was for letting this happen, but even though they were upset they were still very caring and supportive. My boyfriend and I agreed that I would have and keep the baby.
The more time that went by the more excited I became. I mean I was going to have a baby, I would be a mom. But of course nothing could go well for me, the worst possible thing happened. I went into labor two months early. My parents said it would be ok, but I knew something was wrong. We went straight to the hospital so I could give birth. I was scared to death, I was terrified. After hours of pain and labor I gave birth to a baby girl. I can't describe the joy I felt when I was able to hold her in my arms, I couldn't stop crying. I held her tiny pink hand and stared into her small, beautiful brown eyes, then she looked at me and smiled. I was so happy I was uncontrollable. Seconds later I saw her bright pink face turn pale, I screamed for a nurse or a doctor. They came in and checked her heart rate, suddenly her heart stopped beating. She died in my arms. I was hysterical. I couldn't stop crying, I couldn't believe that, that had happened.
After a few days the hospital released me and let me go home. When I was finally home I went into my room and said I would never come out again. I was too depressed to go on. We set a date for the funeral, everyone who knew us showed up, I was grateful to have people to support me. My boyfriend was just as devastated as me. When we finally saw each other all we could do was cry, we were speechless. My parents didn't know what to say to me either, they
were also speechless. When I went back to school I continued with my on going lie about where I had been for the last seven months, I told them I was having trouble at school and transferred to a smaller school for awhile. At least everyone believed me. I didn't want anyone to know about the baby.
Though I was depressed, overtime I began to feel better. Everything started going well again. My boyfriend and I were still together, I got great grades in school, everything was perfect again, almost. By the time I was seventeen I was really happy again. I had just gotten accepted into a ton of colleges, my boyfriend and I were still together, and everything went great until I made another drastic mistake, I became pregnant again. I hated myself, I hated everything, there was no way I was going through that hell again.
I ran home after school one day, stole some money from my parent's bedroom and I got in my car and ran away. At least I knew where I was going, a clinic. I needed to get an abortion, I needed to get rid of this baby. When I finally got there I wanted to back out. Did I really want to do this? I walked in, sat down and filled out some forms. Awhile later a nurse called my name. She ordered me to go to a small, cold, bright room and remove my clothes. When I was done I was told to lie down on the cold, metal table. I started to shake, I wanted to run out of the room, but I didn't. The next thing I knew they drugged me so that I wouldn't feel the operation. After it was over I woke up and it hit me, I had just killed my baby. I was hysterical. After the day they let me leave the clinic, I went home and told my parent's and my boyfriend everything. Again like the first time they were speechless. I hated it, I hated everything.
I finally decided it was time to move on with my life and stop dwelling in the past. It was finally time to go away to college. Because my boyfriend and I were accepted into different schools we figured it would be best to breakup. We both hated it. Finally we said our good-byes and promised to keep in touch and stay friends, which is a promise we never broke.
While I was away at college I began to lose it, I was so depressed, I couldn't take anything. I soothed all of my depression by becoming a drug addict, I was using every drug imaginable. I was spending hundreds of dollars every couple of months just to feel a little better and even if it only lasted for fifteen minutes. When I was twenty-one I met another guy, who I thought was great, again I couldn't have been more wrong, he made my life a living hell. We started going out in the winter of 1964 and everything went perfectly. Of course since my life was terrible I knew things couldn't stay good for long and I was right, and just like the last boyfriend I had this guy
got me pregnant, which I expected. I decided this time I would keep the baby, but I wanted him involved, so we got married in that summer. Later on my best friend who was also a drug addict like me died of a heroine overdose, I couldn't take it anymore. Why did bad things always have to happen to me? After her death I though it would be best if I entered drug rehab. I mean I wanted to protect the baby the best I could and since I had been using drugs the first few months of my pregnancy I didn't know if the baby was ok or not.
When I got out of rehab clean and sober the end of that summer I let my life go back to normal, except that I was going to have a baby and that I was married. I stayed in school and everything seemed to go well. Closer to when the baby was to be born my husband and I began to fight constantly, he blamed me for getting pregnant and ruining his life, all we did was scream and fight, it stayed this way for a very long time.
On January 5, 1965 I gave birth to my son, Brian. Suddenly I was happy again. I felt the same joy I had felt when I had given birth the first time, except this time I was spared the sorrow of the baby dying, my baby was born perfectly healthy. I finished up school with the help of my family and friends, my husband wasn't a big help, but then again we were both trying to graduate and finish college. I couldn't wait until school ended so I could spend more time with my son.
