Chapter 1
Life is quite hard, to put it simply. It really is… there were times when I wanted to end it. In my childhood consisted of moving a lot and running away from my father and returning to him. That was all we had. My father is the type of man that we call “machista” in our Mexican culture, it is very well know. It means that a male head in the family is the one who commands and that is it, there’s no more to it. What he says goes. My mother on the other hand was the type of women then that was in her own bubble for the reason of all the emotional and physical harm my father caused. I understood her perspective, but it comes to the point where the victim becomes the abuser of other in a different way as well. It was never physical, but more emotionally. I will admit that I was not the easiest child, but I had my own reason. I was depressed and my sisters were also depressed. We wanted to receive attention from our parents in many ways that they could not give. We knew our parents loved us, but they were so involved in their own personal lives were they tend to forget how we felt. I saw many dreadful things in my childhood happening to my mother and father. My mother who was abused and my father who used heroin, I saw many hits and many needles as well as my sister who is after me in age. Parents think that we do not pay attention, but we do and we get hurt and traumatized by it as they do. My mother always gaslighted us, saying what you think you saw or what you remember was a dream. How do you think that made me feel? I felt so alone and it made me feel as if I was crazy. There was many things that I hid including getting sexually assaulted from a family member. I was eight years old, when it happened. I never once spoke about it until I was in eight grade to my mother and father over a fight on why I was such an angry and ungrateful kid as they liked to describe me. My mother was shocked of course and my father played dumb, saying he did not understand me because I was speaking English. When in reality he knew and understood English. They never spoke of it again.
