What I Mean When I Say Abused

This is Your Trigger Warning

Two months after my 14th birthday I was apprehended by a store owner for shoplifting. It was a stupid thing to do and I regret it to this day - not for what followed, but because it was a privately-owned store and I was ultimately stealing from her and her family.

She did the right thing and stopped me before I could leave the store. She knew I was up to no good and like any good mother, she was able to break me down with only terrifying glances. She made me call my mother to come pick me up from the store, following the logic that my mother would sort me out and I wouldn't steal again. My mother wasn't home, but my grandmother was.

Beverly was at work at a reflexology therapy business under her own ownership just two miles down the same street. Beverly was a character study in mental illness and strange dichotomy. She loved entertaining guests and was a brilliant cook. Her chicken soup was legitimately soul-healing, which you needed if you knew her for more than a few hours. She was capable of the most outlandish horrors against children and the sort of racism that, if you saw it happen in front of you, you'd think you were in an after-school special. With just two weeks to go until her death, ultimately from dementia, with her brain eating itself from the inside out, the racism was so deeply ingrained that she referred to my father, her one-time son-in-law as, "that fucking kike." I once showed her a picture of my Navy division following my first deployment. When I showed her the photograph and she did not beam with pride or marvel at what we had done. She asked me, "How can you work with niggers?" So that was Beverly. All class, all the time. She had five children - a girl, two boys, and then two more girls - It took until the fourth child before she got a high school graduate out of them. She was fond of beating them and ignoring sexual abuse by way of their stepfather. She would brag about lining her four oldest up in order of age and beating them with a belt if any single one of them had committed a trespass. The youngest? Well, she would also brag that she would put the youngest, my Aunt Kelly, in the bottom drawer of a dresser cabinet until after the beatings.

Bev picked me up and dropped me off at home about an hour after I was confronted with shoplifting. My mother met my grandmother at the door and there was a conference on the mound. The family manager and her starting pitcher were deciding on the best course of action.

*Stop now if you have a weak stomach*

We lived in a ranch-style home at the time with a garage on the west end. One of the unfinished rooms in the basement was my mother's craft room, an unfinished room with the sort of ochre-colored cinder blocks one finds in really shitty elementary school classrooms. I was made to remove my shirt and drop my pants and underwear down to my knees. I then had to put my hands up against that shitty ochre-colored wall and present myself for the beating to come.

The rules were simple. I had to keep my hands against the wall while my mother beat them with a slat of wood. If my hands came off the wall for any reason, she would beat other parts of my body until I put my hands back up against the wall. She came into the room gnashing her teeth and started in. After about six full swings to my hands, I felt a few knuckles break. The tissue and muscles were ripping. My hands fell. That may be, after all these years, my single greatest mistake. When my hands fell, true to her word, she started beating other parts of my bare body. She aimed for the tops of my legs. Being bent over against a wall meant those were my hamstrings and ass, but again, I was bare. So, as she was aiming for the area of flesh just under my ass, she would miss in her anger, and... well, those of you who have seen a naked man know there are these dangling bits that hang between a man's legs. She hit my scrotum enough times to rupture the sac and cause significant bleeding. She bruised my nuts, the base of my cock, and the bottom of my ass so badly that as a 14-year-old boy, every single erection and sense of arousal would cause excruciating pain. And let's be honest, a 14-year-old boy gets hard for no reason at all.

I put my hands back up against the wall and she started beating them again. That said, again, in her anger, her aim was not superb, so the slat of wood would crack against the back of my head causing serious dizziness. I put my hands to my head to settle my rattled brain, but that meant my mother changed her target to my bare ass and thighs.

I moved my hands to cover my ass, as is common nature when one is suffering a wound. This meant the slat of wood struck my forearms and elbows, ultimately rupturing the bursa sac in both my elbows. This went on for approximately 15 minutes. Then again, relativity being what it is, it may have only lasted 17 seconds. With that sort of pain and trauma, I cannot be sure.

When it ended, I was too hurt and too wounded to lay on the carpeted floor, and too hurt and wounded to stand up. I was able to crawl to the basement bathroom and treat myself with basic first aid - wrapping my hands first. My head was bleeding, my nuts were bleeding, my cock was bleeding, my thighs were bleeding, my ass was bleeding, and my hands were a twisted wreck. I cried for two days and bled for a few more.

My freshman year of high school started a month after that, and I got slapped for not wanting to go school shopping with my mother. I remember waiting for the school bus that early September morning and being thankful I would have an eight-hour respite from my mother and stepfather. What I didn't realize was that school would be almost as awful.

That abuse toward me started when I was nine or so and continued until I was 17. It essentially served as the root cause for my decision to join the Navy - I had to get far the fuck away from my mother and stepfather. Now, they are simply old people trying their best to get into heaven.

All these years later, Mom has three outs for this. She either lies outright and says it didn’t happen, or she doubles down on the abuse and congratulates herself for teaching me not to steal, or, she deflects and says it didn’t happen like that but refuses to provide any details. She uses these same tactics to conceal every action of hers because while she knows right and wrong, she remains embarrassed by her behavior when called out on it. Sometimes she adds another tactic by blaming my stepfather. She lies regularly to “protect” her children because while all her children are fully grown with homes of their own, she thinks we’re stuck in an arrested development situation and can’t accept the truth. She also lies regularly because she cannot reasonably express or process emotion. She also lies because, again, she knows right from wrong, and is embarrassed by her actions after the fact. For example, she grew angry with me because I called her out for making a terrible gay joke and using the word fag. She got upset with me for embarrassing her, but it never occurred to her to not tell the fucking joke. She did this knowing she has a queer granddaughter, but I was at fault.

I remain deeply conflicted because while I would very much like to inflict as much hurt and pain on her as she did me, I am also a dutiful father and brother. I cannot simply grab her face and throw her through a wall, regardless of how much she deserves it or how therapeutic that would be for me.

I have no clever conclusion for this. There is no bow I can package this with. Dogs get better treatment than children in this society. I fondly recall Joe Strummer singing about saving us and not the whales, which registers on a titanic scale. Beating a dog gets one about five years in prison, depending on the lawyer, but beating a child? That gets a meme.