Falling in

I lived with my mom until I was nine years old. It was around that time that she developed a pretty bad drinking and drug habit, found a boyfriend who loved to sell drugs and beat her ass regularly. My dad finally had enough, and stepped in and took me away from her. He was a hard man, who expected an increasingly impossible workload from me. A man that expected perfection.
I was an honor student most of my life. I was that kid that was in every single advanced placement class that a student could be enrolled in. I was a three sport athlete. I didn’t drink, smoke or do drugs. I was the perfect kid, and everyone that came around me tried and tried to tell my dad, that he needed to step back… to be happy with the Young man whom he was raising.
People around me noticed that I was the kind of kid who always seemed strung very tight. Being a big kid who was pretty meek I was bullied mercilessly. No one felt bad beating on a kid bigger than them. What they didn’t know was that I tolerated it because it was nothing compared to my home life…
When I was eleven, I got sick with the flu. I screwed something up one day, I don’t remember what exactly, and my dad came down on my ass pretty hard. I can remember standing in the bathroom of the shitty trailer that we lived in at the time. He was yelling at me red-faced, and I remember I was just trying to not throw up. I remember him asking me if I thought I was a big man now, that I could just face him down. I remember the dread that welled up in me as I realized that while I was trying to avoid puking I had missed answering one of his questions.
He backhanded me through a shower door. I remember hitting my head on the rear wall as I slammed backward. I also remember puking on myself…
The fucked up thing is I remember that as the one clear time that he actually hugged me… When he said he was sorry.
As I grew up I became more and more isolated, and as that isolation grew so did the anger inside of me. It grew to the point that by the time I was a teenager it started to play out in my psyche. I played football, and I wrestled. I excelled in these sports because the rage got to come out and play… Here’s how fucked up I had become, I actually enjoyed hurting people on the field, or on the mat, because it was the only time I could let the stranger out to play, and no one would get angry at me. I craved the approval of everyone around me. It made me an easy target for bullies. I was always the kid trying to make everyone else look bad. The apple polishing brown-noser who went out of his way to look superior. In truth, I just wanted someone to approve of me.
The summer between my junior and senior year in high school, I finally snapped. Three random guys decided that I looked like a tasty mark, and they jumped me in a field about a mile from my house. I was lucky, but I left all three of them bleeding in the dirt that day. Two were hurt badly enough that I worried about whether or not the police would respond, and whether or not I’d be arrested for what I’d done. I ran from the three boys I left laying there in the field that day.
I started looking for fights. I went out of my way to get into trouble with people who used to bully me… The problem was, I wasn’t the fat little meek kid anymore. I was 6’ 1” tall, and two hundred and fifteen pounds of solid muscle. I could bench press 320 pounds. I could squat nearly three times my body weight. I could pick a full grown man up by the throat with one arm. I was an all state football player. I dominated guys in the heavyweight wrestling class that had fifty pounds on me, no one wanted to fight me anymore…
I got increasingly violent as I got older. I started to scare the people around me. My friends knew some of what was going on at home. I think they suspected the rest….
One day three months into my senior year I came home from school. In my jacket pocket was a report card with a C on it. I sat and waited for my dad to come home from work. He arrived about 8 that night. He came into the house and I could tell immediately tonight was not the night to broach the topic of the C. He was in a mood, one that stated that if I fucked with him tonight there was no way I was going to enjoy it. Mentally I promised myself that I would show him the grades tomorrow….
I never got the chance. He went straight to my room, and pulled the report card from my jacket pocket. How he knew it was there I’ll never know. He thrust it into my face, screaming at me.
Something you need to know about a child that grows up with an abusive parent. They get bigger, but the scared child never really leaves them. You beat them down enough and they just cower in a dark corner when things get bad.
I made excuses. I lied. I never saw the right hook that put my head into the drywall.