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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504928762 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | AuthorHouse |
| Publication date: | 08/20/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 74 |
| File size: | 115 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Life as I Knew It
Overcoming an Abusive Childhood
By Kara Redkin
AuthorHouse
Copyright © 2015 Debra Beatty BakerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5049-2877-9
CHAPTER 1
My mother told me not to write this book until she was dead. As she ages, I begin to understand why. In her late 80's her mind is as sharp as ever; continuing to do research for her many books. I have no wish to remind her of unpleasant times, and so I write this in anticipation of her inevitable passing.
I have few happy memories of my childhood. Looking back, I am happy that Dad never went out to bars, or even drank. So it is even more perplexing to me that he was such a fierce and dreaded dad. One thing I'll say for Dad, he loved to read. I can imagine it was his way of escaping the realities of having to discipline four unruly kids.
By the time I came along, it was just the three of us girls. We were fairly noisy, and Dad had a night job. I suppose it was hard for him to sleep during the day when we were young. But this is how my Mom and Dad handled us kids. Mom worked days while Dad took care of us and I guess he slept while we napped.
My earliest memory of being with Dad while Nina and Anna were at school, is going to the hardware store with him. I remember him smiling a lot, really beaming with pride as he introduced me to his friend who owned the store. I must have been four at the time since I wasn't in school yet.
The day before Kindergarten was to start, I remember it was a bright, sunny day. Two weeks before I had just turned five and I comprehended little that was going on. My Mom had taught us all to read before we started school. She was a writer and knew the importance of such a head start.
My Dad parked his car at the school parking lot. The outside door to the classroom was propped wide open since it was such a sunny day, and we walked right in. It was "Meet The Teacher" day, and every child had an hour to familiarize themselves with the teacher and the classroom. My teacher, Mrs. Meyers, and my father talked while I played with the various toys. I remember a big wooden shoe that laced up for practice in tying a bow. When I got home I asked Dad to show me how to tie my shoe. It wasn't hard, it just required a lot of practice on my part. My little fingers had never had to maneuver in such an intricate way. I was so proud when I was not only able to duplicate the act, but was able to do it tightly, so it wouldn't come unraveled. No double-knotting here.
The next day was truly my first day of school and I was so excited. Too bad I missed it entirely. It just happened to be raining while my Dad drove me to school. He handed me milk money, and I said, "How many monies is this?"
"Two cents," he said.
I said, "Wow."
He didn't park this time, but told me he would let me off here at the roundabout, and pick me up after school in the same place. This was different. I looked at the door to the classroom. It was closed. At home Nina and Anna had told me, with fear in their voices, never to open a closed door. I had no idea that this only applied to my parent's bedroom when they were both inside. Apparently, Nina had once opened their door to be greeted with much shouting and running and spanking. So as a result, none of us ventured to open a closed door.
There was no way that my father could have known about this conspiratorial conversation between sisters, nor was I articulate enough to relay it to him. Instead, when I got out of the car, into the rain, I grabbed the no-parking pole and went around and around, determined to wait until that door was opened.
Well, that was apparently too much for my Dad. He got out of the car. At first I thought he was going to open the school door for me. But I was so wrong. He threw me back into the car and raced home. I had no idea what I was in for. But soon enough I found out. My Dad tore off my clothes, and I mean all of them. He took off his belt and went to town on my bare skin. I was so bruised there was no way I could make an appearance at school that day. So I missed my first day of school.
The second day of school went fine until the end when one of my class mates asked if I wanted to go home with her. I said, "Okay." We played at her house until her mother said it was time for me to go home. Well, I didn't exactly know how to get home from her house, only from school. So I wandered around a bit until I decided to knock on someone's door.
"Are you a lost little girl?" said the nice older woman.
"Yes. I can't find my way home," I said.
Well, she was used to this, living so close to the school. "Would you like some hot chocolate?"
"Yes, I would," I said.
"What is your father's name?" she inquired.
"Daddy," I replied.
"What is your last name?" she asked.
"I don't know."
"Don't worry, I know just what to do." She then called the police to report a missing girl.
"Does she have short blond hair and freckles?" asked the dispatcher.
"How on earth did you know that?" the woman replied.
"We've had a report of just such a little girl who went missing on her way home from school. Is her name Kara?"
"Yes. Oh, thank goodness," she said. She gave the dispatch her address and told me everything would be fine, that my daddy would be coming to get me.
I was so happy. I would be home soon, playing with my toys and watching TV. Little did I realize I was about to experience another, more horrendous display of my father's unrelenting anger.
