I have six sister and two brothers, and we grew up primarily with our mother and stepfather. I had one brother and sister taken away by Social Services for child abuse. We were starved as punishment for not having a clean enough house, we would risk getting beaten by a belt for going upstairs in the middle of the night and stealing raw packets of Top Ramen because we were so hungry, we were lined
up and beaten with a broomstick in turn and watched each other get beaten until someone would confess to stealing a Progressive can of soup, which was only allowed to be eaten by our mother? I watched my mother try to commit su***de on three different occasions, once drowning in a bathtub with pills, and once as she stood there and looked at us with a knife to her wrist and told us she was going to kill herself because we were bad children. My sister and brother went to their foster homes and the abuse continued for my two older and two younger sisters and myself. I battled childhood depression though I had no clue what it was at the time. I remember going to an old parking lot near one of our old homes that was a few stories above ground. I climbed onto the other side of the chain link fence, and I stood there just begging for enough strength to let go. In the end I just went to the bottom of the parking lot underneath the stairs and cried for what seemed like forever praying that if there was a God he would come and rescue me. That if anything good existed I would open my eyes and belong to a different family. That was also the first time I ran away. Us children have only ever been and always will be servants to our mother. She used us to make her coffee in the morning, cook her breakfast (we didn’t eat breakfast only her), grab her ci******es, and make her bed. All before we left for school in the morning. I am using my story to highlight how I felt as a child in some of these situations and in my effort to pay it forward Canaan’s Cause will start fundraising to help fund similair organizations that saved me as a child.
