Ages 3-4

 Sometime after this my parents made the decision to move to Colorado Springs, CO. I don't remember much of the early days of when we got there. Other than the fact that it was a couple weeks before my sisters and dad arrived. Most days I spent hanging out with my cousins. Me and mom were staying at my aunts house. She had this tub full of really neat toys. Most of them were little figures from characters from Disney shows. She had these little yellow birds who loved to scream. I remember my cousin Jenna didn't like me much... I was told years later that the reason I spent so much time there without my dad and sisters is because this is when issues kind of started in my parents marriage. My dad was threatening to keep my two older sisters from my mom. In the end he ended up moving to Colorado with us. That's when we moved into the apartment in Colorado Springs.

 I spent many mornings in that apartment unsupervised. It was three stories and things finally seemed stable. It was the place I first time I watched Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Scared the shit out of me back then. Looking back I think that movie was a huge contributor to my love of horror movies, and to this day I consider it one of my all time favorites in the franchise. My sisters and I used to take our sleeping bags and slide down the stairs in them. Dad hated it and would yell at us if he heard us doing it. One time, we were sliding down the stairs after he told us we weren't allowed to do it anymore, obviously we never listened. He heard us, and was yelling as he made his way to us to knock it off, threatening to beat us, etc. We all scrambled, grabbing what we could and hiding. Elle, my older sister, however, was stuck cleaning up the sleeping bags and got caught by dad. Nothing ever came of this, though. She was dads favorite, after all. 

I had my 4th birthday in that apartment. All I really remember is the cake. It had little figurines of Disney princesses on it. Aurora, Belle, and Cinderella. I hated the frosting on that cake. It was the whipped kind. The stuff that always tastes stale and is somehow too sweet for even a 4 year old.

Sometime after that birthday, we moved to this house up the street from my aunts. I don't remember much about that place outside of the games we would play to pass the time. Hide and seek in the dark, ghost. We had this bizarre one where we would take the pieces from one of those old McDonald play set things and just them at each other full force. My siblings and cousins had a lot of fun back then. And a few broken bones. I don't know if butt launchers were a thing for anyone else but it was a game we would play where one of us would sit on someone's feet, and then the person doing the launching would essentially kick you as far and as high into the air as we could. Broke Jenna's arm accidently launching her out a window one day. I broke my arm after falling off a stack of boxes in the garage I'd climbed to get away from Elle when she was trying to run over my toes with a red wagon. Sometime after I got that cast on, my family started to get divided. I didn't understand why at first. And then one night, as a complete surprise to me, I woke up surrounded by moving boxes with my parents rushing us out the door. Over night we moved from Colorado back to Oregon. Again, I wasn't given the full picture until years later and didn't understand the full weight of the issue until I was a grown adult.

See, my dad was an abusive man. But he chose to target my oldest sister Cara the most. He was mean to Elle, Tandy, and I. Tandy was around 12 or 13 at the time and really wanted to join cheerleading. She didn't have the best grades, so my parents told her no. But after spending a semester working her ass off she managed to bring F's up to C's. But that wasn't enough for my dad. His favorite hobby was crushing dreams. She would never be a cheerleader. My aunt, however. Was not having it. She was willing to pay for camp for Tandy. Dad wouldn't have it. I think Elle and I got off easy, seeing as we were so little at the time. I don't remember enough and a lot of what was shared here is second hand information. Cara, on the other hand... Cara really saw my dads wrath. She was always left in charge of watching us. Even when there were other options. She missed important softball games, had to put off studying, and put a lot of her adolescent life on hold to watch after her 3 younger sisters. My dad also had a habit of spending money we didn't have. We didn't have the food we needed in the house. Cara skipped meals many times to make sure we ate. It was still never enough. I remember my dad teasing her for licking her plate clean at times. As if he didn't notice a young girl starving herself to make sure her little siblings were fed. But I digress. The reason we moved overnight, was because the abuse was finally coming to light. It was destroying Cara's life, and my aunt was hell bent on doing whatever she could to get custody of us since she couldn't talk my mom into leaving my father. All she wanted was to remove Cara from a bad situation. She never got the chance. My dad would never let her. Before I knew it, we were almost 3 states over, and I was starting kindergarten.

Cara has made it so far. Everything she has ever done, she had created for herself. And I am so incredibly proud of her for that.

Here's to 22. Hopefully, we will see another year.

~Onyx~