1.26 I couldn't stand it [1]

Warning: partly contains explicit language. Don't tell me I didn't warn you! 

In my childhood, I haven’t exactly been happy. My mother made it her job to entertain as many men as possible, sometimes even a few at the same time. She dressed accordingly and put on a lot of makeup, just for them. We fought a lot about this job of hers, because the men weren’t very nice to me. She didn’t believe a word I said, and slapped me almost every time I mentioned my feelings. They didn’t matter to her.

Sometimes I was very scared of my mother. I wasn’t the only one she didn’t care about, though. The men she had fun with often had families who loved them. She took them away from them. Many men made the way between the front door and her bedroom during my childhood.

My father, her husband, was not home much. He worked as an athlete, and spent a lot of time in the gym. Being in great shape mattered to him, and when he came home, he expected a warm and nice dinner on the kitchen table, and a hot wife waiting for him in bed to satisfy his needs. She didn’t work that way, and he hated it. A couple of times a week they fought loudly in the living room, while I tried to do my homework in the bedroom. You could barely call it that, since it only consisted of a very cheap bed. Nothing else, not even a table to do my homework on, or a closet. I had been given a few clothes to wear to school, and that was it. My parents didn’t want to waste any more money on me.

The only thing they ever spent money on was my beloved guitar. They had bought it for my twelfth birthday, demanding that I pay half of it with the money I had made by working as a papergirl. I had started that job when I was ten. The guitar allowed me to let my thoughts flow through my head, without any restrictions. I picked the strings, heard the melodies coming from them and felt the notes in my entire body. The guitar was the only thing that made me feel alive at home.

While my father became more and more aggressive, my mother became more promiscuous. She invited men over every single day, sometimes even two or three a day. It didn’t really matter how they looked, she needed them to make her feel wanted. This was not about love, not even romantic attraction. Pure lust controlled her during those ‘dates’, and the men willingly followed her into bed where I could hear them for hours.

Whenever a man left the house afterwards, hastily putting his shirt back into his pants and zipping up his shoes, he shot me a look when passing me. I saw those looks, but I refused to react to them. It was hard enough to see my mother giving her soul away, this would never happen to me.

One night, it got worse. She had brought a man home who had been with her for a couple of times. He cornered me when they were done, licking his lips and smiling at me in a way that made me want to run away. When he was standing right in front of me, I looked at him, trying not to show how scared I was. He raised a hand to run it through my hair, and I suppressed a scream. At that moment, I was really scared of this man. My mother was still in the bedroom, my father was at work – there was nobody in the house who would be willing to help me.