C
Cherrypanda123
Alright I guess I just needed a safe place to vent about my own childhood trauma because it’s been eating away at my mental health for years. So where do I start?
My first memory of being consciously aware of being alive. I was around 3 or 4 years old and I remember picking up a bald eagle snowglobe because I thought the sparkles in it was pretty and I shook it accidentally dropping it. I remember crying and telling my dad I’m sorry and his response was to grab a firewood log and chase me outside. It was dark, I was barefoot and it was snowy outside. I tried climbing the cherry tree in our backyard to hide but he grabbed me and beat me with that log till there was some pink snow from my own blood. That was my first memory being alive.
Then it only got worse from there.
When I was 5 or 6 years old my parents would actively leave out pornographic dvds and magazines out everywhere in the house. They would leave them out and not care me and my younger brothers would be looking at them. They heavily neglected us and I think this is part of the reason I was so hyper sexual as a child.
Around 6 years old my father would say things to purposely scare us like how he’d let us all burn to death in a house fire and only save my mom. He would praise her constantly and treat us like garbage in front of her. She never stopped him and I think it’s because of her mindset of it he’s not doing it to her why should she care?
Eventually my 16yr older half sister got pregnant so my dad beat up her boyfriend who was also 16 and so dad went to prison for it and I remember cheering hugging a police officers leg thanking him saying I hope daddy never comes back. My mom’s reaction to that was how dare I say such an awful thing?! But I was so happy he was going away because he could beat me or my younger brothers anymore. I was around 6 or 7 at that time. My grandma watched us while mom worked and he was in prison for like a year and it was the best part of my childhood.
But good things don’t last forever and my dad was released and came back home when I was 8yrs.
I remember him being worse after prison. He started gambling all mom’s money on poker in the living room computer smoking cigarettes. He would take her checks and only give her $20 back in spending money. He was supposed to be a stay at home dad doing chores raising us which means he was constantly home and scaring me and my brothers. He would giving my 5yr brother beer often laughing about it with my mom and that brother is currently an alcoholic to this day as an adult.
One day my dad threatened to beat me so I threatened to call the cops on him and he told me in the 15 minutes it’d take the police to arrive he’d have broken every bone in my body because if he’s going back to prison he’s making the crime worth it this time. That really scared me and stuck with me my entire childhood. It made me so scared to ask people for help because I thought if I did he’d break my bones. I was 8 or 9yrs at the time.
The crazy part?? My dad was the better parent out of my two parents. My life only got worse from here.
When I was around 9 years old I woke up to my younger brothers screaming “mommy’s dying! Mommy’s dying! Help big sis!” I had to follow them in my parents bedroom seeing my mom coughing up blood thinking she was dying. Shaking a lot. So I got scared and dialed 911 on the phone and the operator told me to turn mom on her side so she could breathe. So me a 9yr girl with my 5&6yr brothers had to roll this 350lb woman on her side so she didn’t die because nobody else was home.
Once the ambulance arrived she became conscious and yelled screaming at me for calling an ambulance wasting her money without permission and this caused me to have anxiety making phone calls and made asking others for help even more difficult than what my dad did to me. The paramedics said we’d saved my mom’s life and she hated us for wasting her money on it.
After that seizure it’s like her whole personality changed. Maybe it was neurological or maybe she had a mental breakdown from almost dying I’m not sure. But she started cheating on my dad with a guy from work.
Eventually she left dad and took us with her so we moved from the countryside small town to a very poor city neighborhood with sketchy people in a bad apartment. I was 10yrs. At first I thought we were finally safe from dad but it was hell on earth. She started hanging out with her friend who was an addict to dr*gs like hero*n and mom started to do them with her friend. She had this mid life crisis and neglected us worse than dad ever did. She didn’t buy us food or clean clothes or beds. She’d throw parties and they’d leave trash, puke and beer bottles everywhere. My brothers and I were constantly filthy, smelled horrible, we didn’t know how to wash our clothes and our feet grew too big for our shoes so they cut into our ankles and would bleed and blister a lot. It hurt really bad for pe classes because we’d have to run. My hair was so matted that teachers would call cps all the time. All of this was happening while my dad was homeless because mom got everything in the divorce.
