How can you fight Memory Loss.

        Many times while writing in this blog my mind becomes so empty or I forget the topic I wanted to write about it just makes me mad. Today for example, I heard a song and thought, that’s a great topic to write about and tell how it affects me as a survivor, but do you think I can remember the song? They tell me that memory loss is related to severe depression and if that is true then I really need to come out of it really soon before I totally loose my memory for good. It’s weird to start a sentence and stop forgetting that you were even talking let alone what you were talking about. Some time back I mentioned how I forget my way home and don’t recognize where I am at let alone forget the things I have done.

        The mind is truly amazing in so many ways, it holds all our thoughts and memories while controlling out bodies all at the same time. The past which we live are memories that we often can look back on almost on demand like being in a conversation and remember doing the same thing as the topic even as the topic changes. As survivors of Child Abuse our minds had a way of taking these memories and tucking them into a certain spot of our brain keeping the traumatic events away from the front of our mind until our mind felt that we are ready to deal with all the images and facts of the hidden past. I have no idea how the mind decides when the time is right or feels that we are in a position to start remembering the past but when it does it can release images (referred to as flashbacks) or flood us with images, dreams and thoughts causing severe depression, suicidal thoughts or acts, self harming and many other reactions that in fact we cannot handle.

            On the day we brought our first child home I was hit with fears and some memories of my abuse. I took therapy for a couple years and although I continued to have fears I stopped going but it never kept me out of work or from the activities that I did. When my brother abused his son and I helped the police in their investigation giving a testimony about my Sexual Abuse at the hands of my brother and I ended up back into therapy after my mind released more memories of my past which I revealed to the officer. Again I was affected, took counseling and was not out of work or stopped activities in my life. In both situations I was not afraid to leave the house, not afraid of people around me; in fact I continued to live what I felt was a normal life. The third time was no charm, because this time I wasn't telling anyone anything, I was not afraid to handle my children, in fact I had no idea what was about to happen during a simple medical procedure that was so normal and widely used on thousands of people daily I am sure except this time thet procedure was performed on a survivor. The simple act of placing a rubber band on a single hemorrhoid not only would cause me to walk three days feeling that same exact feeling of when I was raped, but would have a major affect on my brain and my life. Major depression sat in after going through just about every flashback I could have, dreams turned into night terrors and I actually started to have suicidal ideation visions which in my state of depression I was so afraid I would act on them so I was checked into the hospital and spent seventeen days working on what was going on.

            Prior to the floodgates opening I had been on meds for slight depression and mood changes that did come about after the first memories when we brought our daughter home. After the flood I was on very strong medications at some of the highest dosages as they tried to bring my depression down to a more manageable range yet this time it seemed that all the meds they tried on me did not work. When they finally found the perfect cocktail that worked they released me to go home, except this time I ended up on disability not going to work. Since then, they have added new meds, changed meds and have tried many different methods to stop my downward spiral I was on. Nothing seems to be working which is why ECT is now the next option. I have heard many good and bad things about this procedure and I will be honest I am somewhat afraid of how it will turn out once I start the treatments. I am the type of person who likes to research everything and one thing that I found about Major depression is that the mind is actually affected in a physical way as scans have showed where a certain part of the brain will actually become smaller but I have not been able to see if ECT changes any of this in any way. Another factor I have is the Disassociation Identify Disorder and how it will affect the alters I have as they have been filling gaps in my memory from my past. I actually learned a ton of information from them and this explained many questions I had, and not just information but information that included memories and images where I actually believe they are there and in someway are a part of me. I also feel that these alters protect me when a severe flashback occurs or when I am in counseling which is where they come forward the most. When they do come forward I have no memory of what they said but I am told it is during this switching that most of my information about my abuse is revealed.  

            I am not sure if the memory loss that I am experiencing are my alters switching back and forth at time, the medication that I am on is causing it or if it is just plain a symptom of Major Depression which I am told. What I can tell you, is that the more it happens the more upset I am becoming almost to the point getting really angry. I am fumbling words, loosing thoughts, forgetting appointments and my short term memory is really poor. Traveling this road I am on to recovery is proving to be a very hard one to travel and is getting old. I know I need to heal but I am not sure my body is working with my mind to reach this goal. Just as in the beginning I explained to my doctors it was like my mind knew what was going on and I was aware of things but my inner child (Alters) reacted in a different fashion causing confusion inside. Confusion that today is still holding me back just as I am able to blog about certain things and come somewhat close to having something good to read yet I am unable my self to follow what it is I am typing. Imagine your goal will help you reach it, do you think I am able to do this? I am lucky if I can picture what I will be doing in the next hour. Dealing with Major Depression combined with PTSD I have said is to me the most difficult things I have ever had to deal with, if you can say I am dealing with it at all, food for thought. Until Next Time…

Child Abuse, a disease with a history.



