In life there are many challenging obstacles to get one where they need to be. In this paper I'm going to reflect on an early childhood tragedy that my oldest sister and I faced. Child abuse is when a parent or any legal guardian physically, emotionally, or neglectfully harms a child. Sited sources state that "every year more than three million reports of child abuse is made in the United States alone." Unfortunately, I was a victim of this terrible act.    

Growing up at first I remember the years looking through rose-color glasses. It was just my mom, sister and I being the baby, there was nothing more I could ask for. I remember my mom working late night shifts to make sure we had everything we need and wanted, doing everything she could to make her girls happy. My mom was everything I hoped and dreamed to be; beautiful and very strong, she was more than enough support; my motivation, she was always there to dry my tears when I cried for my dad. I would find myself asking her questions like "does he love us" "why isn't he here with us." I would see all my friends with two parents, I couldn’t understand why my dad wasn’t there living with us. They divorced when I was maybe two or younger and the only memories I had of him was the occasional weekend visits. I cherished those times with him. The sweet lullabies he would sing to my sister and I before we fell asleep, the cologne fragrance he wore to work and church, his smile, his hugs. I love my father. The divorce was a messy one, they couldn’t even spend five minutes in the room together without tempers flaring. Growing up witnessing this was heartbreaking. For the longest I told myself that I would never get married because if it was going to be like this with children involved I would rather skip that fairy tale. I remember moving around a lot with my mom, she switched jobs often and I could tell that her loads were heavy. But whatever we had, all three of us made it work for a long while.    

The year was 1996 and I was five years old when my mom began dating my step dad. Now before the story unfolds I'm not here to paint him as the wicked step parent because he wasn’t that. My step dad was amazing; a tall, dark God fearing man. Anything we wanted he made sure we had it. The house was small in the ghettos of the Pleasantville subdivision in East Harris County. He grew up in this house in the 70s with his sister and brothers, mom and grandmother. My sister and I shared a room which was new to us because all we ever knew was sharing apartment bedrooms with our mother. The elementary school was directly across the street from our house. I remember sometimes being embarrassed walking home because other kids would laugh at the outer appearance of the house. The color was faded pink wood with an old swing falling apart in the drive-way. The garage was old too, sometimes when we lifted it up to leave it would fall off track. I use to hate walking home from school, I didn’t want other people to know where I lived. I was young and didn’t know no better. Outside looking in you would picture the perfect family but no one knew the hell faced on the inside.    

I was a good child; made excellent grades, well-liked by teachers and classmates, perfect attendance, and honor roll. My sister was my idol but somehow, she didn’t have the same luck as me. Since elementary she hung around the wrong crowd her grades weren't as high, and she wasn’t as focused in school as I was. My mom had a lack of patience with this behavior, I remember one day coming home in tears to what I was seeing. My sister and her friends decided to write on the walls in the restroom and my mom beat her. I say beat her because this was no ordinary whooping with the belt. My mom was hitting her violently with an extension cord. I've never seen my mom act this way, my sister was running through the house trying to get away with a shirt full of blood and my mom was chasing her. The mental pictures never fade and it still haunts me to this day. I'm not sure what changed in my mom from when it was just us three to moving into the house in Pleasantville, but I didn't recognize her anymore and she didn’t feel like my mom she really began to scare me. I was in the second grade my sister and I was walking home from school everything seemed normal. My step dad was waiting on the porch for us when we arrived, there was an after-school snack on the table, and my baby sister Alex was sleeping in her crib. I could tell something was wrong though; something didn't feel right in the house, and my mother wasn’t there with us. She didn’t come home until later that night. My step dad dropped us off at the next-door neighbor’s house to watch us until he returned. This was the when I experienced change for the first time. The next day at school I was told to leave class and go to the office. There was a lot of older people in business suits greeting me with smiling faces. My mom spent the night in jail one of my sisters teachers called Child Protective Services on my mom after seeing bruises on her body.

