My Family and I

We had a big family when I was younger.My father had been married before.Dad had one child Alice during his marriage to his first wife.Then they divorced.We never heard why.Then he met my mother.Her name was Naomi.She was little and fat and to us kids ,she looked like a little beach ball with legs.My mother and father had eleven children.And counting Alice it makes twelve.My sister Rose Mary died at age five.I never got to know her.Then my little baby brother died at birth.So that left ten of us children living.
My father was a hard worker.But he had his problems.He became an alcoholic.And that made our lives miserable most of the time.We got teased in school alot.Most everyone felt sorry for us.And I couldn't take that much.We all felt like we were the most unliked family in the world.We were very poor.We had to do without electricity, and gas.And no new clothes.We all wore hand me down clothes.But the worst part was waiting on our dad to come home from the tavern.We were so scared of what he would do to us if we were still awake when he got home.I can remember the times when he came home drunk,and he wanted someone,not my mother to wait on him hand and foot.And I had to be the unlucky one.He would have my mother to wake me up to groom him.It was awful having to rub his face,cut the hair out of his ears,and to rub his feet and cut his nails on his hands and feet.
But if I refused to do these awful deeds,I would be punished.I tried the next time he had mom to come after me to pretend to be asleep.Sometimes it would work.But most times he would just come in to the bedroom and slap me across the face,and he would holler "Get your rear out of that bed and get in the livingroom".Only he wasn't that nice about it.I had my big tree in the corner lot look like it was made just for me.Its trunk at the bottom was shaped almost like it had a chair made for me to sit on.I would hide there a lot of the times and cry and talk to myself about how bad I was feeling.And I always felt better afterwards.
My sister Alice always protected us from my father.And she was the only one that would stand up to him.When we didn't have Christmas presents,she always made sure we got something.And that one little something seemed like one big present to me.She was a hard worker all her life.I wanted to be just like her.