For more than 100 years Haut de la Garenne
 had been a center of child abuse

Child Abuse is a disease that is running ramped across the United States about as fast as Head Lice and is kept just as quiet. School officials are now trained to look for signs of abuse on a child just like a school nurse is trained to look for Head Lice in children attending school. If a child is found to have Head Lice a notice is sent home to notify parents, however parents don’t discuss this with friends and family because of the myth that Head Lice is considered to be a sign of being dirty. Abuse is the same now, as the news reports almost on a daily or weekly of someone who has been caught and arrested. Letters are sent home every time a sex offender moves into any school district informing parents (At least here in NY) a general location where this person is living.

        This is a good practice and it shows just how many pedophiles are out there but it is not a deterrent to stop them from preying on our children. Back when I was abused there was no checking children, in fact in my medical records when my personality changed such as withdrawing, becoming agitated and disruptive, and not following directions I was sent to the doctor and tested for hyperactivity. There was no checking to see the bruises that were on my body and when I sat against the wall during play time alone, I was not asked why I would not play. So looking at growing up in the 70’s compared to today’s society we truly have come along way in making the world aware of Child Abuse. Children are now speaking up, they are being honest about life at home and they are opening up to friends who help them break away by telling their own parents when the child might still be afraid to speak. We have come long way, but we have still have a long way to go before abuse becomes no more.

            Thinking about this today I did a little research on the history of Child Abuse after knowing that in the 70’s it was not a widely known epidemic, and hearing stories that prior to that it happened yet was taboo to tell anyone what happened in the house behind closed doors. What I found shocked me on just how Child Abuse was not only happening but was also accepted in the world. Historically, the routine use of children as poison containers to prevent adults from feeling overwhelmed by their anxieties had also been universal. Examples from the history of childhood regularly reveal children are expected to "absorb" the bad feelings of their caretakers. As one peasant community in rural Greece puts it, you must have children around to put your bad feelings into, especially when the "Bad Hour" comes around. An informant describes the process as follows; one of the ways for the Bad Hour to occur is when you get angry. When you're angry a demon gets inside of you. Only if a pure individual passes by, like a child for instance, will the "bad" leave you, for it will fall on the unpolluted. Newborn infants, in particular, were perfect poison containers because they were so "unpolluted." The newborn then became so full of the parent's projections that even if he or she is allowed to live (up to half the children in early societies were murdered at birth), the infant had to be tied up--tightly swaddled in bandages for up to a year or more---to prevent it from "tearing its ears off, scratching its eyes out, breaking its legs, or touching its genitals," i.e., to prevent it from acting out the violent and sexual projections of the parents. Most early states practiced child sacrifice. Typical was Carthage, where a large cemetery has been discovered called The Tophet filled with over 20,000 urns deposited there between 400 and 200 B.C. The urns contained bones of children sacrificed by their parents, who often would make a vow to kill their next child if the gods would grant them a favor--for instance, if their shipment of goods were to arrive safely in a foreign port.