I remember being 11 years old wishing my dad would come back to beat me because then atleast he’d feed me and clean my clothes and brush my hair and buy me shoes that fit and give me a bed to sleep in. My brothers and I were usually sick. Especially because my mother would only feed us Burger King food from across the street because she was lazy and it was convenient. Therefore around half the time we’d get food poisoning and puke on the carpets and mom wouldn’t even buy cleaning supplies for us to try to clean it up so it just sat there for months and months in the carpet rotting. I had to sleep by it in my room. By this point my brothers and I were skipping school frequently. They were always getting into trouble, acted violently or yelling a lot. One time my brother chased me around a kitchen table with a steak knife because he was so angry at something. He took it out on me. Thankfully he didn’t stab me but it was horrifying that my own brother a boy I tried to help raise would try to hurt me so badly like our parents had. He would often beat on my younger brother too and I tried to help but I didn’t know how and I got really scared. We did have neighbors see the neglect and they reported everything to the police who reported it to cps but cps didn’t do anything they said something about not wanting to separate us from our mom if they didn’t need to. They very much needed to.
When I was 12 my grandmother had gotten breast cancer so my dad finally moved in with her and he started to see us kids on Wednesdays like 3 hours a day and every other weekend. He would feed us and I was so grateful when he bought us clothes and shoes that didn’t hurt my feet.
At first it was great but then a few months in he started to use me as his personal therapist telling me all these horrible things. It scared me a lot hearing my dad say how the night my parents divorced he drank a bunch of alcohol and nearly sh*t himself in the head. But he didn’t not because he knew we needed him or anything but because he was so drunk he passed out. Telling all this to his 12yr daughter at a park. Telling me how much he regretted having kids and loved our mom still and didn’t care that she was ab*sing us because to him she was beautiful and precious and perfect. It hurt so much hearing that from my dad how much he resented me and my brothers but loved my mom. It was like no matter how awful she got he loved her and no matter how good I tried to be I never would be enough to be loved by him. So I stopped trying.
When I was 13yrs I gave up. I took off my shirt and used it as a makeshift rope to try and h*ng myself. But the shirt ripped and I lived. I remember drinking tap water afterwards and oh my god it burned so badly. The soreness in my throat, nobody tells you how badly it hurts to drink water afterwards you try to attempt in that way. God it hurt to drink water for days after it. Maybe I was just a naive kid back then but I didn’t realize just how bad drinking water would hurt.
Not too long after that day maybe a month or two later my grandma died of breast cancer. We got to visit her before she died and her last words to me and my brothers were to stay in school because she heard we were skipping it a lot. When she died I couldn’t handle it all. These big emotions this sadness I just couldn’t stop crying and I couldn’t go to school I felt so guilty every day because I couldn’t keep my promise. I just couldn’t be around people anymore. Not even my family. I’d isolate myself, literally hide in my closet all day instead of going to school. Just crying so much missing my grandma begging her to come back. I knew it was irrational but she was one of the few family members who never hurt me in my life. I felt so alone and would instead stare at the ceiling for hours everyday or just sleep all day then wake up with a bad headache and hunger pains and go back to sleep trying to force myself to stay asleep because it was better than being awake.
Finally my dad claimed to have cancer so mom let us see him more. He then said he’d need a surgery and I thought he was going to die like my grandma had. I cried so hard only for the truth to come out he had faked having cancer and a surgery because he wanted the same sympathy my grandmother got from having breast cancer. He used it as an excuse to see us more and I guess try to emotionally manipulate my mother into dating him again because poor him being sick. But he wasn’t sick. He didn’t care how badly that hurt me and scared us kids.
Finally when I was in 8th grade my mom had a seizure and I had to get a neighbor to call 911 because I was still scared to use the phone to make calls. When the paramedics came and saw the state of the apartment they got cps and police involved. My brothers and I were finally taken away from mom after they had found hero*n in her system which triggered her seizure. We were given to my dad and moved to a big city. He didn’t hit us or yell anymore but he never apologized either. He had a new girlfriend and acted like none of those years of ab*se happened to us as kids.
At that new school at first I kinda felt nothing but anxiety and avoided talking, I couldn’t look at peoples faces anymore especially not the eyes so I just memorized their shoes and voices instead. Until a girl in my class approached me and slowly we became best friends. We hung out, she took me to this mall where a business was closing and she bought me these hand crocheted pug gloves that are fingerless with little ears on them. I bawled like a baby. It was the first gift and geniune act of kindness I had in years. Who knew $3 gloves could change a persons life so much?? We were best friends for a year and she helped me see people’s faces again. To talk about to be more outgoing. She was my safe place. I loved her dearly. But when I was 15 her boyfriend got a crush on me and I went to the park with them. He SA’d me in public and she saw. I cried and asked for her to help me. I yelled at her boyfriend for doing it and she gaslit me saying it’s no big deal and how she knew he had been planning to do this for days. Why didn’t she warn me or a teacher about his plans?? After that we stopped being friends.
