07
After the divorce, I started stuttering.
Mom didn’t want me.
When she saw I couldn’t even talk, she got
mad.
She called me worthless.
She called me a burden.
She thought I was too young to know what
the words meant.
I knew.
One time, she took me downtown, said she’d
get me something to eat, then disappeared
for hours.
I stood there.
It started to rain. A kind store owner let me
wait inside, but I said no.
A few minutes later, she came back.
“You’re a freak? Don’t you know to go home
You re a Treak? Dont you know to go nome
in the rain?”
She yelled, and I cried.
She cried, too.
Later, I saw something similar on TV, and I
knew, she tried to leave me.
After that, I stopped talking and wrote in a
journal.
I wrote: Why does Mom treat me like an
enemy?
I wrote: Sometimes, I don’t think I’m her kid.
I wrote about how I felt, my anger, my hate.
く
I let everything out.
One day, she found the journal.
She tore it up, yelling: “I gave birth to you,
raised you, why hate me?!”
She took everything out on me.
Grandma said, when she got home, I was
curled up in a ball, not moving.
Like I was dead.
She freaked.
She grabbed a rolling pin and beat Mom,
yelling and crying.
Afterward, she didn’t take me to the hospital.
She went to the drugstore and got some
medicine.
When I woke up, my body was covered in it.
All bruised.
Grandma cried, saying sorry.
She spoiled Mom.
She begged me, not to tell anyone, not to call
the cops.
“I’m old, your dad’s wherever, with Kevin. If
something happens to your mom, you’ll go to
an orphanage.”
I was silent.
Г
I was silent.
Tears slipped down my face.
The five years with Mom were terrible.
It was darkness, the past.
But my brother thought he suffered, while I
was enjoying a good life.
He hated me for it.
I stood in the bathroom, touching my scars.
Smiling without making a sound.
