Seven years ago, a woman, who was the mother of four, started talking to an old friend. Her children and husband didn’t know about this old friend and wouldn't know until the husband got back from a long deployment overseas.

One day, this mom and dad sat their four children down and told them that mommy was leaving and that they were getting divorced. They would still see mom all the time, but she wouldn't live with them anymore. The youngest two daughters, who were five and one, didn’t fully understand what divorce was, but still got upset. The second born, and only son, understood and got angry and sad. The oldest daughter, however, understood and got numb. She told her parents that she was fine with this and didn’t really care. She was only eight at the time and was an impulsive liar from time to time. Truth is, she was scared and angry and sad. She cried herself to sleep many nights after that, saying she hurt herself climbing up to bed or something if her dad walked in to check on her and her sisters.

The mother got a house across town and the children would alternate which house they stayed at each week. The mother’s new boyfriend and everything else seemed nice and fun for the first year. Then, when the two moved to another town and the father went on his last deployment, the children had to move with and leave their friends and old schools behind for six months. The mother had also gotten pregnant before moving.

The oldest daughter, now nine, hated the new school. She had no friends and didn’t want to make new friends. She protested moving every day, complaining to her mother that she hated it there even if their neighbors had easily become family to them. She would storm off to her room after dinner every night and hide up on her bunk bed while her siblings played.

The baby was born after the oldest had turned nine and was a big-eared little boy. The youngest sisters were thrilled, the brother happy to finally have a brother, and the oldest angry that another baby was even here. A few weeks after that, the mother's boyfriend came home drunk and the children had just been put to bed. They heard yelling coming from the parent's bedroom and opened their door to peek out. Their mother and the boyfriend were fighting and the mother got hurt.

The boyfriend apologized a lot after that and the mom somehow forgave him. That night was the night that the oldest daughter started hating this man. She would hate him throughout the next five years. Through the birth of her blonde haired chubby brother born two years after the first one. Through all the fun summers with water fights and trips to parks and zoos. Through the verbal abuse every day after he got off work, her mother saying he was just tired after a long day. He would abuse her mother, her younger brothers, the older brother, her sisters and even the dogs. She was left to comfort them through all of it because her mother would just yell and scold her boyfriend for treating them this way. It never helped though.

The oldest daughter would comfort her siblings, tell them it was okay and that he would be gone soon. Every day for five years she told herself that he would be forced to leave one day and they would be free from his hate but it never happened. He called her a mistake, useless, worthless, and many more horrible things during these five years.

The four children would cry to their father who was home for good after retiring from the Army to be able to take care of them and who had bad anger issues from being in the Army. He would just tell them that they would just have to ignore it or tell their mother. They tried both things, but it was hard to ignore and their mother would just yell at them for wanting her to be unhappy. She would say that she was happier with him, and would be sad without him. She wasn’t really happy with him. They all knew this but didn’t say anything more.

It got worse after three years. The mother and boyfriend fought more frequently, and the father of the four children was angry a lot of the time. The oldest daughter felt like she was stuck in an endless loop of yelling and name calling from everyone in her family.

The boyfriend’s family, whom they had been staying with in the next state until they found a house, had kicked them all out in the middle of the night, forcing them to turn to other family for six months, then onto more family for another six months or so. It wasn’t the best situation, but the boyfriend had been put in a rehab place for six months after the family had a house and the children were happy again.

The oldest daughter was now fourteen. She had started high school, was a freshman now and had lots of great friends. She would never tell anyone about the name calling, about the physical abuse that her brothers took. About all the times that her sisters would be yelled at for crying because they were scared of their mother's boyfriend. All the times that her mother had screamed at the man to leave them and never come back. The girl would get happy after he left, go to her father’s house for a while and come back to see the man with her mother once more and still as horrible as ever.

She could never tell anyone about the countless nights she would stay up, crying in the dark, reminding herself that if she killed herself, her siblings would have no one to be there for them through the torment. No, she would suffer in silence until she had the courage to confide in someone. She wouldn't want anyone to find out the truth and do something to her two youngest brother’s father whom they loved no matter what. Everyone in the oldest daughters’ family knew how much hate she felt towards the boyfriend, even he knew after she screamed it at him one night during the second half of her Sophomore year of high school. He had gone too far and hurt her mother once again. She had been shaking all night and crying in her closet, wishing for the nightmares to end. She comforted her youngest brothers and made sure they were okay. Her mother would check on her, but she would fake sleeping just so she wouldn't have to face her with tears and makeup down her face and on her pillows.

She had been toughened up over the past seven years. She knew how to pick fights and when to pick them. She knew various ways to defend herself and her family if needed. She could shoot, use a knife, knock a person out in so many different ways. These had all been taught to her by the man she hated more than anything in the world.

This all started seven years ago, and it hasn’t ended for the oldest daughter of six, now fifteen, with a mother and father who divorced. With a horrible man who claimed he loved her mother, and she loved him. She was a girl who had a strong yet broken heart and head. If she could make it through the seven years of Hell that led up to this point in her life, where she had a few amazing friends, a girl she couldn’t forget about or stop liking so much that it hurt sometimes, even if they both tried to help her get over this girl. She had people who supported her sexuality, an amazing best friend who was hours from her in another state but was still there for her through everything that had happened in the two years since they met. If she could survive the past seven years, then she could make it through more years like this, and anything else life threw in her face.

Seven years ago this girls life changed for the worse, but also for the better.