            By the thirteenth century in the West, abandonment via oblation, or the giving of young children to monasteries for sexual and other uses, had ended, and the first disapproval of pedophilia appeared. The first childrearing tracts were published and some advanced parents began to practice what has been termed the ambivalent mode of childrearing, where the child was not born completely evil, but was seen as being still full of enough dangerous projections so that the parent, whose task it was to mold it, must beat it into shape like clay. Church moralists for the first time began to warn against sexual molestation of children by parents, nurses and neighbors. Pediatrics and educational philosophy were born, parents of means began suggesting that perhaps rather than sending their infants out to be wet nursed in some peasant village--and thereby condemning over half of them to early death--the mother might herself nurse her infant. The baby, said some mothers who began to try nursing their own babies, even responded to this care by giving love back to the nursing mother, stroking her breast and face and cooing. And if the father, as often happened, complained that his wife's breast belonged to him not the baby, these bold new mothers suggested that the father should be allowed to hold the baby too. These childhood reforms immediately preceded and thereby produced the humanistic, religious and political revolutions we associate with early modern times. Prior to this, children were masturbated by adults and even licked on their bodies as though they were substitute breasts. For instance, Little Louis XIII, in 1603, was described by his pediatrician as having his penis and breasts kissed by everyone in the court, and his parents would regularly make him part of sexual intercourse in the royal bed. But childrearing reformers beginning in the eighteenth century began to try to bring this open sexual abuse under control, only it was the child who was now punished for touching his or her genitals, under threat of circumcision, clitoridectomy, infibulation and various cages and other genital restraint devices. These terrorizing warnings and surgical interventions only began to die out at the end of the nineteenth century, after two hundred years of brutal and totally unnecessary assault on children's bodies and psyches for touching themselves. Despite the reformers' efforts, progress was so uneven that one British journalist wrote in 1924 that "cases of incest are terribly common in all classes. [Usually] the criminal goes unpunished. Two men coming out from [an incest] trial were overheard saying to a woman who deplored there had been no conviction, what nonsense! Men should not be punished for a thing like that. It doesn't harm the child.'" By the nineteenth century's socializing mode, some parents no longer needed to terrorize, beat and sexually seduce their children, and more gentle psychological means began to be used to "socialize" the child. The socializing mode is still the main model of upbringing in Western nations, featuring the mother as trainer and the father as provider and protector, and the child is seen as slowly being made to conform to the parents' model of goodness.

            Changing childhood is a communal task. And it works. In 1979, Sweden passed a law saying that hitting children was as unlawful as hitting adults. Imagine that, children were people, just like adults. Parents who hit their children weren't put into jail--that would just deprive the children of their caretakers. Instead parents were taught how to bring up children without hitting them. And at the same time, high school students were taught how to bring up children without violence. Twenty years later after this passage, these high school students had their own children, and no surprise they don't hit them. To those who object to the cost of communities helping all parents, we can only reply: Can we afford not to teach parenting? What more important task can we devote our resources to? Do we really want to have massive armies and jails and emotionally crippled adults forever? Must each generation continue to torture and neglect its children so they repeat the violence and economic exploitation of previous generations? Why not achieve meaningful political and social revolution by first achieving a parenting revolution? If war, social violence, class domination and economic destruction of wealth are really revenge rituals for childhood trauma, how else can we remove the source of these rituals? How else can we end child abuse and neglect? How else increase the real wealth of nations, our next generation? How else achieve a world of love and laughter of which we are truly capable? Our task now must be to create an entirely new profession of "child helpers" who can reach out to every new child born on earth and help its parents give it love and independence. I was very amazed at the information that is out there and it appears we have our work cut out for us. Until Next Time…

Most information taken from http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/05_history.html
Photo taken from http://www.highstrangeness.tv/articles/jerseydevils.php

Are the eyes really windows to the soul?

            Today while looking into the mirror, I looked deep into my own eyes and thought about the old proverb that says, “Eyes are the window to the soul” which happened to be traced back to somewhere between 58 and 68 AD. This very saying has been said a million times or more for many different reasons, even in most of my prior counseling sessions this phrase was mentioned. As I stood there looking deep into my own eyes, the only thing I was able to see was darkness without any emotions. That is when I began to wonder, how do others view me when they look into my eyes.

This actually got into thinking what do people really see, and how is it that I can attract people who at some point in their lives have been abused and find it very comfortable to talk to me. Of course a lot of these are triggers into my own abuse however in some way speaking with them made these triggers a bit different which I can’t explain. It was at this point that I remembered how I wear a mask to hide my past from the world, could it be that they are able to see through my mask and see who I truly am? Could it be that the other perpetrators had the same ability to see beyond the mask I was wearing and see that I was an abused child? This bothered me as I have always said I wore a sticker on my forehead that read “VICTIM”. While I know this is not true, the fact that I had my family abusing me, two other people were able to take advantage of me so something in these two statements had to be true or there was something else at play. What I was able to find was a proverb that covered everything that I was questioning. What do people see when they look into my eyes, and do see behind this mask that I wear every day of my life? What I found was someone named Cicero (106-43 B.C.) is quoted as saying, 'Ut imago est animi voltus sic indices oculi' (The face is a picture of the mind as the eyes are its interpreter)**.

