I will never forget the day stepsister moved to her dad’s. It was a regular day in the sense that stepmother was in her usual awful mood and decided to take it out on me. At the age of five I was unsure about most things, but I was certain that stepmother and I would never have the relationship I had imagined. See that is the saddest part about this whole story, I had almost pushed my dad to marry her so we could be a family. I had this picture in my mind, that she would come into my life, replace the hurt that was left by my birth mother and we would be all the things I had always imagined a mother and daughter should be. She would take stepsister and I out shopping and to a movie afterward. She would buy me my first bra. She would smile at me, with that warmth I’d remembered from the day at the park with my own mother. Laying in the shattered bits of glass from the water goblet she had thrown at me, blaming me for her daughters decision to leave, I realized that we would never be anything close to what I had pictured. Stepsister had been gone mere minutes when stepmother had thrown me in my room after another one of her relentless beatings. I layed on my bed and cried, sliding up my shirt I looked at her fist marks all over my tiny abdomen. Upon closer inspection the imprint of her wedding band could be seen to the left side of my small bellybutton. I hated that bruise almost as much as I hated her. I felt my emotions brewing inside of my small body screaming to be let loose, with my face crunched up in a look of complete disgust I fell asleep. My innocent face rested gently on the tear stained pillow. Sun shone through the cracked window of my tiny bedroom, illuminating the effects of her hatred, welts all over my body which would soon be scars, enternal memories of her and the way my childhood was ripped away in one swift motion. I awoke hours later to hear my parents fighting, stepmother was screaming at my dad about me, how I was a terrible child and that she wouldn’t put up with me. I let the tears fall freely as I stood to change into my nightie. She told my dad that she couldn’t look at me. I pulled my nightie over my head and stood still, wondering why this was. She supplied the answer unknowingly with her next sentence: “she looks exactly like the crack-whore mother!” These words haunt me to this day. As I pushed my arms out the arm holes of my nighty, I sat down on my bed and touched my face, sure to be gentle as she had left a nice purple bruise on my cheek. Was this why she hated me so much? My face? I wondered if we would have had the relationship I imagined if I had had a different face. As I layed down and pulled the warm covers over me I remembered that my mom had small eyes, it almost looked like she was squinting all the time. As I drifted to sleep again, a new patch of tears began to slide onto my damp pillow and I decided that I would open my eyes real wide everytime I was around her. As a child, all I wanted to do was please. I wanted to please her and I would try anything. I just wanted to be loved, so I would open my eyes as wide as they would go and maybe she would love me. Like she did her son and my younger brother. Maybe she would love me like that. Alice.