The Choice

The swirling mix of fear and confusion within me will never be forgotten. It’s been eighteen years but it may as well have happened eighteen seconds ago. It is amazing how I can evoke those feelings so easily, yet the memories seem so distant. It is as if these things happened in another life. To another person.

That night comes to me in flashes of light but no sound. I know I was standing upon the coffee table, wearing just a white and pink sleep shirt. Why was I standing on a table? Why didn’t anyone else in the room wonder the same thing? After months of enduring that home of darkness and sickness, it had come to this moment. He had pushed my mother too far this time. All these other times of him trashing the apartment, breaking her bottles of perfume in the bathtub, the bruises, the death threats, the knife…finally there was a breakthrough. He left, his mother and my grandparents came. I was almost giddy with adrenaline. It was over! Over! My grandmother picked me up off the table and carried me to her car. I remember her saying to my mother, “As long as you stay with him, you won’t have your child.” And with that, my mother let me go. She stayed with him for another few years. She stayed with him.

At that age I wasn’t hurt by this fact. I didn’t really notice. I went from a dark hole to a home of love, attention, and normalcy. I can’t say for sure if I even missed my mother. I don’t remember. I do know that it took almost a decade for the cause of my depression to hit me like a thousand lightening bolts: my mother chose him over me. She chose a man who beat her physically and mentally over the innocent little girl that came from her womb. She chose him over me.

As I go out in the world as a young woman, I now know where the inner demons were spawned. Logic tells me that the flaw is in her, not in me. Deep within--no matter how good my GPA is, no matter how sweet I am, no matter my pretty eyes--there is that resounding set of words echoing in my brain. She chose him over me. Who will choose me now?