My organic father finally agreed to take me away from my mother. The life I had with her was a special kind of hell. I wasn’t going to school anymore because I’d become a full-time babysitter for my little brother. The house was a minefield of her abuse, both mental and the other kind. I was still pissing the bed, my body showing all the signs of a kid being slowly eaten alive by the rot around him. I needed to escape.
So my father, he “bravely” filed the paperwork with the courts. That’s a good word for it, I guess. Bravely.
The day my mother was served, she didn’t have any words. No screaming, no fighting. She just looked at me, a long, quiet look that said nothing and everything all at once.
That night, she was just gone. Packed her shit and left.
That night started like a hundred others. With the sound of her car, a beat-up Vega, screeching into the driveway. With the knowledge that she was coming home from her temple, the Diamondback Lounge, full of cheap vodka and looking for a fight. When she stumbled through the front door at 1 a.m., the air in the house went tight, like the whole structure was bracing for impact.
I knew the routine. Fake sleep. Don’t move. Don’t breathe too loud. Cease to exist. Maybe she’ll pass out on the couch. Maybe you’ll make it to morning without a new bruise.
Not this time.
I heard her footsteps first, that uneven, drunken shuffle in the hallway outside my door. Then, silence. A dead silence that was always worse than the yelling. I knew she was just standing there, watching me, waiting.
I cracked my eyes open just enough to see her shadow in the doorway. I watched her lunge, a sudden explosion of violent rage. She grabbed the big AM/FM clock radio from my nightstand. In one vicious motion, she ripped it from the wall, socket and all, and raised it over her head.
Then the screaming started as she began the motion, heaving the damn thing back. I saw it all happen in slow motion. I saw the clock-radio, a black plastic missile, aimed right at my skull.
I rolled. Pure instinct.
The radio exploded against the wall right where my head had been a second before, showering my bed in a rain of shattered plastic and exposed wires. The sound was deafening in the small room.
The cheap plastic from the clock-radio was still raining down on the bed when I bolted upright, pure, dumb animal instinct. There was no time to think. She was already on me.
Her breath hit me first, a hot wave of cheap liquor and pure, uncut rage. She was a big woman, heavy-set, but she moved with a frightening speed when she was angry. Her hands were everywhere—a blind storm of slaps that stung my face, nails that raked my chest, and hard, clumsy fists thudding against my arms and ribs. I felt the sting, the impact, but there was no real pain. Not yet. There was only the need to get out.
I twisted, trying to get past her, but it was like fighting with a bear in a phone booth. I finally scrambled free, made a break for the door, but she was too fast. She slammed me up against the door jamb, her body pinning me there. Her hands locked around my neck.
Her face was just inches from mine, and I could see it then, clear as day. It wasn’t just anger in her eyes. It was something else. A pure, blank, horrifying rage. The eyes were black, empty. There was nothing behind them. No mother. No person.
Just the rage.
For the first time in my thirteen years, I fought back.
With her hands clamped around my throat, the world started to go fuzzy at the edges. Pure, dumb animal instinct took over.
I threw a wild side-punch, my fist connecting with the side of her head. Then another, and another, just beating against her, a frantic, clumsy rhythm, until her left arm finally dropped, releasing its grip.
The second my throat was free, my own skinny arms went wild. A left-hand fist, one I didn’t even know I had, connected squarely with her jaw. I felt the pop, saw her lower lip split open, bleeding immediately. The next right connected with her left temple, and the impact seemed to shut her arms down completely; they just fell to her sides. The last punch, another left, found the other temple.
I could see the blood, her blood, already spilling onto her shirt, turning her drunken fury into something else, something broken and monstrous. She let out a shriek, a raw, wounded sound, and staggered back.
And I used that single, solitary moment of her shock to run like hell.
I didn’t stop to think. I ran.
I ran from that door jamb, through her room, past the dining room, and into the den they’d converted into a master bedroom. Gary, her latest live-in lover, was half-asleep in there. He’d been through her rages before, but he’d never seen this. I jumped right onto his bed, frantic, yelling at him.
“Help me,” I gasped. “She’s lost it.”
Before he could even sit up, I could see her coming, charging down the hall towards me like a black rhino coming in for the kill. She stopped dead at the edge of Gary’s bed, a predator at the edge of its territory. Her face was streaked with her own blood, her eyes wild.
