**repost: the original got removed because of a ‘slur’. **

So, this is going to be a long one. i’m writing this because im trying this new thing where i truly trust in my healthcare professional and tell them what the fuck is bothering me. as a reference - i guess. But also because i’ve never been really honest about this all to anybody, and in order to heal, i need to be able to acknowledge and reflect on how this affects me, but i dissociate and have memory repression issues when i do, so i’m writing it all down.

when i was a baby (less than a year old), my mom moved my brother, sister, and me away from our father in ohio. we lived in texas for like 2 years. then moved again, to louisiana, where she had started dating a wealthy real estate developer. i was three years old when we moved into H’s house.

i should describe his house and property for context. it was a massive colonial house on 27 acres of land and woods. maybe 500 ft down the driveway from the house there was a wooden bridge that crossed a fairly large, very swampy river.

We lived there for awhile, until i was 7, i think. during that time, my mother and the real estate developer, __H__, terrorized and abused my siblings and i. H, had bi-polar disorder and ocd.
, so my mom told us. we were children and naturally would make a lot of messes. H couldn’t handle it. he would beat my brother and i, sometimes my sister. but not as often, i don’t remember. after beating us, he would make us kneel (boths knees, no space) in the corner of the room, in a metal pan full of uncooked rice. he would make us stay there for a few hours usually, sometimes just until our mom got home. he would tell her whatever we did to upset him, then she would beat us again, and make us go into our rooms until dinner.

at some point, my sister called H ‘dad’. My mom corrected her. our mom told us that our father had been an alcoholic abuser, that had beaten her with a shotgun, put it in her mouth, and threatened to kill her while she was pregnant with my brother and sister (who were twins).
and after their birth, he held her hostage for months while he would rape her until she became pregnant with me.

we were maybe 5 or 6 years old. she told us that our father would beat her, hit her in the stomach, and smash her head into the wall. constantly abusing her until she gave birth to me. which, shortly after of, she fled our father and that’s why we moved. But we moved again, to Louisiana because he was stalking her, and ‘was gonna find us’.

I should also mention my mom was a hoarder. She managed to convince H into getting 6 dogs. But no more. not until we moved later did we get many, many more.

we started going to school and it was okay. we were getting away from the house. all i really remember is an occasion where a teacher reported signs of abuse. the school came to talk to my siblings and I, and we didn’t realize anything was wrong. so we didn’t say anything.

anyway, there came a day when someone left the front door open while my mom and H were out and all the dogs out. when H got back and was parking, he hit one and blamed us. he sent all 3 of us into the corner and told us to stay there all day. after a couple hours my brother and i started peeling the wall paper. H realized and got extremely angry. he grabbed my brother, A, and me and took us outside, where he put us into 2 of the dog kennels. put us in the back of his truck and drove to the middle of the bridge, and put the kennels next to the edge and threatened to throw us in.

my sister called our mom, she raced home and got us. she took her clothes, stole some of his money, and threw us in the car. we were off to schenectady, new york. the specific town is important later.

we were staying in a small motel room on the edge of town for awhile. all of us, 5 some cats, and 2 dogs. after some time there, she met a man named gary, and they started spending a lot of time together. gary was a weird guy, i don’t remember much about him aside from him having a recent bullet wound in his head. mom was an escort at this time and gary was paying her a lot of money, until we moved into a large house in town.

the house was yellow, with a red barn in the backyard. my siblings and i shared a bedroom, in the attic. it wasn’t heated. there was one bathroom in the house and one in the barn. we were only allowed to use the barn bathroom, except for winter, when we could bathe in the house. we changed schools after 3 months due to bullying. I was like 7. i was a smart kid, but had undiagnosed adhd and was anti social, so people really picked on me. we all started going to a new school. 4 months in the new school i broke my wrist on the playground and stopped going for 2 months, then we moved again.

