When you’re getting beat consistently, hope evaporates. You stifle your emotions, but your trauma off-gasses in unconscious ways. After countless beatings she endured and witnessed, this particular beat down left my mother ina constant fog, a shell of the woman I remembered from a few years before. She Was distracted and vacant most of the time, except when he called her name.Then she’d hop-to like she was his slave. I didn’t know until years later that she was considering suicide.

My brother and I took our pain out on each other. We’d sit or stand across from one another and he would throw punches as hard as he could at me. It usually started out as a game, but he was four years older, much stronger, and he connected with all his power. Whenever I’d fall, I’d get up and he’d hit me again, as hard as he could, yelling like a martial arts warrior at the top of his lungs, his face twisted with rage.

“You’re not hurting me! Is that all you fucking have?” I’d shout back. I wanted him to know that I could take more pain than he could ever deliver, but when it was time to fall asleep and there were no more battles to fight, no place to hide, I wet the bed. Nearly every night.

My mother’s every day was a lesson in survival. She was told she was worthless so often she started to believe it. Everything she did was an effort to appease him so he wouldn’t beat her sons or whip her ass, but there were invisible trip wires in her world and sometimes she never knew when or how she set them off until after he slapped the shit out of her. Other times she knew she teed herself up fora vicious beat down.

One day I came home early from school with a nasty earache and laid down on my mother’s side of their bed, my left ear throbbing in excruciating pain. With Each throb my hate spiked. I knew I wouldn’t be going to the doctor because my father didn’t approve of spending his money on doctors or dentists. We didn’thave health insurance, a pediatrician, or a dentist. If we got injured or sick, we were told to shake it off because he wasn’t down to pay for anything that didn’tdirectly benefit Trunnis Goggins. Our health didn’t meet that standard, and that pissed me the fuck off.

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