[two] in Open Diary

I want to write about everything, but I don't want to write about anything. It's all so damn depressing, yanno? I don't want to fill up pages with all of my husband's transgressions. I feel guilty. It feels so disrespectful to keep a secret record of the ways he hurts me. He's not a completely bad guy. I mean, at least he doesn't hit me, right? Oh...are domestic violence jokes in poor taste? I should know--one of my earliest memories is my mother's abusive husband punching his fist through a window of our house because she wouldn't let him in. She pulled out a shotgun, broke out the rest of the glass with the barrel and shot at him. He took cover under a convertible VolksWagen Rabbit she had in the back lot. I don't remember ever riding in that car. I remember the year before I crawled up on top and fell through the soft top--that was when we still lived at the house. I don't know if my dad was supporting us at the house. I only have one memory of him there--he was installing a satellite dish and singing Jimmy Crack Corn--but I don't remember him ever living there with us. I don't know. Maybe my mother's drug sales weren't going so well, but we moved into a little apartment in the back of her antique store. That's when things got bad with her husband. At least, that's how it goes in my mind. I was little, maybe three years old, so my memory and my ability to understand at the time is limited. The details my parents have given me as I've grown have filled in some of the details, but even those aren't totally reliable--we all see things from our own perspectives, right? We remember things how we want to remember them, I guess. Anyway, sometime shortly after the incident where she shot at her husband through the window, she took us to live with my dad and his parents, my grandparents. She said she would come back for us in two weeks. She didn't. She's been in my life to some degree since then, but she was never really a mother. Hell, she wasn't a very good mother before that. Somehow all of this matters and none of it does. It has shaped who I am, yet, as an adult, I've had the freedom and responsibility to make my own choices. My own choices with drug abuse and abusive husbands...but at least he doesn't hit me, right?