I felt isolated and didn’t trust people my age anymore so I started hanging out with college students as a 15yr. I started dating this 22yr when I was 15 and he would spend thousands of dollars on hotel rooms, dates, gifts, and write me these letters about how much he loved me. So many poems and texts about it. We stayed together until I was 17 because I started to realize it was wrong. So he threatened to k*ll himself if I left. I then threatened to show my phone of our messages to cops if he didn’t leave me alone. So he stopped bothering me. I then met a guy in my acting class and we dated for awhile only for him to cheat on me with my ex best friend who also cheated on the guy who SA’d me with my boyfriend. Those two are married now. She would say stuff like I was his practice girlfriend and call me fat and ugly and all these names.
Once my 18th birthday came around I was so happy because it meant I could move out once I finished high school but like two weeks later I had a seizure and months later another. I was diagnosed with epilepsy that I inherited from my mother whom abandoned me when I was 14 because she didn’t care about seeing me or my brothers once dad got custody. So the only person who could have helped me navigate this condition was not in my life and being diagnosed with epilepsy is scary. I was told I probably wouldn’t be able to drive because of how dangerous it is. My seizures got worse. I started having them once a month consistently. I didn’t use alcohol or drugs or smoke cigarettes because I didn’t want to be like my parents. So instead I resorted to eating junk food when I got stressed out.
Eventually I graduated from high school and got my first job. I was so proud of myself for getting a job at a pizza shop. But like a year in I had a seizure and I guess when I hit my head on the floor hard a customer came up yelling at me for their food so my manager had to cuss the guy out while I had a seizure and another employee called an ambulance.
There was blood and it dyed part of my blonde hair pink. It was very bizarre waking up in the ER with my hair pink and my brain foggy I was so confused I couldn’t even remember who the president was or the day of the week when they asked me questions to see if I had memory issues.
My dad picked me up and not even an hour later my boss texted my phone saying I had to come get my jacket from the break room that evening or he’d throw it away. So my dad had to drive us back not even two hours after my seizure to get my jacket from the restaurant. After that I quit working there. It was hard to feel like a burden constantly for my epilepsy. I thought I should be doing all these things by myself like driving or working out by myself without fearing I’ll get hurt.
I think the weirdest part was all this pity and care I suddenly got from my dad and his girlfriend and my brothers. It was like they suddenly cared about me only because of my seizures because they never cared about me before and it’s confusing to live with this idea that if I never had epilepsy they probably wouldn’t care about me now.
My first memory of being consciously aware of being alive. I was around 3 or 4 years old and I remember picking up a bald eagle snowglobe because I thought the sparkles in it was pretty and I shook it accidentally dropping it. I remember crying and telling my dad I’m sorry and his response was to grab a firewood log and chase me outside. It was dark, I was barefoot and it was snowy outside. I tried climbing the cherry tree in our backyard to hide but he grabbed me and beat me with that log till there was some pink snow from my own blood. That was my first memory being alive.
Then it only got worse from there.
When I was 5 or 6 years old my parents would actively leave out pornographic dvds and magazines out everywhere in the house. They would leave them out and not care me and my younger brothers would be looking at them. They heavily neglected us and I think this is part of the reason I was so hyper sexual as a child.
Around 6 years old my father would say things to purposely scare us like how he’d let us all burn to death in a house fire and only save my mom. He would praise her constantly and treat us like garbage in front of her. She never stopped him and I think it’s because of her mindset of it he’s not doing it to her why should she care?
Eventually my 16yr older half sister got pregnant so my dad beat up her boyfriend who was also 16 and so dad went to prison for it and I remember cheering hugging a police officers leg thanking him saying I hope daddy never comes back. My mom’s reaction to that was how dare I say such an awful thing?! But I was so happy he was going away because he could beat me or my younger brothers anymore. I was around 6 or 7 at that time. My grandma watched us while mom worked and he was in prison for like a year and it was the best part of my childhood.
But good things don’t last forever and my dad was released and came back home when I was 8yrs.
I remember him being worse after prison. He started gambling all mom’s money on poker in the living room computer smoking cigarettes. He would take her checks and only give her $20 back in spending money. He was supposed to be a stay at home dad doing chores raising us which means he was constantly home and scaring me and my brothers. He would giving my 5yr brother beer often laughing about it with my mom and that brother is currently an alcoholic to this day as an adult.
One day my dad threatened to beat me so I threatened to call the cops on him and he told me in the 15 minutes it’d take the police to arrive he’d have broken every bone in my body because if he’s going back to prison he’s making the crime worth it this time. That really scared me and stuck with me my entire childhood. It made me so scared to ask people for help because I thought if I did he’d break my bones. I was 8 or 9yrs at the time.