   I wasn’t prepared at all for this next chapter in my life. My mom was the only parent I knew for the first eight years, so to be told I wasn’t going to live with her anymore brought a lot of unwanted emotions. I can’t lie, at that point in time I hated my mom for what she did to our family. Before the whole custody battle all three of us would stay up crying because of the near separation. I couldn’t understand why she was crying though because she was the main reason for the division.  We stayed with our paternal grandparents for a while before moving in with our dad. I didn’t want to live with him though. I loved him and the weekend visits were fun and all, but the thought of permanently living there gave me nightmares. In the house was my dad, stepmom, step brother, and new born baby sister Lauran. It was a two-bedroom house on the southwest side of Houston. We had everything we wanted growing up there; both parents working full time jobs, we had cable TV, all the toys, food and candy a kid could dream of. Looking back at those times it almost feels like they were trying to buy our love.   

The last thing I received from my moms side of town was a huge yellow envelope full of handwritten cards from my classmates and teacher telling me how much they would miss me, some left phone numbers while others shared funny memories of our third grade class. Changing schools is hard on any young kid trying to fit in with a new crowd, wanting to please any and everybody just for them to accept the new girl was very challenging for me. I was already shy and kind of awkward so it was hard for me to make the same number of friends I had while living with my mom. I remember eating lunch alone and always coming home in my feelings because no one would talk to me. I was the quiet kid with the big glasses who sat in the front of the class and got picked on. There was this group of girls who at the age of eight or nine thought they were all that. They would always make fun of my last name, its Pierce but they made jokes calling me Peterson or any other name that was not mine I hated living there. One day I saw a familiar face. Her name was Kiara Austin, one of my friends from Pleasantville; she had just gotten transferred to Kate Bell Elementary. It was fate I finally had a friend. It didn't last that long because she moved away for the very same reason we moved in with our dad. Then I was alone again. 

I felt alone for the most part growing up in my dads house. My sister and my him formed a close relationship and my stepmom was always busy taking care of the baby and my step brother because of his disability. I wondered why I was even living there some times; my mom never touched me so why did I have to leave? She always talked to me, made sure I was okay and if I wasn’t she cheered me up in an instant. She supported all my dreams even if they seemed impossible at that time she was there to motivate me and push me to be the best I could be and always correct me when I was wrong. At my dads I was stuck in the middle. I always felt less important or second best. I wanted to play sports in middle school and high school but my dad would rather pay for my sister to cheer. So then I began to act out just hoping that someone would pay attention to me but with their busy lives they just enrolled me in therapy sessions. I felt like my dad didn’t even want to find out the reasons behind my behavior I wasn't a bad adolescent, I just wanted the same familiar love that was shown to me before the change. My grades in high school started to drop lower and lower each year; I guess it’s due to lack of discipline and guidance in the household. I started dating which made it even worse because I wasn’t focusing at all on what I needed to be focused on so I ended up having to take my sophomore year over, when all of my classmates of 2010 was going into their junior year. That same year my sister and I formed a relationship with our mom again and she told us the reasons why she did what she did when we were younger. She was dealing with a lot of anger, and my sisters behavior was out of control she strongly admits to being wrong and she apologizes for it all to this day. Something happened at my dad house which forced us to move in with our mom. I was seventeen at that time, and already stuck in my ways of doing what I wanted to do. My dad let me get away with everything maybe because he didn’t care too much. When I moved in with my mom it was a different ball game; she enrolled me into the high school up the street, was on top of me so that I would get caught up with my class, made me get a job, and made sure we all went to church every Sunday. I wasn’t use to this discipline so I would often rebel against her and my step dad, but if it wasn’t for them I probably wouldn't have graduated on time. I would have continued to let the ones who meant me no good drag me down, I wouldn’t have a relationship with my God, and I would still be lost.  

