Broken

mother iii

I like to stand and watch.

My favorite pastime.

Looking on while my light is being brutalized by a crazy person who claimed to show love by hurting the person.

Whose answer to every question was dominance and control.

After all the lies I told myself on the hospital bed to protect and defend, here I was standing still like a sculpture.

While my husband, no, this animal mauled my baby.

God knows, I wanted him dead.

Before the birth of my beauty, I didn't ever think of fighting Richard.

But now, I could feel anger rising from the pit of my stomach.

The beatings i had endured, i could deal with them without fighting back. But the assault on my baby, I couldn't take.

As a nurse and an aspiring doctor, I knew that this would have a psychological effect on her.

If it wasn't already.

There were signs.

Her cold reluctance.

Her facial expressions of both blank iciness and a menacing scowl.

Those two expressions were the only she ever showed.

She wouldn't play.

Even when I sneaked her out of the house to the playground, she would simply stand to the side.

Even when she was enrolled in school, I made sure the school I chose allowed playtime.

It didn't work.

The teachers complained time and time again that she didn't go out for break.

That she didn't engage in games.

But she played sports, she did well in karate class.

Too well.

No one wanted to spar with her, because she was quite fond of breaking the skin of her partner.

Inflicting bruises on the bodies of her opponents.

To most people, it would seem as if she was just too forceful.

That was what it looked like to most people.

But I knew. I knew what was happening.

I knew the damage Richard was causing was starting to take root.

That coupled with the fact she was wetting the bed.

It was quite adorable how she was trying to hide it, how she was taking perfect caution to how she slept, drank water and made sure not to wet the bed.

But there was only so many trips you could take with a urine stained tarp.

A tarp I wrapped my old clothes with.

Clothes I was planning to give to the refugee home.

I had come home to find my wad of clothes on the floor close to my bed.

I spent some time looking for it.

One evening, my little light ran into her room with the tarpuline under her arm.

She had folded it to the smallest square she could manage.

When she was asleep, I walked into her room to see her lying naked without any covering on the floor.

My light slept on the floor all this while.

Her thighs had dots of moisture, moisture that was starting to stink.