My mom's ex-fiance is an alcoholic. She met him when I was two and we moved in with him shortly afterwards. While I obviously don't know how their relationship was, it was well enough for her to leave me alone with him while she worked. It started with comparatively small things: he'd drunkenly break my toys, throw them away. Soon it graduated to more damaging acts. While I was being potty trained, he would leave the seat up so I would get stuck in the toilet, and when he bathed me he would run the shower and hold my head under the water until I was coughing and gasping for air. It hit one of the worst points after a few months. I had recently turned two and I don't know what led up to this because obviously I was too young to remember. However I do remember running my little legs down stairs away from him, and then I remember his hand on the back of my head smashing it into a metal chair in the basement. The only thing I remember after this is being at the barber shop getting my remaining front tooth pulled out because it was too chipped and the other one had been knocked out.
I don't remember the foster home, but I do remember the glorious year and a half that I lived with my amazing grandmother and loving aunty and the rest of that family. Unfortunately, my grandma fell ill and I had to be put back with my mom and her fiance. We moved to a small town in southeast Saskatchewan where he worked at a grain terminal and my mom worked with a group of people with mental and physical handicaps. I remember countless nights where my mom would wake me up in the middle of the night to escape to her friends house, a few blocks away, while her fiance was in one of his rages. I remember bottles flying towards us from the kitchen windows, on more than one occasion. One time, he didn't feel satisfied just throwing a bottle, so he followed us out to the street corner as we ran away. This is a picture I can never get out of my head: him throwing my mom to the ground as I stood frozen by a fire hydrant. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the sight of him sitting on top of her, pummeling her in the stomach and cracking her in the face. As a 7-year-old, I couldn't decide whether to run to the neighbors for help (though now I wonder how they didn't fucking hear...they had to have known) or to stay there to make sure he didn't kill her. It still makes me sick to think about it.
However, she stayed with him, but forced him to get help. She changed his life. A few years later, she fell into a bout herself. The worst she ever got with me happened after she drank 3 bottles of homemade wine. She came up to my room while I was trying to sleep and told me about the ghosts that stand over me when I sleep. I also know that she tried punching her fiance one time, but he kept his cool. A couple of years later, when I was 16, she took me and left him. It was then that he and I actually developed a relationship...a FATHER/DAUGHTER relationship. I guess he realized what he had when we left (don't we all). He is actually now a strong father figure in my life. He comes up every couple of weeks to have supper with my boyfriend and I. Unfortunately, he is not sober, but he knows not to drink when he sees me or is going to see me. He might have a caesar or a beer with supper, but I can deal with that. You can't change a person, that person has to change themselves. However, I have learned from him AND my mother about who I don't want to be. I think that's the most important thing you need to gather from any shitty situation.

--Anonymous