Pain Lived, Love Found Read online

  Before their last court appearance, my mother begged Carly to tell the judge that she was okay with our father coming back home even though that was the last thing Carly or any of us wanted. Carly did it because she wanted to please our mother even though the thought of our father being back in our house made her sick to her stomach.

  When our father came back home it was awkward and very uncomfortable. Our family would never be the same, and we made that abundantly clear to him. None of us wanted to be around him. No one felt comfortable around him. The judge said he could never be in the same room with Carly alone, ever. For a while Carly refused to be around him at all. She stayed in her room the majority of the time. This didn’t last long because Carly graduated high school early, and Sarah had already graduated a year before. They moved out of the house and got a place of their own, much to our father’s happiness.

  Soon Junior followed, only he made his escape by secretly joining the army. Michael dropped out of school his junior year and asked our parents to sign papers so he could go to Job Corp in St. Louis. But what no one but me, knew at the time was that Michael was a career criminal and a high-ranking gang member. I knew because I had seen his notebooks full of rules and gang initiations and symbols and had confronted him about it. He was doing strong armed robberies, knocking over corner stores, but he didn’t tell me any of this until years later.

  Just that quickly the house of horror that we grew up in was becoming empty, and I felt abandoned. It seemed like it would take forever before I was old enough to escape the hell I called home. Carly worried about me constantly and would call to check up on me once, sometimes twice a week. She’d ask me if our father tried to touch me and to make sure I was never alone with him. One day when our mother answered the phone she questioned Carly as to why she called so much for me, and Carly told her, “Because I’m worried about her ma. I’m worried that he’ll try the same thing with Sloane that he did with me.”

  “Well, I’m Sloane’s mother, and it’s my job to protect her - and I am! So don’t you worry about what’s going on in this house, you hear me?”

  Carly felt differently. There had been no one to protect her, and she knew from the way our mother treated her that she felt that Carly brought this on herself. She never came out and said this to Carly, but Carly could tell from some of the comments our mother made over time, and it caused Carly to seek our mothers love and approval even more. Long after she had moved out, she still went out of her way to please our mother. Whenever our mother called needing her for anything Carly was there, but Carly never got the love and reassurance that she needed. All that Carly wanted was the reassurance that she wasn’t alone, belief that she truly was the victim, and that it wasn’t her fault that she was raped. She just needed to know that she was not the cause of our family being broken. But the words never came. As a result Carly found herself in many unhealthy relationships with men until she found the wonderful, understanding man that she eventually married. It took years of counseling for Carly to come to grips with what happened to her. The guilt she carried nearly killed her, the shame she felt crippled her, but the intense counseling she received and her faith in God pulled her through it all—that and the love and support of her husband. I couldn’t be more proud of my sister.

  Sarah was very selfish like our mother, but she used to be nice and she used to laugh a lot and have fun with us. There was a period when Sarah was kind and giving, but something changed when she got into high school. None of us knew what made her change or what happened to her, and Sarah kept a lot of secrets from us. From high school through adulthood everything had to be centered around her. Sure she was pretty and had a nice shape, but she was conceited. She didn’t think twice about putting Carly or me down to make herself look and feel better. She was a mean girl and never had many friends because of her nasty attitude. In her mind all men were fair game, so she didn’t think twice about spreading her legs to get what she wanted. It was a very dangerous way to live, but Sarah loved the challenge and pleasure it brought her to take what didn’t belong to her.

  With Michael gone, there was only me and Evan remaining at home, and life did not get any easier for us. Evan was terribly spoiled by our parents. They thought they could right their wrongs with him by not disciplining him as harshly, if at all, the way they did the rest of us. That only created an entitled monster. Evan never felt the need to earn anything. Instead he felt he deserved everything. He didn’t apply himself in school because he didn’t feel he had to. I was amazed that he made it to high school, but he eventually dropped out his junior year, the same as Michael. Unfortunately, he carried this attitude into adulthood. He lived off of women and depended on them to take care of him while he floated through life. Eventually he too turned to a life of crime trying to make fast money instead of earning it the legal way. That’s why he’s sitting in jail now.

  I got my first job when I was fifteen years old and have been working ever since. The less I had to depend on my parents for money the better. When I graduated from high school, I moved out of my parent’s house less than a year later. I lived with Sarah and Carly for a year and a half before I got my own apartment. My sisters didn’t exactly want me around while they did their dirt with the men that came in and out of the house. They always had parties at our house late at night, and if they weren’t having parties they were going out to the clubs.