Months went by and my husband and I had become very distant. All we did was fight, which always upset the baby, and then all of a sudden he started acting violent during our fights, he would hit me. Normally this would only happen if he was really mad or really drunk, since he did happen to love alcohol, but after awhile it seemed to become more frequent. Now he would hit me all the time. As my son got older he began to realize what was going on and get scared. After watching his dad beat me up everyday he became terrified. Soon my whole body would be bruised up. I had bruises, cuts and scratches everywhere. I started becoming terrified too.
As time went by he started beating my son too. He wanted to hurt both of us. He blamed the two of us for ruining his life. He wanted us to be scared. He wanted us to hurt.
In 1967 I became pregnant with my second child who was born on June 7, 1968. It was a baby girl named Ashleigh. She was beautiful. She had blond hair, blue eyes and she smiled all the time. She was such a happy, positive kid. I loved her, but I knew from early on there was someone she loved more then me, her brother.
I have never seen a kid so addicted to something or someone in my life until she was born. She loved her brother more then anything,
even when she was a baby she would cry if he wasn't in the same room as her. She loved him more then anything, which is good. Them having a good relationship turned out to be a very good thing as time went by.
Though I was happy because of my two wonderful kids I still couldn't forget that my husband was always beating me. How could I forget? Everyday I have a new bruise or scar. As the kids got older, the abuse got worse, now he wanted to hurt all three of us. He abused every one of us. He really hated us. I know he didn't hate the kids as much as he hated me, but he still wanted to take some of his anger out on them. We were terrified to get out of bed, or at least I was. My kids were stronger then I was, they took it and didn't care, but I couldn't handle it. See the great part about them having a great relationship is that they would watch out for each other and protect each other when I wasn't around. Except I think they relied on each other more then anything since I was unreliable and unstable. I would always run away or try to commit suicide, anything to escape from the hell which is my life.
I hated it. the worst part about all of this is that I had to watch my kids get hurt too. He would force me to stand there and watch him hit the kids and slam them on the ground or into walls. I couldn't take it, but I couldn't leave either. He said that if I ever left he would kill me. He knows where I would go if I took the kids and ran, I would have gone to stay with my parents or my sister depending what year it was. I was too scared to risk my life or the lives of my kids so I stayed and took whatever hell he had to give me.
In the summer of 1973 he thought he would have a little fun with me. He decided it was time for me to die. One night we were fighting over our usual shit and suddenly he lost it, he wanted me to die. I didn't take him seriously at first since his favorite thing to say to me is "I'm going to kill you one of these days Cara, you fucking bitch!" so it was no surprise when he said he wanted me to die. Then he got up and went into the kitchen, I started shaking I didn't know where he was going or what he was getting. I didn't know until he came back into the bedroom with a sharp kitchen knife. I started hesitating and backing away from him, he kept coming closer to me, closer and closer. Finally I had backed away so much I had hit the wall. He grabbed me and threw me on the bed. Next he got on the bed and held the knife up to my wrists and said "do you want all your pain to go away" I nodded my head while I cried. "Well I can make all you pain go away, I can help you trust me" he said as he held the knife closer to my wrists. I couldn't stop crying I was hysterical. The next thing I knew I felt a sharp sensation in my wrists, he started cutting
them open. Blood was everywhere. I was shocked. I started running out of the room trying to wrap the wounds up with some towels or something, anything to keep me from dying. I heard him call 911 to get me an ambulance, he told them I tried to commit suicide and that he was very concerned. The ambulance came just in time, I was basically dead when they showed up. Unfortunately I lived. Sometimes I wish I had died that night, but when I think about my kids I decide that I'm glad that I lived.
After that incident things started calming down between him and me. He was less violent, at least towards me. That fall I began teaching at the school my kids went to. Finally I thought my life was getting better and it did for awhile. See with me working he couldn't make the fact that he abuses me visible so he was a lot less violent towards me. Everything seemed to going well, not great, but well until 1978. I knew something bad would happen again.
He started getting tired of the fact that I didn't want to sleep with him all the time so he found an alternative or a second person to sleep with, along with me, little did I know that he was sleeping or basically raping Ashleigh. All I knew is that from about when she turned ten her attitude went from really sweet, nice and attention loving to mean and people hating. She hid out in her room all the time. She never talked to anyone. Her grades in school dropped drastically. She became extremely depressed.
