The Things That Always Were

It is 1962 and ten year old Annie is fighting to survive a stepfather and mentally ill mother who abuse her physically and emotionally.

 

It hadn't always been this way. Just a few years before, Annie was safe in Yakima with her parents and three brothers and sisters in the white house with the picket fence and the swing set in the backyard. Then her parents divorced and her mother took the kids to Missouri. Within a year Annie's mother was hospitalized with a nervous breakdown. The children were placed with a Catholic bus driver's family who brutalized Annie's little brother, Sammy. Annie did her best to protect him, but she was eight years old.

 

When her mother came to get them, Annie believed that now everything would be ok. Instead it gets worse. Every day is a struggle, to stay away from the hits and the screams, to escape her mother's look that says that Annie is something less than dirt. Annie doesn't understand why she is singled out for mistreatment. She tries everything she knows to "get through." She pretends not to hear the words, tries not to feel the slaps. Twice she runs away from home.

 

Like any child Annie must determine who she is to become, and, in addition, make sense of the havoc of her life. She forms her own theories about how grownups can be so cruel, and resolves never to be like them. In time she forms an identity apart from her place in her family. At school, she is the smart kid, whom her teachers nurture when her parents do not.

 

This is a child's story, told with a child's voice. It will resonate with anyone who has suffered, or struggled, and found the strength to overcome.