The crazy part?? My dad was the better parent out of my two parents. My life only got worse from here.
When I was around 9 years old I woke up to my younger brothers screaming “mommy’s dying! Mommy’s dying! Help big sis!” I had to follow them in my parents bedroom seeing my mom coughing up blood thinking she was dying. Shaking a lot. So I got scared and dialed 911 on the phone and the operator told me to turn mom on her side so she could breathe. So me a 9yr girl with my 5&6yr brothers had to roll this 350lb woman on her side so she didn’t die because nobody else was home.
Once the ambulance arrived she became conscious and yelled screaming at me for calling an ambulance wasting her money without permission and this caused me to have anxiety making phone calls and made asking others for help even more difficult than what my dad did to me. The paramedics said we’d saved my mom’s life and she hated us for wasting her money on it.
After that seizure it’s like her whole personality changed. Maybe it was neurological or maybe she had a mental breakdown from almost dying I’m not sure. But she started cheating on my dad with a guy from work.
Eventually she left dad and took us with her so we moved from the countryside small town to a very poor city neighborhood with sketchy people in a bad apartment. I was 10yrs. At first I thought we were finally safe from dad but it was hell on earth. She started hanging out with her friend who was an addict to dr*gs like hero*n and mom started to do them with her friend. She had this mid life crisis and neglected us worse than dad ever did. She didn’t buy us food or clean clothes or beds. She’d throw parties and they’d leave trash, puke and beer bottles everywhere. My brothers and I were constantly filthy, smelled horrible, we didn’t know how to wash our clothes and our feet grew too big for our shoes so they cut into our ankles and would bleed and blister a lot. It hurt really bad for pe classes because we’d have to run. My hair was so matted that teachers would call cps all the time. All of this was happening while my dad was homeless because mom got everything in the divorce.
I remember being 11 years old wishing my dad would come back to beat me because then atleast he’d feed me and clean my clothes and brush my hair and buy me shoes that fit and give me a bed to sleep in. My brothers and I were usually sick. Especially because my mother would only feed us Burger King food from across the street because she was lazy and it was convenient. Therefore around half the time we’d get food poisoning and puke on the carpets and mom wouldn’t even buy cleaning supplies for us to try to clean it up so it just sat there for months and months in the carpet rotting. I had to sleep by it in my room. By this point my brothers and I were skipping school frequently. They were always getting into trouble, acted violently or yelling a lot. One time my brother chased me around a kitchen table with a steak knife because he was so angry at something. He took it out on me. Thankfully he didn’t stab me but it was horrifying that my own brother a boy I tried to help raise would try to hurt me so badly like our parents had. He would often beat on my younger brother too and I tried to help but I didn’t know how and I got really scared. We did have neighbors see the neglect and they reported everything to the police who reported it to cps but cps didn’t do anything they said something about not wanting to separate us from our mom if they didn’t need to. They very much needed to.
When I was 12 my grandmother had gotten breast cancer so my dad finally moved in with her and he started to see us kids on Wednesdays like 3 hours a day and every other weekend. He would feed us and I was so grateful when he bought us clothes and shoes that didn’t hurt my feet.
At first it was great but then a few months in he started to use me as his personal therapist telling me all these horrible things. It scared me a lot hearing my dad say how the night my parents divorced he drank a bunch of alcohol and nearly sh*t himself in the head. But he didn’t not because he knew we needed him or anything but because he was so drunk he passed out. Telling all this to his 12yr daughter at a park. Telling me how much he regretted having kids and loved our mom still and didn’t care that she was ab*sing us because to him she was beautiful and precious and perfect. It hurt so much hearing that from my dad how much he resented me and my brothers but loved my mom. It was like no matter how awful she got he loved her and no matter how good I tried to be I never would be enough to be loved by him. So I stopped trying.
When I was 13yrs I gave up. I took off my shirt and used it as a makeshift rope to try and h*ng myself. But the shirt ripped and I lived. I remember drinking tap water afterwards and oh my god it burned so badly. The soreness in my throat, nobody tells you how badly it hurts to drink water afterwards you try to attempt in that way. God it hurt to drink water for days after it. Maybe I was just a naive kid back then but I didn’t realize just how bad drinking water would hurt.
Not too long after that day maybe a month or two later my grandma died of breast cancer. We got to visit her before she died and her last words to me and my brothers were to stay in school because she heard we were skipping it a lot. When she died I couldn’t handle it all. These big emotions this sadness I just couldn’t stop crying and I couldn’t go to school I felt so guilty every day because I couldn’t keep my promise. I just couldn’t be around people anymore. Not even my family. I’d isolate myself, literally hide in my closet all day instead of going to school. Just crying so much missing my grandma begging her to come back. I knew it was irrational but she was one of the few family members who never hurt me in my life. I felt so alone and would instead stare at the ceiling for hours everyday or just sleep all day then wake up with a bad headache and hunger pains and go back to sleep trying to force myself to stay asleep because it was better than being awake.
