"How did you survive that?"

I didn't.  

I only lived through it.  

The thing that people who have never "gone through it" don't understand is that in the middle of it all - while it's happening year after year - you are not often of the mind to even consider survival.  You just want it to stop.  When your parent is going batshit whacko on you with the buckle end of the belt, you're not thinking "Golly Gee Wilikers, now how do I deal with this?"  You're thinking things like, "Ow!" and "I hope she doesn't hit me in the eye." and "Did my tooth just get knocked out?" Or "Fuck! That hurt!" (And yes, I thought "Fuck!" at the age of eight.)

Surviving comes later.  As an adult.  Surviving comes in (re)learning how to live like a normal human being.  How to fuck something up and not cringe and flinch because you'll no longer be beaten within an inch of your life for it.  Surviving comes much later in a million different ways you never expected.  In discovering what it feels like to be loved in return.  In learning the joy of being wanted.  In belonging for the first time - EVER.  In waking up unbattered and not having to worry about how to hide it from Mrs. Gulledge.

This was my normal.

Insanity runs in my family. Not the locked-in-a-padded cell with Thorazine insane (though some would, no doubt, debate that would help), but more of the barking mad variety. When I was young I was a bit of a wild child, and therefore not often allowed to visit my friends homes, so I never realized that all mothers were not like mine. I did not know that not all mothers smoked and drank and danced around the house wailing to Janis Joplin at the top of their lungs until they just fell down and went to sleep in the foyer. I thought that was how things were done. Mimi (as my mother called herself - she was too young to be a mother and wanted no reminders of it) would often take her "cigarettes" and guitar and her black labeled bottle and climb up onto the roof at night after Trey and I had gone to bed and sing sad songs to the moon about lost loves at Scarborough Faire and dreaming of a world in peace... It became our lullaby as we laid there in the dark. It was normal. But the times, as they say, they were a'changing.