            I read this and was struck by the way this proverb was written and just what it meant to me. The face is a picture of the mind, so no matter what mask I am wearing there really is no hiding from the world and since the eyes are the interpreter to what is on my mind it trully could be seen just by looking into my eyes. Think about that for a moment, what ever you are feeling your mind is projecting the image onto your face. This phrase does makes a lot of sense now in so many ways. I looked into my own eyes and saw darkness because as the saying goes, “you are your own worst critic” and because I feel so down and depressed that is what I was going to see. Yet when I speak to my counselor or the receptionist they will sometimes tell me that I look good or don’t look as depressed today. No, my mask, is not broken, it is just that my mind is painting an image of my own inner feelings. When I am depressed my face becomes droopy, there is no smile, I get tired so my eyes just sort of sag which basically means I am not really showing any real emotion. However, if I get into a good mood I smile, my face is more alert, they tell me I have more color in my face and I don’t look as tired. I have more color in my face, another thing to think about, can't you adjust the colors of a painting by making them brighter or dimmer? My mask at the time is a painting of my minds reaction to my own feelings or thoughts that I possess at that very moment.

            So the question is, why do they say that it is the eyes are a window to the soul? Think about that for a moment, reactions to the soul are played out in the mind and thus a picture is painted on our face. So as a survivor of Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) the very soul that was touched is portrayed on your face and if someone crosses that boundary or enters your space where you become uncomfortable to the point your heart is racing, and you have that empty butterfly feeling deep in the pit of your soul, then the mind is going to react to the uneasiness or the building fear and project this onto your face painting or what we can call a facial reaction. When someone is in this, they will start looking for an easy escape, a route to safety or they will not look at the person because they are afraid that they will see the fear that has built up.

            My own feelings and thoughts about this are that perpetrators don’t have the ability to see past any mask but they do have the ability to read eyes. If a child is willing to look at them and shows no fear, then they have found a target to prey upon, and if they find a child that immediately reacts with fear, they may probe a little to see what the reason they are in fear and knowing how to relax a child could very well take advantage of this child again. For the child that looks away, does not speak, runs or walks away pretending not to notice the person, then the perpetrator will most likely move onto another target. It is only the real hard core criminals who will choose a child where it is easy to grab them and most likely this will be the child that will end up never being found alive or even found at all.

            So the next time that I start to think about how I wore this sticker on my forehead or somehow attracted pedophiles to me I really know now that it truly was a myth. It is the way that my body and mind were conditioned to react to different situations and that someone is able to see me for how I was. No, it is not my fault that it happened once and now I fully know that in no way was it my fault that it happen again or by more then one person, it was just that the other people were already a perpetrators and knew what to look for. Something that I had no idea that I was giving off, let alone showing my past through my eyes, my mind or my soul. Until Next Time….

**From "Random House Dictionary of Popular Proverbs and Sayings" by Gregory Y. Titelman (Random House, New York, 1996).

Broken Dreams

            Dreams, is what we do when we sleep or think of something we would like to do, go or have. Dreams are good, their normal and in life it’s something that keeps us going, thriving to reach what we are on a path towards. Dreams are goals that we set at one point or another in hopes that we will make it to what we have always wished for. A new car, getting married, a special trip or surviving a past that has changed your life and taken away most of the dreams I had.

Broken dreams are something that I and many other survivors of Child Abuse live with almost everyday of their lives. Many times my depression has stepped in the way of spending time family and friends and because of this I have missed out on a lot of my children’s special moments. Lately they don’t even ask anymore because more times then not they know what the answer will be, and I don’t know if they know how hurt I am because I am not the father that I have always dreamed I would be. Many times the struggles of life alone would have me working longer hours and even weekends but when someone begins

 to relive a past the struggles that stood in the way become trivial and forgotten because of the new problem that settled in. I guess this is one reason I understand why my children make the comments they do when they say them, even if they are made in anger, after all I know they harbor some anger towards me and if its not really anger it can be called disappointment. They don’t mean to have these feelings and yet they can’t understand when someone who used to be someone they knew as a close father to a father who spends most his time depressed and sleeping. My daughter once wanted to marry me when she was very young and also said the song that says “Daddy’s hands were like steel when she was wrong, but still had the softest hands” reminded her of me. Now, she is lucky to get me out to take her driving and will tell me that she will drive and that I will be okay. I will be okay, my sixteen year old daughter is there to hold my hand when a daddy is suppose to be the one to protect her, and no it’s not due to the change of the times.

