Promises To Keep

One promise I did keep was to fight for the hurt and battered angels of this world, wherever they are. Yet, I rarely if ever open up about the reasons for that promise. Today, I have a promise to keep. To speak openly about a child so badly abused that some doctors, police officers and friends wept.

Like most badly hurt children, I kept my mouth shut, because you just didn't tell. This is very very difficult, even now to write about. It feels like betrayal on a deep, deep level.

On the surface of my early childhood life, it appeared that we were a happy, well known, highly affluent family. My father was a prominent, well respected, and much publicized figure in San Francisco and the Bay Area. My mother was a much admired and sought after beauty.

We attended private school, and had loads of friends. but no one noticed that one of us-me, was severely undersized, I weighed 30 pounds at age 7, and wore long sleeves often on very hot days. Our affluent neighborhood was complicit in not observing that out of 4 children, the eldest was the smallest and most frail.

My much respected father, who taught me to read and spell at age three, was so demanding, so insistent on my perfection, I lived in terror of failing him. His beatings with the belt were savage. So much so, I urinated on the floor, as soon as I saw him coming. He demanded and got A's and A+'s from me, because he threatened to send me away to boarding school, if I failed him.

My mother, who was both a drug addict and alcoholic, had a little game she'd play on her eldest child. She would hide in my closet, which was huge, and slowly creak the door open, dressed in white robes and moan, until I'd scream in terror. She hit me so hard at one point, after I'd wet the bed in fright, she sliced my face open, with one of her many rings.

At age 7 I developed rheumatic fever. I had complained to my Nanny about my throat hurting badly again, and that it was hot. Sarah told my mother, who insisted I was as usual lying and made me go to school. Two days later the doctor came and my father told me I had rheumatic fever, I could die, but he expected me to go half day to school and maintain my A+ average.

When he died, I was 13, and very conflicted about his death. But my mother made things even worse by informing me, the day he died, that he had threatened to kill me in the womb, by pulling a gun on her pregnant belly, and informed me she was replacing household staff with me.

Then the beatings commenced in earnest and kept up, until one of my brothers threw her across the room, and left home at 16. When I turned 15, she threw me out on the streets with no money, no clothing, nothing.

I lived on the streets for months, and only God kept me from harm. She did it because I was not going to lie and tell her many male friends my real age. Finally, ill with pneumonia, I ended up in hospital, and doctors discovered the truth. They called her and she stated "I don't care whether the little bitch lives or dies, she's a bad seed".

Regardless, I was returned to her home and assigned a case officer: Mr. Duncan, who came by weekly for a year. She continued beating me, pulling me out of bed by my hair, and going crazy ripping down drapes, throwing glasses at me and worse. And insisting I was "crazy" like her mother.

At 17 she had me committed to a state hospital on her and her attorney's word alone. She did me a favor in doing that. For I discovered through a wonderful series of committed doctors that it was my mother who was sick, not I. Dr Margaret Pranger, who offered to adopt me, told me I had a choice: to cope with all that had happened to me, or give up.

From her, I learned about the eternal victim syndrome, and found that after deep introspection, that I chose not to live that way. It's a choice any victim finally must come to terms with. In learning to see my mother as a victim herself, I forgave her, and continued to grow out of pain and grief into someone who could honestly say, I had promises to keep, and I did.

A new foundation will be established from sales of a book I'm writing: Promises to Keep. Anyone who wishes to add a story to another anthology can contact me here.