Overactive Imagination is what my mother called it. I talked about having a husband when I was still under the age of ten. I wasn't so sure as to what exactly it was that my father did to my mother at that time, but I knew that he would hold her down and get on top of her and get between her legs. Sometimes she would escape but he would catch her and fight her until he had her and when he got off she would yell at him and call him bastard. She would make me sit with her when she was preparing supper and do my homework. My mother would tell me that it was best that I never got a husband.

I was a few years older when I understood what my father was doing with my mother. My mother never stopped me from watching. She wanted me to watch. When I watched she talked to him but she was really talking to me, she also didn't fight. She told me that she wasn't really his wife, he just took it upon himself. My father had taken my mother to live with him when she was pregnant. My mother liked sex, she just didn't want him to think she was for free. In her words she liked that stuff.

In our neighborhood was an older boy. He and I would sit and talk on the side of the street when we were like four and ten, but now that he was much older and I was going through the puberty phase my mother kept me indoors. Sure, she knew that one day he was going get me but she wanted that to wait as long as she could. It happened when I was fifteen. She found me still on my bed, she checked me and put the covers over me and left me there until it was time to eat dinner. The baby came late in the summer. The second baby came the following spring, ten months and a few days later. First a girl and then a boy.

I stayed with my mother and by the time I got to finish school he was living with another girl. See, she would tell me, that is why you keep your business to yourself. But she never kept her business to herself, she let my father have her business. After my kids got into school I went to work, I had to ride the bus and my mother would take my kids to school and pick them up. I was twenty three and this man at work offered to teach me how to drive. He got between my legs first but he did teach me how to drive. My mother told me take an aspirin when I went out with him, just hold the aspirin with your knees. But she never had any aspirin in the house.

My daughter was around ten when my mother told me that she was sorry she had never been able to have any more kids, that her insides were messed up and that I was lucky that I got my two, a boy and a girl and I got it out of the way early. And that man, the one that taught me to drive, he was a good man but she always knew that he was only interested in one thing, he was not ever going to marry a girl like me. She was right about that. He married a girl from his home town.

For not being married to my father my mother never left him, she never worked after I was born, she kept my kids, she was a regular housewife and my father liked it that way. He didn't like me working. One day he brought home a guy that worked for him to have dinner at our house. He wasn't much to look at. After dinner he told me to be nice to him, I would do well with a man like him. He moved in to our house and he took me as a wife. He earned well and after a couple of years he had a place of his own and we moved there with the kids. Once we were in a place of our own I let him win and have his own kids. My husband has always been a good man to me and my kids, even if my kids were not all his.

My kids, they grew up different. My husband had finished high school and he rose and had a good job and my kids went to school and they are all out there doing the right thing. He took care of my father's job too, my father was never laid off. In the end it turned out that I had a good husband, but only because my father picked him for me. My mother and I had lots and lots of talks about keeping a man happy, and when my daughter got old enough she had to sit and listen. My son too, keep your business where it belongs my mother told him. Zip up and shut up. And to my daughter she talked to her about the birds and the bees and that boys wanted what she had between her legs, not to believe anything else, she didn't want to have kids early like me, get an education, find a husband and then get married. And she did. Like I said they grew up different.