Prologue
I used to hate it when people complained about their lives. Maybe it was because theirs always seemed so much better than mine. I couldn't understand how they could complain about having parents that loved them enough to punish them to protect them. My father ignored me when he wasn't yelling at me for spilling something that he had spilt or hitting me for undercooking his supper. It came to the point where I wanted to be invisible so he wouldn't be able to hurt me anymore. My father would come home drunk some nights and I would be able to smell him before he even entered the small trailer we lived in. I could hear him tripping over rocks on his way up the walkway. There was no way I could get out of the trailer, he was coming in the only door, I learned to expect the inevitable, all I was to my father was a punching bag to take his frustrations out on. I envied the people whose biggest problem was that they got a C on an English mid term. That might sound strange but I had bigger things to worry about than school, like where I was going to get food for our breakfast the next morning when there was no money because Pop had taken his paycheck straight to the closest bar. Then I had to worry about how I was going to get out of the beating I would receive for the lack of food even though it was his fault. Pop blamed all our problems on me. That would never change, and I knew that, but I refused to accept it. I can't help wondering how life would have been different if I had just learned to forgive and forget. But I didn't and this is the way it turned out.
I used to hate it when people complained about their lives. Maybe it was because theirs always seemed so much better than mine. I couldn't understand how they could complain about having parents that loved them enough to punish them to protect them. My father ignored me when he wasn't yelling at me for spilling something that he had spilt or hitting me for undercooking his supper. It came to the point where I wanted to be invisible so he wouldn't be able to hurt me anymore. My father would come home drunk some nights and I would be able to smell him before he even entered the small trailer we lived in. I could hear him tripping over rocks on his way up the walkway. There was no way I could get out of the trailer, he was coming in the only door, I learned to expect the inevitable, all I was to my father was a punching bag to take his frustrations out on. I envied the people whose biggest problem was that they got a C on an English mid term. That might sound strange but I had bigger things to worry about than school, like where I was going to get food for our breakfast the next morning when there was no money because Pop had taken his paycheck straight to the closest bar. Then I had to worry about how I was going to get out of the beating I would receive for the lack of food even though it was his fault. Pop blamed all our problems on me. That would never change, and I knew that, but I refused to accept it. I can't help wondering how life would have been different if I had just learned to forgive and forget. But I didn't and this is the way it turned out.