Exodus Project Blog, He Walks With Me Blog
A Night To Remember…The Invisible Victims Of Abuse
Trigger Warning: This blog review will contain graphic information pertaining trauma
It was a night that will always be seared into my memory. My father was a raging alcoholic, a nightmare and for my mother and I, the warden over our dungeon. To the outside world, he was a good man, loved by darn near everybody who didn’t have to live with him. He would give the stranger the shirt off his back…while my mother and I would go nights without food.
It was normal for me to sleep light…but usually when I would wake up during the night, I would just lay still and listen for the sounds of drunken chaos piercing through the walls…the loud drunken fumbling around in the kitchen or some obscene, agitated rambling that my father was almost always carrying on late at night and on into the wee hours of the morning.
But on this particular night, I was awakened to a silence. An eerie silence. After a while, I decided to “check” to see if my mom was OK. With fear gripping my body, I got up and proceeded to go check on her. Ready to defend, I armed myself with a mop handle from the kitchen and tiptoed, fearfully, towards my mothers bedroom door. Strangely, the door was open but she wasn’t in her bed. My mother never left alone at night. I started to panic, shake, my eyes filled with tears…I screamed, “What happened to mama?”
When you live in a nightmare, expecting the worse is a normal
I decided to go check the rest of the house and walked into the living room where immediately I knew something was off…the lights were off but I could see the front door was wide open. Enraged and scared to death at the same time, I screamed for my mama. After what seemed like an eternity, I turn on the lights, and to my horror the entire living room, wall to wall, front to back was covered with blood. Blood everywhere the eye could see. On the walls, on the furniture, on the carpet. The front door, which was a glass pane door, was broken into pieces — bloody glass was everywhere. But my mama was nowhere to be found. I knew, I just knew, that the narcissist had finally killed her in an alcoholic rage. I went numb, my body went limp. A fell to the floor and sobbed profusely.
After a while, I somehow convinced myself that this was all just a dream, a bad dream, and I was sleep walking. I was so convinced that this had to be a dream that I went back to bed believing that everything would be OK when I woke up. By the time I turned eight years old, I was used to escaping realities of our hell by disconnecting from it. I woke back up, went back into the living room and realized it was not a dream, it was just a horrifying as I remembered it.
All I could think to my 8-year-old self was what was I going to tell my Aunt, my mothers sister, who lived 10 blocks away and was like a second mother to me. After walking around in a daze, I put on my clothes and started what seemed like a 10 mile journey to my Aunt’s house. As I walked, I kept wondering through the tears to myself, “Why did he kill mama and not me too?” I arrived at my Aunt’s house around 7 in that morning, and banging on the door yelling, “My mom is dead, he killed her.” Over and over again, “My mom is dead, he killed her…”
My cousin opened the door, I ran in looking for my Aunt. I ran through the house screaming as loud as I could. When I got to the den, I see my mother on the couch sobbing profusely. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I ran and jumped into her arms…we clutched each, sobbed and sobbed some more. After a few minutes, I asked, “What happened, I thought you were dead?” To make a long story short, one of my father’s alcoholic flying monkeys came to our house drunk as skunk looking for my father. So drunk until he didn’t realize he was banging on a glass door. In a drunken rage, he broke the glass, knocked the door off the hinges. In her moment of panic, my mother thought I had ran so she ran to my Aunts house. After my mother arrived at my Aunt’s house, she was so traumatized that she was unable to speak for five hours.
What’s my point? That night and the horrifying assumptions were made possible by the fact that we lived in a house with a monster whose drunken unpredictable and terrorizing behavior was so traumatizing that it was completely plausible to my young mind that our monster was capable of killing my mother.
Sadly, that was a minor incident in comparison to countless others. Being away from my mother for any reason, for any length of time, after that day, was the hardest thing thing to for me to do. I would run home from school everyday, run through the door yelling her name just to hear her respond. That went on for years. To this day I don’t know who cleaned up that mess but it was cleaned up almost as suddenly as it happened. My mother and I never talked about “the night of the dead” after that day — and as with most things that happened in the dungeon, it stayed in the dungeon.
You can’t unsee or unexperience trauma. It’s your truth, your authentic truth, as are the trauma triggers they create.
All children who grow up in abusive home are being abused. Without exception. God, work and time transformed my life, healed me from the horror but like the Apostle Paul, there are some thorns that won’t be removed and we learn to access more grace because of them. There have been many personal and professional successes, enormous successes in my life, but I understand what the Apostle Paul meant when he said, “Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me” (2 Corinthians 12:9).
Don’t let anybody tell you that a broken home is worse than being abused and broken in your home.
Don’t think for a minute that your babies aren’t co-sufferers with you beloved. The difference is, they don’t have a choice. They can’t leave, you will have to escape for them. Escape is hard, it’s not always just a matter of walking away but promise yourself, when you can, as soon as it’s possible, you will take your babies and run. Forgive yourself — you didn’t ask to be abused, you didn’t sign up to be abused — physically, emotionally or mentally. Don’t stay for your children, leave for your children beloved.
My mother never escaped. Her generation literally believed in, “Till death to us part.” She was never offered help, she was never given any support — from church or friends. Even as a child, the lack of support my mother received hurt me to my core. My father died of an alcohol induced stroke/heart attack nearly 12 years after that night. My mother died almost 5 years ago.
I pray she will know that her suffering was not in vain. I pray that God will use me to glorify His name and serve victims of abuse with the compassion my mother deserved but never received. I pray that together, we will fight like hell for abuse victims, and the invisible victims of abuse.
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Thank you for sharing your story. I am currently in a relationship where my husband is forcing sex on me almost daily and the frequency and intensity just keeps escalating. I know I need to get out for my babies. Trying to take small steps forward every day in getting out.