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Broken Childhood

As I contemplate the beginning of my adult life I realize that I am merely a boy among men. I have come to realize and accept that half of my adult life has been consumed by violence, by fear, by hate. My life seemingly started 9 years ago, not nineteen years ago. I was born Joshua Patrick Emerson. The place, the time, how much I weighed, what I looked like, all are pieces of history that unfortunately I have no knowledge of. My childhood is like the outskirts of a puzzle, while the general picture is clear and valid the details and deeper more vivid picture isn’t distinguishable because not all of the pieces have been put together. The first 9 years of my life were out skirted by a mother who was an alcoholic and a drug addict. A neglectful father who wanted nothing to do with me. And a sister, younger than I, who I protected on the streets when I was only two years old. That is the layout of my life, as it would turn out I would not let it become the foundation of my life. I along with my sister was physically, sexually, verbally, and neglectfully abused. Food, water, medicine, and shelter were every now and then commodities never necessities. Food didn’t sit on the table, instead an abundance of cocaine, alcohol, and marijuana sat stagnantly for the taking. There was no Christmas, no Halloween, no Easter. Everyday was a test, a test of survival. I was all I had, there wasn’t
a mother, there wasn’t a father, there wasn’t a God. I had to fight through the beatings, fight through the streets, fight through the times when I and my sister were succumbed to waiting days at a time for our mother to come back. The only thing that kept me alive was my sister, if I wasn’t there for her then who would be? Even at the age of two I understood that I was the one who had to protect her and I did that, and honestly I think that’s the only reason I’m alive today.
As I look back at those days I realize that its not the beatings nor the streets that has greedily stripped me of feeling normal. it’s the pictures, the stories, the memories that have dehumanized every part of me. I don’t know what I even looked like as a child because no pictures exist. I don’t have those special memories that every child deserves to have. No first Christmas, no learning how to ride a bike on training wheels, no putting my tooth under the pillow for the tooth fairy. My life was simplistic, survive. Children are supposed to be angelic, cherubic, but I was neither. I was my mother’s mistake, I was the test subject for her hate, her anger, her ferocity. For seven years I was exploited to a life that I didn’t deserve, a life that could end on any given day.
Now I am no longer Joshua Patrick Emerson. Patrick Emerson Kueber was born on May 29, 1998. This date was my adoption, but most importantly it was my rebirth, my resurrection from the ashes. As I look back and reflect on a past that has been nothing short of an atrocity, I try and find some sort of reasoning behind it. It is said that everything happens for a reason, but yet I have yet to reason a logical explanation as to why I had to go through such pain and hate in order to get to where I am today. Sure our choices dictate the paths we inevitably take in life but I wasn’t given a choice. I walked
the path that was set before me, not the one I chose. People have always told me that I no longer need to get upset or discouraged about what happened because someone always have it worse than I. it’s a statement that tears me apart all over again. Truly its a statement of insecurity, a statement aimed at completely avoiding what one wants to say or feel. I understand that there are others out there who don’t what I have, but emotions have seemed to always control me. How am I to accept that half of my life is gone, never to be relived or cherished? How am I to look at myself in the mirror and not see a little boy I had once been? The answers are simple. I can’t accept I didn’t get to live out the first 9 years of my life; but acceptance is a choice whereas my own will to continue going down a righteous path is destined. And that little boy in the mirror? He isn’t there, I have tried to find Joshua Patrick Emerson, but he is lost and I decided long ago it was time to stop focusing on my past and focus primarily on the future ahead.
My past wasn’t meant to be a dark hole in which I was destined to ultimately choose the wrong paths, my past was meant to be a gateway. A gateway to my reason, my belief of what I was brought on this earth to do. Those nine years weren’t meant to utterly destroy a human being, they were meant to open the eyes of humans. Now that my eyes have been opened I have become an advocate against child abuse. I have used my experiences not as a weapon but as a gift. I have made my life as simple as possible in order to stay focused on my goal. I do not sulk myself into such societal divinities such as alcohol and drugs. I don’t open myself to others, I stand alone, so that I may be able to keep my goals clear from unnecessary kinks. When I look in a child’s eyes I see myself. Children are a symbol of innocence, untouched by the hands of sin. I have never
understood how one can corrupt the purest most innocent beings with violence and oppression. I cannot attempt to stop such heinous crimes alone, my goal, my life, is simply to open the eyes of others to make a change. To show that it is possible to extinguish the hate, violence, disparity, that has grasped its firm hands on this earth and shook it into a realm of eternal sin.
I have become strong in my beliefs and the road I have chosen to take not only because of what I have seen and been apart of but because I know somewhere inside of me my inner child sympathetically cries to be freed. Somewhere within me I am still that frail scared little boy wanting to understand, wanting the answers to questions that have been doused out because I no longer share the blood of my biological family that was once apart of me.