No More

By Heidi Shank-Bridges and Kimberly Causby

Most girls grow up fantasizing about the type of man they are going to marry and how their wedding will be, and they imagine things like the house with the white picket fence, two kids, and maybe a dog.

No girl grows up dreaming about a man who will want to marry her, control her, and nearly kill her. However, the truth is that many girls end up doing just that.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jul 20, 2011
• ISBN: 9781449720551

Heidi Shank-Bridges

Heidi Shank-Bridges was born and raised in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, before moving with her family to Lakeland, Florida, in 1982. Kimberly Causby was born in 1986 and raised in Lakeland, Florida. Both mother and daughter have graduated from colleges in Florida with degrees in criminal justice. They decided to write this book in an effort to educate, motivate, and try to help put an end to domestic violence by delivering a book that gives a perspective from both a victim’s point of view as well as a silent victim’s point of view—the children who witness it daily. Learn the warning signs, refuse to be a victim, and say “No more.”

Book preview

3.jpg

NEVER SAY NEVER

Most girls grow up fantasizing about the type of man they are going to marry, how their wedding will be, and they imagine things like the house with the white picket fence, two kids, and maybe a dog.

No girl grows up dreaming about a man who will want to marry her, control her, and nearly kill her. However, the truth is that so many girls grow up doing just that.

I made a mistake years ago that so many young women make today. I got pregnant before I got married. My child is not my mistake. My mistake came when I put all of my eggs into one basket so to speak. I met a man, fell in love, thought he loved me, and I decided that I would move in with this man. I wanted to see if we could live together before the relationship got serious enough for matrimony. During the time we were living together, there were arguments, and sometimes he would get angry, angry enough to scare me, but not hit me. He always apologized for losing his temper and somehow found a way to convince me to overlook the loss of his temper, every time he lost it. Before I knew it I was pregnant, and was forced into a ten-minute court-house wedding that I did not want but I was too afraid to say no.

As a result, on my wedding night, after the kids went to sleep, my husband didn’t think I had expressed enough happiness to be his wife, and for the first time in my life, I saw a real monster.

When I closed my eyes to go to sleep, I felt a terrible blow to my face, like I had just been hit with a cannon-ball. I heard my jawbone crack like a dry twig, and saw blood fly across the room. My husband, who just hours earlier in the day promised to love, honor, and cherish me, struck me repeatedly with a .38 caliber pistol and with his fist. I could feel myself swallowing large amounts of blood. I lost two teeth and I had been hit so many times that I stopped feeling the pain from his punches. He wanted to show me what would happen to me if I ever decided to divorce him. I can remember not being able to open my mouth to speak or eat for almost three weeks after that. When I awoke the next morning, my husband was standing over me waiting to show me what I looked like in a mirror. I looked hideous.

I never thought it could happen to me. As a young girl, I watched my oldest sister Lisa take beatings from her husbands and I remember saying, That will never happen to me. I learned my lesson about saying never because what was never going to happen to me did.

Never say Never.

3.jpg

UPBRINGING

Before I go any further let me give you some background on how I grew up and how I came to be the person I am today.

I was raised in a home where I knew I was loved, but I still tried so hard to grow up before life intended me to. Trying to grow up too fast was the main factor in my winding up in the situation I found myself in years ago.

Too often young girls try so hard to grow up fast. There is so much in life that children need to learn from their parents, but it seems when children become teenagers, the devil erupts in teenager’s lives, all of the sudden fills their heads with thoughts of how they know it all and they cannot be told anything. The biggest goal for many teenagers is to turn eighteen, become a legal adult, and move out of their parents’ home.

I grew up in a crowded home with three older sisters and two younger brothers. We lived in a family community; we really didn’t have much as far as material things go, but we were loved and we had all we needed. My siblings and I were raised in a home where both love and discipline were seen by everyone who knew us and some who did not. Our parents had expectations of us, and for the most part, we met those expectations or we met the consequences. In addition to that, we grew up in a home where if one of us got into trouble, all of us felt the consequences. We tried to keep each other out of trouble the best we could not just because it was the right thing to do but because we didn’t want to get into trouble for what one of us had done wrong. We didn’t have video games, computers, cell phones, or pagers. Heck, we didn’t even get a telephone until I was about fifteen years old.

