I was born into a military family and spent most of my childhood moving every 2 to 4 years. This often meant making friends fast and losing them fast plus having no real roots anywhere. My mother didn't know my father for very long before marrying him, getting pregnant right away and moving overseas. She tells me I was an active and colicky baby and an active toddler. My brother followed a year later, then we moved to Texas and my next 2 siblings were born about 2 years apart.
My earliest memories are of our first assignment in Texas; playing outside a lot, the introduction of TV to our house, and the birth of my youngest brother. My father was a vague figure until my 4th sibling's birth, as he seemed to be gone a lot on missions, work and out with his friends. When my mom went to the hospital and had my brother, she had complications and stayed for several days. My father had to take care of us, and I remember him making us scrambled eggs one day, then packing us off to pick up mom and baby. It was exciting, but I look back and see that was the time I saw us kids starting to suffer at his hands.
My father was always very controlling; with my mom and us kids, he also drank. Things always had to be clean and neat, stuff picked up and put away, beds made, dishes done. As soon as I was big enough to do dishes while standing on a stool, I was put to work. If things didn't go exactly the way he wanted, he would lose his temper. Lots of times that meant spanking or slapping of the kids and yelling. If you said something that offended him, he would scrape a bar of soap on your teeth. I remember going out to the kiddie pool in summer, dunking in my head and trying to get the soap out of my mouth. I would often hide in the dog house with the dog, who also suffered from my father's wrath. One day, the dog disappeared and All of us kids were devastated, but we knew our father hated the dog and got rid of him. I would sit in the empty doghouse and cry for my comfort buddy.
My father's idea of playing with us was to torment us with poking and tickling to the point we would be screaming and crying. He would pin us down while doing this. My mother never stepped in to stop it and would use him as her punisher; we always heard *wait until your father gets home*. My father would get home and often when confronted with our *bad behavior*, would make us find his current instrument of punishment (belt, paddle, rubber thong) and give it to him. It was a form of pre punishment torture. We would have to drop our pants to get hit and I would pee myself in fear, which would illicit a worse paddling. We would then get sent to bed, and heaven help you if you were not laying there with your eyes closed.
I never saw him hit my mom, but he did say a lot of things that would put her down and make her sound incompetent and attack her self esteem. Us kids got the same emotional attacks along with physical attacks. Interspersed with the bad things were good, like my parents sending my brother and I to a private school the first 2 years, buying us nice clothes and toys, sometimes taking us fishing, camping or boating. My father also liked having his 2 girls sit on his lap a lot. Sometimes that was good, and sometimes not so good; we were never given a choice- if he said do it, we had to and it most often was when he was in his easy chair in his underwear. The last thing we wanted to do was make him mad; it would end up hurting us in more ways than one.
One time, I broke a glass he had left in the bathroom when I was trying to turn on the light to take a bath with my brothers and sister (I was about 6 or 7). My father heard it and lined all 4 of us up to ask who broke the glass. We are all too terrified to speak. He proceeded to beat us in turn, especially the oldest ones (me and my brother). The more he beat our bottoms, the more afraid we were to admit anything. I found myself waking up later, face down in my bed with a cool washcloth on my battered backside that had welted up with blood blisters. I had passed out from the beating. To this day, I don't know if he knew who broke that measly 50 cent glass. I wonder why my mother stood by and let it happen.
While he would drink, I was too young to notice if it was excessive. Things got much more unbearable when we were transferred to another TX base and his drinking increased along with smoking that made my asthma so bad, I ended up in the ER multiple times, and hospitalized.
