There’s a saying I’ve come to find rather irritating as the years pass me by in slow succession.
“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”
Firstly, I don’t have a liquidizer, nor do I have the time to stand in the kitchen making lemonade when I can just—I don’t know—go to the store and buy one already premade in a resealable and recyclable bottle.
Secondly, making your own fruit juice sounds like a lot of work.
Thirdly—and not because this has anything to do with my previous statement whatsoever—but to the person who invented high heels, I hope you get viciously attacked in the back of a sedan on a hot summer’s day. Sure, they look great, but my god are they the most painful fucking things in the world. Yet we, as women, still put ourselves through the agony of wearing them for the simple fact that they look great on our feet.
Anyway, I’m deviating from why I hate the saying about lemonade from lemons. The reason I dislike it so much is due to the fact life didn’t hand me lemons in the fruit sense. No, ithanded me one in the shape of an abusive father who came home drunk every night and took out his anger towards the world on my mother. A woman who’s not only the sweetest human you could ever come into contact with, but she’s also kind, loving, and so supportive to me. If you needed something—no matter what it was—my mother was always there to help.
When my parents met, they were high school sweethearts, and the way my mother tells it, the moment she saw my deadbeat asshole father… it was love at first sight for the both of them. But in my eyes, loving someone doesn’t constitute as having free reign to hurt them whenever you want. Love is kind, generous, all encompassing. It’s an emotion you can’t see, but one you feel every single day—when it’s the right person. But needless to say, she fell for him and his charming smile hook, line, and sinker, and the rest as they say… is history.
He wasn’t always an alcoholic, that came over time. Initially he hated his job, so he got a new one. He hated where we lived, so we moved. He hated being home alone on days my mother would work—y’know, before they had me. So she quit, got a dog, and became a stay-at-home wife. Even then he still wasn’t happy, but whatever my father wanted, my mother agreed with and gave to him. Whatever he complained about, she nodded along.
Then, I was born. I don’t know whether their problems started after that, or if they were already there before my arrival, but growing up in that household, all I remember is a lot of fighting between the both of them. It began with raised voices, nasty spoken words, and then an apology given within the hour. Soon enough though, things only worsened. The more the years passed and the older I got, the more his verbal abuse became cruel and unrelenting. Even then, my beautiful mother stayed the epitome of happiness… but it only got worse.
Until one day everything changed.
I was fourteen the first time I witnessed my father strike my mother across the face, and it didn’t stop there. Every time he returned home from one of his usual nights out with his cop buddies, there was something to complain about. Something my mother did—or didn’t do—to embarrass or annoy him. Something he needed to punish her for.
It went on for years and nothing changed. When he was at his most volatile, my mother always told me to go hide so his line of sight was nowhere near me. She protected me, like any great parent should. She kept me away from his hands and took everything he dished out to her in silence. No matter how harsh his attacks were… she never made a single sound. He beat on her like she wasn’t the love of his life, but someone he despised and loathed.
The night of my eighteenth birthday, I watched in trepidation as he backhanded my mother so hard she hit the living room floor with an almightythud. All while I was still holding my bright pink birthday cake in both hands. I watched in slow motion as she collapsed to the floor and hit her head on the corner of the coffee table.
She barely survived the ordeal, what with the amount of damage he had inflicted on her from his hit,andwhat the wooden corner had caused to her temple. She spent three weeks in intensive care due to a shattered orbital bone and short-term memory loss.
Meaning she had no recollection of what happened that night, and no matter what I told her, she refused to believe me. Rejecting the idea that my father was a bad man and believing only that she had an accident—one he told hershehad caused. The son of a bitch had brainwashed her before I had a chance to tell her everything.
It was then I realised I needed to tell someone, to do something,anything, to try and save my mother. Butconsidering he was a cop, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that even if I did try to report what he’d been putting her through, it would’ve been ignored and brushed under the metaphorical carpet anyway.
So, I did the daughter-like thing. I sat him down that night and begged him to stop drinking, to love us the way he used to, and for a while… everything was perfect. He removed every single bottle of alcohol from the house, stopped going out to bars with his work buddies, and didn’t touch a drop of alcohol for a year. I truly believed he was going to change, to give us back the life he’d promised… until last night.
The night he came home and hitmefor the first time. That same night, he sexually assaulted me in the same place my mother’s lifeless body lay until he decided it was right to call the police and save her. My father drunkenly stole my virginity and any ounce of innocence I had left on the rough brown carpet of the living room floor like it belonged to him, andonlyhim.
He ignored my pleas for him not to do this—because I was his daughter—and he forced me to listen to him call me by my mother’s name before he muffled my cries for help with his large, calloused hand. The same night, I woke up from briefly passing out, only to see him wailing on my mother all over again like she was his own personal punching bag. The same night, I stabbed him to death in my family kitchen as my mother watched on in silent, slack-jawed horror as I rained down blow after blow with the handle of the knife gripped tightly in my palm.
He had to go; he had to die for both me and my mother to be safe.
So I continued for as long as I could. No matter how tired, or breathless I became, I watched as the life faded from his eyes with every spear of the steel blade as it sliced through his thick flesh. Stopping only when my arm eventually gave out. By then,I think he got the message that he should’ve made better choices about the women in his life.
It’s why I’m currently standing over a six-foot-wide, eight-foot-deep grave that took me hours to dig.
“Shit. There’s no way I’m going to get this dirt out of my outfit.”
Fuck.
Time.
It’s the one thing you can never tell how much of it you might have left. It’s also something that can either move at a glacial pace, or so quickly you have no idea where the day went or how the hours passed you by.
It’s why I’m here.
Just so I can seeher.
Heather Delaney is one of the most beautiful creatures I have ever laid my eyes on, but she doesn’t know who I am.
Yet.
