It’s very strange…the tricks that a mind can play on a person. At 40 years old, Lauren still blames her mother for everything. Granted, there was a lot to blame her for but she should blame him more. To this day she still finds her mother’s weakness, so much worse than her fathers. Even though, he is the one that abused her.

It began when she was five. Lauren’s father and mother were going through a divorce. He used to come home in the middle of the night, reeking of alcohol. Lauren still can’t stand the smell to this day. Her husband has to stay away from her for like a day when he drinks a beer because she can smell it from a mile away, even if he drank it hours before he sees her. When her father would come in the door, he would quietly come into the room that Lauren shared with her mother. It was Wisconsin and they only heated the downstairs of the house to save money. He would come in and put his hands on her mom and try to get her to make love to him. Her mother couldn’t stand it knowing he would be gone again in the morning and he was only there because he was drunk and had been fighting with his girlfriend. So, she got out of bed to get away from him. She went to the kitchen and she thought that he would follow her. But, he didn’t.

He took what he came for, from Lauren instead of her mother, and quietly left the house the same way he came in. He looked Lauren in the eye for just one brief second before he left, tears and horror filling his eyes. Lauren’s mom realized what had happened the next morning when she saw the blood on the sheets and Lauren told her she was sick and couldn’t go to school. Her mother never said a word. Just took her temperature and changed the sheets, then went back to the kitchen to sit and play solitaire. The horror continued like this for three very long years. Her mom never said a word when he came in the night. She just left the room and let Lauren stay home from school the next day.

After a while, he stopped coming during the night. Lauren thought she was finally free, but she had never been more wrong. A short time later, a few months perhaps, Lauren’s dad showed up one Friday afternoon after school. The courts had given him visitation rights and she would now spend every other weekend with him. Nothing happened right away. They spent most of their weekends at the bar. He introduced her to all his bar friends and gave her all the soda, candy and money for the jukebox that she wanted. It was actually kind of fun. Until one night, he led her out into the alley behind the bar with one of his friends…and so it began. His friends began paying him to take her in that alley. Lauren was his beer money…weekend after weekend.

It was a small town. Lauren’s Godfather was the Chief of Police. Her mother knew it was happening. The whole town knew it was happening, and nobody did anything about it. Nobody knows how a whole town could allow this to happen to a child. But they did. Until one day, someone left a Swiss Army knife sitting on a table at the bar. Lauren told them when they tried to take her in that alley not to do it. She had never said a word before…never. Vern, one of the regulars, looked kind of shocked when she spoke, but he was too drunk to worry about a threat from a 12 year old child that he was getting ready to rape. Vern screamed when the knife entered his leg and ripped open a six inch gash in his leg. Poncho, a very large Mexican that was another regular, was the first one to hit the alley. Finally, it was over or so Lauren thought. The police came and Lauren’s Godfather told her father to get out of Wisconsin by morning or he was going to jail. He left for Arizona that night.

But it was never over. It still isn’t over. How can it be over? And yet, this is not what haunts Lauren. As a woman and a mother, what haunts her is her mother’s weakness to protect her. When her husband first moved out, the first thing she said was that without him, she had no reason to live. This is what she told to her five year old daughter. The only one there. Lauren’s siblings were much older and had already moved out at this time. It was just her and this pathetic woman who just sat in chair, smoking Winston’s and playing solitaire. She had severe diabetes and couldn’t work. She wouldn’t drive and didn’t even have a license. They had no help. They had no one but each other.

Lauren’s mom stopped taking care of herself. She stopped taking care of Lauren. No cooking, no cleaning, nothing. She just sat in that chair watching TV and playing cards. Lauren walked to the store to buy food with the little money that they got from the state every month. It must have been 10 blocks to the closest store. A long way for a five year old in the winter, but she did it. Over and over. To the store, the laundry mat to wash their clothes, the pharmacy to buy her mother’s insulin. She took her blood. She gave her insulin shots. She cooked. She cleaned. She called 911 every time her mother went into a diabetic coma. Everybody in town felt sorry for the little girl that did the grocery shopping before she could add. But, not one soul did anything about it. They lived on canned ravioli and processed ham and cheese sandwiches that Lauren micro waved at the gas station across the street for a year and a half. Every weekend that she had to go to her dad’s place, she was terrified of what she would find when she came home.

But, time moved on and she started to learn to cook a little more. A little macaroni and cheese and some hamburger helper and by the time the weekends with her father were over, Lauren was more than a little angry. Her teenage years started with a bang. By 13, she was smoking, drinking, doing drugs and having sex with anyone that would. Then, skipping school started and it was the beginning of the end. She was in a foster home by age 16 and then she moved in with her older brother.

He took her home. He and his wife did everything that they could to make everything seem normal. But they had no idea how she had been living all those years. Their family is very good at not talking about things that are uncomfortable. The only time anyone ever said the word alcoholic regarding Lauren’s father was her father himself, in court, explaining to a judge why she couldn’t go live with him before she went to the foster home. So, it wasn’t normal. It was far from normal. Lauren ran when she was 18 and went back to hiding in drugs and alcohol. She spent a lot of years making horrible choices to hide from all the pain and anger.

And then she met a man. A man who loves her no matter what. A man that knows everything about her and still loves her. A man who doesn’t allow her to treat him like shit. A man who doesn’t allow her to treat herself like shit and makes her face the realities of her childhood and deal with them. It isn’t fun, but it is getting better. And he is right there with her every step of the way.

Today, her 18 year daughter, her pride and joy, told her that she was the worst mother in the world because she told her to make her own sandwich. Her daughter had worked 51 hours this week and she was tired, but Lauren was busy with something else and she told her that she was certainly old enough to make her own damn sandwich. For a minute, Lauren did feel like a bad mother…but only for a minute. A couple of minutes later, her dear, sweet one went back to her in tears telling her she was sorry and she loved her. And Lauren can finally see that it wasn’t her. She wasn’t a bad child. She didn’t do anything to make them do those things to her. She knows that she does deserve to be loved and what she survived as a child was just preparing her to do what she was meant to do. Be a mother.