As soon as I got into my Dad's car, he back-handed me across the face. Nothing could have prepared me for such stinging pain. Even the belt whipping from yesterday was forgotten. Looking back on it now, I tell myself that he trained our dog with much more patience than he had for my innocent behavior.
The weekend had arrived and our Mom was taking us to the lake, which was close to her mother's house. We spent many glorious days at my grandmother's house. She cooked from scratch and even taught me how to make a cherry pie with a lattice crust. She would send us to the corner store for milk or eggs, or whatever she needed for the dinner. All three of us, Nina, Anna and I, went and we each carried a little bag for the few things she needed. When we got back, we each received a quarter! We were so happy!
The next day we came back home with horrific sunburns from our lake activities. Our tender shoulders were blistered and every exposed limb was lobster-red. My Mom always said a nice warm bath helped everything. So she got all three of us in the tub. The warm water did help. We must have been quite noisy because all of a sudden, there was our Dad, yelling loudly. Meanwhile I reached for the soap.
He slapped me on my sunburned back and said, "Don't you ever turn your back when I'm talking to you!"
Well, I had no idea he was talking to me. I hadn't done anything wrong. I didn't understand. The slap stung me even more than the back- hand did. When my Mom was toweling me off, I asked her, "Why did Daddy hurt my sunburn?"
She said, "I don't know, honey."
Looking back on it now, I hope he had heard that innocent exchange.
CHAPTER 2We had a lot of fun at our Grandmother's house. One Christmas, I received a wonderful gift of underwear with the names of the weeks embroidered right on them. Another Christmas I got a Tressy doll whose hair could be pulled long or wound up short again inside her head. The most useful toy I ever received was a device with an alphabet dial built into it that allowed me to spell out a word that it "spoke." When I spelled the word correctly, it would reward me with "That's Correct!" I played with that until it broke, many months later. By then I knew how to spell all the many words in the toy. Of course by today's standards, it had a very small storage capacity. But it kept me quite busy and happy.
I was very inquisitive and always asked everyone how to spell this or that word. It was around the time of "Laugh-In" where the famous saying arose, "Look that up in your Funk and Wagnall!" And so for my 13th birthday that year I got a Funk & Wagnall paperback dictionary. I looked up everything in it that I didn't understand while reading my many library books. I was a voracious reader.
In the summer after sixth grade, I read Gone With the Wind. It was wonderful. I kept my dictionary handy for any "grown-up words" that I hadn't heard before. I was getting to be such a good speller, my mother got me a Washington Post Spelling Bee guide to prepare for taking my place in the National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C. I was in the seventh grade when I tried out for the spelling bee's first elimination in a classroom at my school.
I sat at one of the desks and listened to the way the other students spelled their words. They started out with easy words. They were to stand up, say the word, then spell the word, and then say the word again. When it was my turn, I said, "Pillow. W-I-L-L-O-W. Pillow." Then I sat down and smiled. The teacher in charge told me that I could go now. I didn't understand. She explained that I just spelled Willow. I was so humiliated my face turned red before I was able to leave the classroom. I could hear the other students laughing. The teacher admonished them that there would be no laughing for mistakes.
When I got home I told everyone what had happened and they all laughed. Every once in a while someone in my family would ask me "How do you spell Pillow?" I would always answer, "W-i-l-l-o-w!" It was our favorite inside joke.
That summer my Mom bought a set of Encyclopedia Britannica. All summer long I would read, from A to Z, until I finished the entire series. I imagined all sorts of things I could accomplish. The only thing is, I didn't talk very much. It was my belief that if I but knew the Russian Alphabet, I could learn to read and write Russian. If only I had communicated this little known "fact" to someone who knew differently.
But I did learn French. All throughout my elementary years, as a group our classroom watched the local public educational network and learned French. Every year for an hour a day, from Kindergarten through the 6th grade we had a French lesson. This helped me enormously when it came to figuring out words from their French root. We didn't have any Latin classes, but French is a "romance" language, meaning that it has Latin roots. So when I learned that superior could also mean "upper," as in the head is superior to the neck, the word "supra" came to mind, which is Latin for "above." I use that word a lot now, working as a medical word processor.
One summer day I was sitting on the front porch, just chilling, when the mailman brought my Dad's Book of the Month Club selection. Having nothing to do, I opened the books and decided to read "Love Story". I finished it in a few days, and then handed it to my Dad and said, "I think you'll like this." He chuckled and said, "Thanks."