I didn't know what was going on until she was thirteen in 1981, the same year my husband magically died. That summer he went to a party for work and supposedly died there, the cause of death was a drug overdose, but he never used drugs and there were never drugs at his office parties. The night he died I heard the real story about what happened. Ashleigh had bought some drugs and gave them to him telling him they were painkillers, since he happened to have a headache that day. Well what happened is that he took the drugs at the party unaware of what they were and died. It's a good thing the police never heard the true story or else my daughter could be in jail for murder, since she did plan this and followed through on her idea of murdering him. I would call it self-defense since he was raping her but the courts would have thought differently, so of course we kept the truth a secret. But I still knew that even though my husband had died, everything would not go well.
Ashleigh's mood just got worse as the months went by. She became more depressed by the day. She began to hate everyone and everything. She was always running away. I think she was on the streets more then she was at home. Then she started with the cutting. When I would be in the kitchen I would always realize that my knifes
kept disappearing. I didn't know where they went and gave up on finding them until I walked in to her room to get something she had asked me to get and found one of the knife's covered with blood sitting on her dresser. I confronted her about it and she denied ever taking the knifes and ran out the front door and didn't come back until two weeks later.
I wanted to give up when it came to her, I didn't know what to do anymore. Next the worst happened, her suicide attempts. She attempted suicide at least twelve times every year. Also she didn't just want to kill herself she wanted to hurt other people too. I mean she got away with killing her dad, why couldn't she hurt other people too. I became terrified of her, I was one of the people she wanted dead. She stabbed me once, but it didn't have much affect, I wasn't hurt that much by the cut, it wasn't very deep.
When she was seventeen she decided to try one last time to kill herself, she took a pill overdose and drank some alcohol to go along with the pills. When I came home I found her passed out on the bathroom floor, I called 911 to get an ambulance, she was fading fast. They got her to the hospital and she died for about forty-five seconds and then luckily they brought her back to life.
Everything seems to be a cycle for me. A never ending cycle of hell. Someday I will be free of all this pain…soon that day will come.
When I was a kid everything was perfect. I lived in a huge house, my family was very loving, we were rich, everything was great. When I was thirteen and my family was living in Connecticut I met a guy who changed my life forever. We started dating and all of a sudden things went seriously wrong, I became pregnant. When I first found out I thought it was no big deal. I mean my mom had me when she was seventeen, so I figured my life would turn out as great as her's, I couldn't have been more wrong. From the moment my parents found out they were upset, they told me how terrible I was for letting this happen, but even though they were upset they were still very caring and supportive. My boyfriend and I agreed that I would have and keep the baby.
The more time that went by the more excited I became. I mean I was going to have a baby, I would be a mom. But of course nothing could go well for me, the worst possible thing happened. I went into labor two months early. My parents said it would be ok, but I knew something was wrong. We went straight to the hospital so I could give birth. I was scared to death, I was terrified. After hours of pain and labor I gave birth to a baby girl. I can't describe the joy I felt when I was able to hold her in my arms, I couldn't stop crying. I held her tiny pink hand and stared into her small, beautiful brown eyes, then she looked at me and smiled. I was so happy I was uncontrollable. Seconds later I saw her bright pink face turn pale, I screamed for a nurse or a doctor. They came in and checked her heart rate, suddenly her heart stopped beating. She died in my arms. I was hysterical. I couldn't stop crying, I couldn't believe that, that had happened.
After a few days the hospital released me and let me go home. When I was finally home I went into my room and said I would never come out again. I was too depressed to go on. We set a date for the funeral, everyone who knew us showed up, I was grateful to have people to support me. My boyfriend was just as devastated as me. When we finally saw each other all we could do was cry, we were speechless. My parents didn't know what to say to me either, they
were also speechless. When I went back to school I continued with my on going lie about where I had been for the last seven months, I told them I was having trouble at school and transferred to a smaller school for awhile. At least everyone believed me. I didn't want anyone to know about the baby.
Though I was depressed, overtime I began to feel better. Everything started going well again. My boyfriend and I were still together, I got great grades in school, everything was perfect again, almost. By the time I was seventeen I was really happy again. I had just gotten accepted into a ton of colleges, my boyfriend and I were still together, and everything went great until I made another drastic mistake, I became pregnant again. I hated myself, I hated everything, there was no way I was going through that hell again.