  I never liked the guys they invited over to the house. They were sleazy jerks who were there for one thing and one thing only - sex. If they looked at me too long, Sarah would get mad at me and say mean things to me in front of everyone in the room. I had a mouth on me and a temper of my own and never took crap off of anyone, including my oldest sister. She didn’t scare or intimidate me the way she did Carly, and I would go right back at her no matter who was around. Sarah and I were never really close even though I looked up to her when I was younger. I was always closer to Carly. I had accepted years ago that my two older sisters would always be close and I would be the odd man out because of the age difference. They were almost a decade older than me and each other’s support system and confidants. They did everything together, got jobs together, got their first apartment together, and I didn’t fit into that. They couldn’t relate to me, and I couldn’t relate to them. I was into my books and making it through college. I didn’t have time for parties and boyfriends and going to the clubs like they did. Sarah and I simply didn’t get along, and the tension between us was thick. The one sibling that I am extremely close to is Michael. We called ourselves Bonnie and Clyde ever since we were kids. We always had each other’s backs no matter what and there wasn’t anything we wouldn’t do for the other; ‘til this day we call each other Bonnie and Clyde.

  Chapter Six - No Shame, Always the Same

  I worked my butt off and put myself through college with the help of scholarships. I was able to attend Michigan State University majoring in business and analytics. I loved numbers and I loved working with money and helping others make more. It was my forte. I always knew I wanted to work in the corporate world in some big reputable company where I could wear nice suits and high heels to work every day. Watching my mother bust her butt my entire life in a factory, standing on her feet for ten to twelve hours a day and coming home dog tired was not the life I wanted. I hated seeing her so miserable and worn out, her feet constantly swollen and hurting. When she went back to school to get her GED, she also took a typing class. My siblings and I encouraged her to keep furthering her education so she could get a better job, a job where she could sit behind a desk.

  Our father, on the other hand, did everything in his power to discourage her. He ramped up his name calling and put-downs, picking fights with her when he knew she was trying to study, constantly telling her that she wasn’t smart or good enough to be anything but a factory worker. I already hated the man, but I hated him even more for that. He only had a seventh grade education himself and didn’t learn how to read until he was almost fifty year
s old. How ironic that the man who loved to call everyone around him dumb and stupid couldn’t read.

  Needless to say, our mother never pursued any jobs inside of an office, nor did she continue her classes after receiving her GED. Her confidence was shattered due to the constant badgering and insults hurled at her by her husband. No matter how much we tried to encourage her and build up her confidence, the damage was already done by Johnny Paris, and she gave up. After the factory she worked at for almost twenty years closed, she got a job working in the kitchen at a high school. After working another fifteen years my mother finally retired.

  My relationship with my mother had deteriorated significantly because of my strong dislike for my father and my inability to stomach his constant bullshit and lies. He hated that despite everything we had been through, things that he put our family through, my siblings and I still tried to maintain a relationship with our mother, but not him. He would find ways to turn her against us or try to drive a wedge between us with some heinous lie that our mother would ultimately believe. I cut this cycle of dysfunction in my late teens and kept my distance from my parents as much as possible. This was easy to do since I was in college and spent the majority of my time studying.

  After I graduated from college, I poured myself into my career and climbed the corporate ladder quickly. I met some very powerful and influential people along the way, a few of which were kind enough to take me under their tutelage to teach me the ins and out of the career I was pursuing. The more time I spent on the job, the less likely it would be for me to be dragged into any family drama. Even though I took great care to distance myself from my parents and a few of my siblings, it didn’t mean that they stopped trying to suck me back in. Every so often I’d get a frantic phone call from my mother crying hysterically because she discovered outside children, or because she suspected Sarah of carrying on a sexual relationship with our father. Yup, you read that correctly. I’ll spare you the details, but it changed my relationship with my sister tremendously.

  I was sitting in my office at Pricewaterhousecoopers preparing for one of many meetings for the day when my phone rang. I had to do a double take at the number that came up in the display because my mother never called me at work unless it was an emergency. My mind instantly began to race as I wondered who died or if she finally killed our father because he had pushed her too far. One could only wish. Taking a deep breath I answered my phone. “Hi mama.”

  “Sloane? Can you talk? I need to talk to you as soon as possible.” My mother was crying which only increased my nervousness. This was bad, just like I thought.

  “I’m about to go into a meeting mama, can you give me an hour?” I asked.

  “That’s fine,” she sniffed. “I’ll come get you, I need to get out of this house.”

  “Ok, well come get me in an hour. Just park out front and I’ll be able to see you from my office window.”

  “Ok, bye.”

  “Bye.”

  After all the preparing and note-taking I did for the meeting I couldn’t remember a thing. I couldn’t focus, and the notes no longer made any sense. I couldn’t wait for the meeting to be over with, and when it was I ran out of there as quickly as possible. Once inside of my office I looked out of my second floor window to see if my mother was there in her emerald green Toyota Tundra truck, and she was indeed there. I grabbed my purse and stopped at my secretary’s desk to tell her that I was taking an early lunch and would be back in an hour.

  Once inside my mother’s truck, I could see her red eyes and red nose. “Hey,” I said tentatively.