In 7th grade I took French. I thought I would get an easy "A" because of my elementary years of French. Well, the teacher gave me a "B" because I failed to turn in one assignment. I was pretty indignant and decided in the 8th grade I'd take Spanish. It was pretty easy for me to learn to read and write both French and Spanish, but for some reason I could never speak them very well. That's because as a child, I didn't talk very much. I kept my thoughts to myself and "talked to God."
We went to a Baptist Church and Sunday School, all except for my Dad. One day while walking to Church I asked why I had to go to church when Dad never went, and I got a spanking. Mom's spankings never really hurt, but were somewhat of a humiliation.
I had a paper route year-round early in the morning. Many times, while walking to each subscriber, I would say in my head, "God, please take me home." That was my plea to be allowed to go to Heaven. By 8th grade I had had enough of being given a bloody nose for every imagined wrong. If the house was messy when my Dad came home from work, he woke us all up in the middle of the night. After giving us all bloody noses, he would say, "Clean up this pig sty!" He knew just how to cup his hand to give us a "compression" nose bleed. The air forced into our nostrils would break the capillaries and give us bloody noses without any bruises. I will never forget that.
Nobody trained us up to be responsible children. Is it any wonder that we all left the house as soon as we possibly could? And that we all had babies by the time we were 19?
One day I was carrying a chair downstairs to my basement bedroom and I bumped my hip. My Mom asked me what was wrong. I mouthed off at her saying, "You don't care, why would you want to know?"
Well my Dad was hot on my trail and caught me up by the hair, slapping me left and right until I was in hysterics. Nina told me that was child abuse. That was the first time I had heard that term used in my house. I certainly never thought of it myself. I just thought that's how it was. It never crossed my mind that parents lovingly took care of their children. Just not mine.
And so my mantra was every morning at my paper route, "God, please take me home." Every day that was my plea.
CHAPTER 3Steve was born six months after my sixth birthday. We girls all adored him. He was little more than 2 the first time he answered "No!" to my Dad. We were all in the living room when Dad told Steve to "come here." After he said "No" there was a collective audible intake of air through our mouths. Nobody ever said no to my Dad.
Dad was on his feet in seconds, snatching Steve up into the air and spanking the living daylights out of him. He never said "No" to my Dad again.
One day we were playing in the living room with Steve while my Mom was in the kitchen pouring coffee for a neighbor lady. We were telling Steve to do this or that just to see the little bugger run his little legs off in his cute little diapers. He was having a ball. One of us told him to get a napkin from the kitchen. He ran into the kitchen and saw a napkin on the kitchen counter that was directly underneath a just-poured cup of steaming coffee. He grabbed the napkin and the entire cup of coffee spilled on his leg, all the way down to his ankle. The blood-curdling scream was terrifying, even as I remember it today. His tender skin literally melted away from his leg. The ambulance came for him and he had to have plastic surgery. He had to stay in the burn unit for weeks before he was allowed to come home. Only my Mom visited him. My Dad didn't. Many nights we girls stayed in the hospital hallway while my Mom read to Steve. His favorite book was Mike Mulligan and the Steam Shovel. That had been my favorite too. My Mom read that book to him every night, repeatedly, until he went to sleep.
He gradually healed, but it was a slow process. I don't think my Mom was ever the same afterwards. She never invited anyone over again and none of us ever had anything to do with our neighbors. Until Susan Green moved across the street. She had a little girl just my age and we would play for hours in her back yard. She would always say "Let's pretend to ..." And I would say, "Don't say let's pretend. Let's just do it." I think she was much more articulate than I was.
Sometimes I would watch her mother type on a little electric typewriter. She didn't look at the keys as she typed. I told my Mom that I wanted to learn to do that. So we bought a little electric typewriter with green stamps and my Dad bought me a text book to learn to type. I really loved learning to type. My Dad was proud of me. He just smiled as he listened to me typing faster with each lesson that I took. By the time I was in 8th grade, I was typing my Mom's books. One day my Dad took me to his work to do some typing for him. I was so happy when I was typing. It was so fun.
When I took an official typing course that summer I was way ahead of everyone else. During one typing test the teacher announced, "Type as fast as you possibly can, but endeavor to hit the right keys." I always liked that saying. After five minutes into the test, the teacher said, "Kara, you can stop now." I looked at her puzzled, and then looked at my paper which had already become filled up and was then on the floor. She said, "You passed the speed test. Now let me grade your accuracy." She handed my paper back to me without saying a word. She didn't want to discourage the other students. I typed 103 words per minute with 1 mistake.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Life as I Knew It by Kara Redkin. Copyright © 2015 Debra Beatty Baker. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse.
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