No One Gets Out OF Here Alive

When I first heard this quote from Jim Morrison, I was a teenager in high school. It hit home in a way that left me shaken. It was how I felt about my life.

On paper, my life should have been perfect. My father was a minister, my mother a teacher, and they had four children together: three boys and one girl. I was the oldest, born in December 1969. I came into this world with masses of curly hair and big black eyes. I was also over 9 lbs. Sorry, Mom.

In my early memories, my father doesn’t really exist. He was gone a lot. As a missionary, minister, Bible teacher, and radio host at a Christian radio station, he was constantly busy. I do remember not liking him much when he was around, but I couldn’t say exactly why.

I was very independent as a child. It was also the 70s and we lived in a closed community of fellow Christians. Our environment felt safe. So, kids of all ages ran around together, playing at different houses throughout the day, or trudging through a nearby field on various adventures. When I went to vacation bible school at 3, I insisted on walking to the bus stop alone, so my mother stood on the sidewalk and watched me. I was fearless.

When I was four, that fearless independence made me a handful. My mother was good at directing my energy in positive ways. Again, I rarely saw my father, so I didn’t really think about him much. He was always “at work” or with his “family” (his brother’s home).

One day, I woke up and found myself alone. My mother had gone next door, my father was who knows where, and my brothers were asleep. So I fed myself, got dressed, and, being bored, headed out the door to a friend’s house to play. It never occurred to me I was doing something bad.

Panic followed when my mother found me missing. My father got into his car and went looking for me. He found me playing outside with some friends. Furious, he ordered me into the car and yelled at me all the way home. I understood why he was mad. It made sense to me. I apologized to him and then my mom when I got home. My mom told me we were going to have company soon, so I went to my room to wait for my friend to arrive with her mom.

The door shut behind me and in my darkened room (the blinds were still shut against the morning sun), my father descended on me like a monster. I wasn’t even afraid at first. I assumed I was going to get spanked, which I didn’t like, but I knew it would be over fast. Instead, I got punched in the stomach. I remember the air getting knocked out of me and suddenly being on the bed. He unleashed on me, punching my mid-section until I was sobbing.

Then he was gone.

I climbed the shelves in my closet and hid on the top one. I was completely traumatized. My dislike of my father turned into a loathing that day. I never trusted him again.

When my friend, a girl older than me, arrived, she came into my bedroom looking for me. She found me on the top shelf and it took some time for her to get me to come down. I was a sobbing mess. It was my very first beating. My first time experiencing that level of violence. I was hurt and furious. So I told her what he did to me.

“He hit me,” I said to her.

"Well, sometimes parents have to do that when we’re bad,” she answered with all her ten-year-old wisdom.

She didn’t understand the gravity of what I had experienced or that her reply was only the first time I would hear that phrase whenever I sought help. It was also the first time I heard that violence directed at me was due to my “badness,” but by far not the last.

By the time I heard the Jim Morrison quote, I had suffered over a dozen years of physical, mental, and other abuse. I had been strangled, held at gunpoint, and threatened daily with violence. I was around fifteen at the time, and I wondered at that point if I was going to survive to adulthood.

I look back at that time and remember the terror that I lived with every day. I wish I could somehow go back and tell that version of me that she’s going to survive, but it will not be easy. It’s going to take every bit of her strength, but one day she will wake up and not be afraid. And it’s going to take her imagination, her writing, and her love of books to get her through it all.

I survived, I wrote stories, and I found a way to make my own happily ever after.

I made it out alive.

*Note: I will not be using my birth name or the names of my family members, town, etc. This is my story and I want to keep it centered on my healing. Everyone else affected by these events has their own stories to tell and I’m not the one to do it.