Silent Cries of a Military Wife

By Myla Silence

Silent Cries of a Military Wife is a terrifying, sometimes hilarious, sometimes downright devastating truth that I lived for over a decade. For years, like many others, I accepted things that no woman should have. I allowed the one person who was supposed to give me love and respect treat me like I was less than nothing. I thought by accepting the treatment, at some point, he would see that what he was doing was hurting me and it would force him to change, but sadly, that never happened. I watched myself change as a woman, mother, daughter, and friend into a person I didn’t even recognize. I asked the military and those around me for help, but my cries repeatedly went unnoticed. When I finally received help, I was ostracized by those whom I called friends because of my decision to stay. Now I want to share my story with all of you and all those women who are silenced.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9781984544520

Myla Silence

My name is Myla Silence, and I was born and raised in upstate New York. At the age of 18 I married the man I thought I would spend the rest of my life with, and gained the title of an military wife. Being married to someone in the military has its challenges everyday, especially when it comes to the travel. Being away from your family and friends can be hard, and start to take a toll on your spirit if your new military family isn’t what you thought. For me, with every new placed we moved came a new heartache, and turmoil. The feeling of loneliness even when around people became more and more intense. So one day while hiding in a closet crying silently I grabbed a note pad and started to write what I was feeling, because I never wanted to forget my pain. I wanted it to be the reason I become a stronger person so I started penning “Silent Cries Of An Military Wife” to help me get through one of the toughest times in my life. Whether it was the pain that was brought to me, or the pain brought on by myself I was determined to get through it, and writing became my escape. I was able to say my truth in writing because I could not say it out loud

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Copyright © 2018 by Myla Silence.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 10/16/2018

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1 The Outside

Chapter 2 Feelings and Living this Way

Chapter 3 The Beginning

Chapter 4 California Dreaming

Chapter 5 Starting Over

Chapter 6 Uncertainty

Chapter 7 Learning to Love Myself

Chapter 8 Wild

Addendum: Letters

I have always longed for love and acceptance from people I knew would hurt me more than they could ever love me. I found myself looking for things like unconditional love. I wanted to be a man’s one true love or to enjoy the feeling of being pretty even when I didn’t feel I was. I wanted things I felt I could never aspire to, so I learned how to live without them, and in the process, I forgot how to love and respect myself.

I want you to read my story with an open heart, recognizing that I am less than perfect. I make mistakes and hope I can learn from them. I stayed, much too long, in the marriage I am about to tell. I allowed myself to become a person I no longer recognized.

I know I am still flawed, but I am happier now because I found a better me. I am more accepting of who I am. Here, then, is my story.

CHAPTER 1

The Outside

M Y LIFE’S FIRST memories were not always pleasant. As a child, I wanted to live in a blue house with a white picket fence and a yard you could play in. Instead, I was a child of the projects. The fence I saw around my building was more like the bars of a jail cell. The house I grew up in was a six-apartment brick building. The backyard I looked out on was a concrete jungle. I longed for a different kind of mother and father than the ones I had. I wanted to live in a fairy tale. So when I was a child, I learned to dream as my way of erasing the life I was in.

My mother, Frances, wasn’t a bad person. She was just too wrapped up in her own life to be able to think about me. Frances had her own demons and failed at raising her daughter with any sort of love. Frances couldn’t rise above her battle with addiction, and that would have a profound effect on my life.

I first opened my big brown eyes back in 1989. My parents were too caught up in their own lives for me to ever stand a chance at living any kind of normal life. Frances was so heavily addicted to drugs that she put me up for adoption the minute I was born.

I’m not sure how many days I was in the system, but it was long enough for the agency to send out a letter to my grandmother’s house, saying that Frances had not finished writing the adoption paperwork before leaving the hospital. Consequently, the hospital was unable to move forward with her wishes. They reached out to my family, looking for someone to come and get me. If no one came, I would have become a ward of the state. Luckily for me, my eldest sister, Kiesha, happened to find the hospital’s letter. If she had not, I would have become an orphan. Our grandfather never opened the mail because he couldn’t read, so he simply piled the mail up on the corner table in the living room. My letter was buried among several unopened envelopes. It came to my sister to read the mail and inform my grandmother, who worked long shifts at the nursing home, about what bills were due. My sister read the letter a few times, unable to fully comprehend what the letter was saying. It was a shock to everybody that my mother was even pregnant. Frances did not reveal her pregnancy to anyone, partially because of her drug addiction but also because my grandmother and grandfather were already raising my sister and brother. When Kiesha informed my grandmother, Lucille, of the contents of the letter, she didn’t believe it, and said it wasn’t true. How was Frances able to keep something like this a secret for so long especially since she didn’t look pregnant? Not only that but she was around the family throughout the whole pregnancy. Lucille finally came to the realization that it was real and her grandchild was out there alone. Lucille contacted Benjamin, my father, to inform him that my mother had given birth to his daughter and had left the hospital without me. Whether he knew about her pregnancy or not was never confirmed, but after receiving the news, Benjamin sprang into action and because he didn’t want to go alone he got in touch with my aunt Angela, informing her of my arrival. That same day, they picked me up at the hospital and brought me to their house. I was a little over a week old. The only things my mother left for me was my name, Myla, and the names of my father and mother on my birth certificate. I was released into his custody. My mother was far too addicted to care about what would become of me. I still am eternally grateful that my sister found that letter. I have a hard time imagining how my life might have turned out.

