My Life

My life in a nutshell.

My Life

As a child I promised myself three things: I would always treat all people equally, I would always believe in love and wouldn't give up until I found my Prince Charming, and even though there are so many horrible things in the world, i would stay positive and try to cheer up those around me as often as I could. As a child, I wasn't aware of the horrific events that could take place in a good person's life. It didn't take long for me to get a taste of the cruelty the world has to offer.

I don't have many memories as a young child. Almost everything I know about my life at younger ages are just things that my family have told me: We lived in Illinois, hiding from tornadoes in a bath tub or closet, I had to go to preschool two years in a row.  One thing I do remember though was age five sitting in a room with a woman I didn't know, because my parents were getting a divorce and my mom thought I needed counseling. I remember my mom continuously saying, 

"it's not your fault, Abby. Your Daddy and I just don't get along anymore. We still love each other very much, but we can't be together."

I never believed it was my fault, but her repeating these words to me so many times in my elementary years began to make me if I should believe it was my fault. Ever since then, I always wonder if things are my fault and people are just too nice to tell me so. 

After my dad moved out, he started getting in some trouble. He's always had a problem with alcohol and drugs but after my parents got divorced he started getting caught for it. I only visited him once when he was in rehab. He introduced me to a girl he met there, a girl he dated for a little while after he got out and then broke up with soon after. Every time I was able to see him he had a new girlfriend on his arm, my dad has always been afraid to be alone; a quality that I unfortunately inherited from him. Since I couldn't see my Dad very often I became extremely attached to my Mom. I wouldn't go anywhere without her. 

My mom only dated a little, very few of the men that she dated she introduced to my brother, Carl, and me. Eventually though, she met and married the man of her dreams, Ronny. Ronny was a logger and an avid fisher. He was a family man with a tough look and a very giving heart. He became the father for my Carl and me. Along with Ronny, Carl and I got two sisters and a brother. Only the brother lived with us because he was the youngest. One day Ronny got an amazing job opportunity in Alaska, so with only half a warning to us kids, we picked up and moved for two years. Alaska was where I finally made some friends. I was a sweet second grader, but I wanted friends so desperately that I let everyone walk all over me, which led to a lot of bullying at my previous school. In Anchorage though I became friends with everyone. not one person to my knowledge disliked me. Alaska was like a dream for me. I had a plethora of good friends, I went to an amazing church, and I got to celebrate occasions such as the Iditarod. The one thing that meant the most to me was school. My teacher was a hippie who loved arts. Every day we had an hour where we would read poetry, he read us books and let us keep journals on them, he made us write poems and stories and let our creativity reach its peak. If it weren't for this amazing teacher I wouldn't have the creative abilities that I have. Unfortunately this heaven was only a dream. One day my brother got jumped and this started the process of moving back to Colorado. He began being home-schooled and falling into a very sad state. Then, two of my step dads close family members died and sent him reeling into a deep depression. He would lie on the couch most of the time. We already lived in a cheap trailer park in the ghetto but we ran out of money.  So we moved into a motel, we lived in this motel for a while, my parents would drive me back and forth to school and I'd come home to a room that we all slept in. Soon my step dad moved back to Colorado and we moved into a four-plex. We had to get rid of all our animals including my favorite cat, Nana, that we rescued as a kitten. My heart was broken. I was happy to be in a new house but losing my cat was horrible. The next summer we moved back to Colorado and I, once again began attending school with all of my bullys.

After our second year living where I grew up again, I had made a new friend, Hannah. As a sixth grader I expected her to be my friend forever. Regrettably, the definition of forever had been tampered with in the case of Hannah and I. One day after fighting with Hannah, I returned to an empty home. This happened a lot so it didn't really faze me, that is until my Dad picked me up with Carl already in tow. Immediately I knew something was wrong. My Dad made sad attempts at trying to keep me happy for a few hours, then he returned my brother and me home. As I walked into the house, an echo of sobs surrounded me. The whole world seemed to have slowed down. I walked to the hallway and found the source of the sobbing; my mom.  She limped towards me with one leg in a cast and a collection of scratches covering every inch of exposed skin.  After the longest few minuets of my life my Mom sat my brother and I down and proceeded to reveal the solemn story of how she and Ronny got into a car crash. One specific sentence insists on sticking in my mind, 

"Ronny and I were in a car accident, and Ronny didn't make it." My father sat sadly and watched the two of us react. My brother cried which was unreal to me because my brother had a large sense of manly pride and so I had almost never seen him cry. I think I teared up a bit but the reality hadn't settled in that I lost the one person that accepted me, that believe in me, that protected me. My mom was that way for me too, but she had to be that way. She's my mom. Ronny though. He took my family in. He loved us like his own kids and never questioned that we loved him just as much. 

