The Breaking Point

Since my days as a daredevil have been established, I guess it's safe to say that I can move on to how I became somewhat of a gypsy..

The older that we got, the more apparent it became that my dad was not going to be the kind of dad you assume you should have. When we were very young, he was too busy with sports to spend much time with us, which turned out to be a blessing now that we look back...because he was an angry man. We grew closer to my mom but more distant from my dad, especially through the teen years. Those years seemed to escalate the angry fits we heard, as we became more vocal in disagreeing with him. We went to church every Sunday and were always very involved, including my dad, who would usually become a leader in a Men's Ministry or Sunday School Teaching. But then we would go home and see him change from the nice & friendly church goer, to the short tempered man that created tension. We knew it was wrong, we knew he shouldn't be that way...living with different faces. But what could we do about it? Just get more frustrated I guess.

The alarming traits in this man were not just anger and hatefulness, but also scheming and manipulation. It was scary actually. To find out more and more just from watching someone that they would plan what to say to someone and how long to say it until they knew they would eventually get the reaction they wanted. If we had known then what would happen later, we would have run.

The years kept sailing by, we continued to grow up and move into adulthood. With my eldest sister married with two small children, my other sister in college a short distance away, and my brother living abroad after enlisting in the military...I was the only one living at home with my parents. Things went from bad to worse, with my dad becoming more controlling than ever before. My mother couldn't even go to the grocery store without him following her in his car to yell that it wasn't safe for her to go alone. And even worse yet....the lectures began. He began giving long lectures to my mom every night that just went on and on, mainly to tell her that God would never hear her prayers until she submitted to his authority. Authority to what? Everything. To rule and to control.

I found that if I walked in the middle of these lectures, he would stop talking and leave the room because he didn't want anyone to know what he was saying. So that's what I did every night. Praying and praying that God would save us from this situation...I'd wait until my mom would go to bed and then I'd go down to my room, only to find he was sitting in the dark waiting for me so he could question what I had talked to my mom about. This went on for a while, so much turmoil....so awful. We knew that God would save us somehow, so we kept praying and waiting for Him to show us what to do. What can you do, other than that? Leave? Yes, but we didn't have enough money to get very far. Call the police? And tell them what, that my dad was freaking us out? Tell our church or friends? Most people in there would've only told us to seek counseling and dig deeper, or not have known what to do. There was nothing. We'd thought of it, really. But there was nothing.

On December 13, 2002...there was the breaking point. It was late that night and I had already left my mom to go to bed, but I had this nightmare that really prevented me from being in a deep sleep. I dreamt that my dad was trying to kill me with a gun. I heard a loud thunder coming from upstairs and sat up as I heard someone running loud down the stairs to my room, right before it sounded like someone was going to rip the door off the hinges to get in. My first thought was, "Oh my gosh, this is it...He's going to kill me." But then when the door was unlocked and opened, I heard my mom scream at me to turn on the light while she locked my door back up. I held her for a little while and listened to her tell me how my dad had put a gun to her head and told her it was Friday the 13th, her day to die. He'd planned 6 different ways of doing it to make it look like an accident. She was trying to scream to me for help up there, but their room was over the garage, and I didn't hear anything from my room. He told her that if she didn't stop screaming, he was only planning on killing her & himself, but he would come down and kill me to.

The only way she got out of there was because of God. When she said the name of Jesus, he went crazy and told her Jesus couldn't help her...but Jesus did help her. It was in that Name, that she ordered my dad to let her go. He barely did, but had no intention of doing so. When my mom saw him step away from the bedroom door, she fled. She came down to my room and we called for help. I listened at my door to see if he was coming down while my mom was on the phone to my sister & brother-in-law, who just happened to be 2 minutes away with their neighbors. Ofcourse, they didn't just happen to be that close. God was working. I could hear my dad's voice coming from somewhere on the other side of that thin door to where we were trembling so bad, we couldn't hardly think straight. I thought I heard him singing. Tell me that's not even more terrifying. He was very calm the entire time he had spoken to my mom, so calm...

That night was so horrible, I can't even begin to describe everything.....hiding in a hotel until the police could find my dad after he took off. Being so sick from nerves and shock, that I couldn't hold anything down for a couple days...being disowned by my father's family because we had allowed outsiders (police) to help us when it should have been kept in the family. The harassment from that was heart wrenching...having your own family break into your house to steal your things because you don't make as much money as he does, therefore, everything must belong to him. But God knew what was happening and He was always 10 steps ahead. He provided for us to sell the house and we gave all that we had away, so when it was broken into, there wasn't much left but a few miscallaneous items.

My mother's family has been loving to us, welcoming us into their homes and blessing us. So we're a bit homeless, but how blessed are we? We're free. We don't want anything from them, just to be left alone. And now I'm in a different state altogether, writing about it when it feels like it was so recent....but it's been 5 years. Takes a while to heal from that, but we are:)

So that is how I came about being somewhat of a gypsy...and hopefully somewhat wiser. I keep finding out how people can just let you down, but yet God never does. I'm living proof that He's real. How? I'm alive. And I'm free.

But this isn't the end of my story........I'm just getting started, so hold on. Here we go..