07/05/2022
Memories of the Past (Montana Rose)
By: Montana Rose
Photos By: Rogich Pix - Photography
I was sixteen when I decided to try to and end my life. Looking back now I don’t know if I was suicidal or just lost. My parents had split, and my mom had taken my two younger siblings and I away from everything we had ever known, I was going to a new school where no one knew me and where the evidence of students having committed su***de was everywhere. It was announced what seemed like every other day, a new brightly painted rock added to the small make shift cemetery Copper Hills High and created in hopes to show that they cared.
So much had happened since we had moved from Salt Lake to West Jordan; it quickly became almost unbearable to continue day after day doing the same things over and over again. What was worse was I wasn’t allowed to talk to my dad unless it was a dire emergency, my mom had become a workaholic just to support the family and our three-bedroom apartment in the middle of nowhere. When she worked, we were left to suffer. She had not only called things off with my dad, but she had moved us into a place with a man who was a shell of the uncle figure I had grown up with. To me it looked as though she had almost done it freely with no regards to her children, she chose him, and he chose the drugs, while I was left to choose my siblings even over my own self.
We went months suffering from the mental abuse permitted by my mother, locked out of the apartment on occasion, I was told I couldn’t eat when hungry, locked in my room with not so much as a single book to keep me occupied. The last few weeks of my sophomore year I had to fail because of the move, and with time even my friends had grown worried but there was nothing any of us could do. We were children, forced to deal with life as it came our way, still needing to rely on our parents and their decision making.
With time my new favorite activity had been getting my face pushed up against a wall as my mother or her boyfriend forced me into “time out,” for back talking, standing up for myself, for my siblings who I had became a surrogate mother for while our real mother was out working. I was sixteen years old and while I should have been out celebrating summer with friends and learning how to drive I was still being put into time out, and threatened by a man I once called uncle. I sent text messages to my dad when I could, but he wasn’t in a situation where he could be of much help and in a way I was glad that he stayed away. I still remembered watching him face his best friend down and attempt to run him over, and I knew that if he did come to our rescue something similar might have happened and it wasn’t something my siblings needed to see. I struggled every day but I always remained optismitic that one day things would get better and we’d all go home to dad.
In august of 2015 I woke to find a uniformed police officer searching my closet with a flashlight looking for drugs. They tore drawers out and flung shirts from hangers trying their hardest to be quiet to no avail. “Go back to sleep miss,” a tall black police officer told me before he walked out of the bedroom and returned to the front room where the shouting had started to rise. I quickly threw on pants and jumped down from the top bunk before racing out into the hall just in time to watch my mother get hand cuffed and tossed like a rag doll onto the sofa. The giant of a man who I called uncle sat with a look on his face that told me he had no real idea what was going on because he was too high to realize the severity of the situation. My two year old brother sat next to him and as I came out of the room, the other children slowly started to trickle in. This didn’t make the police any happier, but they seemed to deal with it, I remember every nerve in my body screaming to run, to do something other than just stand there watching as my mom screamed for my brother who hadn’t shed a single tear through the whole ordeal.
With time the children were all escorted back into the far room and without thinking about the consequences I called my dad. It was three o’clock in the morning and I was wide awake. It went to voice mail but within moments he had called me back and I handed the phone to a female officer who was watching us. I heard her say that my mom was possibly going to jail but they didn’t know yet, and that it would be wise to come collect us all, though we had a few days of freedom we were back with my mother by the end of my first day at Copper Hills High School. She had called me at work and told me to go home that night after my shift was over. “I gave him a choice,” she said. “Me or the drugs and he flushed them down the toilet, and whether you like it or not your dad won’t be there to pick you up tonight.” She was right, He wasn’t I went home that night once my shift was over. The whole apartment radiated this feeling of chaos and danger, but I had no choice but to enter through the door and meet what awaited me.
Later that night staring down at the dull shaving razor in my hand and the red t-shirt that I had used to clean up my blood from my arm, I felt as though I had finally broken and would never again be strong. I was wrong of course, but as the sun rises and sets, new chapters always come with new insight.
