While In My Underwear, I Punched A Girl In The Face

I've really only ever punched one person. It was in the locker room in high school. I was in my underwear. I got suspended for it.

Yup, that happened.

We had gone running that day in gym class and when we got back to the locker room the teacher ordered all of us to get in line and wash our faces. I was a freshman, a waif of a thing at 14 years old, and patiently waiting in line when a 19 year old senior in front of me turned around, nodded her head at me, and said to her friends "don't let that girl in, she's too ugly."

Me, despite being only a waif of a girl, opened my big mouth and shot back "well if you weren't so fat there would be room for both of us."

Wrong choice.

She didn't say a word, She just turned back around, washed her face, and walked away.

Or so I thought.

I was washing my face when all of a sudden I felt my head get slammed into the wall next to the sink. I flung around and without even thinking landed one solid punch square in the middle of her face.

Then her and her friends jumped on me and completely kicked my ass.

We were both suspended but under pressure from the dean her friends all ratted her out. I was let back in, my participation being deemed "self defense," and my record expunged. Because of the school's strict "no fighting" policy though, she remained suspended. The suspension just happened to be during finals week and she missed all her finals, which caused her to fail a good majority of her classes. She had to come back next year as a super senior (2nd yr senior) and I positively avoided her like the plague.

After that fun little incident, I decided violence probably wasn't for me.

I tried a few times to defend myself against my husband, but I learned real fast that me fighting him wasn't really an option. I'd barely get an arm raised before I'd be tackled to the ground or completely restrained with his suprisingly well muscled arm. After the first few futile attempts I made, I never raised my hand in violence towards him again.

That is until one fateful trip to Florida.

Now let me set the stage for you guys. I was traveling with all of my most hated favorite people. My parents, my brothers, and my lovely husband. Oh yes, I was so excited to go. I booked my ticket to hell  Florida and off we went, 16 fun filled days of Florida sun. At least I had my super cool 2 year old girl child with me.

I should have just turned around and gotten back in the car at the airport, seeing as how things started going downhill almost immediately. All the warning signs were there, but did I listen? Noooooo, of course not.

We hadn't even made it onto the plane before the red flags started popping up. We are in line, just about to go through the security metal detector x-ray things when my husband grabs my arm and sternly whispers in my ear "I need to get out of line, NOW." I'm looking at him like he is completely insane as he bolts from the line and snuggles up to the nearest trashcan. What does he have in his pocket? A knife, a lighter, firecrackers, and three smoke bombs.

Who the HELL has that stuff in their pocket!? Who the hell FORGETS about it and tries to board a plane with them!?!?

Yes folks, he was all mine.

When we finally get on the plane, without anyone being detained in federal custody, which is a miracle considering that my two brothers (who were on a different flight) had wasted no time in getting trashed off their asses. Mid flight when the more trashed of the two brothers leans over to the lesser of the trashed two brothers and says "Dude! Check out my football!"

Who the hell carries a football onto an airplane? Do you know what happens when a football is overfilled to begin with and then gets pressurized?

They explode.

From every eye witness account I have heard, the football was positively the size of a large thanksgiving turkey, each seam stretched so thin that you can literally see where they are equally starting to fray and tear at the skin of the ball.

You have absolutely got to be kidding me. 

Dumb and dumber are drunk and holding a bomb at 27,000 feet in the air.

This is not going to end well.

By some miracle of God the thing manages to not explode and when we all finally make our way to the resort, I breathe a sigh of relief.

And I have to say, I was impressed. My father had booked the penthouse suite, which meant that we had a majority of the entire top floor of the resort (and the rooftop balcony!) to ourselves. My husband and I had a private bedroom suite off of the main living quarters, which meant we had plenty of privacy for rape bonding time.

The resort amenities were amazing. Private beaches, mini golf, para sailing, water biking, you name it, they had it. There was even a lazy river stream thing that ran in, out, and around the entire resort that you could paddle boat in.

The football not only flew on a plane, but it went paddle boating as well

But by day 8 I still hadn't seen more than two minutes of my husband unless he wanted something from me. My days were spent building sand castles with my daughter, splashing in the pool, and relaxing in a hammock. My husband? Off with my brothers doing who-knows-what. On the night of day 8, after watching families all week playing with their kids, romantically walking the beach, and relaxing together on balcony's, I broke down. I wanted that too. I wanted to know that I was important. I was surrounded my people and yet had never felt so alone in my life.

I put my daughter to sleep and asked my parents if they could watch her while my husband and I went out. I pulled him into our room and told him that I wanted to have a nice evening with him. "Walk on the beach with me? Grab dinner at the outdoor restaurant? Snuggle with me in a hammock? Hold my hand? Show me that you care?"

He wanted sex.

I wanted his heart.

"This is what couple's do here Eden. They have sex. They have great sex and that's why they have fun together."

I wanted great sex too, I just knew I wasn't going to get it from him. I got in the shower, turned on the water so no one would hear us, and I let him do what he wanted. It hurt more than I was anticipating and I started crying. He covered my mouth with his hand, called me a bitch, and after it was done he said he was leaving.

I was stunned. Even more than stunned, I was heartbroken. I begged him to stay, literally threw my arms around his neck and sobbed into his shoulder.

"Please don't go. This is our family. I am trying to show you that I love you and I am so lonely. I've been here with you all week and you haven't given me or your daughter two minutes of your time. Please stay with me tonight. Please don't go. I need you."

