Pause, Rewind, & Play

WARNING: Some crude language, and demonstrations of domestic violence. Please be advised.

Rays of sunshine are peering through the blinds on the windows and onto the auburn colored carpet. The year is 2008, and the television is blaring the campaign of Democrat Barack Obama, who is running for presidential office against Republican John McCain. A soft sizzling of hotdogs and mac n’ cheese as it is cooking, dances upon my ears, as I am hungry and it is dinner time. A waft of tonight’s dinner carries through the autumn breeze being let in, and radiates through the entire trailer.  Finally my stepfather, Adam, has called me, and my siblings to the dinner table.

At the table, I sit in the back corner against the wall that separates the living room, and the kitchen area. My four year old sister, Kyra, sits in the chair directly across from me. And Adam places my 2 month old brother, William, in a beige high chair at the end of the table. It is a shared responsibility of both Kyra and I to assist my brother William in eating his food and making sure he does not choke. Adam places small ceramic cereal bowls that have the hotdogs and mac n’ cheese combined in front of our faces. Dinner is officially served to us, and we are all eager to begin eating.

Adam does not eat dinner with us, but instead he waits for my mother to return home from work. Adam does this on a regular basis, and once my mother is all settled, they will eat together. Not having an actual “sit-down” family dinner, is quite familiar to us and I am perfectly content with what has become the normal routine of my family. I look across the table to see Kyra playing with her brown colored pigtails rather than eating. I instruct her to eat her food, and then look to my left to look at my brother William. He’s not wearing a shirt, only a diaper, which in turn is a good thing, because he has seemingly dressed himself in cheese on his upper torso and his red hair. Adam, rather than sitting back down to continue watching the presidential campaign broadcast, is constantly pacing through the living room, into the kitchen, and back into the living room. He does not appear to be looking for anything in particular, but instead he is rather anxiously pacing, while the TV is still singing the campaign of Barack Obama.

Adam is a towering 6 foot 4 inch individual with a body that is built for weightlifting. Needless to say, Adam is quite a tall and strong individual. As tough as he seems on the outside, on the inside - it is a disaster zone. Adam has an extensive list of serious mental health disorders, and has an awful habit of not taking medication to help combat these mental health issues. And it just so happens that recently, Adam has not been taking his medication, again. This is a road all too familiar to my family. It is actually what causes the biggest riff in our family dynamic. 

Adam has a habit of physically abusing Kyra and I while my mother is at work. Each time he hits us - he has a different reason, and he would tell us his reasons for our “punishment”, before beating us. His reasonings for beating Kyra is different from his reasonings of beating me. His favorite reason to use for both my sister and I, is the fact that “we are not his biological kids.”

The place I live, and the people I live with are supposed to be known as “family”, yet I cannot provide them with such a label. Adam, by law, is my “stepfather”, but does not deserve such a title due to how he treats Kyra and I. Melody, by birth, is my “mother”, yet she always believes Adam more than she believes her own children. I don’t quite understand why she believes Adam, when Adam dismisses our marks and bruises as “accidents while playing outside”. Adam could be cruel due to his mood swings from not taking his medication - and my mother knew this. I rely on my siblings, and my siblings rely on me for some sense of what a family should be… loving, caring, providing and not toxic. At eight years old, I had become their motherly figure, and they had become my sense of relief in a time of panic that everything was eventually going to be okay.

My mom faintly jiggles the front door’s doorknob as she inserts her keys to come inside. Adam rushes to the door and flings it wide open, and immediately starts towering over my mother, his face full of rage. The clock on the microwave in the kitchen only reads as a couple of minutes past five o’clock in the evening, which is the normal time that mom comes home from work on a nightly basis. As my siblings and I are still eating our dinner in the kitchen, Adam is yelling in a boisterous voice and accusing my mother of “being late”. My mother immediately begins to plead with Adam, in a calm and soothing tone. She defends herself by saying she was caught up in the rush hour traffic - which is more than probable. Adam immediately dismisses her claims and begins to accuse her of cheating on him, still acting as a complete opposite to my mother’s calm demeanor. Adam marches into the kitchen area, and reaches onto the top of the refrigerator to retrieve his loaded .45 pistol, and marches back into the living room. He begins welding the pistol to his head while my mother sat crying on the sofa in front of him.
“I bet you want me to die. I bet you’re thinking ‘kill yourself’. Am I right?” Adam screams at my mother. My mom starts to plead with him through tears as he continues to threaten to take his own life. At the dinner table, Adam and my mom cannot be seen by my siblings nor I, due to the wall that separates the kitchen / dining area to the living room. We could not see what was happening, but we could definitely hear it.

