I believe in learning from your parents. From my mother I learned to be a better mother to my future kids than what she was to me. Growing up, my parents divorced and my mother had full custody. I was only able to see my father once a week and he was not to come close to the house, even though he was a great father, he just had really bad taxes and wasn't able to take us in. Growing up, I didn't understand what love was. I portrayed it to be abuse because that is all my mother gave us. I was scared to go home from school because I didn't know if my mother was going to be in a good mood or a bad mood. 

She would abuse and mistreat us in many ways. Going to school with a black eye didn't come often, but it did happen. Going home and bleeding from my face because of how hard she would slap or hit me, did come often. I remember my sister got into trouble because she borrowed my mother's straightener while she went to the store. When my mother didn't see her straightener in her bathroom the whole house changed. My mother was beating my sister in the living room while my other sister and I were screaming to get off of her but we were too scared to come close because we knew we would get it twice as bad. I remember the police being called over to our house due to our neighbors filing a noise complaint. The noise was my sisters and I screaming at my mother to leave us alone. The police came so often it became a routine. My mother was a great liar and an amazing sympathetic actress. She would say the scratch marks on our face were from the cats and the bruises are from us hitting each other while she was at work. When they would ask us questions we could feel the tension coming from our mother to not say anything bad. We were afraid to stand up for ourselves - I was afraid.

 At the age of 8 I started attending a psychologist and I recall them telling me that I had selective memory, which means I could only remember what I wanted to remember. I do not really remember much of my childhood, just the bad parts. At the age of 10, I started running away and through the years it occurred more and more often. During the beginning of my freshman year, one day I came home and my mother was angry at me because I had forgotten to clean the dog poop along the side of the house in the morning and she started throwing plates at the floor because while she was getting angry, she was doing the dishes. I was afraid of my mom and the first thing I did as soon as I saw her rage was to run out the door. I went over to a close friend's house and when I went back later that night she saw me as I walked through the door. She said to me, “You do not belong here. You are not my daughter.” She kicked me out that night and it has been around 3 to 4 years since she has spoken to me and when she does it's merely to tell me i'm a disappointment and my father is doing a bad job at raising me. My mother always believed she was a good mother due to the fact that every time she would beat us, she would leave for about an hour and then come back as if nothing had happened. However, if she was a good mother, she would have invited me to her own wedding and not having to find out from my aunt and having her tell my mother to invite me due to me not even knowing about it when she talked to me. If she was a good mother this wouldn't be the third year in a row that I do not get a happy birthday and the second year to not  hear a merry christmas or a happy new year.
  I learned to break the cycle my mother had started. I will not treat my child the way she treated me and I will not scar my child the way she did to me. I will know to love my child more than the world and let them know they always have a safe home. I will be their mother, not their monster. I will be an amazing mother because I learned what not to do from experience. I believe in learning from your parents. 
I love you mom...I miss you.