            Sometime ago my daughter said to me that her growing up she really did not get to know me all like she would have liked to and that she was kind of jealous of the younger kids because once I am over all this they will truly get to know a father like she never knew. All the needles in the world could not inflict the pain in a man’s heart hearing that from the first daughter whom I love so very much. And the whole problem is that sixteen years ago when we brought her home for the first time I could not change her diaper because of my past and this was the first time things started to surface. As a father, I was robbed of many things a father normally would do with their growing children. I have never given my children a bath, never seen them nude, and never changed a diaper unless I was the only person there and there was no waiting and never was able to watch some of the things that a father would share in memories with their wife or children. I started counseling back then and after a year work and other commitments started to get in the way and I stopped going, even though I never really started to touch on my full past because I did not know too much about it.

            The current job that I have I have used a lot of sick days in the years I have been there, it was not until I went out sick back in February 12^th that I realized that all those times were really related to my past. It was the procedure that caused me to cross over the edge in what you have heard me refer to as the volcano when all the memories that I could have came flowing forward through flashbacks, nightmares, and triggers from places that I would have never expected. It was not until I was admitted to the second hospital because of my depression and suicidal ideation that the word disassociation would come out from the doctor which I had to see on a daily basis for my eighteen day stay. A lot of things started to make sense about things that happened throughout my life but it was not until my third hospital stay in Baltimore where the Disassociation Identity Disorder came into play and that explained a whole lot more of my life. For once in my life I could understand the reason I had done things the way that I did, the way that I act and most of all the feelings that I carry. All along the path of my life the dreams that I had, the dreams that I carried and those I made for my future were all dictated by my family and a past that I would carry inside for everyday of my life.

            So now I am on this long road to recovery to try and come to terms with my past and to continue to heal. There are a lot that I need to continue doing what I have learned such as grounding and containment, there is many tools that I have yet to learn and will soon be putting those into motion on my road and how funny that the first step to healing turns out to be making goals, or in other words Dreams. And once I am able to reach all my dreams only then, can I go back and pick up the pieces of my broken dreams. Until Next Time…..

What is my meaning?

            Tonight was depressing the same, yet I wondered if my life had any meaning because I felt as if I was falling over the edge. I have been depressed before but nothing like this, not where I questioned if my life had any meaning or not. I just sat there thinking of all that I have and I tried to come out of it because it scared me to even feel this way.

            I have a feeling it came from a comment my daughter had said, see we were joking around in a van full of girls and her boyfriend she said she realized that there were two guys in the van. I looked up and said, one boy and one man to which she replied that the last she knew my mind was stuck at age twelve. I knew she was joking and did not mean what she said but I felt it inside and my heart started to sink, my mind started drifting into other comments my family has said and I just went down hill just as fast as I thought of them. I began to think of the way that I was then I thought about the other comment she had said to me once before about if I stay the way I am I will not become anything that I might as well be dead. I thought about what happened last week when my wife was disciplining my son when I know that alter had asked her to stop. It was the eight year old but like she said, she can’t go around worried all the time that she is going to trigger me by doing or saying something wrong. And actually out of the seven children we have four have made reference to my problem, even tossing the agoraphobia in my face by saying at lease she is not afraid to go out. How I am feeling and what the family is seeing is starting to get old, they can’t deal with me and frankly I can’t either.

The road I am on is becoming very bumpy and I feel I am at one of those spots in the road where it is a struggle to get over this hump. More often have I been questioning my meaning and how much longer my family is going to deal with me until it really blows up to where I won’t be able to handle it? The comments are starting to come easy and I try to ask as if I do not notice them, in fact no one would have known about today if my other daughter did not hear it. And of course no one knew what she was talking about so when the whole van broke out into a laugh I went right back to that eight year old who was always being made fun of and laughed at. I wish someone would tell me how long it will take until I stop feeling this way. When words that I hear won’t cause me to flashback or send my mind roaming my past as if looking through a deck of cards each with an event I have lived. I can tell you this, which is just how it feels, like a deck of cards with events of my past just flipping around in my head not knowing which memory card will be the next drawl. And the more cards that are played and the more comments made, makes me really wonder just if my life now has any real meaning.