I read in an article called "5 Benefits if showing your child unconditional love" that “Affection and unconditional love can make children emotionally happier and free of stress”. I apply this to my life because when I started out growing up with my mom I was happy I was on the honor roll in school, and I was healthy both mentally and physically. When I moved in with my dad at an early age I felt myself becoming more and more stressed, developing depression, and felt alone as the years would pass. I sometimes would question his motive of even wanting custody of us some would agree that it was to get us out of the violent environment we were in living with my mom, but I later found out that he didn’t want to pay child support for my sister and me. When I moved back with my mom for the remaining high school years I was depressed for a little while but only because I missed all my friends from the other side of town. I knew it was to better me and I knew that my mom wanted nothing but the best for me.  

I wonder a lot how my life would have been if I had grown up with my mom; maybe it was for the best that we didn’t live with her until she matured and sorted out her own issues. My younger sister who did grew up with her, is now a senior in high school, getting ready to go off to Texas State and full of joy in her heart.

I believe that the love and affection a parent shows are very important for both the child’s mental and physical growth. If you fail in either area you are hindering your child’s growth. Growing up living with my mother I felt that I had the best of both worlds. There was never a day that went by where I felt unloved by her or my stepfather. It wasn’t easy growing up in the house because of the physical abuse that my sister had to endure or the outer appearance of the house which was embarrassing to me, but it was when the house wasn’t getting turned upside down where it felt like Christmas every day. Figuratively speaking together my mom and stepdad did everything they could to make sure we had what we needed. Not what we wanted but they were in our ears at a very early age drilling in; that to get what you want in this world we would have to work hard for it, nothing in this world is free and handouts that can only get you so far.

One night when I was in second grade my mom went to my school’s open house, but came back disappointed and I thought I was in trouble. In class I had many friends but I was quiet; I knew what kind of mother I was coming home to so I didn’t let anything or body jeopardize my life. I was focused and whatever I didn’t understand my mother was always there to assist me. I didn’t understand why she came home mad her exact words were, “tell me why your teacher had a lot of things to say about you and your behavior in class.” I felt my stomach drop and my eyes started to tear. She then told me that my second-grade teacher Ms. Jones told her I was one of her best students in the class, I was always respectful to her and other classmates, my grades were honor roll noble, and that she was pleased to have me in her class. I think I tried so hard to please my mom because I knew she wanted nothing less than for me to do my best.

 It wasn’t until recently when my sister and I sat down and talked to my mom to find out what made her so angry during our years of growing up. It was a very emotional conversation but we both wanted to know. When we moved in with our dad both of us felt that we would have been better off growing up in Pleasantville and we wanted to know what made us different from her raising our younger sister. She went in detail to tell us all the trauma she faced growing up with her mom. When she was a senior in high school, my grandfather left the family and proceeded to start a new family with some other woman leaving my grandmother to raise four kids on her own. Since my mom is the oldest of the four a lot of responsibility fell on her shoulders. My grandmother stopped working and started drinking and smoking cigarettes heavy due to stress. She then started taking her anger out on my mom. It was her senior year in high school when my grandmother became violent towards all four of them. After graduating my mom tried everything she could to get away from her mom, but since she is the oldest and loves her siblings so much she stayed around to make sure they had the love and support to finish school too. My mom miscarried her first child, because of stress and other the things my grandmother put her through. For instance, making her walk five blocks in the hot sun carrying gallons of water and other heavy grocery bags by herself. Locking her in the restroom causing her to lose a lot of blood, blaming her because she was too young and didn’t know what she was doing. After hearing these things, it made me despise my grandmother, since knowing her she was the sweetest person to be around. I do understand her anxiety and frustration after her husband up and leaving the family in that way but it was not my mother’s fault especially when she put her studies to the side to make sure the family still had a system. Also, hearing this didn’t justify the way my mom treated my sister. I do believe in cycles, since my grandmother expressed her anger through the violence of child abuse, my mother acted the same way towards my older sister when expressing her anger. My sister is now a mother, and at first I was scared for my niece because I didn’t want the cycle of child abuse continuing. What made it worse was when we found out that her daughter Karlie has Optic Nerve Hypoplasia, she was diagnosed when she was 10 months old, and I’m sure all parties involved with the custody battle we went through was on edge to see how my sister would be able to raise a blind child. My sister is in love with her daughter, who is now four, and has never raised a hand to harm her, and will go out of her way to do so, to anyone who tries to harm Karlie.

