Little Girl Lost

The funny thing about memories is that you remember the last memory you had about an event and not the actual event itself. So basically we only remember the memory of the last memory we had about something and so on.

Some people have only a few memories about their early childhood, whereas others have an eidetic memory. What most people would call a photographic memory. I'm one of those people that has very vivid early childhood memories, with the earliest ones from even before I was a year old. I don't know how or why I can, I just do.

I despise being pinched. It's because I can remember my older brother reaching through the rails of my crib to pinch me when I was still an infant, but I know I was old enough to hold my bottle. I remember watching him sidle up to my crib, his head not much higher than the crib mattress. He would stand there and stare at me between the wooden rails before slowly reaching in between them to pinch me.

I learned to scoot out of his reach when he showed up. Even then I could sense his hatred of me, or maybe it was because he was just evil in disguise. I didn't know why my four year old brother wanted to hurt me. It was many years later before I was able to understand why he hated and resented me so much. My mother was the reason.

My daddy was my mother's second husband. She and her first husband had been married for less than a year when she became a widow. She was also 7 months pregnant with my older brother. I was barely four when I asked her why my older brother had a different last name than I did. She shook her head and with a heavy sigh she told me the whole damn story after saying, "I wondered when you would ask me that."

My brother's father was killed in an accident at work when he fell to his death. A cable broke on an open elevator that was on its way up. He died three days after the accident from a brain injury. Mother said his head swelled to the size of a basketball because his head hit the edge of one of the concrete floors as the elevator was falling down between them. My mother even told me that she tried to throw herself down the stairs at the hospital and that she had to be restrained to prevent her from committing suicide right after the doctor told her that her husband had just died.

That's an awful explanation to give to an almost four year old of why her brother's last name was different than hers. I had a nightmare about it that night. She just had to give me all the gory details in her answer. It's because she liked the sympathy she got when she told it, I'm sure. She liked seeing the shock and disbelief on people's faces when she told them that story and the comforting words spoken to her afterwards. Even years later, she thrived on the tragedy.

So anyway, my mother was showered with sympathy because it was really very sad. When she had my brother, just two months after becoming a widow, he was doted on by the entire family. The poor little baby boy who would never know his father. He was also the first grandchild born on both sides and so he was fawned over by everyone in the family.

My brother could do no wrong in their eyes. Both families were also very affluent, and he was always showered with anything and everything he wanted. Nobody could tell him no, so he became entitled and learned early on how to use it to his advantage. My brother became "The Golden Child."

My mother met my dad two years later. She got pregnant with me soon after they were married and she made sure to tell me that I was "a mistake" I don't know why she told me that she thought daddy was wearing a condom and he thought she was using her diaphragm. Fuck me! She's telling me this before I was in grade school! I had no idea what a condom or a diaphragm was, but she said it like it was "dirty."

I was born prematurely, and I was also the first girl born into the family. My brother was used to getting all the attention, so he resented me when everyone's attention was suddenly on me. Rather than dividing her time between me and my brother and teaching him that he wasn't losing her love because of me, she literally banished me from their lives.

On a daily basis she sent me to our next door neighbor, an elderly widow, who would take care of me throughout the day. My mother said I had colic and she couldn't hold me without my brother pitching a fit. "It was easier," she justified. My dad worked out of town a lot and wasn't there to help her.

I don't understand why a stay at home mom with a premature infant wouldn't want to take care of her baby herself. I realized, later on in my life, that a poor little fatherless, jealous and spoiled, almost four year old boy was the reason.

God forbid if she cared for me or showed me any love. Despite having vivid memories of my early childhood, I can't remember her ever holding me. My brother resented that I came along and believed that I was taking attention away from him. My mother apparently felt the same way. She treated my brother like royalty. She also told me that my dad cheated on her when she was pregnant with me and that I was the reason for his infidelity. Like she literally blamed me for it!

I remember hearing my dad crying one afternoon, when I was around four years old. I walked into their bedroom and saw my dad sitting on the side of their bed. His elbows were resting on his knees and his face was buried in his hands as he sobbed. I put my hand on his arm and asked him, "Daddy, why are you crying?" He said, "Sissy, I know you don't understand right now, but I can't fill the shoes of a dead man." Of course I didn't understand what he meant at the time, but it's a conversation I had with my daddy and one I could never forget.

I stood there for a minute, then went to my bedroom and got him a butterscotch hard candy that I had hidden under my pillow. One of the ranch hands had given it to me after playing a game with him. I had been saving my candy, but I gave it to my daddy, because seeing him cry broke my little heart. I desperately wanted to fix him. He pulled me into his arms and told me he loved me, then he unwrapped the candy and put it in his mouth before pulling me back into his arms. He held me as he thanked me for my help.

Maybe it was a coincidence, but my dad's favorite dessert for the rest of his life, was anything butterscotch. That dead man was the reason my daddy cried. That dead man was why my mother and my big brother abused me. And that dead man was the reincarnate in my big brother. My daddy didn't know it at the time, but he wasn't the only one that couldn't fill a dead man's shoes.

So anyway, by the summer of my second birthday, I had become independent. I would slip outside on my own and go adventure seeking. When mother finally noticed I was missing, it would end up in a neighborhood search. I would walk into a stranger's house and just make myself at home. People didn't lock there doors back then, so it was easy for me to do. I would sometimes even crawl into their bed and ask for something to drink and hoping it would be a Coke.

I couldn't help myself. I loved going outside so I could go visiting. I just didn't understand why my big brother could go outside by himself and I wasn't allowed to do the same. I figured out how to unlatch the hook on our screen door once the regular door had to be left open during the summer for air to circulate. We didn't have air conditioning back then.

One of my favorite things to do was to race outside when the ice truck made its delivery. I liked to watch the men unload the block of ice for our ice box.