 I feel slightly upset, but I try not to focus on it. Adam is typically aggressive, and verbal arguments between my mother and him are something that I am far too familiar with. I just want there to be peace, but yet I was being faced with a new breed of chaos. I continue to try to eat my dinner while making sure my siblings eat theirs. Do they know what is going on? Will they remember this later on in life? Is it as traumatic for them as it is for me? William is too young to even comprehend what is happening, so he peacefully eats. Kyra is attempting to eat hers, but has begun to cry because of the loudness and violence, and I quickly try to hush her and encourage her to eat rather than cry. I hear a scuffle pursue between Adam and my mom, before my mother lets out an ear piercing shriek. 

“What if I kill you? What if I f*****g kill you b***h?” Adams voice booming across the entire house. By now, I can only assume the worst - Adam has the gun to my mother’s head. I quickly reach under my right leg for my TracFone cell phone and fumble over the keypad. I manage to press out the numbers 911. Adam is still threatening to kill my mother while my mother begs helplessly for him to stop. I stop and think to myself before pressing the SEND button to make the call. What if he Adam hears me calling 911? What if he takes his anger out on me and my siblings? What if I freeze up and forget the address to our house? 

Question after question floods my mind as Adam silently walks back into the kitchen and I hide my phone under my right thigh again. Adam places the pistol on top of the refrigerator, back from where he got it. It feels as if God had just pressed a “rewind” button, as if life is a tape being played in a VHS, due to the sudden change in the events that were happening. Adam gets into his car and leaves the property, and mom stays back at the house quietly weeping in the living room. The TV is audibly presenting the presidential campaign of Barack Obama once more after being drowned out by the violent situation that played out in the living room minutes prior.

I collect the dishes from my sister, brother and my own dish, and quietly scrape the remaining food into the trash. I lift up William from his highchair and place him on my left hip, and Kyra gets up from the table as well. We all silently walk past my mother in the living room, and enter our bedrooms. My mother, per usual, is oblivious to her children’s existence, even though we are two feet away from the couch where she lay as we pass by. I tuck William and Kyra into their beds, and turn on the Spongebob Squarepants movie for them and tell them goodnight. 

I crawl into my bed, and finally release the tears I had been holding onto for so long. I reflect upon tonight’s events, and ponder if I could have stopped Adam at any given point. I ponder if it seemed cowardice of me when I did not call 911. Was it brave of me to even take it into consideration? Most of all, I wondered if Kyra was okay, and how was she coping with tonight’s happenings. God pressed the “Pause” and “Rewind” buttons on the VHS for now, but with Adam’s habit of not taking medications - we are doomed to have God eventually press “Play”. The only two questions I can ask myself is; “what will happen then?”, and “when?” The cool autumn evening breeze seeps through the window again, and gently puts my wandering mind to sleep. 

In 2012, God had pressed STOP and EJECT on the VHS player. As we stood before the court, I felt my heart race, my knees wobbled in a way I had never felt before. My mother had placed her signature on one line of the paper, and Adam had placed his signature on the other -- the long awaited divorce happened, and just like that I no longer had to live in fear. The fears that I would be beaten, Kyra would be beaten, mom would be verbally assaulted all had suddenly ceased. 

The damage was done although the cause of the damage no longer existed. The relationship with my family members would be a long hard road to repair, much like the VHS tape that had become my childhood. The tapes were frayed, and the movie never could play scene to scene without error, but it had become what I knew to be my childhood, and my broken reality of what I had to call a family.