FanStory.com - No Change Without Changeby Lea Tonin1

What is it about my computer that causes my heart to pound? I know that what I write could be and should be beneficial to another. Maybe it could salvage the childhood of even one small child. I know this logically, and yet, when I think about writing this next set of events in my life, the ground-shaking fear returns. The quake and dance of my nervous hands as my heart pounds and my eyes fill with water.

All the pain and the old powerlessness rear their ugly heads. At any moment, those old, hard memories can push through a doorway. The door is simply tolerated by my memory...for now.

However, on the other side of writing, the small girl I used to be comes clambering for an audience, pressing me to continue, asking for release...for freedom from my memory. She points at my PC with a flustered expression. So I shall pull the chair out from under my table and turn on my computer again...for her.

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I watched shockingly as my mother's second husband angrily left without a backwards glance. As I saw him drive away, I must admit, even now, the heart of my five-year-old self was relieved to see him go. There did remain some fear, though, about who this other man was, the one who had come almost every day. I barely spoke to him and yet I played with his son all the time.

During the time my mom was with her second husband, we moved four or five times that I can recall. One of our homes smoked us out rather than catching on fire. We spent some weeks in a motel...incredibly boring when you're small, but not anything I dared to mention.

Now, in minutes the other man was moving in.

My mother had decided that we -she and I and my sister-- were going over to her new mans apartment to help him clean and pack up to move into our house.

I did the best a five-year-old could do. I stood in the kitchen with him while he washed dishes and I dried them. He picked up the bowl and decided that he did not consider it dry enough. He then extended the third knuckle on his hand and formed a fist.

That fist, which could cover half of my skull, flew out and connected to my small head. These were the first set of stars I had ever seen, but there were many, many to follow. Shock did not prepare me for this. He told me to get off the floor and quit faking it.

And so, from the pan to the fire we went, and I knew it, lying on the floor, my head pounding as I cried. My mother asked what was going on. This new man in her life told her that I made a smart-ass comment. My mother's indifference showed its ugly's face again. Never once do I have a memory of her siding with her children, not once. We were her afterthought.

Beyond the betrayal of a parent, I also learned that there was no such thing as hope. That I shouldn't hope, because there was no way out. That it would go on and on and on without end.

Even then in my small girl's mind I knew things that no child should ever know. But once again, the ever-present "why" was never answered.

Fear, I was used to. I recognized and knew what it was. I'd been there before; it was familiar.

So, a power struggle began between him and me.

My soul would not allow me to let go of the spine I didn't know I was developing. That one little thing that saved my life. That one little piece of stubborn something that would not let me let go.

We moved to a small World War Two Army housing community for the next six years. It was isolated on a small island in a small community. Cut off from the world around us, my world and my sisters world shrank down to the end of a large fist. I didn't know it then, but that became the key to anonymity for both my parents. It enabled them to carry on their torture for years, unchecked.

There were endless nights of being torn from our beds made to clean everything in the kitchen. He would pull all the plates, cups, bowls and glasses put from the cupboards because he'd found a single dirty dish in the cupboard decided they all must be done. So, in the middle of ther night, there we would stand, cleaning dishes. This happened time and time again.

But these were mild nights compared to others. During those nights, we would be taken out of bed for an infraction --one we may or may not have committed-- and were not allowed to stop standing in the kitchen until one of us admitted wrongdoing.

In our house, we were punched for lying and we were also punched when we were telling the truth. Either way, we were punched, so we took our chances at lying and trying to get away with things. Very rarely succeeded.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, he would growl out his favorite stupid, menacing question: "Who did this?" No one wants to say anything, of course. We didn't need another lineup of physical pain or the last of my head to be caved in! But it was inevitable, so it gor to the point where I just stopped postponing the punishment. I would look at my so-called parents and say. "OK, I did it. Now you have someone to punish." Then I would look at my sisters and say, "You guys can go to bed now."

Once, my mother actually piped up and said something scholarly like, "Now, now that's not fair, you can't do that." It was all I could do to not burst out laughing at the ridiculousness of that statement. By then being eight years old, and I thought to myself, "What's fair? What in the world has ever been fair?" It was still stuff I didn't need to know.

As is the nature of the abuser, first, they try to make you believe that it's your fault that you're being hurt. It's your fault that you got him so angry that he had to raise his fists. Better not to make him angry. Just do what we're told to do. Also, the nature of the abuser is that it gets worse over time.

Blood, starvation, false promises, abandonment and lies were our repast for breakfast lunch and dinner...

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I hung my head to cry one more time for the girl who never experienced childhood. From memory, no peaceful night ever came. But thankfully, my hypervigilance and super sensitivity were coming to full-fledged fruition by then. A creak on a stair, the turn of a knob, pressure changes in the air. Understanding the nuances has never left me.

With a weary push of my hands on the desk, I backed off from my PC.

This is the way for me. Preparation of my mind to remember and write. Then de-pressure once again for another kick at the can. The unbelievable number of events strikes me every time as my memories jostle for position. A lineup for recollections on a partially open valve...push, push.