A Change In Heart {1} Jelena

It wasn't always this way. We use to be a happy family. But that ended four years ago when things started changing. I'm still not sure about what happened and what caused things to take a bad turn, but I know it started when my dad cheated on my mom with his old girlfriend from high school. At first it was just awkward silences but in a few weeks time, they turned into intense yelling matches. It continued like this for about four months until my mother thought counseling would help. And it did, for a while. My mom made me go with them a few times because she thought I could use something from it, and it actually wasn't that bad. I mean, it wasn't the most enjoyable thing to sit through, but I learned a lot and even got to talk a few times about my parents arguing myself, which was good to let off my chest. They went to counseling for six months and then they stopped going, saying that their marriage was fine, and they didn't need a shrink anymore. They told me everything was going to be fine, and it was, until I came home from school one day to find my mother laying on the kitchen tiles with blood, bruises, and scratches all over her body and my father passed out on the couch with a beer bottle hanging loosely in his hand. My father never told me what happened and I never questioned it. But seven months later I found out what had caused my mother's death; she had committed suicide because she couldn't handle the pain my father had been putting her through. I found out what exactly that pain was first-hand.
It had been three months since my mother's death and my father had made a complete turn around. He'd been sober for two and a half months and I couldn't have been more proud. It was a Saturday night and I was just coming in from a party when I found my father sat in the living room with pictures and multiple empty beer bottles sprawled around him. I walked closer silently and caught a glimpse of the pictures; they were all of my mother and us over the years. In his right hand he held a half full bottle of beer, in his left hand he held a Polaroid picture of us at the beach when I was nine. My mother was cliché and wanted us to all wearing matching white outfits for the photo. I was stood in the middle of my parents and each of them had one arm around my shoulders, the other was wrapped around each other. The smile on all of our faces was so bright and happy, that it made me pull a small smile despite the lump forming in my throat and tears pooling in my eyes.
My father turned his slightly to look at me and spoke, "We were a nice little family, weren't we? I wonder what happened. Oh right. My fault. Like always, right? Your mother always put the blame on me, though, so."
He stood up and faced me, a look of complete disgust on his face. "You were always the princess who could do nothing wrong in mommy's eyes. But nobody's perfect, sweetie."
I didn't see it coming. I didn't see my father raise his arm to slap me. Or maybe I did. Maybe I just didn't want to believe that my own father was going to hit me.
He put his hands on me seven more times that day.
//
Here's the new story I was supposed to post 20 years ago. This is just background but I will be back later this week with the next one and hopefully something new from the other stories.
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