Finally my dad claimed to have cancer so mom let us see him more. He then said he’d need a surgery and I thought he was going to die like my grandma had. I cried so hard only for the truth to come out he had faked having cancer and a surgery because he wanted the same sympathy my grandmother got from having breast cancer. He used it as an excuse to see us more and I guess try to emotionally manipulate my mother into dating him again because poor him being sick. But he wasn’t sick. He didn’t care how badly that hurt me and scared us kids.
Finally when I was in 8th grade my mom had a seizure and I had to get a neighbor to call 911 because I was still scared to use the phone to make calls. When the paramedics came and saw the state of the apartment they got cps and police involved. My brothers and I were finally taken away from mom after they had found hero*n in her system which triggered her seizure. We were given to my dad and moved to a big city. He didn’t hit us or yell anymore but he never apologized either. He had a new girlfriend and acted like none of those years of ab*se happened to us as kids.
At that new school at first I kinda felt nothing but anxiety and avoided talking, I couldn’t look at peoples faces anymore especially not the eyes so I just memorized their shoes and voices instead. Until a girl in my class approached me and slowly we became best friends. We hung out, she took me to this mall where a business was closing and she bought me these hand crocheted pug gloves that are fingerless with little ears on them. I bawled like a baby. It was the first gift and geniune act of kindness I had in years. Who knew $3 gloves could change a persons life so much?? We were best friends for a year and she helped me see people’s faces again. To talk about to be more outgoing. She was my safe place. I loved her dearly. But when I was 15 her boyfriend got a crush on me and I went to the park with them. He SA’d me in public and she saw. I cried and asked for her to help me. I yelled at her boyfriend for doing it and she gaslit me saying it’s no big deal and how she knew he had been planning to do this for days. Why didn’t she warn me or a teacher about his plans?? After that we stopped being friends.
I felt isolated and didn’t trust people my age anymore so I started hanging out with college students as a 15yr. I started dating this 22yr when I was 15 and he would spend thousands of dollars on hotel rooms, dates, gifts, and write me these letters about how much he loved me. So many poems and texts about it. We stayed together until I was 17 because I started to realize it was wrong. So he threatened to k*ll himself if I left. I then threatened to show my phone of our messages to cops if he didn’t leave me alone. So he stopped bothering me. I then met a guy in my acting class and we dated for awhile only for him to cheat on me with my ex best friend who also cheated on the guy who SA’d me with my boyfriend. Those two are married now. She would say stuff like I was his practice girlfriend and call me fat and ugly and all these names.
Once my 18th birthday came around I was so happy because it meant I could move out once I finished high school but like two weeks later I had a seizure and months later another. I was diagnosed with epilepsy that I inherited from my mother whom abandoned me when I was 14 because she didn’t care about seeing me or my brothers once dad got custody. So the only person who could have helped me navigate this condition was not in my life and being diagnosed with epilepsy is scary. I was told I probably wouldn’t be able to drive because of how dangerous it is. My seizures got worse. I started having them once a month consistently. I didn’t use alcohol or drugs or smoke cigarettes because I didn’t want to be like my parents. So instead I resorted to eating junk food when I got stressed out.
Eventually I graduated from high school and got my first job. I was so proud of myself for getting a job at a pizza shop. But like a year in I had a seizure and I guess when I hit my head on the floor hard a customer came up yelling at me for their food so my manager had to cuss the guy out while I had a seizure and another employee called an ambulance.
There was blood and it dyed part of my blonde hair pink. It was very bizarre waking up in the ER with my hair pink and my brain foggy I was so confused I couldn’t even remember who the president was or the day of the week when they asked me questions to see if I had memory issues.
My dad picked me up and not even an hour later my boss texted my phone saying I had to come get my jacket from the break room that evening or he’d throw it away. So my dad had to drive us back not even two hours after my seizure to get my jacket from the restaurant. After that I quit working there. It was hard to feel like a burden constantly for my epilepsy. I thought I should be doing all these things by myself like driving or working out by myself without fearing I’ll get hurt.
I think the weirdest part was all this pity and care I suddenly got from my dad and his girlfriend and my brothers. It was like they suddenly cared about me only because of my seizures because they never cared about me before and it’s confusing to live with this idea that if I never had epilepsy they probably wouldn’t care about me now.
