April 11, 2012

"I have a secret, and it's too bad to tell."

Twenty-one years later, I finally begin to hear the secret as my son and I drove home from visitation with his daughter.
He told of standing outside his father and step-mother's bedroom door, pounding on it, trying to prevent his sisters from being abused. He told of removing the little bed that was in the room. He told of being beaten for doing so.
I knew of one time: the kids' father had taken the girls, and when they returned, Ben thought that the father had bought snow cones for the girls. He started complaining about it, and the father picked him up and threw him behind the sofa.  He picked Ben up and threw him over the sofa where he landed on a glass coffee table, shattering it. The father then took Ben to his bedroom where he beat him with a coat hanger. (His sisters verify his statement.)
Ben came home after that summer visit and didn't go swimming again - at least not for years. And he had been such a wonderful and fearless swimmer for his entire life.
At a later time, when the kids were living with their father, my oldest daughter (Ben's twin), called me to tell me that Ben was in the hospital.  I called Martin Army Hospital and was finally put through to Ben's room. He told me that he had blood poisoning from walking home with sores on his feet. I found out on this April day that it wasn't just a blister. He said that after one time when he'd tried to thwart an abusive episode, and his dad took him down to the basement - where the beatings took place - but this time, he cut Ben's feet, and they got infected, and he nearly died.