“Father, you did not manage to destroy my future!

I am 14 years old and I hate my life. I cannot stand to see him anymore, I cannot stand to sleep with fear, fear for what could happen to myself, to my little sister and brother, and to my poor mother.

My poor mother, I see the desperation in her eyes, I feel the scream for help in her trembling voice, I feel the fear in her shaking hands, I see in her eyes that she is terrified every time she hears the door opens.

I think my mother, after so many years, took a decision but she is too afraid to do something.  She cannot go to the police because they know him, it’s a small place so everyone knows each other, she cannot talk with her family because they will not understand, they will say: “He is the father of your kids!” “How can you leave your kids without a father?”

She is struggling every day to survive, mentally and physically and I am dying inside to see her like this, and I cannot do nothing. I feel powerless. I hear my mother crying every night, after we go to bad and she thinks we are already asleep, and the house is quiet because he went again to drink something at the bar.

She sits next to her bed, bends on her knees, and starts praying. Once she does this, her tears come instantly. I go to her, I give her a hug, and say that whatever she will decide, I will be there next to her. She starts crying harder.

I think this is her only way to let everything out, all the frustration and her impotence of not being able to do something to change that situation. She cannot talk with anyone about it. They will not support her and if he finds out that she is thinking of leaving him, the situation will get much worse. I think he is capable of everything.

I go to school every day with fear, with the fear that the police will call the director informing me that something bad happened, that my mother or my brothers are in the hospital, with fear that my school colleagues will notice the blue spots on my body. I need to be careful when we have the sports class and I need to go and change. What if they will see?

Yesterday he come once again drunk at home and he started again to fight with my mother, to beat us all and to break everything in the house.

Sometimes I just wish I could be a normal kid, have a normal life and do the stuff that kids in my age are doing like going to the cinema,  go and play football, meet up with friends and not being afraid that when I arrive home he will start to beat me. And I cannot do this to my mother because she has no money. We are already struggling to have the basic stuff like food and if I would dare to ask him for money, he would kill me, he will beat the s… out of me.

One day I come home from school and I found my mother extremely nervous and packing some suitcases. She told me and my brothers to immediately start packing the basic stuff because we will leave and we don’t need to forget nothing important because, if everything goes well, we will never come back to this place.

I was not disappointed that we need to leave. I hated that place. I just had bad memories there and finally, we will go out from that nightmare that we were all living in.

And we left . . .

I still remember that day like the day where we all had the chance to start a new life. We need it to leave the city, that is true, and all the places and people we knew, but it was the best decision that my mother could take.

I do not know how she managed but she rented a flat in another city, a few hours away from our home. If you can call it home. I need it to give up school to start working and help my mother. But that was little compared with the huge sacrifice she did for us.

I do not have a degree, I did not even have the chance to go to high school, so I struggled to find a job. But somehow, I succeed. And now I am happy with the life I have and that I manage to take care of my mom – my hero.

After more than ten years passed by I come back to the roots. Now there is no danger anymore. I am a grown-up man and I can defend myself. I can continue my life in the opposite way than my father did.

I have two beautiful kids that I totally love and cherish them more than my own life, and I respect women more than my father respected them his whole life.

Today, I forgive you! Today I am thankful. Father, you showed me in a very tough way, how I should never live my life, how I should never treat the others. This is thanks to you!”

I am here right now writing the story of another person – a friend of a friend. It impressed me so much his strength that I decided to share it here. A person, coming from such a toxic environment to find the strength to decide that he does not want to live like this, he does not want to be like his father, and to give up his future at such an early age to support his mother and his brothers.

We are not born being a bad person, we are like a white page that gets written with time, experiences and people teaches us to be the way we are and, if you do not deal properly with your own issues and problems, you can become a person like this – toxic and unhappy with everything around you and you start hurting the ones next to you.

We all are blessed with the life we have, some of us more and some of us less, but after a time, when we are already grown up, it depends only on us how we decide to be and what we decide to offer to the other people – you define yourself which kind of person you are or which kind person you want to be – not the others.

Version in Spanish: https://journeywithmada.com/historia-nr-12/

Version in Romanian: https://journeywithmada.com/povestea-nr-12/