And then, with an audience, she put on her show. Her attention snapped from me to him. She became the victim.
“He hit me!” she cried, her voice raw and ragged, full of a theatrical disbelief. “LOOK AT WHAT HE FUCKING DID TO ME!”
Gary just sat there, dumbfounded, his slow, stupid brain trying to piece together the chaos. I didn’t wait for him to figure it out. I knew he was useless.
I saw my window. That moment of distraction was all I needed. I jumped off the bed, lowered my shoulder as I ran past her, and slammed into her right side with everything I had.
She went flying backward into the brick fireplace.
The sound of her body hitting the bricks was a sickening, wet thud. But I didn’t stop to check the damage. I didn’t look back. All I could think about was the front door.
No time to think. Just run.
Back to my room. Grabbed my pants, no time for a shirt. As I was yanking them on, I could see her charging out of Gary’s room, already yelling like a madwoman. I left my own room and hit the hallway—a goddamn marathon track of terror—and sprinted for the front door.
I could hear her heavy footsteps pounding the floorboards right behind me, gaining on me as she made the turn down the hall. My fingers, slick with sweat, fumbled with the goddamn deadbolt. Panic, thick and hot, clawed at my throat.
Then—click—release.
The door flew open. I burst out into the street, barefoot and shirtless, the asphalt biting into the soles of my feet like a thousand angry teeth. I didn’t care. I just ran, right down the center of the road, my heart trying to beat its way out of my chest, my lungs on fire.
And then, I stopped.
Right there, in the middle of the street, under the quiet, indifferent suburban stars, I turned back toward the house. I could see her shadow in the doorway, a dark shape against the light, watching.
And all of it—every slap, every locked door, every drunken slur, every last goddamn thing I had been forced to endure—it all came flooding up my throat, a black, hot tide of poison. I let it out.
“YOU FUCKING CUNT!” I roared, my voice raw and cracking, cutting through the night, echoing off the neat, sleeping houses. “YOU WHORE! YOU’RE NOT A MOTHER, YOU’RE A FUCKING WHORE! A PIECE OF SHIT! YOU’RE NOTHING!”
My voice kept climbing, a litany of pure, uncut hatred. “FUCK YOU! FUCK EVERYBODY!” It went on and on. My body, shirtless under the streetlight, was a roadmap of the fight, the welts and scratches already rising on my skin.
Porch lights flickered on, one by one, up and down the block. I could feel their eyes behind the curtains. The good citizens of Whittier, witnessing the latest episode of the shitshow, but not one of them willing to interfere. I didn’t care. I had spent thirteen years swallowing my rage, choking it down.
Not anymore.
I screamed every last insult I had in me, every foul word I’d ever learned, until my voice was just a shredded whisper, until my throat was raw, until there was nothing left inside me but a hollow, ringing silence.
And after all the screaming, when my throat was just a raw, empty hole and there were no words left, I did the only thing there was to do. I turned my back on that house, on her shadow in the doorway.
And I just walked.
Away from her. Away from the house full of ghosts. Away from that whole goddamn life.
That was the night I divorced my mother. The real one. The courtroom, the judge, the papers that came months later?
That was just a footnote. A piece of paper for a war that was already over.
Author’s Note:
My thoughts are this: the way you’ve laid it all out, that’s the whole story of a life, isn’t it? It starts with the paperwork, the clean version, the official story: “My father bravely saved me.” A nice, neat little headline.
Then you pull the rug out from under it and show the reality: it wasn’t a rescue. It was a goddamn escape after a bloody, bare-knuckle brawl.
That’s what the whole thing is about. The difference between the official story and the truth you get written on your own skin. The world sees the footnote—the court date, the custody change. They don’t see the kid with a split lip, screaming at his mother’s ghost in the middle of the street.
That kid fighting back in the house, that wasn’t a tragedy. That was the first honest business transaction of his life. She offered violence, and he paid her back in kind. The screaming in the street? That was him settling all the other outstanding debts, paying off thirteen years of quiet abuse in one long, ugly howl for the whole neighborhood to hear.
So yeah, my thoughts are this: you’ve told the story of how you were really born. Not in some hospital, but at age thirteen, barefoot on a suburban street, with blood on your knuckles and a throat raw from screaming the truth. Every man has a moment like that, a moment where he stops being a victim and becomes the author of his own damn survival.
That was yours. A shitty, violent, and absolutely necessary beginning.
