It's the Little Things

Prologue

“Ugh, girl why are you so stupid?”

This was a common rhetorical question I got on the daily from my stepfather.

“Father” being a term used as loosely as possible.

He was married to my mother, but he was in no way a man I should look up to or approach for fatherly advice.

Today’s insinuation of my lack of intelligence was due to the fact I had dropped his dinner plate more or less at his feet.

I was clumsy on my best day. Add that to the fact he had once again littered the small dining room floor with discarded beer bottles and cans, and I was lucky that spilling some mashed potatoes by his boots was all I had done.

With a sigh I hoped he hadn’t heard, I knelt to clean them up.

“You’re going to make some poor bastard a really crummy wife someday if you don’t get your shit together, girl.”

Girl.

I had a name, but that was all he had ever called me.

Even though my mother had been married to him for more than half my life, I was pretty sure I’d only heard him say my actual name a handful of times.

And that was mostly in the beginning, when he was trying to win my mom over with his charming personality. Charming, my ass.

The guy was a dick, and my poor mother was too blind to see it.

In her defense, she rarely saw the side of him reserved only for me.

He had taken a disliking to me almost immediately, and while I was never certain as to why, I had a feeling he saw me as an easy target.

He knew I just wanted my mom to be happy, so I would never tell her about the harsh words or the backhanded comments.

And I would absolutely never tell her about the slaps across my cheek or the shoves to my back.

No. She would never know about that. For all the ways he was terrible to me, he treated my mother decently.

Not as well as she deserved, but she seemed happy most of the time.

If that’s what she was okay settling for, I would keep my mouth shut, even if it killed me that she wouldn’t get the fairytale ending I desperately wanted for her. But it was her life, I guess.

She and my biological father had never married, and I had never met him, although I remembered overhearing a conversation they had on the phone several years back. A conversation where she tried to talk to him about me, but he had no interest in being a father. That hadn’t changed.

Cool, cool.

While I was busy cleaning up the mashed potato mess, a recurring thought swirled in my mind. A thought that hurt, but one I was genuinely curious about.

What was it about me that was so unlovable?

My biological father had zero interest in knowing me, much less loving me, and my stepfather made it clear daily that I was no more than a nuisance living under his roof. I loved my mom, but I had the suspicion that if she were made to choose between me and my stepdad, she’d choose him.

What was wrong with me?