it gets better

toni

There has never been a day when everything is okay.

All my problems started when I was 8 years old. I was sexually abused and I didn't tell my parents until I was 10 years old and we took him to court they didn't arrest him.

I developed depression when I was 10 and started to devolop anixety from living with my father who told me that the world is dangerous and was very observant of strangers. I guess that is from what had happened to me but I thought he was just being annoying at the time.

At school I was very shy and anti-social and got bullied a lot due to my stutter that my dad often made fun of me because which made it worse. But I still had friends and I seen my mother every weekend who was very different to my father.

My mother is a very out going person who doesn't see danger in anything. She will take any risks she can and I remember her taking me and my brother to a giant waterfall and you had to climb down a cliff to get to it and if my dad saw us climb down there he would go mad.

By the time I got into High school the bullying got worst and I started to have anxiety attacks, I used to cry a lot and I started to self harm. I still lived with my father and I have a disabled brother which spends most christmas's in hospital which was hard as a young child but I learned to cope with it and it wasn't that bad.

I started to have flash backs and nightmares about what happened when I was 8 and I never told this to anybody because I wasn't an open person and didn't like to share any problems I had. When I was 13 I decided to move in with my mother.

I liked it better with her because she wasn't as strict. She had a boyfriend that used to hit her but he was really nice to me and my brother and never hit her when we were around so we didn't know, she would always find an excuse for the marks on her and we would believe it.

Once we went on holiday to Spain and I remember that they argued and went upstairs in the hotel while me and my brother waited in a game room while they argued. A hour later I got worried so I walked toward the stairs of the hotel and my brother grabbed my arm and because he was older than me he wanted to go first just in case something bad happened.

I followed him up the stairs and down the hall to our hotel room. We opened the door and my mother was led on the bed holding onto her leg crying and her boyfriend was stood over her watching and telling her that she was over reacting.

I ran to her and asked her if she was okay but she couldn't reply as he had broke her leg by pushing her over and it getting caught on one of our beds as she fell. It was the worst sight that I have ever seen when we got back to our house it was never mentioned again but the abuse continued.

As I lived with her I got more confident and my stutter went and the billing stopped. My anxiety got better and I got more mature. I stopped crying so much and everything got better.. for a while. It was good, I liked having freedom and not being made fun of in my own house and she would should at me a lot but it didn't bother me, I got used to it after a while.

(Not the full story but to summarise, now I am living with my mother and I still see my father. I am hurt from a break up and my mother has got back with her boyfriend and he still abuses her which he now does in front of me)