Chapter Two

How did this all start?
Life started for her as the only daughter of a young couple who were selfish, immature, and irresponsible people. Youth and foolishness are a terrible combination. Thankfully, there were no siblings to endure the hellish life she had to endure as a child. Her birth mother, Quinn, and her father, Ashley, had started dating as a couple in high school and, barely two years post-school, decided to seal their relationship in marriage. They had both just turned twenty years old and barely settled into their chosen career fields, he as a welder for a small engineering company, John and Son on Gillmor Street, Berkeley, and she as a trainee accountant at a small real estate agency. They had no clue as to the responsibilities of marriage, notably when the family started growing with the inevitable arrival of children, in this case, the one child.  This marriage was against the advice given by both sets of parents, family elders and even their friends. Good sound advice, but not taken at all. From the knowledge of her experiences plus the chats she had had with aunts and uncles, she was able to piece together where it all started to go pear-shaped. Her birth, two years into the marriage, brought about the first crack in their union. Living costs just increased in leaps and bounds. Their salaries combined were insufficient for the new added obligation of a child. Costs they had not envisaged were now playing out in real-time. Necessities for the newborn, the landlord’s rental increase, plus the high prices of food just ballooned. Another cost that had to be taken into account was for a full-time nanny so as to allow both of them to continue working in their respective jobs.

The arguments and constant bickering resulted in frayed nerves, accusations and insults being traded back and forth, gaining momentum with each encounter. She had heard that this was the time her father started drinking heavily and coming home in the early hours of the morning, in the twilight. This just compounded an already shaky relationship as her mother now began responding with crazy insults and brutal taunts that took him to the very brink of beating her up. Something he promised he would do if she continued like a banshee screamer. There were nights when the disturbances got so bad that the neighbours complained to the local police in an attempt to resolve their conflict. On one such occasion, her father, in his drunken state, challenged the police, who unceremoniously cast him into their van and locked him up for the rest of the night to sober up. She vaguely remembered this sad state of affairs as well as the toll it took on her childlike psyche. She had long ago gotten over the “scars” as it was now a distant memory, soothed by the wonderful times that were now her life experiences. This was just the beginning of her woes. As if that was not enough, what happened next, just plainly put, was the height of rejection.