Immediately I ran to my best friends house but instead of comforting me she just sad wide eyed our friendship dwindled soon after that because she told me he deserved to die one day when she was mad.   The few months after that day are still a blur in my mind, just a whirlwind of tears and sleepless nights hearing my mother weeping at the thought of losing that one person she chose to spend her life with. I could overhear grueling details of the car accident in the middle of the night. Stories of how she collected the blood overflowing from his mouth so he wouldn't choke. Horror stories of him taking his last breath and her sad hopes of him still living. Ronny was my father no matter what blood results would say he cared for me when my dad would rather do meth and party with his friends. It took a long time for me to let him go and unfortunately I didn't just lose my father that day, I lost my mom too. I'll tell you this: no one ever warned me that life could change so abruptly, I had to learn it the hard way. Most people think that things like that can never happen to them. Heed my warning; it can.

After Ronny's death it seemed that people were dying all around me, three of my friends, my grandparents,  my cousin, my favorite teacher, my uncle and many more. I started attaching to those around me grasping at a relationship I could keep. No friends really stuck until the end of 7th grade when I met Joe, Brianna, and Mario. Instantly the four of us became enamored with each other, but we had so much drama between us that by the time the new school year came around Brianna stopped associating herself with us and Joe moved to a nearby city for school. Around this time my mom had met a new man, Tim. Tim was someone she knew in high school. I had never heard of him because they were never close, but one day she just saw him at a bar and the relationship stemmed from there. I was happy at first when she met him. I wanted her to move on and be happy. They became extremely serious though, she said that we were buying a new house with the money we had gotten from Ronny's wrongful death suit. When we got the new house I stayed there alone. My brother was always partying forgetting his troubles and my mom was tired of sleeping alone so she would  sleep at her new boyfriends house. For a few months I lived alone, until my mom decided it was the best idea for my dad and his pregnant girlfriend to move in with me. She insisted that it was so I could spend some time with my Dad but I knew the truth. She didn't want to spend time with me so she let my incapable father do it instead. All we did was fight when he lived with me. He fought with me, he fought with his girlfriend and I felt like I didn't have an escape. With my group of friends being split apart, my mom not wanting me, my brother not around to help me with my angry father, and my dad constantly picking fights I fell into a really bad relationship with Mario. Soon i realized that he was a horrible boyfriend but it was too late, I was hooked. I became a fiend for the nasty ways he treated me. I felt that even negative attention was better than no attention at all. What I didn't realize was how bad it could get. It started harmless just over protecting me, then he went on to giving me rules like I couldn't see my friends more than two times a week and I had to come home from school and talk to him on the phone from 7PM to 12PM. We even had to fall asleep on the phone together so he knew that I was sleeping. I made a new friend on the first day of school that soon became my new best friend, unfortunately he always compared me to her: her penmanship, her style, the way she talked; everything. That was only the beginning. As the months passed my mom finally moved in with her boyfriend and his son. Mario started to cheat on me and verbally abuse me but he also became extremely violent. The first time his violence was directed towards me he pushed me down the stairs for wearing a low cut shirt. No one was witness to it and I was too dumbfounded to acknowledge it. He apologized profusely and promised it would never happen again. It did. As time moved on i continued ignoring it and learned how to cover any type of bruise or scratch. I became amazingly adept at lying and I learned a few ways to keep the abuse to a minimum. Luckily, almost a year later I finally snapped out of my "love" for Mario and broke up with him. 

Before Mario and I broke up my best friend from sixth grade, Hannah, moved back into town. Very soon, we were completely inseparable. She was my other half; my entire world as far as I was concerned. We never fought or disagreed, we had no reason to. We agreed on everything we shared everything there was nothing to fight over. After years of spending 24 hours a day seven days a week together she started having some problems. We partied a lot and in the midst of our partying we decided it was a better idea not to eat before we drank considering it would get us more drunk. After a few months of doing this I quit realizing that it was a stupid thing to do. Hannah though, she did the complete opposite. She began to start cutting junk food out of her diet, she wrote down her least liked of her body parts on her mirror. She worked out constantly and soon she began cutting more and more food out of her daily diet. Eventually she was down to only drinking soda but that didn't last long and very soon she wasn't eating anything. She would beg me to exercise with her and I would try to get her to eat. I tried everything, I ate all sorts of food in front of her to try to make her eat it; she never did. She was pretty much living with me for some of the time she was doing all of this so at night when she was doing excessive sit-ups I would sit on her knees and beg for answers. 