I ran home after school one day, stole some money from my parent's bedroom and I got in my car and ran away. At least I knew where I was going, a clinic. I needed to get an abortion, I needed to get rid of this baby. When I finally got there I wanted to back out. Did I really want to do this? I walked in, sat down and filled out some forms. Awhile later a nurse called my name. She ordered me to go to a small, cold, bright room and remove my clothes. When I was done I was told to lie down on the cold, metal table. I started to shake, I wanted to run out of the room, but I didn't. The next thing I knew they drugged me so that I wouldn't feel the operation. After it was over I woke up and it hit me, I had just killed my baby. I was hysterical. After the day they let me leave the clinic, I went home and told my parent's and my boyfriend everything. Again like the first time they were speechless. I hated it, I hated everything.
I finally decided it was time to move on with my life and stop dwelling in the past. It was finally time to go away to college. Because my boyfriend and I were accepted into different schools we figured it would be best to breakup. We both hated it. Finally we said our good-byes and promised to keep in touch and stay friends, which is a promise we never broke.
While I was away at college I began to lose it, I was so depressed, I couldn't take anything. I soothed all of my depression by becoming a drug addict, I was using every drug imaginable. I was spending hundreds of dollars every couple of months just to feel a little better and even if it only lasted for fifteen minutes. When I was twenty-one I met another guy, who I thought was great, again I couldn't have been more wrong, he made my life a living hell. We started going out in the winter of 1964 and everything went perfectly. Of course since my life was terrible I knew things couldn't stay good for long and I was right, and just like the last boyfriend I had this guy
got me pregnant, which I expected. I decided this time I would keep the baby, but I wanted him involved, so we got married in that summer. Later on my best friend who was also a drug addict like me died of a heroine overdose, I couldn't take it anymore. Why did bad things always have to happen to me? After her death I though it would be best if I entered drug rehab. I mean I wanted to protect the baby the best I could and since I had been using drugs the first few months of my pregnancy I didn't know if the baby was ok or not.
When I got out of rehab clean and sober the end of that summer I let my life go back to normal, except that I was going to have a baby and that I was married. I stayed in school and everything seemed to go well. Closer to when the baby was to be born my husband and I began to fight constantly, he blamed me for getting pregnant and ruining his life, all we did was scream and fight, it stayed this way for a very long time.
On January 5, 1965 I gave birth to my son, Brian. Suddenly I was happy again. I felt the same joy I had felt when I had given birth the first time, except this time I was spared the sorrow of the baby dying, my baby was born perfectly healthy. I finished up school with the help of my family and friends, my husband wasn't a big help, but then again we were both trying to graduate and finish college. I couldn't wait until school ended so I could spend more time with my son.
Months went by and my husband and I had become very distant. All we did was fight, which always upset the baby, and then all of a sudden he started acting violent during our fights, he would hit me. Normally this would only happen if he was really mad or really drunk, since he did happen to love alcohol, but after awhile it seemed to become more frequent. Now he would hit me all the time. As my son got older he began to realize what was going on and get scared. After watching his dad beat me up everyday he became terrified. Soon my whole body would be bruised up. I had bruises, cuts and scratches everywhere. I started becoming terrified too.
As time went by he started beating my son too. He wanted to hurt both of us. He blamed the two of us for ruining his life. He wanted us to be scared. He wanted us to hurt.
In 1967 I became pregnant with my second child who was born on June 7, 1968. It was a baby girl named Ashleigh. She was beautiful. She had blond hair, blue eyes and she smiled all the time. She was such a happy, positive kid. I loved her, but I knew from early on there was someone she loved more then me, her brother.
I have never seen a kid so addicted to something or someone in my life until she was born. She loved her brother more then anything,
even when she was a baby she would cry if he wasn't in the same room as her. She loved him more then anything, which is good. Them having a good relationship turned out to be a very good thing as time went by.
Though I was happy because of my two wonderful kids I still couldn't forget that my husband was always beating me. How could I forget? Everyday I have a new bruise or scar. As the kids got older, the abuse got worse, now he wanted to hurt all three of us. He abused every one of us. He really hated us. I know he didn't hate the kids as much as he hated me, but he still wanted to take some of his anger out on them. We were terrified to get out of bed, or at least I was. My kids were stronger then I was, they took it and didn't care, but I couldn't handle it. See the great part about them having a great relationship is that they would watch out for each other and protect each other when I wasn't around. Except I think they relied on each other more then anything since I was unreliable and unstable. I would always run away or try to commit suicide, anything to escape from the hell which is my life.