            It is so hard to live in today while at moments living in yesterday, I can’t stop these memories even if they are old. Each alter comes out at different times, and sometimes it feels as if two are out at once and when that happens I really feel low because I know what they are and why they are here. This alone makes me think of just how bad things really were, or I realize that it is not a dream I’m going to wake up from soon. .The depression hurts badly, the PTSD hurts worse and combines them together and it’s a world of hell. I take all these meds that are suppose to help, I wonder what I would be if I were not even on these. The biggest thing that it has done is take away the anger I had that I directed everywhere but where is should but as time is going on I feel as if I am starting to stall or even go backwards. Some of my post make a world of sense, the poems that I write they sound so good but inside I question if even I listen to what I say. I get so confused and forget about everything I am told that I really do wonder where I am going, where I am on this road. This is why I question now, what kind of meaning does my life really have. Until Next Time…

Who dealt the cards?

            Who stacked the deck of cards against me, that’s what I want to know. I follow a site on Twitter and tonight they posted three tweets in a row, most sexual abusers are someone in the family or someone the child knows, not the proverbial stranger with a lollipop, child abuse is far more likely to occur in the child's home than in a day care center and drug and alcohol abuse in the family makes child abuse about twice as likely. If this is all true which we all know they are then I was born with the wrong hand in the game of life.

            Most children know their abusers, how very true. Not only did I know my abusers they were family and as it says is more likely to occur in the child’s home. That’s two out of three so it’s not looking to good so far on this topic, not one bit. Alcohol and drugs, yup that comes into play as well which is in our home and I knew them very well. My brother obtained alcohol from a neighbor and what I remember he also had a drink when my parents were not home, and how he never got in trouble is something my sister and I cannot figure out, unless he had my mother in his pocket. My father was one who drank all the time, if he was not working he was drunk and I have no idea he went to work with hangovers. He worked part time at a bar and one of the perks was free drinks, it was an alcoholic in a candy store with a get free card. Mom, she lived on pain pills which I have no idea why she did because she had no reason to be on them. Those and Xanax were the pills of choice right up till the day she passed away. If life was played by a deck or cards, then my sister and I were dealt the worst hand one can be dealt.

            I watched how Oprah had the guy on there who told about all his abuse, that was vey hard to watch and listen to because it was very much like my life. My life was fear, lack of sleep and always on guard. Sexual Abuse, Physical Abuse and Mental Abuse ran rapid in the family so much that anyone who came in contact with our family was sucked into it like standing in front of a black hole, there was no getting away from it. From my wife who I have spoken to and had a bad couple days’ realizing what it was that I did to help allow her to be abused because to me it was so normal. It was the way I was raised and it became normal to her. One of my sister’s boyfriends became a victim of my brother by himself as well as partnered with my sister. The things that we were subjected to like watch experience and do goes way beyond my own comprehension. Then I look at my parents, oh how they fought and I don’t just mean arguments either. My father would hit my mother, push her and she in turn would throw things and it did not matter what it was. They both tried to commit suicide in front of me, or I should say I was the one to walk into them doing it (Lucky Me) and would end up stopping it. Not only did the abuse go on for days, weeks, months or years it went on for a decade and a half. In fact, it went on longer then that and even longer for my sister even though I thought it had stopped for her,

            As my sister and I got older and the three kids moved out away from my parents, it was my brother who could not live too far away from them. In fact he was three streets over and spent 90% of his time awake over to their house. He would say my mother was more important to him then his wife was. If one of his kids got hurt it was my mother and brother that would go to the emergency room, not his wife. When it came time for shopping it was the same situation. I actually asked my wife if she thought it was possible that they could be sleeping together as it was that type of relationship. What I did find is that my mother was doing things for him that no one knew including my father. His cars, house, major purchases were all made by my mother and he was suppose to be paying for them but was not making any payments. By the time he was arrested he had over $80,000.00 in debt which including $40,000 that his mother in law co-signed for, No wonder when my mother passed away she left everything to me niece, because she was my brothers daughter and as far as she was concerned my sister and I rocked the boat a little too much. Heck, my father stopped talking to me the day my brother was arrested because I turned him in. Dysfunctional family is not even close to the family I lived in.

            Well, I am going to make this short because most of this I have already said but it was those three statements that got to me tonight. It made me realize that from the start of everything the decks were stacked against me and my sister. In the end we thought we had the final card to play when he was arrested but all along they left the last card which has me fighting for my own life. Until Next Time…