At the time, my father, Benjamin, was married and didn’t want his current wife and family to know that I was his child. So many stories were floating around I can’t be sure whether they knew or not. My aunt Angela offered to take me, but my grandmother didn’t want me to be away from my siblings, so she took me in. My grandmother and other family members raised me until my mother was able to get clean.

I’m pretty sure someone in the family found her and told her that she needed to get her life together, and if she couldn’t do it for herself, she needed to do it for her kids. So it was not long after being rescued from the hospital that my mother managed to kick the drugs and come back to claim us. It was clear that neither my grandmother and grandfather wanted to raise any more kids. They had not only raised their own but were now raising their daughter’s children.

Sometimes you have to go way back to find the root cause of why people do the things they do. In my mother’s case, she had been abused. My mother had been in several abusive relationships before I was born. The father of my sister and brother used to beat my mother all the time, once so badly that he knocked out her front tooth. I was told his rage was so bad that he beat her with a baseball bat in broad daylight, and yet she stayed with him for years. My own father abused her, but his abuse was mostly mental. He had a mean way of putting her down. To get through the pain, she was constantly experiencing, she turned to drugs.

My mother had not been there for me right after I was born, but she was determined to get her life back on track. She found a rehab facility close to home, and that took her in within days. She knew if she waited too much longer she might fall back into her old ways, and she didn’t want that for her kids or herself. While she was away, she asked that no one contact her because she didn’t want to have anything trigger a setback. My mother was in a ninety-day program. She said she’d stay longer if she needed to. While my mother was in rehab, her family took care of me. Everyone made sure I had what I needed and loved me as if I was their own. I was still a baby when my mother got out of rehab, but I was no longer the same baby she had left at the hospital. My features had changed. I was bigger, and I was happy. I was unaware of what had happened to my mother.

Perhaps because I never had that bonding moment with my mother or that first eye-to-eye contact, our relationship was always rocky. We never saw things in the same way. We were never able to have a real mother-daughter relationship. She was always harder on me than my siblings. Looking back now, I am aware that I have always had rocky relationships with the people I most wanted to love me.

My father would sometimes come and see me and take me out. Often he would take me to certain family and friends who never let on that they knew I was his daughter. Well, that’s how I looked at it. I saw the same group of people over the years, but I was rarely invited to any of his family functions, and when I was, he never spoke to me, so I always felt like he was ashamed of me and that I wasn’t really a part of his family. I remember a time my father took me to a garage where a few of the guys he raced with stored their race cars. While there, one of the guys looked at him, then looked at me, and then asked him, Whose child are you babysitting? My father looked at him for a moment, and they both started laughing. The thing I remember is that my dad never corrected his friend and never said I was his child. Being so young, I didn’t know how to describe the pain that caused me. A part of me wished he wouldn’t come around anymore because I didn’t want to feel the way I felt that day.

Sitting in my room, night after night, I would play with my Barbie dolls, making up stories of the perfect family—a father I was close to, a mother that never abandoned me, and the kind of relationship with my siblings I saw on television. What I wanted was only happening when I played with my Barbie dolls, so I played with them a lot. I wanted to feel something I had a hard time describing. That feeling, I now know, was love, but in those play moments, I knew exactly what it felt like. It felt like happiness. It came so easily during those moments. I’ve always felt trapped inside my inner self, and sometimes I’d find myself escaping from whatever it was that was holding me back and begin to feel free, but then I was always sucked back in and would feel like I was drowning in my own river of tears.

To cope with everything I was feeling, I began cutting myself. I used to sit in my room almost every night and cut the inner part of my thighs. With each cut, I felt some of my pain leave, but once it healed, the pain came back, and so I cut a little deeper. What I was feeling was unbearable, and I didn’t want to feel it anymore. I used to wish someone would catch me doing it—that they would talk to me, hug me, take the time to listen to me, and see that I was hurting. But it never happened. I wanted to be like what other children considered normal.

My mother and I lived with my uncle Larry while she was trying to get on her feet, and when she finally found a job, she was able to also get housing because of her new position. My grandmother continued taking care of my brother and sister until my mother could afford having us all under one roof. It didn’t happen immediately like she would have wanted. My mother left me at my uncle’s for about a month so she could get the house set up and to become more settled in her new job. The day came when we were to move, but I didn’t want to go. I realized I didn’t want to be with any of them. I felt I would be much happier if I stayed at my uncle’s house.

As we were driving to our new home, I looked out of the car window and saw several kids walking with their mother and father. I remember thinking that I never had a moment like that, figuring I probably never would, and then I remember feeling selfish for wishing that they didn’t either. We pulled up to our new place in no time at all. I didn’t want to get out of the car, but I screwed up my courage and stepped out. Someone was peering through the window. It was my mother. She came to the door, waiting for me, and grabbed my hand,