  “Hey,” she said, in return before pulling out into traffic.

  “Are you hungry, did you eat anything yet?” My mother asked.

  “No, I didn’t eat. But we don’t have to stop anywhere to eat. Just drive to Orchard View Park and we can sit in the parking lot and talk,” I said. Something told me that whatever she had to tell me was going to make me lose my appetite.

  Nodding her head in agreement, my mother headed for the highway and drove east towards Orchard View Park.

  “I think there is something going on with Sarah and your father,” she said matter-of-factly. She glanced at me long enough to see my reaction. I gave her a semi-surprised, but very serious look in return. My sister was a very low down person and I can’t stress this enough. My mother knew this about her child too. There hadn’t been a line that Sarah wasn’t willing to cross yet if it meant her getting what she wanted in the end, and that included sleeping with her own father.

  “Are you sure?” I said in return, as the bile in my stomach churned.

  “I heard them talking, and I know I’m not losing my mind or hearing things, Sloane.”

  My mother went on to relate the conversation she heard between my father and sister word for word, and I believed her right away. My mother may be many things, but one thing I do know about her is that she never reacts without having a reason to. If she knew nothing else, she knew her husband. She knew that man better than he knew himself which was why she knew when something wasn’t right.

  “I believe you,” I said.

  My mother looked at me, and I watched as relief came over her face. She needed to hear those three words more than she needed her next breath. She parked the truck and turned it off and turned in her seat to face me, and I did the same.

  “How long has it been going on?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I’ve had a feeling for a while that something wasn’t right, so I paid attention to things more.”

  “This is sick, ma. What is wrong with them?” I said, as anger took over me.

  “We’ve been married over forty years and I’ve never been enough. Never!” My mother sobbed, as she looked for tissue to wipe her nose and tears.

  “And yet you stayed. You kept putting up with his crap for years and years, mama. He put our entire family through hell. Look at how messed up all of us are! We all should have been in some kind of counseling to deal with our issues. Look at Junior and Michael – they’re messed up for life because of that man and they still go out of their way for his approval. It’s a never-ending cycle and Johnny Paris, Sr. is always the source of the pain that we endure.”

  I wanted to say more, but it was hard for me to talk to my mother about our father without bringing up how her selfishness in keeping him around tore our family apart. We’ve had this conversation before, and I’ve been brutally honest with my mother, so she knows how I feel. I’m just tired of sounding like a broken record when I know it’s falling on deaf ears.

  There was an uneasy silence between us for a moment before my mother finally responded.

  “I know I made mistakes when it came to you kids,” she said with regret.

  I swallowed back tears of anger because her admission was too little too late. I couldn’t help thinking back to when my brothers tried to tell her about our father’s cheating ways when they were just little boys. They were trying to protect her, thinking they were doing the right thing, and in return she let her husband beat them like rabid dogs. What mother in her right mind could allow such abuse to happen to her children?

  “What do you plan on doing now?” I asked, bringing the conversation back on topic.

  “I’m gonna confront them, and that nasty heffa Sarah is getting out of my house today.”

  Apparently my mother had forgotten that it takes two to tango. Sarah wasn’t alone in the filth.

  “Do what you gotta do mama. You can’t afford to keep letting yourself get upset like this with your high blood pressure.”

  Suddenly I felt pissed at myself because this was the same shit I always got dragged into with my family. My mother had done this before only to go right back to our father as if nothing happened. A few years ago she called Junior crying telling him that she wanted him to help her find an apartment because she had decided that she was leaving our father. I was skeptical because it wasn’t the first time that our mother had done this. I took the, ‘I’ll believe it w
hen I see it’, stance whereas Junior got excited and began to furiously search for nice apartments in nice neighborhoods. He eventually found her exactly what he was looking for in a nice area of the city, and just like I knew she would, our mother changed her mind within forty-eight hours.

  Now here I was being sucked into another one of her dramatic episodes, and as disgusting and serious as it was, and despite the fact that I believed her, deep down I knew nothing would change. Sarah may get kicked out, but Johnny Paris, Sr. was going nowhere, and neither was Betty Jean.

  “I gotta get back to work mama. I have another meeting to go to in ten minutes,” I said as I looked at my watch.

  “Oh, okay. Thanks for listening to me Sloane. I know you’re busy, but I had to talk to somebody,” my mother said, appreciatively.

  “You’re welcome mama. I believe you, and you need to confront them as soon as possible. Whatever happens, just know I’ve got your back on this,” I said in return.

  My mother gave me a sad smile before she turned the ignition on the truck and pulled out of the parking lot.

  I don’t think I need to tell you how bad things got when my mother confronted Sarah and my father. My mother called me and told me about it a few days later. As always, Johnny Paris denied everything and Sarah tried to as well. But when my mother repeated back to them word for word the conversation they had that she overheard, both of their mouths dropped open, and guilt covered them like a blanket.