Sara:
I think the first time I realized that the personal hell that I called home wasn't the way everyone else lived their lives was when I was about nine years old. It was the look in the eyes of a nurse at the emergency room as she treated my mother for a broken arm.
My mother was spinning some story about how she'd been carrying laundry up from the basement and had tripped, catching her fall with her arm. She had shot me a glance that was loaded with unspoken meaning as the nurse stepped outside the curtain and we could hear whispers of spiral fracture and possible abuse. I wasn't sure what those words meant at that age, but I knew that my mother was lying because we didn't have a basement and because I had stood there and watched in horror as my father had twisted my mother's arm until it had snapped.
In the back of my mind I knew that something was terribly wrong with my family; but there was another part of me that wondered what my mother kept doing to make my father so angry; so angry that he'd beat her up until she begged for him to stop. Sometimes he listened and sometimes her begging just made him even angrier. I knew that I never wanted to make him angry; never wanted him to take it out on me and so I found that it was safer to poke my nose into a book, any book, and try and block out the arguing followed by the inevitable slapping and screaming. Self preservation was a good friend because I certainly didn't have many others.
It seemed after that the trips to the emergency room seemed to be more and more frequent, and I didn't know what was worse, the looks of pity from the nurses or my mother's lies, blaming herself for whatever injury she was being treated for that her and I both knew had been caused by my father.
I'm ashamed in some ways to admit that I felt an overwhelming sense of relief five years later when my mother finally decided that she'd had enough of being beat up by my father and so she stabbed him to death.
I have seen my mother only a handful of times since she was sent to prison. Each time I'm never really sure what to say to her; I can see that prison has changed her into a very sad and weary soul; but at least it's a soul that doesn't have to wonder anymore if something as simple as burning a piece of toast is going to send my father flying into an uncontrollable rage.
The ripples from my childhood are still being felt in my life today. I have a very hard time forming real attachments with people, I seem to be drawn to emotionally unavailable men, and I firmly believe that I would second guess any man that might say he's interested in me.
I pour myself into my work as a way to atone for the fact that maybe I could have done something differently that would have stopped my father from hurting my mother and from her ultimately killing him. I know that deep down it's not my fault; but so much of the time it feels like my fault and I can't help but feel the victims' pain in the cases I work, can't help but hear their screams in my sleep, and in line at the grocery store because those are my screams, my mother's screams and I don't think they'll ever leave me.
There is a part of me that wants to believe that I'll find happiness in this life; and then there's part of me that just wants to be satisfied that I haven't entangled myself in a messed up relationship like my mother did. Maybe that's why I've fixated on Grissom so long; because I know deep down he'll never do anything about his feelings and it's just safer this way.