Prompt #4: Fear

[ambitious_wench]

For thetendermuse
Warning: First person account of abuse received as a child. Yes, it is my own experience, and not fiction.
Fear

My hands were slick, clammy with sweat. My mouth was dry, and my breath rasped in my lungs, through my throat. I felt a sudden and intense urge to void my bladder, but I didn't. I crossed my little legs, and wiped my palms on my corduroys.

My mother's angry face above me was a terrifying sight. The smell of curried lamb and rice stung my nose, and the taste of it burned my mouth. My stomach clenched, and it was all I could do to keep from vomiting.

Her voice was cold, impersonal. It always was, I don't remember tenderness from my mother at all. She had told me that I was to finish my dinner within 15 minutes, or would face a spanking, and the timer would be set again.

She had put in three times the amount of curry powder that the recipe called for. She loved curry.

The beating was administered, and I sat uncomfortably on a sore butt on the floor of the trailer at the coffee table, the cold plate of curried lamb and rice before me, sickly yellow. I think it was my fourth or fifth attempt.

I could not eat it. I tried, and vomited. I went to bed with an empty stomach, and the worst part of it was the fear of having curry again the next night.

I think I was 7 years old. Today, the smell of curry makes me ill with fear.

Comments

[artemii.livejournal.com]

it still amazes me sometimes how many of us there are

[mintogrubb.livejournal.com]

Have posted a comment, but LJ is being a bugger tonight.
My dad was an alcoholic. That does not mean I understand everything, but at least I am not tempted to try and rationalise things. To me it is important to recognise that my Dad was evil and should have been punished, not sympathised with and given a decent funeral like the rest of the family tried to give him. I wold have been happier to have left him where he had fallen. If he hadn't been a drunkard, he would not have met such an end as he did. It's assholes who never met him, and tell me how sorry they feel that I cant forgive that piss me off. I've got no time for them, though.
However you want to take this forward you have my support.
If you want to talk. I will listen.

[ambitious-wench.livejournal.com]

When I was in the navy, we had a small brown glass bottle of some sort of acid in the tow tractor repair shop where I worked. It was sulfuric acid, I think, and we used it carefully to loosen rusted bolts. There was a box of Arm and Hammer baking soda right next to it, to neutralize it in case of spills.

The top of the bottle was a screw cap, but it wasn't acid proof. I remember grabbing tha bottle to take with me to work on a machine outside, and put it in my pocket of my coveralls. Just out of habit, I grabbed the box too.

Can you see it coming? The lid leaked. Thank god I had the baking soda.

I carried anger toward my mother for a long time. Until I realized that bottle was leaking in my pocket.

I was lucky then, too. I made a tentative peace with my mother before she died. Mother was mentally ill. That doesn't forgive her of the terrible things she did to me. And while I don't understand her illness, at least I have something to point to as a "reason".

I can't be an asshole and tell you you should forgive your father. You might have a bottle of anger that doesn't leak, and that you are now using to make changes in this unpleasant world. But I would not wish the internal sulphuric acid burns of repressed resentment and anger on anyone. Be careful, Minto.
Edie

[turnberryknkn.livejournal.com]

(nods nods) A very difficult thing to share. Even more difficult to live through.

I have always known, my whole life, that simply having parents who cared about me made me luckier than a significant fraction of most folks. And from that, in part, an obligation to do something with that beginning to repay them --and the universe-- for that.