flashbacks

**WARNING** THIS STORY FEATURES A DETAILED LOOK AT DOMESTIC VIOLENCE FROM A MOTHER TO A CHILD. DO NOT READ THIS IF IT WILL UPSET YOU, OR TRIGGER A FLASHBACK OF YOUR OWN.**

One minute I'm sitting in sociology class taking notes on domestic violence, and the next I'm reliving it. I almost became a statistic. That's all I can think of, those are the only words my mind can form. I almost became a statistic.

Growing up, I knew that other kids got in trouble and that some of them got spanked, but it didn't take too long for me to realize that other kids' moms weren't like mine. When other moms came to school to drop off their forgotten lunches, my classmates didn't scatter like roaches when the lights come on. When other moms picked up my friends from school, they were usually right on time, or maybe a few minutes late, not an hour. When other moms had a bad day at work, they might be more prone to raising their voices, or they might take the dog for a run before facing all the housework, rather than screaming and beating their kids bloody over spilled cat food.

But my mom was a single mom; a single, working mom. My mom had a house note and a car note and a grocery list and a sticky floor and a stupid boss. Most of her bosses were stupid, or fat, or lazy. That's what she told us, anyway. If she had a boss she liked, though, that's when the trouble came home. If she had a good boss, she would work herself to the bone trying to please him (or her) and would be so stressed out and exhausted that she had to take it out on us. She had to yell about how the kitchen wasn't cleaned up or how we were (once again) watching a cartoon instead of working on our homework or how we had forgotten to defrost the chicken.

Yelling was only the beginning, though. Yelling was the tame part. Once, when my sister was in first grade, my mother got insanely angry that Claire was having trouble finding the first word of the last sentence in a paragraph on her homework. Claire was not only dyslexic, but she had also gotten used to getting help, or someone to do at least part of her work for her. When mom started yelling, Claire started crying, because she felt ashamed and guilty that she couldn't please my insatiable mother. The tears flooded her big blue eyes and blurred her vision. Claire was a beautiful child.

When her vision was blurred by the tears and the frantic feeling of needing to please my mother right away, Claire panicked. When she panicked, she hesitated, and when she hesitated, she was told to stand up, lean up against the table, and get a whipping. We didn't call them spankings in my house; that word wouldn't cover what we sometimes endured. Usually the beatings came in increments of ten, and since Claire had such an easy-flowing fountain of guilt in her, ten was usually all it took for her to straighten up and do right. All the beatings ever did for me was perpetuate my anger, my hate, my nightmares.

Claire got her first ten pops, and was sent back to the chair on the other side of the table, rubbing her little round behind, with her head hanging low. She sat down, ready to search for the first word of the last sentence, and my mother stood behind her waiting, with the thick leather belt slung around her neck like a towel on a boxer.

"Well? Where is it?" my mother prodded.
"I... I... I don't know," pleaded Claire, with a scared look on her face.
"You do know, and if you don't find it in ten seconds you're going to get another whipping."

Claire's breathing started to get a little more shallow and her eyes raced back and forth across the page, but she wasn't seeing the words, she was just seeing dancing shapes.
"Where is it? Seven... Six... Five..."

Claire panicked again and started reading, very slowly, with each word stretched out like the cat in the sun. She started reading the first sentence of the paragraph, instead of the last.
"Nope, that's not it. Go over there and get another whipping."
"No, let me try again. Let me try."
"You better hurry, Four... Three..."

Claire found the last word of the last sentence of the paragraph. The intonation in her voice spiked, like she knew it was the wrong answer, but if she said it fast enough, and high enough, it might pass, but it didn't.
"Damnit, Claire. You know damn well that's not it. Stand up. I'm not taking any more of this bullshit."

Claire immediately started whaling and did not get out of her chair immediately, as prompted. This was one of many tragic mistakes to come. My mother then grabbed Claire's pudgy little hand, yanked it up until my sister was forced into an upright position, and then with her other hand, my mother whipped the belt off her neck and started hitting Claire again. The strikes were more random now, landing on my sisters behind in criss-cross welts. My mother wasn't even counting out loud, as she had been before, but I always knew to keep count in my head. Sometimes, I could smell a 25-er coming at me and I would count in my head, just so I could keep track of the stats. It wasn't so much of a baseball-score obsession, as it was preparation, in case I'd ever need the numbers on hand; in case I ever thought she'd break the record, I'd need to know what the record was. Seven was all Claire got. I hated the number seven.

Seven was often the number my mother started counting from, when she said we had ten seconds to do something. Seven minutes was often the amount of time given for us to finish cleaning our rooms or the dishes, before the next beating. Seven was not just an annoying number, as I absolutely hated hearing my mother count backward, but it was also a number which usually indicated that something bad was going to happen. Seven was one of many things that triggered the anger.

Only 18 months older than my baby sister, I could do nothing but stand back and watch all this happening to her. I was frozen by the shock of seeing her hurt repeatedly, and also by the confusion at my mother's rage. I wanted so badly to tell my sister the answer, even though I couldn't even see the words on the paper from where I was standing. Every loud crack of the leather against my sister's tender skin made me flinch, like I was the one getting hit. I wanted so badly to take the hits for her. All I ever wanted was to be able to protect her. I failed.

The yelling and the crying and the whipping and the begging went on like this for what seemed like hours. I can't remember where my father was while this was going on, but since I remember sunlight coming over my shoulder while I watched my sister's porcelain behind be stripped of the cotton panties, and hit so many times on top of already pulsing welts, that the image still reminds me of raw liver, I have to assume my father was still at work. Had he been home, though, the situation wouldn't have been much different. My father didn't trust his parenting skills because he had had such distant and short relationships with his parents, who both died in their 50s. Because of my mother's intense domination of everything and everyone in that house, it is likely that my father would have been closed up in his office, far away in "computer land," as my mother often called it.

I think it took Claire about 30 minutes to finally find the first word of the last sentence of the paragraph that day, and when she did, my mother's congratulations were bitter and sarcastic. Now, nearly two decades have gone by since then, and I still sob like a helpless little girl thinking about it. I called my sister about an hour ago to tell her how sorry I am that I didn't protect her, or at least find something to do to distract my mother--like kicking her in the calf. Claire barely remembered the episode and told me not to worry about it because there was nothing I could have done. She also assured me that we had "turned out alright," though I beg to differ.

I still am extremely hesitant to trust women, especially ones in authority positions. I still occasionally have instant-replay nightmares where I try to alter the past by fighting back, and accidentally killing my mother, who is nearly six feet tall. I am still worried by the hate and the anger that boils up in my throat at least a couple of times a month, usually misdirected at just about anything. I am still terrified of turning into my mother. Thankfully, my professor didn't ask me why my sister had to lie to my cousin about why she had trouble sitting down for almost a week. Fortunately, I was allowed to cry silently, on the front row of class, and slip out to my car before bursting into tears. I hate crying, especially in front of female authority figures.