He unclenched my arms from his neck and told me that he could never respect someone as desperate as me and then he left.

A rare father daughter moment

I cried myself to sleep. Deep gut wrenching sobs that I muffled into my pillow. He had whittled my spirit down so much that I was begging for love and affection from the man who was destroying me. I was angry with him and I was angry with myself.

At 3:30am I awoke to the sound of vomiting from the penthouse kitchen. I opened the door and one of my brothers was heaving into the sink. I asked him where my husband was and he told me that he was in the room with me.

"Uh...no, he isn't. I'm pretty sure I would have noticed."

After debating with my overly intoxicated brother for quite a while that no, my husband was not in the room, and from what I could tell, not even in our penthouse, my brother wobbles into my room and begins looking.... in the drawers....for my husband.

Clearly he is in no shape to be helping me find him.

It's then that I realize I can hear something "dinging."

"Ding......ding......ding....."

What on earth is that noise? It's coming from the hallway. I open the door and there lies my husband, half in, half out of the elevator. It's a miracle the thing didn't start moving and rip him in two. Every time the door would try to close, it would hit him and bounce back open, resulting in the "ding" noise.

Are you fucking kidding me?

I go over to him, grab his legs, and with all my strength I pull him out of the elevator and into the hallway. I gently slap his face a few times, trying to rouse him, but nothing. I peel his eyes open and realize his eyes are rolled completely back in his head. In a panic I run back into the penthouse and get my other brother, one who had gone to bed early, and was not trashed out of his mind.

I should have seen this coming, seeing as how the pre party for them was a rousing game of beer pong

Sober brother comes out and I'm in a panic thinking my husband had overdosed or has alcohol poisoning. Sober brother tries everything he can think of to wake my husband up and eventually the two of us literally drag my husband back to the penthouse and leave him lying on the kitchen floor while we wake my parents up. I'm yelling that we need to call 911, my parents are yelling that we woke them up, my daughter is screaming, terrified of the wobbly swaying man in her room looking in all the drawers for her daddy, and its freaking 3:30 in the morning! I follow my parents into the kitchen so that I can show them my husband....who is now gone.

What the hell.

He hasn't just moved, he has completely left.

Now my sober brother and my parents are panicking. They are half afraid that he will wander into the ocean and drown, and selfishly afraid that his drunk high ass is wandering around the hotel and will get us in trouble. Sober brother and I race down to the lobby where he blurts out to the receptionist "HAVE YOU SEEN A MAN WANDER THROUGH HERE THAT IS.....sleep walking. Yea, he was sleep walking....and we are really worried about him."

They haven't seen him and after what felt like an eternity of running around the resort, at one point even standing on the beach and scanning the waves by moonlight, we find him sitting in a lawn chair, crying that everyone was being mean to him, and refusing to come inside. My brother literally throws him over his shoulder and I hold onto his arms as he is pounding away on sober brothers back. At one point he gets so volatile that we set him down and tell him that if he can remain upright we will leave I'm alone. I take one finger and every so gently pushed on his shoulder. The man doesn't even bend as he falls over like a tree. Sober brother catches him, back over his shoulder he goes, I distract the front desk while they sneak by, and together we get him back into the room.

From there begins two hours of hell where we have to babysit this man. He is belligerent, alternating between screaming and crying, fighting and falling, and just generally pissing me off.

Great, now it's my job to take care of a crying, over tired toddler, and a grown up man child. My parents are screaming that "we" (like I did this to him) have ruined their vacation, my wobbly brother is throwing up all over the kitchen, and I have had it.

I have absolutely freaking had it.

Six years of dealing with this loser of a husband has culminated to every feeling that I have at this moment. Every feeling that I have stuffed down over the years and buried so deep that I can't feel them anymore, is starting to erupt to the surface in a fit of anger and exhaustion.

When he finally passes out on the couch in what appears to be an actual coma, I find myself standing over him overcome with rage.

The two of them sleeping off a hangover, my brother made himself a light proof tent

"I could just beat the crap out of you right now" I hear myself say to his comatose body.

From behind me I hear a voice that says "do it."

Wow. That little devil on my shoulder is getting louder everyday, she almost sounds real. I turn around and it's actually my mother. Oh well, close enough.

"Seriously mom, I could seriously just smack the living daylights out of him right now. I have never been so angry in my life."

She looks at me and says "Don't hit him too hard but you get one shot so make it a good one and we never mention this again."

To this day I don't know if she "knew" or if this was just another one of her twisted games. I turned back around and looked at my near comatose husband, thought about all he had put me through, and I decided to take her up on that offer. I raised my hand as high above my head as I could get it and I backhanded his face with such force that I myself screamed. His head snapped to the side and back so far that for a minute I actually thought I had broken his neck.

I checked and yes, he was still breathing.

A couple hours later  he woke up and claimed that he had absolutely no memory of the night before.

No apologies, he didn't care a bit.

But for the next three days, every time he complained that his face "really hurt and I just don't know why," I smiled an evil little smile inside.

My mother never told and neither did I. To this day that might be the one and only real bonding moment my mother and I have ever had.

What a freaking twisted family.

The next 8 days were just as bad, if not worse than the first 8 were, but I didn't care. I had finally gotten my shot, my chance, and as awful as that makes me sound, I gotta admit, it felt pretty damn good.