Viva las fucking vegas, am i right people? mom met a wealthy gambler, named L, who lived in vegas through an escort service and hit it off. after going to vegas a couple times to visit him, he paid the deposit and rent for a house there for us to live in.

after i turned 9, my mom sent me to go visit her friend Stephen, in Schenectady. He was a movie producer that was interested in having some kids play parts in his movie. my siblings and i flew out, individually - as unaccompanied minors. my sister and brother went first. when i went to visit, i spent the night at his apartment. it was prearranged with my mom. late that night, he sexually assaulted me. I fell asleep watching steve urkel, in Stephen’s bed, and woke up with him forcing himself into me. i was too young and in shock to really process what was happening at the time, and it’s taken me a long time to talk about that.
3 days later, i took the round-trip plane home to vegas. didn’t say anything about what happened.

some time after that, in school, my brother learned what being gay was. he made fun of this kid, W, calling him gay and laughing at him. later, at home while i was showering, my brother got in the shower with me and told me he wanted to ‘play the W game’ (after the kid he made fun of), and raped me multiple times in the days afterwards. he later told the neighborhood kids we went to school with that i was gay and started making fun of me for it daily. i never left the house because everyone made fun of me and i had no friends, so i played video games a lot until we moved again.

on my 10th birthday, we left Las Vegas and moved again. L was having an affair, and mom met a wealthy doctor online, Dr F, who lived in malvern, pa. Dr F recently divorced his wife after his second heart attack; also leaving his children, while pursuing my mother. he was very mean. he put the down on a mortgage for a house for us in malvern around thanksgiving. we moved into the house on my 10th birthday. nearly 9 hours on a plane, and 12 + after an overnight in an airport.

we approached the new house, and Stephen was there to greet us; mother referring to him as ‘grandpa’ and calling him our godfather. My uncle and Dr F were also there. the first night, Stephen stayed over, Dr F did not. Stephen and us (my siblings and i) stayed in the basement in separate air beds. mom stayed upstairs. during the middle of the night, i went to the bathroom in the basement bedroom, and was sexually assaulted by stephen again, on my 10th birthday.

we lived there for 3 months, and within that time, so much happened. my siblings and i were sexually traumatized, waking up in the middle of the night to our mother and Dr F fucking on top of us, sometimes it wasn’t Dr F, it was a stranger. Dr. F also bought mom a mercedes station wagon. it was her baby. Malvern is also where we got the St Bernards, Alpine and Gershwin. My mom was dreaming of getting St Bernards and she got Dr F to buy 2 for her from a breedery out of state. They were sweet and loving, until they weren’t.

Later, Dr F conflicted his divorce and mom got mad. She got fucking wasted and put us in the stationwagon and started driving. we moved to philly. on the drive there, she was pulled over by a cop at an intersection for drawing an ‘R’ with her wheels. she gave the cop a runaway sob story and he told her to park in a hotel and not drive until she went to court. he confiscated her license in the parking lot and told her to call a friend to drive us.

we sat in the parking lot for 6 hours while our mom napped. she woke up and finished the drive to philly, where her friend Kelly helped her rent an apartment. she began to work very prominently and profusely in her sex work, often kicking us out of the house for 4-6 hrs at a time. she would give us $15 and tell us to go to 7/11. sometimes, she gave us $30 and told us to go to the movie theatre, 3 miles away.

once, we decided to come home early because we thought she might be done. we waited at the door until i went to the unlocked front door, and went upstairs while my siblings stayed downstairs. i walked into the third floor where the office and master bedroom were. my mother was being fucked by a man i’d never seen before. i ran downstairs and hid under my bed and cried because i thought she was mad at me for coming home early. when she was mad at one of us, she would punish us specifically for as long as someone else doesn’t make her upset. she would bully us and blame us for her life ‘being so miserable’. she often said things like ‘you’re the reason i have to suck dicks, to support you 3, while you and your brother just sit around and jerk off’ to me and my brother. i was still 10 and i didn’t realize how fucked up that was until much much later. sometimes, if we were being bad, or if we forgot to do a chore, like dishes. or if she had to ask us to do it, she would sometimes say ‘you guys just sit around doing nothing and treat me like your little house (n-slur)’

About 6 months into living in Philly, Dr F threatened my mom that he would report the mercedes as stolen, because he didn’t register it to her. so she packed up all the dogs and cats, her new, favourite dog, teddy, stuffed us all into the mercedes and drove us to Poughkeepsie, new york.

we started middle school there, lived in a small house in the middle of nowhere. it was a shit town. when i was in graduated 5th grade and started 6th grade, my brother started a rumor that i was mentally challenged, so that people would inherently not like me. my sister’s friends got mugged by knife (they were twelve), my sister and i started going to therapy, i joined boy scouts. my mom made fun of my sister and i for getting therapy. she said that our poverty was due to our need for help.