I still remember that phone; it was a turquoise blue rotary phone. When everyone else had a push-button phone, we were just getting our very first rotary phone. My father had rules for the phone, rules he ensured would be followed because he put a lock on it so we could not spend all of our free time on the phone with our friends when he and my mother were at work.

One rule for the phone was that when he called, he better be able to reach someone, not get a busy signal. The biggest rule for the phone was that the phone was not to ring more than three times before it was answered. If we did not answer by the third ring, my parents would know we were not inside the house where we belonged while they were at work. My father used to say The phone is not a toy and is not to be viewed as such.

In my house growing up, we were out of bed at 7:30 a.m. every morning, unless we were sick, whether we had school or not. We went to bed at 9:00 p.m. every night, to ensure that we got the appropriate amount of rest our bodies needed. Our parents did not believe in raising lazy children. We all had work around the house that we had to do every day, and work time was not play time. We really didn’t have friends until we hit middle school because my parents also believed that our family was large enough that we could entertain each other. We played outside, and we were not permitted to stay shut up in a house all day and do nothing.

My father used to say, God made beautiful weather days for us to enjoy, so if the sun was shining, we were outside enjoying the beautiful day.

We did not spend the night with other kids and that is why I believe, we were so close growing up.

My sister Tifanny was a year older than me; she and I were closer to each other than we were with other siblings. Where she was I was, and where I was she was. We did our chores together and helped each other. I remember her failing the first grade just so we could be in the same classroom together the next year.

Our family was a very athletic family. We were involved in athletic events, mostly track and field. Again, Tifanny and I were a team. We were the fastest runners one year and that meant we were going to compete in the Junior Olympics together that year. Out of the entire community, it was Tifanny and I who had the fastest times in order to secure the titles. Our father was our coach and he knew how to push us to our fullest ability without making us feel like robots. He knew where to draw the line between father and coach. My mother was supportive of the entire family and overly protective of my younger brothers. My brothers were both born with breathing issues and it was hard for them to participate in events where they would run out of breath. We were fortunate that we did live in Pennsylvania so in the cooler months, my brothers could participate too. My father coached city league football and then baseball when football season was over. He did not coach just any team. My father coached the team of the unwanted kids.

When I say unwanted kids, I mean that he coached the inner city kids, like lower-income families whose parents would not have otherwise had their kids participating due to the cost involved with registration and uniforms. Mostly he coached them because no one else would volunteer to do it.

No one wanted the inner city kids on their team. My father grew up knowing what it felt like to be unwanted. His parents died when he was three years old so my father was raised in an orphanage in Pennsylvania. I believe it was his way to try to make all kids, especially underprivileged and unwanted kids, feel like someone cared enough to invest their time in them so they felt wanted and worthy.

We grew up in an era of prejudice also. We were all proud of my father even when people threw rocks through our windows and kids at school made fun of us and called us names. It made me especially proud when his team won the super bowl game every year. In my eyes, my father was strict but fair, and he was full of rules if nothing else, but he made certain he was dedicated to his family and his kids. He would work all day and come home and coach us in what ever happened to be the sport we were involved in, and still found time for other kids in the community.

I remember growing up wishing I could be just like him. Rules in our house were the same for my brothers as they were for my sisters and me. There were two rules for the girls I did not understand. One was that the girls did not need a diary (my father believed that there should be no secrets in our family: therefore there was no need for diaries). The other was that there was no need for make up. My father used to say If God wanted you to have makeup on your face, you would have been born with it there; besides, it is poor soil that needs to be fertilized. There was no winning that argument. We also had parents who would just drop by the school and check on their kids.

One day my father saw my sister Lisa wearing make up and saw that she had changed clothes after she left for school. You would have thought she committed the biggest sin possible. By the end of the day everyone in school knew she got a whipping. Oh yes, my father did not have any issues with disciplining his children at school, home, or in public. See, back when my siblings and I were growing up, discipline was called just that, discipline, not abuse, as it is too often referred to today.

School administration allowed parents to come to school and handle discipline or they handled it themselves,