Birds Without Wings

By Reina Murray with Sylvester I. Okoro

Like so many people, Reina's parents messed up their own relationship then married other people, bringing strangers into their children's lives. Although Reina does not go into detail about her mother's husband, it is apparent that there was something not good going on there otherwise her father wouldn't have gotten sole custody of Reina and her brother and sisters. Too bad for the kids that Daddy's new wife was the stereotypical stepmother: evil, cruel, warped and maybe just a tad insane. Then to compound the father's stupidity, he often left his kids alone with this monster for months at a time as he had to travel for his job. No, while Daddy was away from home, the monster stepmom had free rein to indulge her depraved urges to dominate and destroy the children entrusted to her care. Not that he didn't have a clue as to what was going on. No, the stepmom didn't hide the fact that she whipped and beat his children, but they were going by the old testament precept of spare the rod and spoil the child. But even if a parent sees nothing wrong with spanking a misbehaving child, what this woman was doing went way beyond that -- she actually drew blood when she disciplined her stepkids.
But nothing lasts forever and Reina eventually got big enough to face her stepmother down. In a final confrontation, she knocked the woman on her ass and her stepmother never laid a finger on her again. But when Reina became an adult and married and had a family of her own, she cut her father out of her life since he stayed married to her abuser. So for twenty years she didn't see him and rarely spoke to him. It was only when her father was quite elderly that she consented to come see him and his wife and upon seeing how weak and infirm the woman had become, Reina was able to put her fears behind her and have a more normal relationship with her dad.

This was a good read. Reina and her siblings had a rough time of it. Even beyond the physical abuse they received from the stepmother was the psychological abuse. She treated the kids like servants, making them maintain the house, requiring them to enter the house only through the back door, making them use rags to bathe and dry themselves, making them eat their meals out in the garage. But these kids were resourceful. They managed to take care of themselves and they managed to cope with the abuse. And they often managed to get around their monster stepmom. They survived.