I hated it. the worst part about all of this is that I had to watch my kids get hurt too. He would force me to stand there and watch him hit the kids and slam them on the ground or into walls. I couldn't take it, but I couldn't leave either. He said that if I ever left he would kill me. He knows where I would go if I took the kids and ran, I would have gone to stay with my parents or my sister depending what year it was. I was too scared to risk my life or the lives of my kids so I stayed and took whatever hell he had to give me.
In the summer of 1973 he thought he would have a little fun with me. He decided it was time for me to die. One night we were fighting over our usual shit and suddenly he lost it, he wanted me to die. I didn't take him seriously at first since his favorite thing to say to me is "I'm going to kill you one of these days Cara, you fucking bitch!" so it was no surprise when he said he wanted me to die. Then he got up and went into the kitchen, I started shaking I didn't know where he was going or what he was getting. I didn't know until he came back into the bedroom with a sharp kitchen knife. I started hesitating and backing away from him, he kept coming closer to me, closer and closer. Finally I had backed away so much I had hit the wall. He grabbed me and threw me on the bed. Next he got on the bed and held the knife up to my wrists and said "do you want all your pain to go away" I nodded my head while I cried. "Well I can make all you pain go away, I can help you trust me" he said as he held the knife closer to my wrists. I couldn't stop crying I was hysterical. The next thing I knew I felt a sharp sensation in my wrists, he started cutting
them open. Blood was everywhere. I was shocked. I started running out of the room trying to wrap the wounds up with some towels or something, anything to keep me from dying. I heard him call 911 to get me an ambulance, he told them I tried to commit suicide and that he was very concerned. The ambulance came just in time, I was basically dead when they showed up. Unfortunately I lived. Sometimes I wish I had died that night, but when I think about my kids I decide that I'm glad that I lived.
After that incident things started calming down between him and me. He was less violent, at least towards me. That fall I began teaching at the school my kids went to. Finally I thought my life was getting better and it did for awhile. See with me working he couldn't make the fact that he abuses me visible so he was a lot less violent towards me. Everything seemed to going well, not great, but well until 1978. I knew something bad would happen again.
He started getting tired of the fact that I didn't want to sleep with him all the time so he found an alternative or a second person to sleep with, along with me, little did I know that he was sleeping or basically raping Ashleigh. All I knew is that from about when she turned ten her attitude went from really sweet, nice and attention loving to mean and people hating. She hid out in her room all the time. She never talked to anyone. Her grades in school dropped drastically. She became extremely depressed.
I didn't know what was going on until she was thirteen in 1981, the same year my husband magically died. That summer he went to a party for work and supposedly died there, the cause of death was a drug overdose, but he never used drugs and there were never drugs at his office parties. The night he died I heard the real story about what happened. Ashleigh had bought some drugs and gave them to him telling him they were painkillers, since he happened to have a headache that day. Well what happened is that he took the drugs at the party unaware of what they were and died. It's a good thing the police never heard the true story or else my daughter could be in jail for murder, since she did plan this and followed through on her idea of murdering him. I would call it self-defense since he was raping her but the courts would have thought differently, so of course we kept the truth a secret. But I still knew that even though my husband had died, everything would not go well.
Ashleigh's mood just got worse as the months went by. She became more depressed by the day. She began to hate everyone and everything. She was always running away. I think she was on the streets more then she was at home. Then she started with the cutting. When I would be in the kitchen I would always realize that my knifes
kept disappearing. I didn't know where they went and gave up on finding them until I walked in to her room to get something she had asked me to get and found one of the knife's covered with blood sitting on her dresser. I confronted her about it and she denied ever taking the knifes and ran out the front door and didn't come back until two weeks later.
I wanted to give up when it came to her, I didn't know what to do anymore. Next the worst happened, her suicide attempts. She attempted suicide at least twelve times every year. Also she didn't just want to kill herself she wanted to hurt other people too. I mean she got away with killing her dad, why couldn't she hurt other people too. I became terrified of her, I was one of the people she wanted dead. She stabbed me once, but it didn't have much affect, I wasn't hurt that much by the cut, it wasn't very deep.
When she was seventeen she decided to try one last time to kill herself, she took a pill overdose and drank some alcohol to go along with the pills. When I came home I found her passed out on the bathroom floor, I called 911 to get an ambulance, she was fading fast. They got her to the hospital and she died for about forty-five seconds and then luckily they brought her back to life.
Everything seems to be a cycle for me. A never ending cycle of hell. Someday I will be free of all this pain…soon that day will come.