shortly before i turned 12, Dr F reported the car stolen in philly, and the police had finally tracked her down. she managed to make bail as long as she forfeit the car; then house arrest with exception for groceries. she started using the same taxi cab driver repeatedly, because he’d take her to the store for free and help her bring groceries home — assuming he could hangout afterwards. while she was on house arrest, during the winter she walked one of the St Bernards and slipped on ice, landing on her ass then slamming onto her head. she claimed the St Bernard pulled her out of the snow and onto the porch, thus ‘saving’ her. this was [her] ‘big brain injury’ turning point. she would use this excuse for years as her reason for being how she was.

she called an ambulance and got picked up. one of the ems guys was my sister’s best friend’s dad, CE. mom got his phone number in the ambulance, sat at the hospital for 4 hours, got discharged from the hospital. she said she broke her tail bone and had an amnesiac episode from a concussion. mom stopped leaving the house for a long time after that. she never let her dogs out, and we couldn’t take them far off the property. plus, they were huge, huge dogs. they never were probably socialized. and became very mean and protective over mom, even to a point where they would growl at my siblings and i.

i’m not going to detail incidences, but both of those dogs attacked me and my sister a few times. leaving scars on our legs, after having lunged into the bathroom for safety, only to wait an hour and hope they wouldn’t still be upset at us and hopefully not attack us again.

the house started getting really gross. mom started hoarding more and more stuff. more and more animals. we had 32 cats and 14 dogs over the course of 3 years in poughkeepsie. my and my sisters room became filled with cat and dog shit, torn up carpets and gnawed doors n walls. my sister and i would often fight over who got to sleep on the second futon in the living room, mom usually sleeping on the other. Mother’s room was also disgusting. But she sometimes stayed in there, smoking her newport 100s and drinking her diet dr pepper. we stopped having people over, and i only talked to and had one friend, Luke.

she called CE sometime later. He was an important figure of the local emergency services. He was fairly wealthy. But he was also the divorcing husband of my sister’s best friend’s mom. he sometimes fucked his ex wife but lied to my mom about it because he was ashamed of feeling lonely due to my mother’s lack of emotional involvement. he took us on vacation once, that was pretty nice aside from me making an idiot out of my 13 y/o self while there and my mother going home after 2 days, leaving us with her boyfriend while she performed sex work elsewhere. CE helped her buy a red Tahoe sometime, and was genuine about letting her just keep it.
She broke up with CE sometime later because he was still fucking his ex wife and another, new woman.

eventually, our landlord came to the house and saw it was disgusting, so he evicted us. we had time to leave. so my mom bought a tow-haul mini camper, packed it full of stuff, and cats. We got in the car and moved to southern Georgia.

South Georgia is where things really went from bad to worse. we moved into the house that everybody in the neighborhood wanted. that’s important, because we fucking destroyed it. that poor, beautiful and old house. i mean like, historically valued, restored, huge farm house. and when we moved there, it was the first time I realized that it was us. we were the explosive problem every where we went.

the two saint bernards stopped getting along and started attacking all the other animals except Teddy. we had to separate the house by which animals got along. Alpine hated everything and was starting to go blind and deaf from neglect and age; so he ended up at the front foyer and nobody ever saw him except to be fed and sometimes mom would sit with him while home alone.

i turned 15 shortly after we moved there. i was depressed. i ran away twice, tried to kill myself, got into a lot of drugs very quickly. i lost my virginity while completely fucking wasted on molly and shrooms at 15. i literally never talked to anybody at school aside from the people i was sexually interested in. i dated so, so promiscuously. within a year, i managed to date all of my friends’ partners, cheating on many of them after romanticizing how bad any of their exes were. i broke so many people’s hearts and didn’t blink about it. i had no idea what healthy relationships looked like.

my sister got sick one day and stopped going to school. she stayed home and tried to do online school but we often didn’t have internet.

October 10th, my one friend I had kept in touch with, Luke, my best friend. He took his life. That night, I went to a small band house show in florida and got fucking hammered. I went with the band to a stranger’s house and did heroine for the first and only time. when i got home the next day, i fell asleep on the floor of the bedroom. later that day, october 11th - the landlord came by for repairs. i was dead asleep and my sister was too sick to move, so the landlord just walked in. there were dead cats on the floor, shit piling in the kitchen. he gave us an eviction notice and by the end of the week, we moved. mom didn’t contact the school to let them know we left either. they called our mom’s brother to report us missing.

we got in her Tahoe, with all the dogs and cats crammed together. we just started driving, she didn’t say where.

