My life, unedited and unrevised in Chapters (1)

I was born a daughter of a military man and a native Spaniard mother. My mother met my father in Spain while he was docking port from the U.S.S. Guam. My father told my mother he would come back for her, and that is exactly what he did. I am sure; however, he made plenty of visits to the “other” females in his life as he made his way back home. The evidence proving these accusations can be found in the collection of love letters he had obtained around the world: letters he still currently has in his possession. If things haven’t changed, they can be found inside the bottom, left hand drawer of his gun case, along with some of my mom’s hair. The hair was a result from a fight my mom had with another woman, pre-PissedOff I believe. Even though my parents have been divorced for nearly twenty years, he still has a part of my mother with him; that Ziploc bag of her hair.

I entered this world in a very violent upbringing. My dad hit my mom, my mom hit my dad, and my dad hit me. I have even been told that my dad hit us both at the same time, while my mother was pregnant with me. I am unable to confirm that information, but I can honestly say that it wouldn’t surprise me one bit. I distinctly remember when I was six years old sitting on my parents bed while he beat the crap out of her. I was writing “I hat dad” on my blue Lisa Frank stationary. I didn’t know how to spell hate, but you get the idea.

At the age of seven, I had become aware that when a parent keeps you from another parent, it is not considered kidnapping. I find this pretty amusing really, because there is no other way to sugarcoat what it was, and it was kidnapping, regardless of what the authorities say. My mom and I left Mississippi and moved to Texas. The courts had established visitation, and I had gone to Mississippi to visit my father for the summer. I remember him asking me if I wanted to stay an extra day, and not knowing the concept of a plane ticket, I accepted. I was familiar with flying, having taken my first flight at two weeks old, but I was unaware that flights had specific times and dates. I was the little girl that thought you buy a ticket, show up, and catch the next available plane. I didn’t realize that wasn’t the case, but a seven year old shouldn’t have been put in that situation to begin with. Aside from pointing out more of my father’s flaws in parenting skills, I should explain the kidnapping. Because of his gracious offer extended to me in staying an extra day, I missed my flight (what a surprise) and my mom was at the airport waiting for me to not get off the plane, which was a shock to her. She called my dad, and he told her if she ever wanted to see me again, she had to come back to him. She did, and as per the norm, and he beat the shit out of her; over and over again. You tell me whether that is kidnapping or not.

I was the only blood my mother had in the United States, and why she didn’t leave him and take me to Spain I will never understand. She said that she didn’t want to take me away from him, and she knew that he would never fork out the cash for me to fly overseas to see him. In the temporary orders establishing visitation, my dad was supposed to pay the entire flight from Houston to New Orleans, and even that wasn’t good enough for the cheapskate. My mom had to shell out half of my measly one hundred dollar tickets for me to even see him, so one could only imagine what an overseas ticket would do to him. My mom didn’t want to be the reason I never saw my dad. She told me, many years later, that she wanted me to make up my own mind about him. She didn’t want to brainwash or manipulate me to think what she thought of him, so she allowed me time to form my own opinion of the man.

I must have blocked this out of my mind for nearly a decade’s time. I remember it hitting me like a bolt of lightning. I was in the theater, in high school, sitting with Miss Black Teen Texas and a few other girls. Miss Black Teen Texas was talking about her St. Lucian father and the things he had done to her mother, and it came rushing back. I was so pissed at myself to have forgotten something like this. I guess I suppressed those feelings due to the trauma I had experienced, but to just forget it was beyond me. How could someone do such hateful things to another person anyway? It was then and there that my opinion of my father started to go downhill. It took me ten years to remember, and another 10 years to put it down on paper. Only this time, I don’t have a Lisa Frank spiral notebook with blue paper in it.

The time of my life when I had forgotten about all the bad things, I was quite the daddy’s girl. When he married for the third time, however, that changed. My mother was on her second husband at the time, which was going nowhere fast. It was going so fast, that she thought it would be in my best interest to live with my father while she “ironed out the kinks of that relationship”. I was in the fifth grade. I left Texas and ended up in Hell for the next seven months of my life. This particular Hell is referred to as Pass Christian, Mississippi.