"Why are you doing this? Don't you know how beautiful you are? Don't you know that you don't need to lose weight?" I just wanted to slap sense into her, cry, and scream all at the same time. I just couldn't understand, I was always ridiculously jealous of her and she couldn't see what I saw. She was seemingly impossible to get through to, everything I said went through one ear and out the other. When other people tell you things like this is happening your first response is usually to tell someone, but I couldn't. I had no idea the repercussions of telling someone else. I knew she would hate me and I couldn't lose my best friend. I kept it to myself, I didn't even write in a diary I just tried to act like nothing was wrong with her. I treated her the same, I acted like it was all okay until one day at school. We would meet up after classes and after one of her classes she walked towards me smiling and as soon as she reached me she just collapsed into my arms. No one was around to see it, everyone had dispersed in different directions, I had no idea what to do. I shook her until she woke up and it dawned on me that it was a problem and I had to do something. We both left school early that day. I talked to my mom on the ride home I cried and cried and pleaded for her to tell me what to do.

"Mom!" I wept, "there's something wrong with Hannah, she won't eat and that's why I asked you to pick me up early, because she passed out and no one knows about it, what do I do?

All she said to me was, "Well it's obvious that she's anorexic." From then on the word anorexic enraged me. I could not believe that she would say it so nonchalantly as she did. It was then that I decided no one would help me help her. I spent even more time with her watching her making sure she wouldn't drink too much or have to much stress. I tried to be her guardian angel.  My efforts weren't good enough. That summer we both went to visit families in different states I tried to keep in touch with her but there was no way for me to do that because she didn't have a phone. When I returned I found that not only was she still continuing not to eat but she was doing pills as well. The first sight of her was like seeing a ghost. She was pale, her hair was brittle and when I hugged her I could feel the outline of every bone in her body. Not long after that her family picked up on it and put her in the hospital and counseling. She still hid food and refused to talk to me because I found out she was doing meth. I had convinced myself that she would die, while she was in the hospital she would call me in tears and send me pictures of feeding tubes in her nose from refusal to eat. Our friendship dwindled even though I begged for it to continue I needed her to be okay, but she wasn't. It took almost a year and a half to get over my guilt for what I felt like I had done. I lost my best friend because I wouldn't tell anyone what happened. While we were still somewhat friends school started. That summer I had created an anonymous blog of lists of popular kids, cutest couple etc. People would send in lists, I would edit them then post them. A group of girls were unhappy about the lists and somehow found out it was me, when school started they harassed me endlessly. It was so bad that every day I would come home from school and beg my mom to let me stay home. My friend, Staci, was doing online school at the time and within a month of coming home sobbing about the snickering whispering teenage girls, my mom finally agreed to let me try online school for myself. Still consumed with guilt over what had happened with Hannah I ignored my school work. I gained 80 pounds and didn't want to look at myself anymore. I was filled with shame, I ate my feelings away and I cried myself to sleep. Although, it took hours for me to fall asleep. I became scared of everything around me, probably from loss of sleep, I began hearing things at night. That year my mom had taken in 5 of my cousins children into our foster care (we had never had a foster care home before but because it was family we did it) two of the five kids were babies and because the three older boys were so hard to take care of I ended up being stuck with taking care of the babies. I had so much stress on my shoulders that I often thought seriously about ending it all. My best friend was pretty much killing herself with her choices, my new best friend, Staci, felt like I was always comparing her to Hannah and became a little resentful of me, I was pretty much a teenage mom, I dropped out of school, I hated my new step-dad. Everything was so wrong, one day I woke up and I was done being upset, I was tired of being sick and sick of being tired. I got my s**t together. I decided that it was no good being upset about the past, because I couldn't change it, there was no use being scared of the future because I wasn't there yet. I stopped being so angry at the world and started working on myself.

I went back to high school but left as a senior due to the fact that I wouldn't be able to graduate on time. I went to an alternative high school diploma program and got all of my work done. I moved out and an old friend moved in with me, Staci got a new boyfriend but we still kept in touch. I gained two new best friends, Randell and Robbie who I couldn't have been more grateful for. I liked Robbie for a while but realized he wasn't the one for me. He was only a heart-breaker with a sensitive front. My best friend Ryan, who was living with me, caused me so many problems. He never cleaned, he did drugs, he would invite random people over and eventually I decided I had, had enough. I kicked him out. On New years I told Randell I liked him and we ended up dating and now it's a year and six months later, I'm graduated from high school and working full time as a house keeper which isn't in my life plan but is definitely a step up from doing nothing.

As a child I promised myself three things  I would always treat all people equally, I would always believe in love and wouldn't give up until I found my Prince Charming, and even though there are so many horrible things in the world, I would stay positive and try to cheer up those around me as often as I could. So far I've kept my promises it may have taken some time and work to keep them but I have. I can only hope as I continue living and writing my life story I can keep true to myself and my promises. 

  TO BE CONTINUED