[Deep Exhale]
I was maybe ten years old the first time I heard my father beat the shit out of my mother.
I don’t believe in the supernatural but that house was haunted and when we moved into it we were all doomed. There wasn’t an escape hatch. There was nothing but the absolute cold- no matter how we tried to heat the house it was freezing cold.
My sister and I had rooms in the basement, but we often pulled our mattresses upstairs and made a bed between our younger brothers’ beds. We would play stupid games, win stupid prizes, and the first one to fall asleep woke up with a Sharpie mustache and goatee.
But one night we heard what we had always suspected was true: dad was beating the shit out of mom in the room next to us. We sobbed, hearing the wreckage. I can’t really explain the terror.
This particular night, the oldest of my younger brothers went to spend the night at one of our uncle’s houses. My dad, a railroad worker, was called out to drive a train to another state so wouldn’t be there that night. My youngest brother, at all of 5 years old, slept with my mother that night.
My sister and I were attempting to sleep in our brothers’ beds. My sister fell asleep pretty quickly, but I couldn’t sleep because my uncle, my mom’s oldest brother, had moved into our place “temporarily” and took over my room which I was fucking furious about.
And then dad came home.
At the last minute the railroad had to change routes so my dad didn’t have to drive a train. This gave him the opportunity to go to his favorite dive bar and drink a bottle or two of whiskey before coming home.
My sister and I crawled into the same bed together and tried to hold each other tight enough that it wouldn’t be real.
But the violence didn’t stop. We heard it all, the slaps, the punches, the throwing. And we knew our baby brother was in there witnessing it all first hand.
At the time, my uncle was sleeping in my room. Fresh out of scams in Vegas he moved to Idaho to recoup and find another grift. He was always the creepy uncle. He never did anything inappropriate, but he was also never entirely appropriate. I don’t know how to explain it. I was his favorite niece and he forced me to sit in his lap while he kissed my forehead and called me his “favorite little tomboy.”
Anyway, that night, the first time we heard my dad beat the shit out of our mom, I lost it. My sister held me down to get me to NOT run into our parents’ room and bite my dad’s ankles, or whatever I was planning.
She wanted me to just lay down and cry with her and I thought that was fucking bullshit, so I wrangled myself out of her body lock and I ran downstairs to my bedroom which my uncle had taken over. I grabbed his wrist and started tugging and crying “Uncle Joe, wake up! WAKE UP! Please, please help….:
He finally woke up and asked what was wrong and I held onto his wrist and pulled him out of the room so he was standing right beneath my parents’ room so he could hear what was happening.
He stood there for a minute, then pulled me in to a big bear hug. “Honey,” he said as I sobbed on his chest, “married couples do this. It’s ok, your mom will be okay tomorrow.”
Then he let go of me and went back to bed, and I always wondered if my mom’s screams, his baby sister’s screams, ever haunted him.
But I know they didn’t because he fell right back to sleep and I went back upstairs feeling completely defeated. I KNEW what was happening was wrong and that a better man would stop it.