They used huge tongs that ended in sharp points to drag and lift the block of ice from the back of the truck and put it onto a dolly. To me it looked like a giant clear wet diamond. One of them would chip off a chunk of ice from an ice block inside the truck and give it to me like it was a giant popsicle. I'd follow them into the house and watch them slide the block of ice into the top of the ice box and then they would pull out the drip pan that was underneath it and pour the water from the melted ice out the backdoor. We didn't get an electric refrigerator until we moved to a different house on a big farm.

Anyway, because I ran off every chance I got, daddy moved the screen latch near the top of the door. So I used a broom handle to reach it. I was a resourceful two year old. Daddy ended up using a loop from a fish stringer in the latch to prevent my escapes. My Houdini days were over. But only for a little while.

When we moved to a house way out in the country on a farm, I regained my freedom. We had cows, horses, chickens and rabbits. The back of the property was bordered by a creek that was a good 40 yards across, and farm roads of silty dust were located in the front and side of the house. By the age of four I became totally emancipated. People didn't watch their kids like they do now. I can't say if I was in any danger or not when I was outside by myself. My mother and older brother hurt me a helluva lot more than playing outside by myself ever did.

The farm hands were my kinda sorta baby sitters. They watched over my little brother too when they were around. I remember one of them would even change my little brother's diaper. He was always very kind to me and liked to give me little surprises, like candy, when I played a game with him.

Charles took care of us kids like we were his. He was really friendly to me and liked to show me tricks. I don't remember my mother ever holding me like she loved me, but Charles would and I sometimes gravitated to him for comfort. The hands had a little shack they sometimes used during the day and I would go there to see if they were around because they would give me coffee with lots of cream and sugar. We would sit at their little table and talk and laugh as we had our coffee. Sometimes they would light a cigarette for me and laugh when I tried to blow a smoke ring just like they could. They treated me like I was a big girl.

Sometimes Charles would call me to the little shack when no one else was around so he could play "doctor" with me. He told me it was okay for him to take my clothes off because that's what doctors did. One of his favorite games was for me to pretend he was putting me to sleep so he could do surgery. Charles would kiss me in my private place and would use his tongue to, "Make sure I was really asleep." I'd squeeze my eyes tight, but I could hear him making funny noises and jiggle a lot when he played doctor with me.

He would always give me a candy after we played, and he always reminded me that it was our secret game and I would get into big trouble if I told anyone. I didn't dare tell my mother because she was already mean to me and I was scared of her. He played games with me up until I turned eight years old.

One day he made me bleed from between my legs and I didn't like him anymore afterwards because it hurt and burned. I avoided him after that and ignored him the next he called me to come play, even though I missed the candies and the little toys he gave me as my reward for playing games with him. He eventually gave up and left me alone. He was a pedophile that never got caught. When I got older and realized that what he did was wrong, I tried to tell my mother about Charles. Her response, "I don't need to hear about that," so I left it be.

My mother would often lose her temper and take her frustration out on me. It sometimes started when she would angrily blame daddy for something until her anger escalated into a blind rage. She would start screaming, cursing and breaking dishes and it always broke my little heart. Sometimes she would come into my room in the middle of the night and dump my dresser drawers out onto the floor and rip all of my clothes off their hangers and throw those on the floor too.

She would then make me stay up all night and clean up "my mess" until time to get ready for school. I never understood why she got so angry with me, but sometimes I knew it was because daddy didn't come home after work. Daddy had no idea that mother treated me so badly when he wasn't around. He thought he was the only recipient of her abuse and volatile temper. She would beat me for things I had no control over like, "You look just like your fucking daddy!" Her abuse was so bad that I even tried to figure how I could kill myself by the time I was ten years old. I was just a little girl with big adult size problems.

She was always sweet and kind to my older brother and even to my baby brother. She would make them treats but wouldn't give me any and would make me go outside while they sat at the table with her to eat the treat she had made, "Just for them," she would say. She would tell me I could have a treat later so I would go away and not bother them.

I never got any of the treats, which was usually cake that she had made just for them. I decided that she just didn't like girls very much and I was a girl. When she was around men who came to visit us, she became all sweet and sultry, acting as if she was one of the nicest and most desirable women on earth.

She would sit with their wives, and they would all laugh and talk and gossip as they sipped on their coffee or iced tea, smoking cigarettes that they snuffed out in ornate ashtrays on stands next to their chairs. I always welcomed their visits with relief because it would be like a vacation day away from her cruelty to me.

My big brother would sometimes use the visits from company as an opportunity to terrorize me, because he knew the adults would be occupied. He would slam his fist into my stomach, knocking the breath out of me, then stand over me and laugh as I laid crumpled on the ground trying to get a breath in, the hit would temporarily paralyze my diaphragm. I'd lay there in a panic because my lungs didn't work. I struggled to breathe again, my stomach aching from the hit and wanting to cry... needing to cry out for help but couldn't. Sometimes he would do it several times in a row and be laughing at me the whole time.

He also had a horse and would chase me down with it until I fell. Then he would make the horse rear back on its hind legs so its forelegs would come down with enough force that the front hooves would shake the ground. It terrified me. It was always accompanied with taunts and cruel laughter. He would sometimes hit my upper arm so hard that my bicep muscles would jump like I had a frog under my skin.

I learned I couldn't tattle on him either, because I would be the one getting punished if I did. He and my mother were best pals and I was nothing to them. My mother treated my older brother like he was her only child. It was only after my little brother "Ben" was born that I felt like I had someone that loved me back the same way I loved them. If I could keep Ben happy and occupied as he got older, my mother wasn't as mean to me and my older brother would leave me alone, most of the time. So, Ben became my world in more ways than one.