Chapter One — Foundation of Fear
Mark entered my life before I could form a memory. I was three months old when he became a permanent fixture in the house, and my older sister, Casie, was four. I have no recollection of a world before him. There is no clean dividing line between safety and danger in my early memory, because danger came first. Fear was not something that happened to me. It was something I was raised inside of.
My earliest memories are not pictures so much as sensations. The sound of footsteps in the house carried meaning before words ever did. The tone of a door closing told me more than conversation. Silence was not peaceful; it was alert. It was the pause before something changed. My body learned this long before my mind could articulate it. Even as an infant, I reacted to tension, to voices dropping, to rooms growing still. Calm never felt permanent. It felt borrowed.
My mother, Brenda, was a slender young woman with short brown wavy hair, blue eyes, and ivory skin. She looked fragile in ways that made people underestimate the weight she carried. She was young, overwhelmed, and trying to survive inside circumstances that offered very few choices. Love existed in her, but it was tangled tightly with fear, exhaustion, and dependence. Protection was inconsistent, not because she did not care, but because survival demanded compromises that always came at a cost.
Or, maybe, she didn’t care.
Mark controlled the atmosphere of the house without saying much at all. He was a slender six-foot man with short black hair and brown eyes. He smelled constantly of cigarette smoke and body odor, a smell that clung to furniture and walls. His laziness was visible everywhere. Empty Coke cans piled on the end table beside him, mixed with important papers that sat untouched for days, sometimes weeks. Nothing moved unless he wanted it to. Nothing happened unless it passed through him first.
The house adjusted itself around Mark’s mood. We learned to sense the way animals sense storms. A quiet room could mean safety or danger depending on how heavy the air felt. We learned to listen for breathing, for pacing, for the sound of a chair shifting. Fear lived in anticipation more than in action. Waiting became the most exhausting part.
Casie understood more than I did and became my protector. She was slender, with long wavy brown hair, brown eyes, and freckles scattered across her face. She was old enough to remember a little more than I could, but not old enough to escape it. We became each other’s mirrors, watching, learning, protecting without ever naming what we were doing. Childhood did not give us time to be careless. It required attention.
My biological father, Steve, drifted in and out of our lives. He was a man of average build with short brown hair, brown eyes, and a big nose we always called the Haase nose. He was homeless most days, moving between shelters, couches, and the street. Drugs, alcohol, or both kept him unreliable and absent. His instability was obvious. His life looked chaotic from the outside. But even then, even as a child, there was something different about him.
Steve was unsafe in predictable ways. Mark was unsafe in unpredictable ones. That distinction mattered more than anyone realized. Living with Steve would have meant hunger, movement, uncertainty, but it would not have meant constant fear. That truth took years to fully settle in me, because children are taught to equate stability with safety. But stability without protection is not safety at all.
Fear in our house was quiet. It did not scream. It lingered. It trained us to move carefully, to speak softly, to watch first and act later. There were no written rules, only consequences. One day something might be ignored, the next day punished. The inconsistency trained hypervigilance into our bodies. We learned to anticipate instead of reacting. We learned to stay ahead of danger by shrinking.
Noise mattered. Laughter mattered. Being noticed mattered. I learned early that attention could turn against you without warning. So, I learned to take up as little space as possible. Even as a toddler, I learned to self-regulate in ways that adults mistook for calm. My nervous system was not calm. It was working constantly.
Love, when it appeared, was complicated. Brenda could be gentle, affectionate, present in fleeting moments. But fear limited her ability to intervene. Appeasing Mark often took priority over protecting us. Survival required compliance. That lesson repeated itself in countless small ways, none of them dramatic enough to point to, all of them heavy enough to shape a life.
There were moments when I sensed that this was not how other families lived, but I had no language for it. Normal is what surrounds you. Normal is what you adapt to. Fear became ordinary. Silence became routine. Waiting became a skill.
I learned early that adults could not always be trusted to keep children safe. I learned that discomfort was something to endure quietly. I learned that needs were dangerous and attention was risky. These lessons did not arrive as thought. They arrived as instincts.
By the time I could speak, my body already knew when to be still. By the time I could walk, I already knew where not to go. By the time I could understand words like anger and punishment, I had already adjusted myself to avoid both. Fear taught me before anyone else did.
This was the foundation my childhood was built on. Not one moment, not one incident, but an environment that required constant adaptation. Before I could choose who to be, I learned what was required to survive. The house taught me that early. It taught me well.
