Rip Me Apart

Rip Me Apart

         As a child, I was a singer. In my mind I was great. I sang all the time, in the car, in my room, I even sang along with movies. No one ever told me to stop, or expressed how annoying they though it was. It wouldn 't be long though until that would all change.
         Many thing happened when I was 5-years-old; My mother remarried, we moved to a different county, and I started school. My mother married a man 10 years younger than herself, who was tall and dark. In contrast to my small size, he was very intimidating.
         I was in the car when it all changed, when I was no longer a singer. We were driving to my grandparents house, in my mom's little red car. I was singing along to some country song, my genre at the time. He quickly stopped the car, and violently twisted the volume knob, lowering the music to a whisper.
         "If you can sing with music, then you can sing without it," He stated, harshly. Shocked into silence, I shut my mouth with a snap. I wasn't used to harsh words, or insults, and I felt my heart clench. I didn't know what I had done wrong; I didn't know when it had suddenly became bad for me to sing.
         "Go ahead! Sing!" I shook my head, holding back tears.
         "I didn't think so," He stated, turning the music up.
         I waited for someone to defend me. Naively, I thought my mother would speak up, since she had always sang in the car as well. Slowly, I realized, that everything had changed. She wasn't on my side anymore. She was on his. I looked out the window, alone, hurt. Nothing would ever be the same.
         I wish I could say that eventually someone stood up for me, yet, that would be lying. I wish I could say that eventually the shocking put-downs stopped. I wish they had. As a child, he ripped my confidence from me, like a blanket from a child, and changed my nature from the outgoing, talkative child that I had been, into a silent girl locking herself in her room.