The physical abuse my sister faced in one house is the same neglect I felt growing up in the other. I tried to do everything I could to get my father’s attention but I never felt the love or support I felt I needed from him while growing up. I don’t spend too much time dwelling on it these days because I like to look at it, as it shaped me into the person I am today. Growing up in Richmond I spent a lot of time alone in my room writing scripts, songs, and drawing. I found comfort in my room and in my thoughts, I would create characters who felt the way I felt. I wouldn’t talk as much at the dinner table because I felt what I said wasn’t important. I went through the cutting stage for attention and I became an angry child, a version of myself I didn’t even dream to be while growing with my mom. I was dark and I thank God it was just a phase. I remember buying my first car from this rundown car dealership. (All signs said not to buy it, but I was 16 and eager because all my high school friends were driving themselves to school, I wanted to do so too). One weekend my sister and I went to the mall to hang out and on our way back home my car must have overheated or needed an oil change because it abruptly came to a stop when I was driving, by the grace of God nothing happened to us. When we told our dad what happened the only thing he said was; “well what you want me to do about it?” Or one Thanksgiving I was sick with strep throat, instead of staying home to make sure I was okay he went out of town to enjoy the holiday. I wasn’t expecting him to put his life on hold but this made me realize that I was all I had in the house.

I tried having a conversation with my dad on why I felt neglected by him growing up and he asked me what I meant by that I told him my feelings in a nutshell saying; “You really don’t talk to me”, “I felt like you never tried to get to know me since moving in” and he jokingly brushed it off by saying “well who do I always talk to” I said “everybody but me” “you talk to the dog more than me” which is true. He then went on to tell me that growing up his father spent a lot more time paying to his older brother than him and he use to wonder why. He said he understands how I felt, but I felt that it was unfair to treat me the same way his dad treated him. Even though I grew up in the same house with my dad for over 15 years I honestly feel that he knows nothing about me. 

In a strong family unit, there should be both parents involved a mother and a father in the house to keep the balance. Luckily, I was fortunate to have both sets in each household I love them all dearly, but I know that they lack what the other provided. In my mom’s house, she supplied the love and nurture to get us where we needed to be to this day. It wasn’t always sunshine and rainbows but looking back on the hard times we went through I feel that that type of parenting helped my sister stay out of deeper trouble. I don’t agree with the force that was used but my sister is now a strong independent black woman who learned from childhood mistakes with the guidance from my mom. In my dad’s house, they made sure we were taken care of but it takes more than words to prove to a child that you love them. Not paying attention to your kid or always making them believe that they are second best to their siblings does something to a child’s psyche. And that was my case but over the years I began to adapt to the feelings of being alone. Being able to stand alone shows the greatest sign of strength and growth. I learned a lot about myself in the time I found a love in the arts and began to occupy my time spent with like-minded groups. My dad and I just recently started to work on our relationship. At first it was a force because when I started going to church my best friend’s mom told me that to receive my blessings from God I would have to honor and obey my parents, no matter what they’ve done. It sucks being the bigger person all the time but I feel that if I never started coming around, I would live a whole life not knowing my dad. I’m still working on myself and all my friends are having babies, getting married, asking me “when’s your turn”? The thought of it all scares me because I don’t want to have the same anger my mom had when my sister and I was growing up. And I don’t want to marry the wrong guy who doesn’t want to take time out and get to know his own child. I still have inner issues to get over from my childhood nobody’s perfect. I just know that I want to be able to give my child everything I lacked as a child.