Admiration

From the distance I could hear the faint sounds of dogs barking and someone loudly cussing them out. That was my sign; my sisters and I had exactly thirty minutes each day to be free, to sit on the couch and relax or talk on the phone with friends, which weren't many since we weren't allowed to go anywhere, but those were the thirty minutes we valued the most. And once the dogs barked the freedom would end.

For years I heard the same bedtime story every night, the one where my parents would argue for hours until one of them got hurt. I couldn't stand to hear it any longer, and I guess my mother couldn't either, because one day she gave up on him and quit on us. That's how it all began; when my mother walked out on us, my father's life seemed senseless. Soon after he started drinking.

He started going to a bar called Bazzi Bar once or twice a week, and soon after that he became a daily customer, or should I say an alcoholic? From work he would go straight to Bazzi and after being there for a couple of hours he would run to where my mother had been staying. Sometimes she refused to come out and see him, so his strategy was to scream until the whole neighborhood was out wondering what was going on. When she came out and didn't give him the attention he demanded, he would act violently towards, sometimes leaving my sisters and I to witness it. Even considering who he was and doing what he did, he loved her, and I think deep inside he still had some kind of hope that she would come back, but she never did.

Getting back to the barking dogs. They, like every other neighbor we had, seemed to not have much admiration for my father either. As soon as he came around the corner, the dogs screamed every possible 'word' out at him. I believe that's what angered him even more, so by the time he arrived home, we had to have all of our daily chores done, everything in place, and dinner ready and set on the table. Otherwise, we would suffer in his hands. He didn't know how to educate us, so we often got spankings for nothing, not anything I would consider having to spank over anyways.

I was the oldest of the three, so I'd always felt that it was my responsibility to make sure they had every support they needed and were taken care of. So every afternoon after they came from school, I stopped doing whatever I had been doing to help them with schoolwork, or at night I'd make sure they were washed up and in bed. In other words, I would play the parents role. Growing up without parents around was hard for me, so I did everything to make them feel better than I had when I was their age.

As I was saying before, when everything didn't go the way he wanted, he would go insane. Dinner had to be ready and served at the table, and when it wasn't something he felt like eating, I can almost guarantee there would be flying plates everywhere. After I cleaned all his mess, I would cook for him again, only this time he picked the menu. When the house wasn't clean enough for him, he would make sure I was on my knees cleaning it over, sometimes by going in the yard and bringing in whatever he thought would make the house look dirty. The day he lost his job, I remember as if it were yesterday, I grabbed my sisters and we hid under our beds terrified he'd come after us. That day, he broke every piece of furniture left.

That was my life growing up. I