The Journey Continues (Part two)

So I arrived in Florida with my father and older brother, and he brought us home. We were living in Sanford, Florida where we already had a complete family, because my father was married. I took to her right away, but my brother was still a little stand-offish. We had some pretty good times, and my new step-mother and I did alot of things together, alot of mother daughter things. I didn't think much of it, but she did prefer that we called her mom, and it seemed fine to me because she was my new mom. My mom didn't want me anymore, so I found a replacement, right? Not so much. Half-way into my second grade year of elementary school, we moved pretty far south from Sanford, to a town called Lakewood Park. It was quite the downgrade. We lived in a run-down trailor located down a dirth road path in the woods, and across from the trailor was a warehouse. Sleeping in the mornings was impossible. My alarm was always the sound of the jackhammer or the tractors driving around. This trailor was where I first learned to ride a bike without training wheels. My dad's method was to put me on the bike, and push me down a small hill. The first attempt, I fell of, and landed in an ant pile. Our trailor had two bedrooms, and two bathrooms. My brother and I had to share our bedroom, and we had bunk beds. We fought quite often over who would sleep on top and who would sleep on bottom. We alternated.

We stayed in this trailor for a few years, and our step-mom left before we moved again. My brother and I were pretty enlighted by her leaving, because as time went by, she became very abusive toward us. My father went to work everyday, and left us home with her. She didn't work. When my dad was at work, she did some pretty unruly things as a woman who was home with two kids. For instance, she decided it would be fun to do housework as a nudist. Now, for me, it wasn't that big a deal, because I'm a female. But, for my brother, it got his curiosity generated pretty early in life. He was only about seven years old when this was going on. I'm not sure if it's true or not, but the subject did come up that she even molested my brother. This subject came up later in life, when something else happened but that's pretty far down the road from this point.

My step-mother also preformed countless acts of child abuse. Once, she cooked us lunch. Now, any kid would be excited about how much food she fed us, and we were. But, now that I think about it, it is a form of child abuse to sit there and force a child to eat that much food until it was gone. She fed us two hot-dogs, a bowl of chicken noodle soup, french-fries(or tater tots. I'm not sure which one), a bologna and cheese sandwich, a fruit roll up, and two ding-dongs. Now, that's alot of food for a six and seven year old to be eating. She wouldn't let us get up until we finished it all, and I finished mine. I was always pretty thin as a small child, but I did gain alot of weight by the time I was ten. I ate alot. I believe that day could have been the source of my overeating.

Another count of child abuse was physical. There were times when my brother and I would get in trouble for God knows what, and she would make us stand in our bedroom doorway, and as she did housework, she walked by us in the hallway, and everytime she did, she'd come in and gives a nice whack across our face. There were times she would make us stand with our nose pressed against the wall for hours. Probably about four hours would be the average. We weren't allowed to sit down, we weren't allowed to take our nose off the wall (if we took our nose off the wall and she caught us, she would add another hour to our time.) There were times she would bet us senseless, and she would put us outside no matter what the weather was like. My brother and I had a place far back inthe woods where we went to escape from her. There was an old water pump there, like the ones in movies about old, low populated towns. There was also a fort built back there. It scared us a little at first, but we made it our getaway. I would say the only time I ever had a bloody nose was she went hit me, and I moved back, and she got me right there and my nose started bleeding everywhere.

On top of her beating us, she would tell our dad that we were bad when he go home, but would leave out the part about her punishing us, so he punished us further, by giving us spankings with the belt. Once, she made it out to be so bad, that my dad spanked me with the belt across my bare butt twenty times. I couldn't sit for days.

Finally, her and my dad got divorced, and it was probably the best day of my life so far. It didn't take long for him to find a new girlfriend, though. Her name was Amy, and she had a little girl, a little bit younger than my brother and I. I don't remember much about that time because it came and went quite quickly. Then, he ended up with another girlfriend. She was Kelly, a pretty blonde lady who was quite younger than my dad. She had a baby boy, and she turned us into the baby-sitters. At seven and eight years old, we were baby-sitting a baby boy. We got left home alone alot, and we were also doing chores that even teenagers don't do these days. She wasn't as abusive as our step-mom, but she would hit us from time to time if something happened to the baby, or we did something wrong by her. Once again, a relationship that lasted longer than the previous one, but no more than six months. After she left, that was the first time I had ever seen my dad cry. We were all sitting in the living room watching tv, and I look up at my dad while he was drinking his beer, and I saw the tears run down his cheek. I might say it was a pretty powerful moment for me, but maybe I was too young to really understand. I was just happy she was gone.

So, now it's just the three of us again, and my dad decided were going to move out of the trailor. I was a bit sad about it, because despite all the bad memories, there were alot of good things about it too, like my brother's and my secret getaway, that no one else knew about. Not even friends at school. I would say my favorite thing about living there was, in the summertime, the fireflies came out. We always had a bunch of empty jars, and we would go into the woods and catch the fireflies and keep them in the jars with hole poked in the top. It was pretty cruel thing to do that, though because they never lasted through the night. The sunwould come up, their light went out, and they died. Maybe they had hiding places during the day when the sun was out. Maybe it was the sun that killed them. One other thing I liked about it, was that I loved to go out on the front porch when it was raining, and I'd just sit there for hours listening to the sound of the raindrops on the tin roof, and I would put jars under the ledge and let them fill up with fresh rain water, and I loved to drink it. Probably not the healiest thing, but, hey. I was just a kid.

So, time came to move..... Stay tuned for part three