My husband called me the "B" word so many times over the years, I'd probably be a millionaire if I had a penny for each time. Sometimes he'd jazz it up, by starting it off with "stupid, f#c%king, ghetto" (or a combination of those).
Funny being called ghetto by someone that grew up in the projects of Harlem, who I was academically superior to and spoke better than. Anyway, he'd scream it at me right in the faces of our children, or my oldest son who was over for a weekend visit. I would not have been surprised if it were our babies' first words.
I remember once I was cooking some oatmeal for our daughter who was a baby at the time, maybe 9 months old. I held her on my hip with one arm, while I cooked with the other. My husband was screaming and cursing and berating me as usual for who knows what and got up in my face so close that I could feel his breath and his spit as he screamed, "F@c%king ghetto b#t%h!," at the top of his lungs. I often wonder if my baby girl thought he was screaming it at her, as her face was right there next to mine. Instinctively, I flung the cinnamon powder that I was holding in his face and he flew into a rage and hit me.
He'd call me stupid, dumb, idiot and on one occasion told our then 4 year old daughter to, "Call mommy a stupid, dumb, idiot." My daughter was crying and said, "NO!" Our son Solomon who was 2 years old at the time, happened to be sitting on his father's lap and hit his father in the face. Jeff then, smacked this baby in his tiny little face and made him cry. I screamed at him and took the baby from him. But none of this shut him up, he kept going and going.
He would call me crazy, tell me that I was “off,” and that I had issues. I would be sad or depressed a lot, obviously because of how I was being treated. At some point almost everyday I would go into the bathroom to cry. If he saw me and could tell I had been crying, he would ask me in his cruel way of saying things, “What is wrong with you?”
To this day, he won't acknowledge that HE was what was wrong with me.
Before one of the last altercations began, three days before Christmas 2008, he began to berate me because a couple of Nintendo Wii Systems that he asked me to post on eBay didn't sell as he thought they would. He told me that this happened because he followed me down the wrong path again. I reminded him that it wasn't my idea it was his, all I did was post them. He kept going on until we were in an argument. He said this was all another part of my stupid life. I told him that I could tell him about my stupid life, got up and went into the bedroom.
He followed right behind me, said something I don't even remember, and when I turned around, he hit me in the face. A terrible fight ensued. My poor innocent children who had seen too much of this, began to scream and ran right into the fight when we tumbled our way into their bedroom. They began to hit at him, kick him, throw things at him and pull his hair. He hollered at them to stop. I yelled for them to stop and go into the other room. I didn't want them involved and I didn't want them getting hurt.
He would tell me that I was nothing and would never be anything. He would say mean, hurtful things about my mother and tell me I was going to end up like her. He could really yell and had a filthy mouth full of poisonous venom. He had a low life ignorant street vocabulary and he’d curse while saying a lot of mean and nasty things.
He was like a septic tank that was constantly backing up...
U.N.I.T.Y. - Queen Latifah
