Caution: Surviving your Childhood

She used to do little things like slap me upside the head and knock me down. I had very long hair when I was younger; it reached to the middle of my back. One time, when I was about six, I remember she wanted to put it up in pigtails. At that time, we had what they called “yarn ribbons.” These ribbons were fluffy, and the ends were capped like the end of a shoelace. This one time, she wanted to put yellow ones in my hair. I had lost one of the ribbons from the time before, and I knew that if I didn't find them something bad was going to happen.

She was already mad at my dad because he did not give her the amount of money she wanted to spend. She spent money like it was water; she could never get enough of it. Anyway, she gave me thirty minutes to find both ribbons. My brother and I turned my room upside down looking for them, but we only found one of them. When we told her, she grabbed me by my hair and started jerking me around, hitting and slapping me anywhere she could. At one point, I remember my brother jumped on her back and tried to get her to stop. But she just threw him off and kept going. She swung me in a wide circle around my room and slammed me into my dresser. The handles were sharp at both ends and they came to a point. When I hit the dresser, I broke my nose, cut my mouth, and cut the corner of one of my eyes. But that wasn't enough punishment. She locked me in my closet. It was one of those old-time closets that had a skeleton key. I don't know how long I was in there, but in my frightened child's mind, it seemed like forever. Because of this incident in my childhood (even though I am forty-seven years old as I write this), I don't have a closet door in any of my rooms in my house.