we ended up at a Motel 8 on the outskirts of Atlanta, where my brother met a local dealer in a room next door. the dealer moved to a nearby trailer park and recommended it to my brother, but we couldn’t afford it yet. we were paying for two rooms, to keep the dogs separated. my sister opened mom’s computer and found an email pertaining to mom adopting a dog from Thailand, and paying its travel expenses. My sister confronted her and mother denied that she was going to adopt the dog, she was just helping him ‘get to a different, new family’.

mom disappeared for a few days after that, she hadn’t been buying food in days. she suddenly returned and announced that she adopted the dog and paid for a third hotel room across the street to have him in. we got kicked out of the motel for having too much stuff and too many animals. They literally told us ‘this is a motel, not a storage locker or shelter’.
we moved to a Red Roof Inn where we only had one room.

it was nearing my 16th birthday. we were only in the one room, had all the cats in the back of the car, with some of the dogs in the front. we had some family living nearby, and since my birthday is near thanksgiving, my mom convinced those family members to throw me a small party and celebrate thanksgiving on my birthday.

so it’s my 16th birthday. i’m depressed and sleep until 1 in the afternoon. we left to go to the celebration, and it’s early evening in fall so mother worries that the cats in the back of the truck will get cold. she puts a blanket over the kennel of 16 cats and we walk to the ihop across the street to meet our uncle in the parking lot. He was - coincidentally, also visiting this part of the family and offered to drive us. and man as soon as we get there, the whole family looks at us in shock and awe and absolute mortification. we were all grotesquely thin and dirty and smelly. my uncle took my siblings and me out shopping for new clothes and asked us if we’d been eating enough - we told him the truth.

we get back to the party after shopping, eat food, i drink a bunch of my aunt’s cinnamon tea, and then my uncle and mom get into a fight. he says he’s worried and wants his in-laws to take us for a few weeks while mom gets ‘on her feet’. my mom never accepts help from anybody, so she got super hurt and prideful and paid for a cab to take us home after dinner.

we met all this extended family that i had never met before, and their kids were similar age, but nothing with their family like i had ever seen. they were functional kids and adults. they said goodbye to me and that they wish things would get better. that was probably the most ashamed i have ever felt in my life.

when we got back to the hotel, mom lit the candle on a cupcake and gave it to me. told me happy birthday and asked what i’d wish for. i wished to feel less alone. my mom told me to wait there while she went to the truck to get a gift she got for me. she went outside and within seconds came back inside screaming her lungs out and crying. all of the cats in the back of the truck had died while we were out for my 16th birthday party.

Kelly, the friend who helped us get an apartment in philly, loaned my mother $5,000 and we moved into the trailer park J mentioned at the Motel 8 shortly after my birthday.

At this trailer park, my brother started running drugs and sometimes guns with J through the local neighborhood gangs. He started becoming independent and working through that. our trailer got shot up in a drive by around May, when some of the local gangs started to take notice of my brother. he stopped slinging guns and they never came back. he was still selling drugs though... I stayed at home and played video games every day, non stop, breakfast to dinner. It was my only means of escape for awhile. I started skateboarding again in the middle of the summer and met my new best friend, Luis, who turned into being my first maybe real love but i never told because i was ashamed and thought he wouldn’t want to be my friend anymore, and i couldn’t lose my only friend again.

i get into drugs again, mostly weed. some alcohol. we move across town shortly before my 17th birthday. then nearly a year goes by, my sister finds my dad, he’s a decent enough guy; i find out my entire life is a lie. it’s almost my 18th birthday, i want to leave but don’t know where i’d go. I told Luis i was in love with him, he didn’t feel the same and felt weird if i stayed at his place. i decided to kill myself or leave my mom.

2 weeks before my 18th birthday, i attempt to hang myself, the branch of the tree breaks.

nights before my 18th birthday, i packed all my things and arranged for plans to be gone for the night, by lying to my mom. on the night of my 18th birthday, i said ‘see you in a couple days’ to my mom, then my sister’s boyfriend took me to an arcade. next day, i ran away and moved 3,000 miles away with help from other family.

my brother was the only one still living with her by then, 4 days after my birthday, he told her i was gone.

it’s been years and i’ve never shared any of this with anyone. i’m doing better ish now. i only really smoke weed, and i quit smoking cigarettes even. i’m sorry this is so long

if you made it to the end, thanks for reading and let me tell you: every day that I am alive, is a goddamn day I choose to be alive. I am still here.